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Honkai: Star Rail throws you into the body of an amnesiac protagonist with unknowable hidden powers who has been awakened from a deep slumber by someone called Kafka. This woman is something of a mystery and seems to have a flair for the dramatic as she kicks off the whole game by playing an invisible violin along to the classic Baroque epic Pachelbel’s Canon as massive, intergalactic monsters invade a spaceship.

It’s an incredibly cool opening, the kind of thing that John Wick would watch to get pumped up before, well, John Wick-ing all over the place. It’s pretty clear that Kafka isn’t a hero, but they’ve woken you up, and since you’ve got no memories, you must be one of the good guys. This setup feels familiar, but there are enough changes to make it feel new and get the blood thoroughly pumping.

Ahead of an upcoming open playtest, Blizzard have released their latest developer design video on Diablo 4, this time tackling player choice and the action RPG’s different classes. My favourite detail is that you can become a werewolf and “do werewolf things”. Although getting to that stage may take a while, as associate game director Joseph Piepora recently said it would take around 150+ hours for an average player to hit the Level 100 cap. Sounds like a week’s worth of content then.

The latest additions to this ever-growing pile of ray tracing and DLSS games are a robust mix of mega-budget adventure, offbeat indie, and Lovecraft love letter. Actually two of those, since both the Sherlock Holmes The Awaked remake and side-scrolling monster wooer Romancelvania now support DLSS. Absolutely tentaculous.

Deep Learning Super Sampling, for the unfamiliar, is Nvidia’s upscaling tech. It’s got some sharp anti-aliasing built in too, but its primary purpose is to make your games run faster by rendering them at a lower resolution before patching the image up to resemble native rez. The results generally look better than rival upscalers like AMD FSR and Intel XeSS, and while we can grumble about DLSS being limited to running only on Nvidia GeForce RTX GPUs, it really is best in its class. There’s a reason why so many of the best graphics cards come from the green side.

I've written before about my love for the standard Xbox Series Wireless Controller, which provide a comfortable feel, responsive controls and laudable build quality for a default console gamepad. These units normally retail for $64.99 in the US, but today the Electric Volt colour is down to $39.99 at Walmart.

For all of Fallout 76’s faults, the multiplayer shooter has fostered one of the most interesting communities in any game, leading to fun mutations such as the theatre company experimenting with performance art in-game. The Wasteland Theatre Company previously tackled Shakespeare and A Christmas Carol, and they've now reconvened with a post-apocalyptic performance of Alice In Wonderland, appropriately adapted as Alice In The Wasteland.

Kingston's Fury Renegade SSD was the fastest one we'd tested in early 2022, although it was later surpassed by the marginally faster WD SN850x and Samsung 990 Pro. Regardless, it's an extremely capable PCIe 4.0 SSD - and now it's available for $134.99 for a 2TB model after a discount at B&H Photo Video in the US. To get this price, which represents an oustanding $45 discount, you just need to add the drive to your cart - easy enough, right?

Paradox have announced the next expansion for their grand spacefaring strategy game Stellaris. It's called Galactic Paragons, and it's coming on May 9th. Larger space regimes require more work, so this expansion is for fans of big government, focusing on Stellaris' collection of leaders, expanding the council system, and introducing deeper character progression. It’s also adding a new Origin delving into the leader who founded your galactic empire, which you can see teased in the very short, very non-descript trailer below.

There's something very sweet about playing as a postal carrier. As we've seen in games such as Tiny Echo and Lake, it can be a relaxing and enjoyable job delivering mail in a small community, and that's the pitch-perfect tone that solo developer Kela van der Deijl has managed to capture in their cutesy mail-delivery game Mail Time. After playing the Steam demo, I can tell you that it's one of the most charming games I've played all year, and it looks like I'll be able to play the rest soon because Mail Time is out this week on Thursday April 27th.

A few weeks after the Asus ROG Ally was confirmed as a real thing, we have something that was missing from its faux-April Fool’s reveal: a proper look at the handheld PC’s hardware specifications. And from the boldness of its screen to the speed of its microSD card slot, the ROG Ally is already looking set to best the Steam Deck on cold, hard specs.

Owners of AMD Ryzen 7000 processors, you may wish to reconsider any overclocking plans. This hardware family may include some good gaming CPUs but several users have recently reported cases of fatal overheating, sometimes even with their processors burning the motherboard socket in the process.

Investigations by Tom’s Hardware and YouTuber der8auer suggest the culprit is SoC (system on chip) voltages being pushed beyond safe levels during memory overclocking attempts. AMD haven’t confirmed this directly, but are supposedly working on a fix that would prevent this accidental overvolting from happening again.

To celebrate Apex Legends’ upcoming Season 17, developer Respawn have announced the newest hero to join the roster: old-timer Ballistic. The battle-royale's last season had no new Legend, disappointing a few Apexers, but Ballistic is coming out of his comfy wine-fuelled retirement and joining the fight on May 9th, just for you guys.

Employees at Sega Of America’s Irvine offices have announced plans to unionise and have filed for an election with the National Labor Relations Board. This means Sega management can now voluntarily recognise the union, or wait for the union election to take place. The newly announced Allied Employees Guild Improving Sega (AEGIS for short) is composed of around 144 employees working across several departments, including QA, marketing, localisation, product development, and live service.

AEGIS have also teamed up with the CWA, the labour union that assisted other studio’s unionisation efforts and who previously filed unfair labour charges against Activision Blizzard.

The EVGA Z20 optical mechanical keyboard is a super-solid option with a boatload of features - and it's currently 69% off at Amazon UK, bringing it down to a measly £39.98. This is an awesome price for a keyboard of this size and quality, and well worth picking up even if you've already got a mechanical keyboard - or if you've never tried one before.

The Steam Deck is a handy device, but its 45W charger isn't the most convenient to lug around as it only charges one thing at a time and takes up a fair amount of space. That's why I tend to opt for a multi-port charger, so I set out to find one recently that would charge my Steam Deck, MacBook, Pixel smartphone and Pixel watch all from a single point.

I eventually ended up with this 65W GaN charger from UGreen, which includes three USB-C ports and one USB-A for £39.99 - but today this model has been reduced by 15%, bringing it down to £33.99 where it's well worth recommending.

Every weekend, indie devs show off current work on Twitter's #screenshotsaturday tag. And every Monday, I bring you a selection of these snaps and clips. This week, genuinely by chance, my eye was caught mostly by first-person shooters. Come for those, stay for the impressive puppet tech, the giant snake, the cute dog, and the colossal crocodile. Check out all these interesting and attractive indie games!

Steam Puzzle Fest kicks off today, offering tons of discounts on all of your favourite puzzle games. Really, though, one of the best experiences you can have this Steam Puzzle Fest week is by downloading the free demo for upcoming puzzler Viewfinder. Developed by Sad Owl Studios, I had a sneaky peek at this at GDC last month and was properly blown away by it. It might look like just another Witness-like, but don't be fooled. There are some real smart ideas in here, and I dare you not to go 'OooOOOooooOOOooooh' when you see the in-game photos you take come to life in all their full, 3D explorable glory.

I honestly thought I was good at detective games until I started playing the early access build for Shadows of Doubt. I mean, I’ve riddled through The Case Of The Golden Idol’s intuitive fill-the-blanks whodunnits, wrestled with Return Of The Obra Dinn’s sixty missing persons, grappled with the mysteries of the very gods themselves in Paradise Killer, and don’t get me started on Danganronpa’s ridiculous mind-bending, patience-testing murder mysteries.

That being said, ColePowered Games' detective immersive sim has really left me stumped, forcing me to hang my deer stalker on a hat peg in shame and sling my detective's notebook out a window. Shadows Of Doubt is like no other detective game I've played, and although its murder mysteries have left me spiraling, I've had an absolute riot playing it.

I do love me a good farming sim, and I also love a good detective game, so imagine my brain exploding when I saw Grave Seasons for the first time, a farming murder mystery hybrid in the works by developer Son M and their studio Perfect Garbage. It's still very early in development (like there isn't even a Steam page for it yet), but it's still an incredible-sounding concept, as every time you start a new game, a random NPC will be selected to become a serial killer. You can grow crops, fish, raise cattle, and also help save your fellow townsfolk from a rampaging murderer. Cute!

As the month of April draws to a close, it can only mean one thing. It's time to announce when we'll be liveblogging this month's RPS Game Club pick, Betrayal At Club Low! Well, it's not the only thing, of course, but listen, our secret pizza delivery agent only has an hour long window to spare us before they'll be whisked away on another top secret infiltration / flamingo thigh stew tasting mission, so make sure you mark your calendars for Friday April 28th at 4pm BST (that's 8am PDT / 11am EDT) to join us for our real-time liveblog chat.

For all its flamingo thigh stews, misshapen clothes model characters and pizza-themed DJ-ing, Betrayal At Club Low is an old-school, dice-throwing RPG through and through. Every interaction you have at Club Low is determined by the rolling of dice, whether it's simply attempting to spark a conversation with a hard-of-hearing bartender, or bluffing your way into VIP backrooms where your blown fellow agent Gemini Jay is currently being grilled by the intimidating Big Mo.

Whether you're successful in your endeavours depends on whether you can roll higher or equal to whatever value is thrown by your opponent, with each face corresponding to a particular Skill Dice you're trying to deploy to win that scenario. A lot of the time, your skill numbers aren't nearly good enough to beat your fellow clubber outright, but for me, the thrill of Club Low comes from clinching a very plain, and highly unremarkable draw, earning you the accolade of 'Success. Barely' in the ensuing results breakdown. It may not sound very sexy, but in a world where the odds are fully stacked against you, barely succeeding will do me just fine here, thanks.

As our shuttle hits the ground, the world erupts into smoke, chaos, and confusion. Samantha, one among my ragged band of survivors, breaks down sobbing on the ground and I direct Maki, a veterinarian, to do something about it. She punches Samantha full-on in the face, knocking her unconscious (“Oh, I guess that’s what ‘knock out’ means,” I realize a moment too late). Well, at least I don’t have to worry about her running off into the woods or something. It’s a rough start, but they have no choice but to work together from here on out.

For fans of the survival simulation genre, crashlanding on an alien planet is a familiar premise, but it's one Stranded: Alien Dawn absolutely smashes. This game has been at the top of my to-be-played list for a while and now that it’s exiting early access for a full release, it’s safe to say that Stranded is the closest thing to my dream human vs nature survival game I’ve seen yet.

Knowing that wombats' dump is little stackable cubes was one of the fun facts I learned at school (it was either a rhetorical proof for or against the existence of God; I forget which). This knowledge comes in handy for understanding the game Hardhat Wombat, coming from George Fan (of Plants Vs. Zombies fame), with Andy Hull (of programmer on Spelunky fame). Out later this year, it's a combination puzzle-platformer and conscruction game in which you play a wombat, wearing a hard hat, who constructs increasingly complex things out of his own feces. That is no way to make a skyscraper, wombat.

Sundays are for getting your glasses frames rejigged so they actually fit your face! Before you pop them on, let's read this week's best writing about games (and game related things).

Dota 2's New Frontiers update has been released and it's a big one. As well as tweaking UI and balance and reworking heroes, it also makes sweeping changes to Dota's single, three-lane battlefield. Specifically: it makes it 40% larger than it was before.

It's always interesting when we get to see video games in their embryonic state. Stardew Valley's lone developer, Eric Barone, worked on his farming sim smash hit for years before it was released in 2016, and yesterday he found his old notebook and started sharing some sketches and doodles he made while planning its features.

Sons Of The Forest just received its fourth major patch and it adds some new features to the cannibal survival sim. The more exciting changes might lie in the "improvements", however, which include things like your sidekick Kelvin being able to carry two logs at the same time and brighter night vision goggles.

Four more Ubisoft games are heading to Steam. Far Cry 6, Riders Republic, Rainbow Six Extraction and Monopoly Madness were all previously available via the Epic Games Store and Ubisoft's own storefront, but will be released on Steam across May and June.

Alice0 is on holiday, which means I have once again seized the wheel on this bus and will drive it right into the next fake tunnel painted on a cliff that I see, like goddam Wile E. Coyote. Or at least I would, if we didn't all have quite sensible offerings this week - with one notable exception that I trust you'll be about to spot without me specifically pointing it out. In my case I'm back cleaning things in a sim game once again, something which I show no signs of getting bored with yet. I need someone to stand near me when I do cleaning in real life and go "DING!" when I finish it.

Hello! Come on in. Please, take a seat. Welcome to the inaugural episode of our brand new (and currently untitled) supporter-first indie video show! Every month*, I'm going to be spending some time highlighting a cool indie game that deserves your attention. Think of this series as a supplement to Sin's Scout Report or our Indiescovery podcast. A brand new method for delivering piping hot recs from my desktop to yours.

My aim is to use this series as a springboard to dive deep into specific elements of a game I find particularly fascinating, sharing my discoveries with you lot behind the paywall first (and don't worry, regular readers, I'll also be making each of these videos public for all to see after a month, which should roughly coincide with the the next one going live for supporters). In it, I'll be discussing some common themes between multiple games, digging into underappreciated gems from years gone by... The remit is broad and nebulous, to the point where it's clearly obvious why I haven't been able to come up with a name for it yet.

(If you end up thinking of something, please do let me know in the comments. More than anything it'll stop me messaging Katharine a list of awful possibilites every other week, which I can only imagine is negatively effecting her feelings about me, the site and the endeavour of games journalism in general. They really have been that bad, folks. Proper rancid stuff).

I am once again spending a candidate for this year's Summer Strategy Game For When Brain Is Melt. Total Tank Generals is possibly the best introduction to wargames I've ever played, but to call it a light strategy game would feel like a disservice. If you're used to heavier fare this may still scratch the itch.

It's not that it's particularly simple, but it feels so damn clean and effortless to play. You'll know what you're doing in minutes, but still find a decent challenge, with lots of options but minimal analysis paralysis. I'm honestly finding it hard to fault.