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Valve’s handheld PC has had a busy few months since I last updated my best Steam Deck games list. Between the Deck’s first anniversary, inaugural (and possibly final) sale, the reveal of a new competitor in the Asus ROG Ally, and the enormous Proton 8.0 update, two things are clear: this device isn’t going anywhere, and I probably should have updated this list a few weeks sooner. Whoopsie.

In the summer of 1983, publisher-that-was Enix released a murder mystery visual novel called The Portopia Serial Murder Case. Designed by Dragon Quest’s creator Yuji Horii, it never saw a release outside of Japan - until now. Square Enix are re-releasing the classic on Steam in two days, calling it an “AI tech preview,” and tacking on “natural language processing” technology, in perhaps the oddest port I’ve seen so far.

Paradox’s grand strategy Victoria 3 is getting its first DLC next month, bringing along some of history’s great political agitators who worked to change social and economic systems with their new ideas. The pack’s called Voice of The People and it’s coming on May 22nd.

Ubisoft held a livestream last night to lay out the future of their MMO shooter franchise. The stream covered a roadmap for The Division 2’s fifth year of support and a deep dive into the upcoming The Division Heartland, a free-to-play spin-off that’s more focused on the series’ survival aspects.

Can you imagine if Dead Island 2 didn’t arrive with actually-quite-good PC performance? All those years, all those developers, and it turned out rubbish? Perish the thought. But nah, Dambuster Studios have ensured it finally hits shelves in a solid technical state; a welcome return to standards for the big-name gamesmaking biz, which has largely spent 2023 chucking out sub-par PC ports.

“In a rare display of AI genius, Grimgor has spent the last 4 turns camping outside Zharr-Naggrund killing every caravan I try to send. I'd be furious if it wasn't so funny,” reads the Discord message I sent to a friend - roughly another four turns before the orcish warboss’s occasional smash-and-grab turned into an entire racket that nearly crippled my burgeoning military industrial complex. Last week Total War: Warhammer III's new DLC Forge Of The Chaos Dwarfs arrived, and it highlights the setting’s greatest rivalry to comical effect.

Good news road brawlers! Capcom held a livestream for the upcoming Street Fighter 6 last night - hosted by lifelong fan Lil’ Wayne - and it delved deep into the game’s customisable avatars, post-launch support, and open-world World Tour mode. Oh, there’s also a demo available next week that’s more focused on singleplayer stuff.

Diablo 4 has already had a closed and open beta, but aspiring hack-and-slashers will get one last chance to test the action-RPG sequel before it launches in June. From May 12th to May 14th, Blizzard are hosting a "Server Slam", in which one and all are invited to test "the durability of our servers."

Immortals Of Aveum has a magic bracelet and quip-laden cutscenes and if you saw a clip of its reveal trailer out of context, you could easily mistake it for Forspoken. This is a first-person shooter with a boy protagonist called Jack (sorry, Jak) from a former Call Of Duty and Dead Space fella, though, and a new "gameplay first look" trailer does more to distinguish itself.

Most co-operative platformers are for two players and an optimal experience normally involves both being sat side by side on a couch. Not so in KarmaZoo. It's a co-op platformer designed to be played by "up to 10 random players around the world" in which the levels adapt to the size of your team and any helpful action you perform earns 'Karma' with which to unlock new characters.

It's coming in 2023, published by Devolver, and there's an announcement trailer below:

Hack-and-slash management game Cult Of The Lamb released last year to glowing reviews and plentiful awards. Developers Massive Monster didn't drink their own Kool Aid, however. They've been working on free updates to expand and improve on the game, and the first, focused on combat, will release on April 24th.

Humanity is a puzzle game about controlling a glowing Shiba Inu who can drop instructions for a streaming crowd of human beings to follow. It's a concept reminscent of Lemmings, but wrapped in a style that evokes the self-assuredly video gamey early PlayStation era. That's what its latest trailer does, too, while also announcing a May 16th release date.

It's not often that we write about deals that knock £2 off the usual price, but it's also rare to get the chance to pick up two 64GB USB flash drives for just £6. These drives are well worth picking up for transferring files between PCs, installing BIOS updates and backing up small but important files, which enough space to store some - but not all - music collections, game install directories and wallpaper packs.

We've continued to see prices fall on solid state storage over the past few months, as manufacturers are looking to sell on excess stock caused by falling demand in commercial sectors. That makes it a great time to be a PC gamer, as you can pick up some great tech for bargain basement prices - including this Crucial X6 portable SSD, which offers 1TB of space for £56.50. That's nearly half the price this drive cost at launch a few years ago and a good £15 below what it was going for in February this year, making it an awesome pickup for the money.

If modern gaming has given us anything that’s good, it’s the surge of recent catventures. Last year’s Stray meowed its way into every cat lover’s heart, Little Kitty, Big City is taking things a chaotic step further later this year, and A Space For The Unbound had an abundance of cats just lying about. Just last night, we received a release date for Mineko’s Night Market, a slice-of-life adventure that’s set on a Japanese island bursting with kittens, cats, cat gods, and other furry feline variations.

Alice0 first wrote about Mineko’s Night Market six years ago, and it’ll finally open its doors on September 26th. Slowly blink at the newest trailer below:

Over the last few weeks we at the RPS Electronic Wireless Show podcast have noticed a slight resurgence in a trend we thought was basically over. That's right: video game tie-ins to films! There used to be loads of them, and now there aren't. Except there are again, culminating in Renfield (of all movies) having a Vampire Survivorslike you can actually buy on actual Steam. What's going on? Is this marking the start of something new? What are some of our favourite game tie ins?

Plus we put the boot in on a couple of Tweets about the Mario movie, because why not, frankly.

Freshly announced puzzle game Crime O’Clock will be putting you in the shoes of a time-travelling detective when it comes out on June 30th, its release date seemingly perfectly timed (sorry) to coincide with Capcom's object-hopping time puzzle detective game, Ghost Trick. In all seriousness, though, Crime O'Clock looks to be its own distinctive beast (and not just because you seem to play as a rabbit). It has shades of Where’s Wally? (or Waldo, Wanda, Willy, Valli, and my favourite, Ali for international readers) as you’re given densely illustrated maps to navigate, and pick out key details in order to stitch together clues to solve cases. It could be very cool if all the right cogs click together.

Spooky supernatural sequel Oxenfree 2: Lost Signals is launching on July 12th, developer Night School have announced. Just like the first Oxenfree, there’ll be plenty of flexible walking and talking where you’ll be able to interrupt conversations at any time, or just stay silent throughout, which would be creepily on-brand for a series about ghostly rifts and unsettling radio frequencies.

A lot of RPGs with stats and dialogue options don't actually give you options. Sometimes you're presented with a skill check and if one of your stats isn't an arbitrary number like, I dunno, seven, then whoever it is you spoke with (a king, a bard, an elf) might shutter their mouths forever.

Betrayal At Club Low is a CRPG that we're playing for our Game Club this month, and which understands the unpredictability of a face-to-face wobble of the lips, and how befriending or swindling or aggravating someone is determined by so much more than a single seven. And when all seems lost, how visiting a puddle can turn your entire evening around.

The Ryzen 7 5800X3D remains one of the fastest gaming CPUs on the market, and the release of Ryzen 7000 X3D CPUs has pushed prices down even further on the best option for existing AM4 motherboards and DDR4 RAM.

The 5800X3D is currently cheapest at Amazon, where you can get the processor for £281. That's the cheapest we've ever seen this highly-respected model.

Developer The Game Kitchen first stealth-announced the sequel to their hard as nails Metroid-like Blasphemous back in 2021 to coincide with a free update for the original game. Now, though, after a long wait, we have the first proper trailer for Blasphemous 2 showing off tons of platforming action, unholy Catholic iconography, and other such sinful stuff. Take a look below, if you dare.

Dishonored was Arkane’s breakout hit, the assassination sandbox that elevated the studio to the top table of immersive sim makers. Its success validated Bethesda’s decision to buy Arkane a couple of years earlier, and left the publisher with a promising new series. But despite critical acclaim, Dishonored 2 failed to bring the series to a wider audience. And after 2017’s standalone expansion, Death Of The Outsider, Bethesda decided to put the series on pause in favour of a shorter, more experimental project - according to Arkane founder Raphaël Colantonio, who spoke to me in an interview about their cancelled project The Crossing.

After a slight delay, the cel-shaded platformer Bomb Rush Cyberfunk finally has a release date: August 18th. It’s been a long wait for Cyberfunk after it was first announced in 2020, and to make the wait even more excruciating, the game is a spiritual successor to the dormant Jet Set Radio series. As such, you’ll be skating, dancing, and graffitiing across a colourful 3D city with a style to die for.

Post-apocalyptic survival is an enduring theme in city building games. In Oxygen Earth has, once again, experienced an environmental disaster with the help of human beings. The Earth's crust has cracked, releasing toxic gas that has spread globally with the wind, and only a little oxygen is left. Unfortunately it's also me who, once again, decided to take on the responsibility of leading the survivors, to guide them to build a city in this dire situation. This is the destiny of a city builder lover.

There’s an alternate world where Arkane made The Crossing, and it’s not necessarily a better one. Before Dishonored, the developer was looking down the wrong end of a bad publishing deal which, in the estimation of founder Raphaël Colantonio, would have ended in either The Crossing’s cancellation or a deeply underwhelming end product. In that timeline, there’s no telling whether the studio would even exist today.

Nevertheless, for fans of Arkane’s sophisticated and immersive first-person adventures, this lost project remains tantalisingly forbidden fruit: a foolhardy mashup of single and multiplayer in which teams of invading players would attack the protagonist of a solo campaign, against the backdrop of a multiversal Paris co-designed by Half-Life 2’s Viktor Antonov.

Zombie survival sim The Day Before is apparently receiving a playable beta test and "should be" returning to Steam, according to developer Fntastic. The enigmatic game was previously pulled from Steam since Fntastic hadn’t actually trademarked The Day Before when they first announced it, leading to a trademark dispute and removal from Valve's storefront.

I'm now the proud owner of a Steam Deck and I think it's fantastic. It's a genuine marvel how I'm able to lay on the couch and play Like A Dragon: Ishin, or stream Resident Evil 4 - with admittedly, a ropey success rate - to it from my PC in the other room. I've even been reunited with some old friends, too. Welcome back to the fold, Rogue Legacy 2.

But my time spent with the Deck has me thinking that my gaming priorities have changed. I'm no longer excited by consoles that promise better graphics or blazing fast loading speeds. At least, not for big boxes designed for living rooms. Right now, I'm far more excited by the practicality of handhelds and how they'll evolve. The Deck might be the future, but it's also brought me back to my past.

After bingeing the Netflix show Arcane and getting hooked on the world of League Of Legends, I was disappointed to find there weren’t too many single-player games for those who aren’t the MOBA-type of keyboard mashers. The top-down action RPG The Mageseeker: A League Of Legends Story is looking to fix that, though, letting you play as the ex-convict and buff mage Sylas while he’s busy running a revolution. It comes from the developers behind the Zelda-like shop roguelite Moonlighter, and it's out now.

I’m too prejudiced against first-person melee games to enjoy Dead Island 2 as much our reviewer Rick Lane did, but even a mind as narrowed as mine can appreciate its slick performance on PC. I wanted to see how well that smoothness and stability would carry over to the Steam Deck, and although the long-delayed zombie mulcher needs some cuts to quality settings, finding the right balance will have Dead Island 2 running almost as comfortably as the very best Steam Deck games.

Alas, it’s still not the ideal handheld game, thanks both to the odd crash (lowering settings helps with this) and the fact that it needs some tinkering with the Epic Games Launcher to get it playable in the first place. Still, playable it very much is.

Let’s start by addressing Dead Island 2’s lack of a Steam version; it launches on February 21st as an Epic Games exclusive, and since DI2 isn’t even listed on Steam right now, that’s unlikely to change any time soon. Luckily, there are workarounds: you can either install the Heroic Launcher, or follow our handy guide on how to install the Epic Games Launcher on the Steam Deck. Both of these should allow you to get Dead Island 2 downloaded onto the handheld, still using your regular Epic account.

Knowing how to build a PC is, at least in the view of this hardware ed, an underrated skill. The single, solitary advantage of buying a pre-built rig is convenience, but if you know (or are willing to learn) how to slap all the parts together yourself, you get to exert far greater control over the specific components in your PC while gaining a greater understanding of how the whole thing works. Not to mention you’ll be saving an absolute bundle of cash, a benefit that’s all the more keenly felt in a cost of living crisis.