Atlas Angle

Unlike Ed, I wasn’t deemed important or youthfully handsome enough to get Black Myth: Wukong review code, leaving my only hopes of conducting some hardwarey performance investigation with the recently released benchmarking tool. The one that, by the admission of developers Game Science themselves, "may not fully represent the actual gaming experience and final performance at the time of the game's release". Monkey nuts. Read more

Black Myth: Wukong is an action RPG that leans a bit into the Souls camp and a bit into the adventure camp. And either way, it's a spectacular journey that works for mostly everyone: those after challenging fights against Chinese mythological creatures, and those after the same thing, but with a little less challenge than your typical Soulslikes. What separates Black Myth from the crowd, though, is its slick presentation and a sense of generosity. You're to witness the most lavish, cinematic worlds and its creatures. And you're to enjoy battering everything with your staff as a highly athletic monkey with copious spells at his furry follicles and fingertips. It's been a while since I've played anything quite as impressive as this. Read more

There you are, rambling through the woods of Interactive Entertainment with an empty pack and a spring in your step. Here I am, lying in wait behind a tree. Wham! Bam! You reel back in consternation as I bounce into the path and clobber you with a sack containing no less than eight venerable RPGs, from Baldur's Gate to Warhammer 40,000: Rogue's Trader - well over a thousand hours worth of dungeons, dragons, dicerolls, dwarven shopkeepers and many other things I refuse to spend time alliterating, all of which will (currently) set you back just £32.07. Were you planning to spend this weekend playing some cute two-hour artgame sideshow, without any levelling at all? Shut up, you DOLT. You will play what the nice journalist tells you to play! Best lay in extra caffeine tablets, because it...

Baroque wilderness-builder Nightingale has not been doing brilliantly since Ed Thorn described the launch early access version as "a numbers grind disguised as a gaslamp survival game". We had moderately high hopes for it before the early access release - I personally enjoy the fairytale setting, with its pop-up Pucks and magic umbrellas, but I also think I've raised enough hovels on procedurally generated maps for one lifetime. Still, I'd quite like it to come good, if only so I can justify op-eds about Lewis Carroll, and I'm somewhat encouraged by what I've heard of the game's forthcoming Realms Rebuilt update. Read more

Good job, everyone! The cat talk in the comments has never been stronger. I miss my cats back in England very much. Though I did visit a cat cafe recently, and I got to boop some sphinx kittens on the nose. Life pretty much peaked then, so I'm in a bit of a slump right now. So do me a favour and sound off even more than usual about what your fur babies have been up to lately! And also, if you feel like it, let us know what you're playing this weekend too. Here's what we're clicking on! Read more

Minecraft's Realms servers have been down for most of the past four days. Mojang's official account for reporting service status updates noted that "intermittent failures or slowdowns" began on August 13th, and despite similarly intermittent reports of uptime in the days since, the servers remain inaccessible to most players today. Read more

I've got a real soft spot for Trombone Champ, a rhythm game about tooting along to music that works perfectly with the mouse. I'm also a huge fan of Beat Saber, a rhythm game in which you slice at blocks that whizz towards you in VR. You can see where this is going. Trombone Champ: Unflattened transports that 2022 tooting into 2024 virtual reality. Read more

JDM: Rise Of The Scorpion is a free prologue for JDM: Japanese Drift Master, a racing game about - who could guess - drift racing in Japan. It's got an open world set in rural towns to burn rubber around as well as several story missions to play. You can download it from Steam now. Read more

Sundays are for cat. I’m currently in the process of acquiring a gorgeous white and ginger kitten for the local shelter. I have seen four seconds of footage and I’m already smitten, kitten. Before I spend the weekend getting very excited about big stretches, let’s read this week’s best writing about games (and game related things!) Read more