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Battlefield 6 review | Rock Paper Shotgun

by admin October 9, 2025

Battlefield 6 review
The new Battlefield is a tale as old as the FPS genre: a vapid military fable salvaged from total irrelevance by a robust albeit unsurprising multiplayer.

Developer: Battlefield Studios
Publisher: EA
Release: October 10th 2025
On: Windows
From: Steam, Epic Games Store, Microsoft Store
Price: $70/£60/€70
Reviewed on: Intel Core-i7 12700F, 16GB RAM, Nvidia RTX 3060, Windows 11

All hail the Battlefools! They fan out efficiently from spawn and are instantly massacred in a hail of rifle fire and grenades. Arguments erupt in the chat. Who’s watching the flanks? Were you watching the flanks? I’m not supposed to watch flanks, I’m an engineer – my two defining passions are blowing tanks up and fixing them, a clash of loyalties that routinely gets me run over. You’re a recon – shouldn’t you be reconnoitring? Blame gives way to frantic improvisation as the attackers turn defender. People switch classes, get cut down, switch classes again. Support players plant lines of barricades that somehow avail them nothing against the snipers. Squad leaders ping the objective icon furiously, like babies banging the arms of their prams. One squad tries crawling behind a line of parked cars and is promptly squished by hammer-wielding exterminators.

Then, it happens. A single friendly player gets the better of somebody holding a corner. That player hoots and hollers into the enemy base and scurries under a table like a naughty kitten. Somebody else spawns on the naughty kitten, skips down the hall and wastes three more with a shotgun. Viewed from the spawning lobby, the two infiltrators are flecks of blue hope upon the sullen red box of the objective. The swarm reacts. Bodies move or teleport into the breach. The other side grudgingly gives way.

This is Battlefield 6, a big team combined-arms shooter in which visibility is king and death comes from all angles, elevations and distances. A woozy cacophony in which you live for those moments when the gods of Brownian motion smile, and you somehow become part of a greater whole that has focus and direction. A return to the smoky azure-tangerine stylings and class setups of Battlefields 3 to 4, after the abortive hero-shootiness of Battlefield 2042. A comfortably furnished, very loud, basically unsurprising multiplayer sequel, encumbered by what could be the worst singleplayer FPS campaign I’ve ever sat through – an aggressively bland piece of war porn that fails to hurdle even the low bar set by previous Battlefields. We’ll circle back to the campaign. First, we have to take Bravo.

Image credit: EA / Rock Paper Shotgun

Battlefield 6’s maps are places of meticulously petrified realism where the fires of history never gutter out. Each is an emblem of forever war with an undead soundtrack of baked-in artillery blasts and a generous, but noticeably selective budget of buildings that can be degraded or destroyed for tactical advantage.

Operation Firestorm – restored from Battlefield 3 – is a great, gleaming oilfield. Picture the workers in overalls and hard hats among the pipes, tapping dials and checking their clipboards. Picture the stooped elders walking between the red-capped houses of Tajikistan’s mountainsides, where you still find patterned carpets thrown over compound walls, and the remains of what could be walnut tree groves. In Gibraltar’s Old Town, you lurk behind ornamental fountains and sun-worn shutters, aiming at the heads among the hanging flower baskets. All these shows of location research come second, however, to the letters marking the map objectives. Glorious letters of tomb-grey or obstinate red, which need to be invaded and painted blue.

In Battlefield’s flagship Conquest mode, each objective is a map within the map that drains the other side’s respawn flags when you control enough of them. The objectives develop their own personalities as each match goes on. Here’s Alpha, the haven that never falls: opulent and imperial, gazing proudly from its stoic perch above the Brooklyn pier. There’s Bravo, the cosmopolitan heart of the war, switching sides at a reassuring, almost-seasonal cadence – a roomy marketplace of constant yet somehow judicious murder. There’s Charlie, the lost: a sunken abscess of recon diehards and anti-personnel mines. “We don’t go to Charlie anymore,” grizzled commanders ominously explain to the recruits joining mid-round. And then, of course, Delta, that filthy rat. That flip-flopping appeaser, trembling between loyalties with a half-full capture wheel, never quite conquered, never quite out of reach. “Pick a fucking colour, Delta,” both sides roar, as they charge into each other’s bullets.

Image credit: EA / Rock Paper Shotgun

Sometimes the letters are strewn all over, and we call this Conquest or Domination – the freest of the modes, where an awful player can often make a contribution (and earn some XP) by walking away from the more obvious explosions and locking down an objective everybody’s forgotten about. Sometimes they form a corridor, creating more desperate attrition across a palpable frontline, and we call this Rush or Breakthrough. Escalation is the new kid on the blockbuster: it’s Conquest, but when you capture enough objectives, the lethal twilight zone that surrounds every Battlefield mission area pulls closer. It’s an attempt to blend Battlefield with Fortnite, offering matches that segue from baggy tank and plane skirmishes into shellshocked close quarter mayhem. I think it works well enough, though I think the average round of Conquest offers much the same interplay of scales already, and less rigidly.

And then there are the garden variety FPS modes – deathmatch, team deathmatch, king of the hill. Battlefield 6 does a fair job of them, but they remain Call of Duty’s turf. Certain classes, like the slow-shooting, vehicle-painting recon troops, simply make less sense in these cramped and spiralling, figure-of-eight engagements, however much you tinker with loadouts. In general, it’s always intriguing to follow Battlefield’s attempts to grab some of the “it’s 5.30pm and I fancy a cheeky killstreak” audience, while clinging onto its identity as a game for people who put sustained teamwork ahead of personal gratification. This extends to the limber, but not too agile movement, which (depending on the heft of your equipment) offers just enough leeway to Keanu Reeves your way out of an ambush by means of spasmodic ducking and sliding.

Image credit: EA / Rock Paper Shotgun

The same existential struggle to be, and not to be COD is found in the classes and loadouts. Battlefield 2042’s Operator customisation is gone, and the four broad class archetypes from previous Battlefields are back. The key thing to know about the classes is that they are all bastards. The engineer is that bastard firing the MG turret on the tank coming up the road. You score a very palpable hit on the tank with your launcher, and the engineer slinks out like a spider and fixes it with a magic blowtorch, while the tank driver puts an armour-piercing shell through your ear.

The recon is that bastard somewhere above you who won’t let you stand or run in a straight line. You head to the rooftop to even the odds, and the recon spies you climbing the ladder through an inch-wide gap and swats you back down into rubble. You try some mindgames, doubling back behind cover to throw the sniper off, but the fucker appears to be psychic – either that, or you’re being discreetly monitored through a drone or deployable camera. The support is that bastard behind the self-deployed barricade who just resurrected four guys with her electric paddles, and is currently power-washing your position with mounted LMG fire. The assault is that bastard who just came through the window care of a creatively deployed sloping ladder. You shoot her three times but only in the legs, and she pirouettes irritably and murders you where you lie.

If you’re a returning Battlefield pervert, you may sneer at me for this display of my evident skill deficit. Bad news, General Patton – EA want 100 million people to play this, according to reports, which means you have to let the dirty casuals in. You have to make room in your elite tactical snuffbox for the folks with two left hands who react to the fall of a pin by bouncing a frag off the wall they’re hiding behind and galloping out into the sights of a helicopter.

Image credit: EA / Rock Paper Shotgun

Let me digress into guide writer territory and offer some advice to the greenhorns. My top tip is to unlock the weapon stocks that lessen recoil, as soon as you can. Also, stop trying to shoot people and focus on playing the objective and using your gadgets. If you’re an engineer, chuck down mines at every junction. If you’re support, get used to playing rearguard and laying on your lightning hands. Even if you’re not a support, prioritise reviving people – in Battlefield 6, you can drag KO’d players into cover before stabbing them with your adrenaline pen, and in a shooter where lives are currency, this can be more impactful than taking the point yourself.

It varies by the mode, but all nonlethal actions earn XP and ensure you have toys to pick from when you decide it’s time to give those bunny-hopping streamers a run for their subscriber money. It’s hard to judge off the back of around six hours in EA-organised pre-launch multiplayer sessions, but I think Battlefield 6’s progression and customisation strike a decent balance between the omni-tinkering of COD and the vegetables-before-pudding, know-your-role strictness of the older Battlefields. There are closed playlists that lock classes to certain guns, and open playlists that let you equip weapons to classes they are statistically less capable with. Each class also has a choice of skill paths that let you skew the emphasis slightly – making the support more offensively-inclined, for example, or the recon even harder to see.

The sole saving grace of the campaign – yes, I guess we should finally talk about the campaign – is that it’s an introduction to some of the boomsticks and boondoggles you’ll use in multiplayer. Every individual fight against scripted waves is bookended by crates of replacement weapons, gleaming in the dust of butchered houses like boxes of eggs freshly laid by some kind of Lockheed Martin chocobo. I estimate that at least 30% of my deaths came about while I was in the grip of choice paralysis – urgh, this laser-pointed SMG seems ideal for the tunnels ahead, but that scoped jobbie with the bipod isn’t without its charms. Mind you, it’s also true that I lingered too long over the guns because I had no interest in advancing the story, and no interest in killing the soldiers trying to kill me.

Image credit: EA / Rock Paper Shotgun

To announce that a blockbuster military shooter has a terrible story mode is like saying that water is wet. Next you will tell me that it has a jump button! Next you will tell me that EA’s new owners in Saudi Arabia have a complicated relationship with the press! Fair enough, but I think Battlefield 6’s campaign is uniquely bad, and not just because it’s another fan letter to the US military with a couple of canned Thoughtful Moments. It’s bad because the concept is tedious, the characters have no character, the pacing is non-existent, and the writing is unbearable.

All hail the Battlefools! They fan efficiently out of their base in near-future Georgia, right into a hail of bullets and shells, and in a terrible stroke of misfortune, do not die immediately. The perpetrators this time are Pax Armata, a paramilitary group backed by a formless coalition of ex-NATO countries, who exclusively employ people in balaclavas save for one lairy Scottish badnik whose motivation never really evolves beyond being miffed that he was left behind in some other war. We know Pax Armata are the baddies because the 60-second prologue full of mashed-together TV broadcasts tells us they are, and that’s all the groundwork you’re getting, bucko, now please kill 100 Paxmen during the scripted jeep getaway.

This kind of disdain for dramatic build-up characterises Battlefield 6 throughout. Beyond the opening bash with Pax Armata, you’re whisked off to the house of a CIA agent who is being held hostage by some of the main soldier people. The gunfolk have questions about missions the spook sent them on, which supplies a basis for flashbacks that bounce you between operations. Somebody says “You don’t understand, intercepting that shipment of Cadbury’s Creme Eggs overrode all other priorities.” And then somebody bellows “THAT’S NOT WHAT YOU SAID IN SOUTHEND-ON-SEA,” so off we fuck back to Southend-on-Sea to drone-strike a million ice cream van drivers with terrorist sympathies.

Image credit: EA / Rock Paper Shotgun

For clarity, Battlefield 6 doesn’t have a mission set in Southend-on-Sea – I am trying to avoid spoilers. But it wouldn’t be any the worse for it. The changes of scenery have no meaning because the premise and structure are so childish and brittle. They could set the campaign inside an IKEA store and it would be exactly as exotic, and probably more surprising. I’ll take the Gruen effect over this game’s torn-up, restitched playbook of two-note stealth, innumerable last stands and tank missions that feel like kiss-chase with Dodgems. I’ll definitely take it over saving the President yet again.

The story might get away with more if the writing and tone weren’t so smug. The thundering soundtrack has this inexplicable air of gloating bad-assedness that had me reaching out to give somebody, anybody a wedgie. The dialogue is half “INCOMING” and half smirk. “I don’t know what’s more impressive, the view or the firepower,” somebody announces on a clifftop, and alas, there is no option to immediately kick him into the sea, scream gibberish at his corpse and throw an exploding barrel after him for good measure. “Oh for fuck’s sake, Murph – you going to make us look like heroes?” somebody else yells, causing me to shoot him in the face for 30 seconds in the hope of persuading the game to register friendly fire.

The story theoretically deals in war trauma, but none of the cast are as psychologically twisty as they sometimes propose to be. There’s a character called Hemlock who is Battlefield 6’s equivalent for Modern Warfare’s mystery-man Ghost. He’s regarded as “crazy” by squadmates, because he says stuff like “this sure beats training”. At one point, a comrade loses his cool and shoots wildly at a dead sniper. It’s a brief, awkward effort at demonstrating that your otherwise Terminator-esque squad have souls, but then you’re handed some kind of robot firework and ordered to play whack-a-mole with the tanks up the road.

Image credit: EA / Rock Paper Shotgun

Battlefield 6 sporadically queries its own taste for violence, but here as in many Call of Duties, these bursts of apologia have no real impact on the business of popping skulls like bubblewrap, and just feel like insulting disclaimers. One of the Gibraltar missions takes you through an underground WW2 museum, and gosh, the Strangelovely irony of blasting your way through a memorial to the last time the island was at war. “Seems like it never ends for these people,” somebody mourns later, as you rock the local villages with quadrotor bombs and C4.

Pissed-Off Scottish Badman dutifully ladles out a few moments of who’s-the-real-villain-here convolution towards the finish – a critique of the game’s oorah patriotism that is basically akin to dusting a tank with pistol fire. “Don’t you want to die for something real?” he asks, declining to share specifics. The greater failure is the overall characterisation of Pax Armata, who are literally described in-game as an omnipurposeful grab-bag of all the mercenary nutters and zealots who hate the United States and the NATO world order – a framing that usefully saves the developers from dealing with specific malcontents, and exploring their grievances.

You can set your watch to the script’s cliches. “Storm’s passed,” somebody says, and I had to fight the urge to unplug the PC before somebody else could say, “No, it’s just a break. The worse is still to come”. Helpfully, this turned out to be the end of the campaign. I’m partial to cliffhangers, but this one does feel rather abrupt. Battlefield 6’s singleplayer has reportedly been a troubled project, and it doesn’t seem impossible that what we’re playing is the scorched stump of a more expansive story. Assuming the numbers add up for now-private EA, Battlefield 6 is definitely getting a narrative sequel, or at least some story DLC.

Image credit: EA / Rock Paper Shotgun

Battlefield 6’s campaign makes the most sense when you uninstall it, boot up the online again, and realise that the ensemble flashback story is essentially a very tedious argument over which multiplayer map to load up next. Multiplayer has always been the point here; the singleplayer is just a means of getting certain people through the door. That door swings both ways, however. Battlefield 2042 got it in the neck from some players for not having a singleplayer mode, but Battlefield 6 is evidence that often a singleplayer story is the worst thing you can inflict on a game that just wants to be a massive round of paintball.

The game’s online sandbox spaces have an eerie vitality in their mangling together of realism and colour-coded objective design. I am perennially fascinated by how the swarm thinks in Battlefield online, how that little pebble tumbling through a gap in the fortifications becomes an avalanche. Add a narrative component, however, and you create expectations of meaningful context, consequence and even introspection that the creators of military shooters are seldom able to fulfil.

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October 9, 2025 0 comments

Game Reviews

Little Nightmares 3 review | Rock Paper Shotgun

by admin October 9, 2025

Little Nightmares 3 review

Little Nightmares 3 is a heartbreakingly competent cover act of the series previous entries. It’s got a few truly brilliant moments, but a comparative dearth of imagination.

Developer: Supermassive Games
Publisher: Bandai Namco
Release: Out now
On: Windows
From: Steam
Price: £35/€40/$40
Reviewed on: Intel Core i5-12600K, 32GB RAM, Nvidia RTX 4060 Ti, Windows 11

The code Bandai Namco were kind enough to send me for puzzle platformer Little Nightmares 3 included a swathe of bonus costumes resembling characters and monsters from the previous games. Another way to phrase this would be that, before I’d had a chance to get to know this game’s duo of very brave, very doomed children, the game offered me a way to paint over their identities with something I recognised from a time I enjoyed myself in the past.

Hmmmmm, thought I. Then I thought it again. But longer.

Little Nightmares 3 is the first game in its series not made by its creators, Tarsier studios. You’re telling me a tarsier made two of mine (and RPS’s) favourite horror games? Best news I’ve had since the shrimps, thank you. This time, duties fall on Supermassive, of spending a decade forgetting why Until Dawn was good fame. I’ve enjoyed many of Supermassive’s games, but the handover concerned me. Little Nightmares traditionally had a bit more life in its DNA than might well be captured through a series of replicable signifiers related to genre, perspective, and those little elves with conical hats. How would they do?

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Reader, they did fine. Little Nightmares 3 is – in a word preceding a second word that makes the second word do things it was not originally intended to do – heartbreakingly competent. Picture the sort of time you roughly assume you might have with a Little Nightmares game not as good as the other two, and you’re most of the way there. To be blunt, I think the game largely displays a real dearth of imagination, intentionality, and most crucially, heart. It does, however, have some neat ideas, an oddly good final encounter, some beautifully creepy environmental art, and at least one moment of pure terror. It’s little as in diminutive, like diminished, as in shrunk, as in less than. But also as in, you know, good job little buddies. You did fine.

Whoaaaa. What if food, but like, too much? | Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Supermassive

That last line was obviously a joke about how patronising I am. I felt it necessary to point this out because, even as I’m about to grouse limerickal about a certain predictability and dryness that hangs over this thing like a frayed rope holding the twelfth pushable crate in the last fifteen minutes, I would like to spend a moment gushing about a kind of storyboarding genius that easily fades into invisibility. The game is about six hours long, and a stunning amount of forethought is needed to keep even an experience of that length progressing at a good, tense clip, with all its crests and lulls and aesthetic and tonal switch ups. It is not the tracks of this ghost train I mourn as much as the bolts keeping them together, so when I whine about ‘intentionality’, I’d just like to make clear that I do not believe something like this can be made without serious intention.

Still, when you make the first set-piece threat in the game a giant creepy infant doll, and later follow this up with a series of disconnected locales, including Spoopy Fairground and Spoopy Asylum, with more scary puppets and scary dolls, I must admit, I start weary and get wearier. The first two Little Nightmares embody a lasting, lingering sadness that elevated them above an easy Burtonesque, Hot Topic creepy-cute. So much of the threat feels either abstract or plain or recycled here. And, when the grotesque becomes commonplace, the grotesquerie starts to resemble a Halloween themed Mario level, dangerous plants and all.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Supermassive

Unfortunately, this kind of predictability also extends to a lot of the puzzle design and navigation. I was about halfway through when I realised that I kept having the same experience, over and over. I’d walk into a room full of fascinating and strange objects and marvel at what elaborate scene I’d have to concoct, only to get stuck because I’d been overlooking that the solution was usually just to climb up a thing and push a door to the next bit.

What is somewhat interesting is that both kids have different tools here: a big wrench for Alone and a bow for Low. The AI companion is exceptionally competent at doing what they need to in a given scene, to the point where they basically solve around a third of the puzzles for you. If you’re playing solo, then, you’ve got two playthroughs with distinct demands on your timing and co-ordination during certain scenes, and it might be worth swapping characters with a mate after you’ve finished, too.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Supermassive

Scores are obviously anathema to what we do at RPS, although I’m not so strong a person that I can avoid pointing out that if someone were to show me a picture of original series protagonist Six right now, I’d nod sagely and say “indeed”. Again, there’s a couple of really inspired scenes and more than a couple of arresting sights here, good enough to drag me from ‘meh’ to ‘oh damn!’ a few times. It plays like what it is, really: a cover act. A tribute. A flatpack knock-off of a trendy piece. Good quality. Well built. You could hit it with a wrench and it’d barely shake. Then again, I do have to ask whether it’s a good thing that I find myself assessing a game like a piece of furniture.

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October 9, 2025 0 comments

Game Reviews

Hades 2 1.0 review | Rock Paper Shotgun

by admin September 24, 2025

Hades 2 1.0 review

Now it’s out of early access, Hades 2 is a very strong sequel that builds on its predecessor’s strengths and offers an enrapturing godly grind.

Developer: Supergiant Games
Publisher: Supergiant Games
Release: September 25th 2025
On: Windows
From: Steam
Price: £25/€29/$30
Reviewed on: Intel Core i7-12700F, 16GB RAM, Nvidia RTX 3060 Ti, Windows 11

I am gonna claw out your eyes, then drown you to death. I AM GONNA CLAW OUT YOUR EYES, THEN DROWN YOU TO DEATH. So goes the chorus to the hit single Hades 2 girl group Scylla and the sirens have been rehearsing in lethal fashion for a year and a bit. It’s one of the most pervasive earworms I’ve encountered in my 26 years on this Earth, the kind of ditty that’d make the Backstreet Boys blush.

Within an hour of returning to Hades 2, now that it’s morphed into its full 1.0 release form, those words were just as firmly lodged in my skull as they were when I defeated Chronos for the first time during the roguelike’s early access phase. By all rights, I should find the purposefully mocking tune annoying, but I don’t. Much like the rest of Hades 2, no matter how many runs I make through the depths of the underworld and to the summit of Olympus, moments when it’s actually, properly grated on me have been few and far between.

That’s not for any lack of trying on the part of its mythical monsters, gabbing gods, and tetchy titans. Hades 2 is plenty tough, especially for those who dare not to reach for the breakable glass surrounding its God Mode, which gradually frees the stuck by dialling up princess protagonist Melinoë’s ability to tank through damage. In my return to Supergiant’s supergiant sequel, I’ve spent most of my time exploring the lengthy endgame section with it turned on to various degrees.

Image credit: Supergiant Games / Rock Paper Shotgun

I know, especially fresh off that whole Hollow Knight: Silksong discourse, shame on me. Except the nature of Hades 2’s God Mode, the fact it works in reaction to the player’s failure, means I’ve still been able to experience plenty of the supposedly sweet struggle that’s so exalted in games that opt to whip out the stick. You can argue that the struggle isn’t the struggle if it’s on the player’s terms, but be warned that I may respond with a joke about bondage dungeons.

Dragging the tone back into respectable territory, one of the things that makes Hades 2 so infinitely loveable – despite its willingness to put you on your bottom whenever you prove too weak or make a mistake – is that it wields the carrot just as deftly. You’re stopped in your tracks, but you never feel like you’re running in place. Each death comes with countless new strategies to try, ways to change or improve your situation using whatever riches you do manage to net each night. As in the original Hades, Supergiant’s beautifully-crafted commutes through the realms of Ancient Greek prose, full of false walls and hidden paths just waiting to be revealed whenever you get a few runs in (or brew up a revealing spell in The Crossroads’ cauldron).

Having already defeated Chronos that one time last year, and been rewarded with a note that essentially read ‘Ending can’t come to the phone right now, please leave a message after the tone,’ I first jumped into Hades 2 1.0 via the save with that victory under its belt. What followed was the bulk of Melinoë’s true task – not just recording one fluke win over the Titan of Time, but ending him and the siege of Mount Olympus by his legions for good. So, I started battling my way back to the house of Hades, all the while hunting for the ingredients I needed to brew an elixir that’d allow Mel to overcome her lethal surface world allergy and start battling through the whole new run added in 2024’s Olympic update.

Image credit: Supergiant Games / Rock Paper Shotgun

While my muscle memory took a bit of time to reform, Hades 2’s cast of characters quickly reminded me why I was so fond of them the first time around. Sure, Mel’s not quite got her brother Zagreus’ meteoric levels of sark and sass, but stick her in a chat with the likes of those pesky sirens and she can dish out some sharp and witty verbal daggerings. Her step-mum and dad, Hecate and Odysseus, help shepherd her along in her lifelong mission to topple Chronos, who’s kidnapped her family and the forces of fate as part of his own elaborate revenge scheme.

Wherever you look, there are distinct personalities, delivered with excellent voice acting, for Mel to bounce off of and add colour to the world. The likes of sarky household shade Dora chuck some comedic relief into the pot, counteracting the serious chat about fates and destinies, and an array of new and returning Olympians pop up to offer boons like a quirky aunt or uncle with a selection of flashy gifts. Plenty stick out, but my favorite has come to be Nemesis, the surly older sister figure who’s always ready to toss a bucket of water over Melinoë’s enthusiastic exuberance with the aplomb only a moody sibling could muster. She’s grown on me as she grows on Mel, starting out as what could easily be a one-dimensional grouch, then morphing into the ideal friendly rival as you ply her with nectar and bath salts.

You’ll sometimes bump into her during your runs, ready to dish out a challenge to take a hit from her or beat more foes in a time limit to earn a begrudging pat on the head. Then, you can turn the corner and find yourself walking in on god of wine Dionysus casually hosting a pool party as Olympus’ invaders swarm all of the chambers you’ve just battled through. Next door, there might be a giant automaton, the bulging eye of a fearsome beast, or a very angry rat with a massive health bar waiting to bash you about and prove it’s the boss. The bone structure of the two paths – one leading to Chronos, the other to a fight with mountain-sized monster Typhon that’s almost comically teeming with ways to die – stays the same, but every trick and twist in the box is pulled out to ensure you’re still running into things you’ve never seen before by your fifth or tenth trip through.

The arc as you do so is the usual Hades one. Earn boons that imbue your base abilities with twists themed around the spheres of different gods, slice in some extra tool sharpening from Daedalus hammers, chew on centaur hearts to boost your max health. Dash around rooms full of enemies hacking and slashing, a whirling dervish of energy and vibrant colour. If you’re so inclined, make use of Hades 2’s addition of magick, a new bar next to your health that powers beefier versions of your strikes, casts and specials. These take more time to fire, much to the chagrin of my well-honed original Hades desire for all of the damage, right now, he’s gonna kill me, AAAAAAGHHHHH. As a result, it took me a bit more time than it should to get into the habit of using them, but once I did, I never looked back.

Image credit: Supergiant Games / Rock Paper Shotgun

Prior to that, plenty of boons and other abilities offered something powerful in exchange for locking off a portion of these magick reserves, meaning that the bar has use for even those who prefer sticking to insta-reward button mashing. I generally found that I’m in that camp when hacking and slashing with the Sister Blades, the weapon in Melinoë’s nocturnal arsenal I used most early in my playthrough. As I delved a lot deeper into the endgame of repeat runs to Tartarus and Olympus, though, I branched out and had a lot of fun with other armaments.

Supergiant have done an excellent job of tweaking and balancing each of the six main weapons on offer throughout Hades 2’s early access patches, as well as giving you plenty of ways to upgrade them with special abilities that encourage different approaches to combat. Despite typically being averse to slower swings, I’ve really dug the weighty scything of power attacks with the Moonstone Axe’s Aspect of Thanatos variant. Specials are also what make the revolver-esque Argent Skull really sing as you fire busts of shells at foes, especially when you opt for its Aspect of Persephone version. It says a lot that since unlocking the most powerful of these arms, the punchy and missile-firing Black Coat, it’s formed part of a regular rotation rather than taking over as the go-to.

I wouldn’t say there’s an obvious weak link among any of the gods offering you boons either, with pretty much every run netting you a loadout that’s got something cool going for it. Having really dug Demeter’s freezing powers early on, my best builds have typically fused any combination of those, Zeus’ lightning powers for some handy repeat damage, Hestia’s hearth handouts for lingering built-up burn damage, or Poseidon’s wave attacks for some extra knockback punch. As you get into the later stages of the game, fresh boons from the likes of Ares and Hera are uncorked, giving you a much-needed extra dose of variety just as you verge on having tried everything the rest have to offer.

On the other hand, unless there’s a specific god I’m keen to get more boons from, I’ve found I tend to rely on the same keepsakes at certain stages each run. So, perhaps some more alluring alternatives to the likes of the Silken Sash, Evil Eye, and knuckle bones might have helped shake me out of that. I also had mixed feelings about Selene’s hex, a spell aimed at very magick-centric builds that can be fun when the chance to turn enemies into sheep pops up, but boasts a beefy upgrade tree that lacks the satisfying simplicity found in applying the various other augments.

Image credit: Supergiant Games / Rock Paper Shotgun

Regardless of the implements you use to battle your way through Hades 2’s beautifully illustrated regions, my favourite of which is a clever series of fights across the decks of ships in the Rift of Thessaly, as of 1.0 you can finally achieve Hades 2’s much-hyped true ending. How is it? Well, I’ll try not to stray too far into spoiler territory (though consider this your spoiler warning), but I think it’s one that might prove a bit polarising. On the one hand, Hades has always been a series about bringing families back together, and on that front the ending delivers no matter which way you slice it. On the other, given how often the motto “Death to Chronos” is repeated throughout, the manner in which he ends up defeated arguably isn’t as satisfying a form of retribution as is built up over all of those hours.

Overall, though, the ending isn’t what defines Hades 2. The journey is the thing, and now that it’s fully formed, it’s as epic in scope and ever-evolving with fresh surprises as I’d hoped. Even if you jumped in for a run to Chronos when it first came out in early access, there are myriad reasons to and rewards for returning to a worthy successor to the throne of the roguelike underworld. As with its siren song, Hades 2’s a game that by its very composition constantly runs the risk of grating on you throughout your repeated delves, but has been masterfully crafted to ensure it’s too loveable to do so on all but rare occasions.

As much as Melinoë matter-of-factly describes her quest to defeat the Titan of Time as her task, Hades 2’s greatest strength is that, thanks to Supergiant’s substantial effort tweaking and adding elements over the past year or so, playing it hardly ever feels like hard work.

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September 24, 2025 0 comments

Game Reviews

Silent Hill f review | Rock Paper Shotgun

by admin September 22, 2025

Silent Hill f review

Silent Hill f marks a big change for the survival horror series with a new setting, time period, and combat focus, but it still delivers strong scares and a lot to think about – even after you’ve stopped playing.

Developer: NeoBards Entertainment
Publisher: Konami
Release: 25th September 2025
On: Windows
From: Steam
Price: $70/£70/€80
Reviewed on: AMD Ryzen 5 4500, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060, 32GB RAM, Windows 10

Is there anything left that Silent Hill can offer us? Last year, I felt the answer to that question was a resounding no. The series’ comeback game The Short Message, a short teaser of a horror experience, landed far, far away from my tastes, and last year’s Silent Hill 2 was a remake of a game that needed one perhaps less than any other. This year is different though, because it has a true, full-sized, and most importantly new entry to bring this question back to the forefront. And Silent Hill f is a game that has, annoyingly, put me in my place.

The game’s series-first setting, 1960s Japan, feels quite well positioned to deal with some pretty big themes outside of the usual guilt and grief – in particular, gender inequality. Going into it, this is probably what made me the most nervous. Having now played it, that anxious feeling has quietened, as I think what it does have to say is in part worth saying in the first place, but also worth engaging with – even if I have some caveats. An intriguing turn of events for Silent Hill revival sceptics like myself.

Silent Hill f starts us off with teen girl protagonist Shimizu Hinako bailing on an argument with her alcoholic, abusive father to go see some friends, including Shu, her male (that’s important) best mate. That classic fog starts to roll in soon after her arrival, another friend turns into flowers, and a monster gives chase, sending the remaining lot of them into a surreal, twisted version of the place they call home. Same shit, different country.

Immediately, I felt surprised by how it did all feel like ‘a Silent Hill game’. For one thing, Hinako is introduced with precious little context for her life and backstory: she’s just thrust into the mess of it all and forced to deal with whatever trauma she’s been keeping bottled up. It’s a similar trick to the one Silent Hill 2 pulls early on, withholding details on why James has come to town, and Silent Hill f is certainly successful at spinning the intrigue on who Hinako is and why she’s in this position herself.

Image credit: Konami / Rock Paper Shotgun

Its more important accomplishment, though, was having me Scooby-Doo-style spinning my legs in the air in an attempt to run away in terror. SHf’s monsters, beasties, and physical manifestations of [insert interpretations here] were truly horrid to look at, and worse to have snarling up in your face. Some of them move erratically, which makes their violent lunges harder to predict, and while bigger enemies are slower and more lumbering, they still move with an domineering sense of threat. All of which makes the more Souls-influenced melee combat interesting, if still likely to prove divisive.

Hardware ed James, for one, wasn’t the biggest fan when he played at Gamescom last month. I don’t know if any tweaks were made since then to tighten up the bludgeoning, but I had no problems with it myself. Missing a swing generally felt like my fault, the impact of steel pipes and axes always landed with a satisfying thunk, and nothing – be it my arsenal or the fog’s monsters – felt imbalanced for an action-horror adventure.

It’s just.. it is quite actiony. You have a stamina meter, which depletes with weapon swipes as well as dodges, though perfect dodges will restore that stamina while slowing down time. Combined with a parry-ish move that stops enemies in their tracks so you can launch into a counterattack, the fighting is rarely bad, but it never feels very Silent Hilly (Shilly?).

This isn’t the Resident Evil 4ification of Silent Hill either, to be clear. Hinako doesn’t do any sick flips, and not once does she parry a chainsaw. I’d even say I enjoyed the combat more often than not. But still, I’m not sure at home it feels within a world like Silent Hill’s, especially considering Hinako is a teenage girl with no apparent combat training. It’s something I ended up justifying in my own head: Hinako is quite an angry teenage girl, as many are and should be – the world is not known for being kind to that particular demographic historically – so why shouldn’t she get to exert some of that rage?

As it happens, the reasoning behind Hinako’s rage is something that Silent Hill f manages to explore with both zero subtlety and a surprisingly amount of nuance, whether it’s focusing on Hinako herself or exploring why her dad is such an abusive drunk. Ultimately, Silent Hill f isn’t about dash-dodging around yokai: it’s about expectations of gender.

See, there are two other things to know about Hinako. The first is that she has an older sister, Junko, whose youthful kindness and playfulness faded away once she got married – not that it hurt her position as their parents’ favourite daughter. The other is that Hinako is seen as quite masculine by her friends and family. She’s a bit rough and tumble; she doesn’t care for dolls, but she does like playing Space Wars with her platonic “partner” Shu.

Now, I’m not saying that in the year of 2025 we’re entirely free to express ideas around gender as and how we like, but it certainly was a damn sight worse in the sixties, and Silent Hill f doesn’t shy away from that. It’s immediately apparent that there’s an expectation placed upon Hinako that she must fit into society and, just like her sister, eventually find a man to settle down with – notions she wholly rejects. Shu’s just her partner, people.

Image credit: Konami / Rock Paper Shotgun.

Even so, they’re notions she can’t seem to escape, even when she’s repeatedly plucked from the ‘real’ world to another, more mystical one, as this is a realm where tradition reigns supreme. There are torii gates. There are old lanterns. There are Zen gardens and Shinto temples. At my most cynical, this is where Silent Hill f’s presentation of its new setting seems to teeter on the edge of Thing, Japan a little too precariously. It’s not without purpose, however. The trials that Hinako endures here certainly feel tantamount to being forced to fit into society, and it’s something that I think that might even strike a chord with gender non-conforming folks out there.

I don’t want to spoil too much of what textually happens, because Silent Hill has always been its best when you’re interpreting its themes for yourself. Likewise, it’s hard to examine the effects of writer Ryukishi07’s signature approach to structure without giving too much away, even if it’s executed wonderfully. But for me, it’s a game about figuring out who you are when the people close to you (and society at large) have such narrow expectations for you. There’s even an eyebrow to be raised here at Hinako’s mother, a parental figure you’d think, or hope, would be more protective than she is shown to be in such a world. Nuance! All of this is a powerful thing to feel and experience in a game, and a fresh one for Silent Hill specifically.

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I still hold complicated feelings on Silent Hill f. There’s a big part of me that wanted to resist it, simply because of the industry’s current overreliance on wringing out (and recycling) existing series. And yet here I am, constantly thinking about it, what it’s saying, dealing with how I’ve been confronted with messy emotions and upsetting realisations. It is, in fact, interesting, and games being interesting is more important to me than how they fall on a simple good/bad scale.

So yes, Silent Hill does still has something to offer, and right now I can’t stop thinking about the game that provides it. Or talking about it! I’m excited for my partner, a fellow Silent Hill lover, to play it, so I can dig into its themes with them. And then grab my friend, who’s only just got into the series, and do the same with them.

There’s nothing I love more in life than a piece of art that triggers a desire for discussion, and in the face of my own assumptions, Silent Hill f has done that for me. Its combat, its new setting, or even its subject matter might not do that for you, but the bottom line is, it turns out that even after all these years, Silent Hill can still strike up an exciting conversation.

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September 22, 2025 0 comments

Game Reviews

Borderlands 4 review | Rock Paper Shotgun

by admin September 17, 2025

Borderlands 4 review

With improved movement, devastating Action Skills that can be adjusted to suit your playstyle, and very limited Claptrap appearances, Borderlands 4 is easily the best Borderlands game yet.

Developer: Gearbox Software
Publisher: 2K
Release: September 12th 2025
On: Windows
From: Steam, Epic Games Store
Price: $69.99/€79.99/£59.99
Reviewed on: Intel Core i5-13600K, 32GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080, Windows 10

While everyone complains about the technical state that Borderlands 4 released in, whether it’s choppy performance or the lack of an FOV slider on consoles, I found myself on the much happier end of the spectrum. Aside from the gruellingly slow start, where I was drowning in weak pistols and absolutely no other weapon types, playing this game had me smiling like an idiot about how it’s the best Borderlands yet.

Admittedly, it’s a series I’ve never really clicked with, all previous attempts having ended in boredom. Borderlands 4, though, is different. Almost everything about it, from the world design to the power variety of the playable Vault Hunters, has been improved or refined, to the point where I’m actually annoyed that I have to stop playing so that I can write up this review. This game is consuming me.

Once again, it all begins with the choice of one of four Vault Hunters. While everyone fights for the witchy goth girl Vex – because of course gamers love their goth girls – I went with gravity-manipulating scientist Harlowe, and while that was because I’m also a sucker for a bit of hair dye, I don’t actually recommend basing your choice on appearance. Even more so than previous games, the mercs of Borderlands offer impressively distinct playstyles.

If, for example, you prefer getting up in enemies’ faces, then Amon the Forgeknight – with his variety of melee abilities – is likely a better pick for you. For those who want an easier solo run, poster girl Vex can provide you with high damage and the ability to spawn in minions to fight on your behalf. Rafa, who packs a holographic exosuit, is a great hybrid, allowing you to jump in and melee before quickly backing out to pelt survivors with ranged abilities. Still, in Harlowe, a runner-gunner with a giant bomb and a lot of crowd control was just what I needed.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/2K

I also appreciate Borderlands 4 finally ditching Pandora in favour of new hellplanet Kairos, a previously hidden world ruled with an iron fist by new big baddie the Timekeeper. Glorious leader to his overly loyal lackeys and public enemy number one to everyone else, the Timekeeper stars in a pretty good introductory sequence in which you bust out of one of this prisons, though it’s odd how he’s set up with the completely overpowered ability to possess anyone wearing one of his control bolts – which includes you – and yet declines the opportunity to just snap your neck as soon as you start causing trouble.

The opening hour also sees you reunited with the one, the only… Claptrap. Except in another case of Borderlands 4’s improved sensibleness, he’s only really there to introduce you to Kairos proper – an open world split into four regions, each with their own objectives and questlines – before promptly leaving. The game is much, much better for it, and don’t even mean this in an edgy ‘It’s cool to hate Claptrap’ way. I genuinely cannot stand that robot and how his voice grates on me. Thank you, Gearbox, for hearing my cries.

There was still something else on my mind during these early stages. Namely, “Where are all the guns?” It makes sense to have stronger weapons limited to later levels, but it takes a while for Borderlands 4 to actually find its feet simply because you’re largely limited to simple pistols for the better part of a couple of hours. After coming across my first good-spec SMG, however, I was hooked, and not just because of my new firepower. Where even to start with what Borderlands 4 does better – dare I say, everything?

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/2K

Take Kairos itself, which finally gives the series its first true open world, with zero loading screen interruptions. It’s more fun to traverse as well, with majorly improved movement mechanics that let you double-jump, grapple, or jet-pack across the alien landscape. You can utilise these in combat too, grappling to vantage points or hovering behind cover as you heal up – moves that, in particular, suit Harlowe’s aggressive style perfectly.

The ability to summon a personal vehicle on command also does away with the awkward moments in previous games where you’d need to run to the nearest spawn point for new wheels. These customisable hoverbikes get the job done even if they’re not that amazing to drive, and your robot buddy Echo having sat-nav makes getting from place to place literally as easy as following a straight line on the ground. So long as it works, anyway – sometimes Echo will just shrug at you or tell you it can’t find a path despite there clearly being one.

Of course, as with any Borderlands game, a lot of missions require you to traipse away to far-off locations just to have a single conversation with some sucker before going to the next waypoint, meaning you spend a lot of time simply travelling. However, one neat change is that you rarely have to rush all the way back to base to ‘complete’ a mission. You also get access to fast travel, though it’s limited to only a few key locations and then safehouses you have to take over. This can be a tad frustrating, particularly when some checkpoint locations are hundreds of metres away from where a fight is taking place.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/2K

There’s been a keener improvement to each Vault Hunter’s skills and build potential. Everyone gets three skill trees, stemming off three variations on their unique Action Skills, allowing for greater flexibility than in past Borderlands games and more opportunities to tailor your Vault Hunter to suit your playstyle.

The powers themselves are more satisfying too, as well as being more diverse. For instance, Harlowe’s CHROMA Accelerator, which throws out a huge, freezing cold energy orb, was my absolute cup of tea. A giant explosion which not only does impact damage, but also leaves behind radiation to deal damage over time? You can’t go wrong.

Thanks to the scale of options when it comes to selecting an Action Skill and placing action points, you can easily ensure you feel the same about your character. If you suck at aiming, you can still make this game fun by opting for explosive AOE damage, or – if you’re running Vex – picking up an ability that creates a massive saber-tooth tiger to fight on your behalf. If you want to buff out your already perfect aim (pfft, show-off) then you can do so by picking up skills which empower your guns.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/2K

There’s definitely something for everyone, far more so than in Borderlands 3. Suboptimally levelling up your skill tree isn’t punishing, either. You can experiment, try out new abilities, and then easily go and reset them at a respec machine for a minimal cost. If something isn’t working, it’s not the end of the world.

Borderlands 4, mind you, can be difficult. You’ll progress through the game and absolutely obliterate the Timekeeper’s loyal companions, and by absolutely obliterate, I mean die over and over again trying to beat them; take a break from playing the game; go outside for a cigarette; come back; die over and over again, then finally by the skin of your teeth win the battle.

Even so, for me, this challenge played into how much more I enjoyed this over previous Borderlands games. No matter how overpowered your Action Skill becomes or how good your guns get, you’ll still struggle, which makes those narrow wins all the more much more satisfying. I cannot describe how good it felt when, after sixth attempts to fell a particularly high-ranking boss, I finally got to watch them keel over.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/2K

And, when the campaign gets too exhausting (or when you’ve run out of cigarettes), there are countless side missions to take on instead, many of them both silly and charming. Whether it’s a couple whose farm animals are seemingly being abducted by aliens or a sentient rock who wants to be able to fly, there are loads of quirky (but not Claptrap-annoying) characters who fill out the world of Kairos and remind you that, for all the surrounding political unrest, it doesn’t always need to be suit-and-tie serious business.

After the excessive wackiness of Borderlands 3, with its shoehorned-in jokes and memes, Gearbox have indeed kept the main story of part 4 more grounded. The laughs haven’t been abandoned to achieve this, though – they’ve just been shifted into those sweeter side missions. Another wise choice.

Borderlands 4 takes everything that worked about the previous games, removes the majority of the hindrances (cough Claptrap cough), and refines its RPG aspects, all of which make this easily the best Borderlands I’ve ever played. It has its share of issues: not just the tech stuff, but also what sometimes feels like endless travelling and the overabundance of terrible weapons. But what is Borderlands, even a much-improved one, without its billions of garbage guns?

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September 17, 2025 0 comments

Game Updates

The Paper, The New Office Spin-Off, Is Good, Actually

by admin September 16, 2025

The Paper, the new spin-off of The Office that’s streaming now on Peacock, will probably be pretty funny to the average viewer. To a journalist who has lived through everything the profession has suffered over the past 20 years or so, the workplace mockumentary is a cathartic encapsulation of so much of the nonsense I’ve never been able to explain to my friends and family who don’t work in the field. The Paper’s 10-episode season portrays the trials and tribulations that come with working in journalism in 2025, whether that be on a local level like the volunteer reporters of the fictional Toledo Truth Teller or on a larger scale, and the show does it with a surprising level of care, sympathy, and advocacy for the important work people are trying to do in impossible circumstances that threaten to undermine them at every turn.

Admittedly, I was pretty skeptical coming into The Paper, not because I didn’t love The Office or because I had my doubts about how it would handle its too-close-to-home subject matter, but because all the early promo trailers did nothing for me. They didn’t really have jokes and seemed to be largely banking on nostalgia for the original series to draw people in. If nothing else, that’s made the fact that The Paper is pretty great a pleasant surprise.

The Paper picks up a few years after The Office. Dunder Mifflin, the paper supply company that the original series documented, has shut down, and the documentary filmmakers who followed its workplace antics are looking for a new subject. They end up in the office of the Toledo Truth Teller, a local newspaper that has been so underfunded that its output is primarily news pulled from AP, mind-numbing listicles, and clickbait non-stories. New editor-in-chief Ned Sampson (Domhnall Gleeson) has left his cozy life in sales behind to try to revive the legacy paper, only to find that he’s dealing with every roadblock the modern journalist faces when trying to do the work.

The Truth Teller has lost almost all of its institutional knowledge, has no real funding to build itself back up, and is under the ownership of a larger corporation that has nothing to do with journalism. In fact, its owners only stand to see their position jeopardized if the publication digs a little deeper into the company’s own business practices. Nevertheless, Sampson is determined to make it work and relies on a small team of incredibly green, volunteer reporters to get things moving. Gee, that sure sounds like every media company, big and small, right now, huh?

I have worked in journalism both on a local level at my small-town Georgia newspaper and at sites read by millions like Kotaku, and watching The Paper was like reliving 10 lives over the course of 10 episodes. The show succinctly sums up all the hurdles getting in the way of good journalism in 2025 in a way that would be kind of horrifying if it weren’t delivered in the hilarious deadpan so synonymous with The Office. Ned and his team face underfunding, corporate sabotage, and a need to also grind out stomach-turning churnalism to help keep the lights on. Trying to do reporting that is both helpful to the public and clears a baseline ethical threshold is a never-ending struggle when the odds are stacked against you. Nearly every episode of The Paper touches on some very real challenges journalists are dealing with as they just try to do their jobs in the modern media landscape, and I was truly pleased with how true-to-life it felt, even when taking things to their most absurdist extreme.

The Office was always at its best when it exaggerated mundane office drama into its most comical, awkward, and uncomfortable end stages, but focusing on a sales team, especially one selling something as unremarkable as paper, gave it a universal appeal. The show is less about the specifics of the work than it is the ubiquitous experience of clocking in and trying to make the most of something dreadfully boring with a group of people you probably otherwise wouldn’t hang out with. The Paper, meanwhile, is so specific and real, I feel like it might double as a surprisingly educational tool for a general audience about the state of journalism right now, who come in with preconceived notions of how it all works.

For example, there’s an episode in which Esmeralda, the previous interim EIC of the paper, tries to get the team to go down the road of doing advertorials to cover some lifestyle products she wants, and Ned intervenes and says the team will review these items instead of uncritically promoting them for the paper. Eventually, it becomes clear that these products all have some serious adverse effects, leading to the staff getting sick or injured, and Ned, in a head-on collision of journalistic principles and the fear of incoming deadlines, tries to test all of them himself at once, and that goes about as well as you’d expect. Rather than trying to completely recapture The Office’s magic by making Ned a carbon copy of Steve Carell’s Michael Scott, The Paper finds its own way to the same hysterical conclusions, all in a way that feels very specific to the workplace it follows. The Paper is actually pretty restrained in its ties to its predecessor when it could have cynically leaned into that connection in order to bait the college kids who marathon the older series between classes into watching it.

The strongest tie The Paper has to The Office is in Oscar (Oscar Nunez), the sole returning character in the main cast, who certainly has his own stuff going on, but also sometimes just feels like he’s there to bring attention to the fact that this show is a spin-off of something else. Nunez has several scenes that feel tailor-made to remind people that Michael Scott is somewhere out there off-screen. Some of the callbacks are good, like the metanarrative of him not wanting to be filmed by the documentary crew following him around again, but then he directly quotes bits from Office episodes, and it loses me. We are all the products of the jobs and coworkers we once had, but I had multiple instances of being like, “Oh, right, this show might one day be some kind of bid for a shared universe of mockumentaries for Peacock to churn out, not unlike the gross churnalism Ned and his team try to avoid.” Perhaps I’m being cynical, but The Paper stands so well on its own that I don’t feel like it needed the Office tie-in to prop it up.

All that being said, I get why Peacock would want to go back to The Office. Its workplace documentary format is still really clever, and when I watched the original show back in the day, I was always fascinated by how it would present scenes that, as far as the characters involved were concerned, were clearly not supposed to be on camera. Some of the most iconic scenes from the original series were shot at a distance, with un-mic’d actors pantomiming a scene the viewer ostensibly wasn’t supposed to see, or they’re shot through the crack of a barely opened door like the crew is being nosey as shit for the plot. When The Office blew the lid off this and had a member of the documentary crew interfere with the action onscreen nine seasons in, it was met with a lot of blowback from longtime fans. The Paper is already more overtly playing with the fourth wall, so maybe that will set viewer expectations appropriately, but even after 12 years, the format still works, and The Paper is using it well without resorting to the same playbook.

I’m glad I gave The Paper a chance after my first impression of it left me cold. A workplace comedy about a fumbling newspaper could have made a lot of uninformed or irresponsible jokes about a profession that is historically misunderstood, both willfully and because misinformation spreads on the internet like wildfire. Instead, it has a surprising level of empathy for the plight of the modern reporter. You have corporate owners who know nothing about the job meddling in your affairs, commenters nipping at your heels, and you’re more often than not barely compensated or rewarded for your efforts. I haven’t set foot in a local paper’s newsroom in six years, but I still marveled at how clearly The Paper sees that a lot of corporate media’s biggest obstacles are the same ones small-town reporters are fighting against in towns you’ve never heard of but that are full of people who still read the print version of their local news. All of its raunchy humor, clever cinematography, and painstakingly awkward comedic set pieces of the kind you know and love from its predecessor funnel into a mockumentary that, at the end of the day, humanizes the people behind the bylines, and knows they’re at their best when they’re free to do the work they came here to do, without constant interference from the powers that be.

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September 16, 2025 0 comments

Game Reviews

Strange Antiquities review | Rock Paper Shotgun

by admin September 15, 2025

Strange Antiquities review

A shopkeeping puzzle game that’s even denser and more satisfying to master than its predecessor, Strange Horticulture.

Developer: Bad Viking
Publisher: Iceberg Interactive
Release: September 17th 2025
On: Windows
From: Steam
Price: £14.99/$17.99/€17.49
Reviewed on: Intel Core i7-12700H, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060, Windows 11

During my first two hours serving Strange Antiquities’ customers, I tugged the bronze pendulum of an ornate clock at least a dozen times, wondering what the resulting spin and settle of its hands meant. I checked my occult encyclopaedia’s index for mentions of time and compared the clock face to shapes in a book of hermetic symbols. Each time I drew a blank I yanked the pendulum a few more times, just in case.

This follow-up to the joyous 2022 puzzler Strange Horticulture is packed with these promises of future puzzles: a locked cabinet with no key, a sliding-door cupboard with no clear purpose, three empty plinths beneath your shop counter, an engraved desk with four missing chunks. I knew they were all clues, I just couldn’t tell what for.

Until, in a series of glorious moments, I could.

When I realised how the clock fit into a multi-part puzzle that revealed a new area of my shop, I genuinely chuckled with delight, and that feeling repeated several times during my 10-hour playthrough. This is a longer and more uneven puzzle game than Strange Horticulture, but also more ambitious, and just as beguiling.

The general concept remains the same. Customers come to your shop for a specific named item. Your encyclopaedia holds clues for each one, from the concrete – like the shape or material – to the more abstract, such as the feeling it evokes when you hold it, or the fact it’s used to draw blood in an initiation ritual. You touch, listen to, and smell the objects on your shelves, and if you pick the right one you can strike it from your long list. Outside, a story of curses and cults unfolds, and some of the decisions you make, such as which of two items to give a particular customer, can change the outcome.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Iceberg Interactive

The objects are imaginative: carved totems with unfamiliar symbols, bejewelled boxes that catch spirits, medallions designed in the image of a snake god, a blood-stained stone held by an eagle’s talons. They all look wonderful on your shelves, however you choose to arrange them. Descriptions are evocative, sometimes with double meanings that made me want to decipher them even more. Does this necklace give me goosebumps because it’s cold or because it’s creepy? Which of these wooden objects could conceivably be described as a “finger”?

At the start, simply knowing that an object is made of bronze with a single gemstone is enough to identify it, but soon the puzzles become tricky, layered challenges. Alongside your encyclopaedia you get a book on gems, a book of symbols, and a book of curses, and you’ll often need to flip between them multiple times to identify a single object. A simple example: if somebody comes in for a curse cure, you’ll first read your curse book to identify their malady, find that curse in your encyclopaedia’s index, and then read all the related entries to identify the object you need.

I was regularly stumped, but every time I split the puzzle into small chunks I could whittle down the possible answers. The hint system points you vaguely in the right direction without outright telling you the answer, which I like, but you can ask for multiple hints at once. When you solve a puzzle you’re handily told which clues were relevant – sometimes these were details I hadn’t even noticed, and that gave me new ideas for solving future puzzles.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Iceberg Interactive

I love the feeling of mastery it builds. When you get a new encyclopaedia entry it flashes on screen. You can ignore it, but the key information often stuck in my mind. I lost count of the times I later thought “Wait, I know that name”, and it’s satisfying to use knowledge you didn’t even realise you had. The way encyclopaedia entries flow from one another encourages you to follow your trail of thought, and before you know it you’ve identified three or four objects, rather than just the one. By the end of the game I’d become a proper expert shopkeeper: I knew, without thinking, which gemstone meant death and which meant fire, which symbol meant summer, and which winter. Sometimes I could pick the right object without consulting my books, which felt fantastic.

Its best moments – like with the clock’s pendulum – are not when you’re identifying objects, but when you’re poking around your shop, discovering puzzles hidden in plain sight. To open the locked cabinet in one corner I had to manipulate an object in a way that I hadn’t initially thought was possible, and that empty cupboard I mentioned earlier proved instrumental in a way I won’t spoil, but was equally delightful. The game’s scope constantly surprised me, and it delivers on every one of the promises it teases.

Even the game’s collectible maps conceal secrets of their own. Click on a location and you get a story vignette, often ending with the discovery of a new object. The clues to find these locations – riddles, matching shapes, pattern recognition – are simpler but no less engrossing, and later, you get a device you have to place over one of your maps to find the right spots. I felt like a genius when I figured it out.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Iceberg Interactive

In a game with so many puzzles, and so many different types of puzzle, a few duds are inevitable. I gave up identifying a particular medallion only for the hint system to tell me I had to first solve another puzzle I’d picked up (and put down) much earlier in the game, in what seemed like an arbitrary process. On another, I narrowed it down to two possible objects and simply had to guess – even when I saw the correct solution, the other object appeared to fit as well. Still, Strange Antiquities’ density and consistent generosity make it easy to forgive these small missteps.

It helped that I enjoyed simply inhabiting the shop, listening to the rain and thunder outside. I petted my cat every morning until he purred, and stuffed my papers in their drawers every night. After the first customer of every day I reshuffled my shelves to match my mood. Early on I arranged medallions by material – bronze, gold, wood, tin – with a separate section for items that looked particularly arcane. Later, I moved all my identified objects to a separate shelf and sorted medallions by the colour of their gemstone. This isn’t busywork – it’s flexibility that makes the shop feel like a deeply personal space.

I wish it was slightly easier to navigate with my mouse, though. When several objects seemed to fit the clues, I liked to stack them on the desk below my counter, a book open next to them, so I could better compare their markings and gems. To move an object from your shelves to this desk you have to grab each one, hold it at the bottom of the screen until the desk appears, and then drop it – an annoyingly fiddly procedure when it involves shifting four or five items in a row. It is, admittedly, easier if you use the keyboard too, but if ever there was a game designed for a mouse in one hand, coffee in the other, this is it. I also found it too easy to zoom in on a book (double click) when I simply meant to open it (single click).

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Iceberg Interactive

My enthusiasm for the puzzles also waned in the final hours, partly because its best challenges are all in the middle, and partly because I didn’t care about what was happening outside the shop. The town’s tale of curses, death, betrayal, and rival factions is, like all the words in Strange Antiquities, finely written, direct, and concise. Mildly poetic, even. But because you spend so much time buried in your books and staring at artefacts, it’s easy to forget what the last plot development was. And even if you keep track, the story loses its momentum about two-thirds of the way through, delaying and delaying what feels like an inevitable conclusion.

Even so, the satisfaction of a fully-ticked list kept me going to the end, and I happily lingered for a few more hours to identify objects I’d missed. The highs of Strange Antiquities – and there are many – match those of anything else I’ve played this year, and surely put it up there with Blue Prince among the best puzzle games of 2025. It is fiendish and delightful, and hopefully, one of many more Strange games to come.

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September 15, 2025 0 comments

Esports

Public toilets in China are making people watch ads for toilet paper

by admin September 12, 2025

China’s latest “smart” public toilet upgrade has gone viral, and it might be the most dystopian one yet.

Clips circulating across Chinese social media show new dispensers in the country that only release toilet paper if you watch an advertisement or pay a small fee.

In a viral video shared by China Insider, a woman is seen scanning a QR code with her phone and being forced to view an ad before the machine finally spits out a strip of paper.

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According to the outlet, users can either watch an ad or pay 0.5 yuan (about $0.07) per strip. Officials claim the system was introduced to reduce waste, claiming that some people had been taking excessive amounts of free toilet paper.

New toilets make users watch ads to get toilet paper

This isn’t the first time China’s bathrooms have made headlines. Back in 2017, facial recognition dispensers were installed at tourist spots, rationing out one 60-centimeter strip per scan every nine minutes.

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By 2019, new dispensers extended the wait to ten minutes per person.

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Like most ad-based systems, the reaction has been overwhelmingly negative. “I’m walking with my own paper everywhere just in case,” one user wrote. Another remarked, “China is more capitalistic than USA.”

“Ok, this is the first actually dystopian thing I have seen,” someone else said.

Others suggested just watching the ad while doing your business to get some “entertainment” while on the can.

There’s also one pretty big flaw: if someone’s phone is dead or they don’t have spare change, they could have a really gross situation on their hands – literally.

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September 12, 2025 0 comments

Game Reviews

NBA 2K26 review | Rock Paper Shotgun

by admin September 10, 2025

NBA 2K26 review

NBA 2K26 offers some on-court improvements over its predecessor, while its other new wrinkles are a bit hit and miss.

Developer: Visual Concepts
Publisher: 2K Games
Release: September 5th 2025
On: Windows
From: Steam
Price: $69.99/£59.99/€69.99
Reviewed on: Intel Core i7-12700F, 16GB RAM, NVIDIA RTX 3060 Ti, Windows 11

I regularly go against my best consumer instincts and check out the yearly iterations of sports games. It’s not something I’d likely be doing without some Steam press account magic letting me dodge the yearly cash sacrifice for a game that usually shares a huge chunk of DNA with its direct predecessor; a sense of deja vu is inevitable, unless you’ve been sensible enough to either let a few years pass or wait until you’ve spotted a new feature that piques your interest.

With NBA 2K26, there was one such addition in my mind. As someone who’s been keen to see 2K’s ball-to-basket series get rid of the invisible wall it’d put up between its simulations of men’s and women’s basketball for a good few years, the first-time addition of WNBA players to one of the marquee male-dominted modes caught my attention. Granted, it was MyTeam, the depressing pit in which you fork over either real money or fake money – acquired across hours of grinding – to buy trading cards that may or may not be dished out via something resembling a slot machine.

I wouldn’t be deterred from at least giving it a go, though. Given the nature of basketball, with its emphasis on height dictating different playstyles and requirement for close-knit teamwork, I figured mixing WNBA ballers in with NBA giants might make for a more unique contrast in experience than, say, playing with a mixed team in EA Sports FC.

In practice, I wasn’t disappointed. I opted for a starter pack that gave me the entire lineup of the WNBA’s Seattle Storm, then built it out with some extra cards and short-term high overall loanees that leant more female than male, making sure I retained some lads to work into my lineup.

Over the course of some breakout and triple threat park matches, most of which have minimal margin for error despite their less formal trappings, I’ve found getting the right mix of baller genders to be satisfyingly difficult. Naturally, the average NBA squad has a height advantage in any matchup, which can make securing rebounds and scoring close to the basket a very tall order for an all-WNBA squad. So, you’ve got to lean into skill and speed, either by finding ways to quickly streak to the rim in transition (or after breaking a defender’s ankles), or relying on your shots from distance.

In terms of the former, I’ve had a lot of fun with Jordin Canada, whose relentless pace and great handles make her feel like a five foot six Allen Iverson. For threes, I’ve taken to relying on Kayla McBride, while the best all-round package I’ve found has been an 89-rated Kelsey Plum, who excels in both of those areas. In terms of a trios squad, teaming up Plum and McBride with the 85-rated Moses Malone (who you get in the tutorial) made for some fun wins, with the retro big man’s inside defensive presence and rebounding prowess helping balance out the areas that even taller WNBA players like Angel Reese tend to struggle in.

Image credit: 2K / Rock Paper Shotgun

Disappointingly, I’ve found that the teams I’ve gone up against – whether AI or player-controlled – tend to still be mainly blokes. With CPU-controlled opponents, I figure it might be down to a WNBA-heavy squad potentially being an easy win if someone’s decided to play with three forwards or centers, so that’s something devs Visual Concepts will need to address going forwards.

In terms of the on-court action, part of what made those games a blast are the tweaks 2K26 makes to the shooting, rebounding, and movement. I’ve got a more mixed view on the former, which is literally hit or miss. Getting a perfect release, which has been signified by the meter turning green for a good few years now, appears to be easier in a number of 2K26’s modes. Which is a good thing, because the chances of making the shot if you don’t release right on cue seem to have been drastically nerfed. The result is that you get to go on immensely satisfying runs when your shots are dropping, but being on the other side of that and trying to grind out points sometimes feels impossible. Get into a park match against someone who’s got their jumper timings down to a T and has players who aren’t easy to block? You might as well not try on defense.

Going up against the AI makes that less of a concern, and it’s in MyPlayer mode where the game really start to sing. I opted to play as a center, the tallest and slowest player on the court who generally spends most of their time getting physical near the basket. The lingering annoyance of your rookie player starting off as a useless lump that’s a bore to control is still there. They can only be upgraded using the virtual currency, which feels deliberately grindy, and can also be bought using real money because of course it can.

Image credit: 2K / Rock Paper Shotgun

Once I’d managed to get a decent baseline, though, I was flying through the air to catch rebounds, employing the new timing meter to ensure I lept at just the right moment. The jostling under the rim feels nice and weighty, and close-range scoring via layups and post moves now seems as effective if you’re keen to more than a pure slamdunk merchant. What Visual Concepts have dubbed their “MyPlayer Freelance Engine” has also vastly improved your AI teammates’ off-the-ball intelligence, making them much better at picking you out with passes at the right time – without you having to grind the offense to a halt every time via repeated calls for the ball.

This brings me to the narrative of this year’s MyPlayer mode, dubbed Out of Bounds. These are relatively simple, often cliche-heavy tales simply designed to put a bit of story meat on the bones of your created baller’s short journey from nobody to NBA hero. Out of Bounds certainly doesn’t disappoint in that regard. With college basketball now back on the map in terms of standalone games thanks to its athletes finally being paid for the use of their names, images, and likenesses, 2K’s NBA game has had to dip back into the bin of royalty-free routes to stardom. As such, after playing a couple of high school games in remote Vermont, 2K26’s MyPlayer jets off to Los Angeles to take part in a club league that’s treated like university ball’s more casual cousin.

To be fair, a single four-game season there isn’t the be-all-and-end-all, with a trip to Europe on the cards as you aim to up your draft stock. Ooh, thought I, 2K have included teams from real-world European basketball leagues in the past, are those back? Sadly not. Instead, you’re suiting up for mirror universe Real Madrid and rubbing shoulders with yet more created players. There are at least nice establishing shots of cities like Malaga and Madrid to make things feel a tiny bit more real. 80% of your player’s dialogue is boasting or pouting, to the point where they feel genuinely unlikeable at certain points, though that’s to be expected. Oh, and the Madrid season’s storyline is mostly based around you earning the approval of a Slovenian teammate whose personality and mannerisms have been shamelessly ripped from GTA IV.

Image credit: 2K / Rock Paper Shotgun

Having had enough of shooting guard Roman Bellic, you may well bolt for 2K26’s array of management modes. Understandable – I’ve spent much of my time with previous NBA games’ equivalents, if only for a reprieve from constantly being advertised at. This time, though, I’ll save you some trouble: don’t bother. Whether it’s MyGM, MyWNBA, or the MyNBA Eras mode that’s essentially been my only excuse for playing more than 30 hours of these games over the past half decade, you’ll be disappointed in how little they’ve progressed.

There are a couple of minor changes. Some new GM scenarios to start from and more of a structure to yearly owner goals. A new expansion team in the form of the Golden State Valkyries. The option to make your Eras sim run slower, but purportedly smarter, or to speed things up and sacrifice some depth of computer thought. The first two are ok, but hardly worthy headliners.

The last one, meanwhile, genuinely seems to have changed almost nothing. Teams with an abundance of players at one position will still trade for, draft, and sign more players at that position without offloading one of their established crop to get better elsewhere. Offseasons still end with very good players left unsigned because computer teams haven’t managed to manage their cap room effectively, making them very easy to pick up on cheap one-year deals once the season kicks off.

That seems particularly problematic when it comes to WNBA sims, with a lot of star players being on short-term deals, meaning plenty of talent can be left on the table amid the bidding wars – then signed for pennies. Computer-made trade proposals do seem a tad more logical this time around, but I still saw instances of teams pulling questionable moves, like trading multiple future first-round picks for one mid-round pick during drafts.

Oh, and you can still phase through your staff in MyGM mode. | Image credit: 2K / Rock Paper Shotgun

All in all, it’s the usual fridge full of good and bad ingredients, making for a soup that tastes slightly different to last year’s – but not noticeably superior. As such, unless there’s a specific change you like the sound of, 2K26 is probably a year to skip. It’s best summed up by its version of The City – the explorable hub where MyPlayers wander around and join impromptu street games. Rather than 2K25’s ridiculously extravagant urban sprawl, complete with pirate ship area, mech workshop and Michael Jordan-themed coliseum, this time, almost everything is tightly packed into a nondescript shopping centre and park.

Am I going against my instincts by preferring when this basketball game had a huge pirate ship, which was likely at least partially responsible for 2K25 taking up about 50GB more hard drive space than the still-almost-100GB 2K26? Almost certainly, yes, but that’s what reviewing yearly sportsathons can do to a guy.

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September 10, 2025 0 comments

Game Reviews

Hollow Knight: Silksong review | Rock Paper Shotgun

by admin September 9, 2025

Hollow Knight: Silksong review

Hollow Knight: Silksong has a mean streak that sometimes tilts into vindictiveness, but its pin-sharp combat and wondrous exploration are too good to pass up.

Developer: Team Cherry
Publisher: Team Cherry
Release: September 4th 2025
On: Windows
From: Steam, Game Pass
Price: $20/£17/€20
Reviewed on: Steam Deck; Intel Core i9-10900K, 32GB RAM, Nvidia RTX 3090, Windows 10

I want to give Hollow Knight: Silksong a thrashing. A fully suited C-suite bollocking. I want to verbally repay unto it every cruel death, every pernickety jumping puzzle, every time-thieving runback it’s inflicted on me across the past five days.

But I can’t. For every moment of frustration, there are five of relief, of joy, of beauty even. As in Hollow Knight, Silksong stretches itself over a vast Metroidvania map, and yet its intricacies – its narrowest tunnels leading to grand new regions, its more acrobatic and tailorable combat movesets – make for constantly rewarding exploration, as well as some thrillingly free-flowing bugfights. There have been a couple times when I never wanted to play it again, and many more when I wish I never had to stop.

This time, as you traverse the deeply religious (and utterly bell-obsessed) kingdom of Pharloom, you’re playing as Hornet – a recurring Hollow Knight boss whose newly weakened state suggests she’s spent the last eight years eating Deliveroo and endlessly refreshing her own subreddit. Start reawakening abilities and unearthering upgrades, though, and some of that old power starts humming once more. Her heal is riskier than the Knight’s, using up an entire supply of silk/soul/energy/whatever, but much more potent, and equipping different crests will – similar to a stance system – significantly alter her base moveset of needle slashes. Even her dash power, gained relatively early, adds sprinting and long-jump abilities that the Knight’s equivalent never did.

Very quickly, then, Hornet becomes a more agile hero, albeit one that needs skillful application of her talents to avoid shunting into another bug’s blade. It’s also understandable that to counter this agility, she should face more powerful foes, though how Silksong goes about this is a bit blunt: it basically gives everyone outside of the humblest larvae an unexpectedly generous health pool and, for boss and grunt bugs alike, the strength to hit for two masks of health instead of the standard one.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Team Cherry

This is harsh. The maths involved essentially make the first, hard-earned mask upgrade useless. You start with five, so upping to six won’t actually let you survive an extra hit, which together with the reduced availability of heals makes it feel like you need to play an even more pixel-perfect dodging game than in Hollow Knight.

Still, since all that falls under a fair and long-lasting tenet of Soulslikery – don’t get hit in the first place – I can’t get too cross about it. Yet Silksong does, sometimes, let slip a more recognisably callous side, one with – at best – antiquated views on punishing failure.

This is most apparent in some of the platforming challenges, specifically those that rely heavily on pogoing. For the uninitiated, that’s performing a downwards strike on an enemy or environmental prop to bounce back up off it. These bits are uniformly horrible, because unlike so much of Silksong’s combat – and indeed, the majority of its running/jumping/grappling moves – pogoing doesn’t feel consistent.

Sometimes I’ll boing into the sky, nearby insects holding up little ‘10.0’ signs (in my mind). Others, I’ll get about three millimetres of air from the same manoeuvre and tumble fatally into some spikes. Because there are always spikes. It gets marginally more forgiving with a particular crest that swaps Hornet’s default diagonal thrusts for a straight downward sweep, but the uneven reactions to successful hits remains a source of lost health and swear words throughout.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Team Cherry

It doesn’t need to be like this, and the worst part is that Silksong knows it. There’s one region that’s basically one super-extended platforming run, and despite it being diamond-hard in its own right, I relished fresh attempts because I was only ever being held back my own timing and movements – not the whims of a bouncy flower.

Also, frankly, at least that region had reasonable access to benches. Silksong typically subscribes to the Dark Souls 2 school of thought on respawn points: not many, and none in useful places, especially not near bosses or midway through lengthy pogo gauntlets. If I squint I can almost, sort of, vaguely, kind of see the point to these runbacks: something about penalising your carelessness, combined with the added tension of having to fight or parkour your way back to your dropped loot without another death erasing it forever.

Except the tension thing doesn’t work because you can just dash over or under every non-boss enemy, and losing to a boss themselves already carries the punishment of not allowing you to play the game any further. In other words, they’re boring busywork, a fact that modern Souls and Soulslikes have increasingly got wise to. Even FromSoftware, developers to whom the Hollow Knight games partially owe their existence, knew to put Stakes of Marika in Elden Ring.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Team Cherry

So yes, Silksong is hard, and not always in ways that are fun to overcome. There is, however, a touch of give and take here. In exchange for tougher battles and platforming, exploration and navigation get some concessions – none of which amount to full-on handholding, but should let you enjoy wandering without needing a pad full of notes on the side. Objectives and sidequests, for example, are now tracked in your journal. Metroidvania heresy? Not quite – quest descriptions are still light enough on details that you’ll still need to listen to NPC chatter for meaningful pointers. It’s just a little help with keeping count of which errands you’ve agreed to, or how many collectibles you’ve gathered for certain tasks.

Background signage highlighting benches, shops, and fast travel points also seem more frequent and much harder to miss than in Hollow Knight. Again, this is hardly the game playing itself, but as long as I’m being battered around by double-damaging megafauna, I think I deserve the likes of bigger signs. New players, who are otherwise afforded nothing but pain, should find these help them avoid getting lost as well.

Still, sometimes it’s nice to get lost on purpose. Pharloom is, as previously discussed, an absolute looker, and half the pleasure of navigating its caves, crypts, and palaces is looking for its next chunk of lavishly drawn, beautifully lit fantasyscape. It’s still a broken vestige of a once-prosperous realm, as is custom, but it’s a bit more diverse than Hallownest, enticing you into magma-pooled factories and snow-capped mountains. Where there’s more of a crossover between games, the qualities of each biome seem heightened and intensified: its leafy areas are slightly more verdant, its royal towers slightly more opulent. It’s a darkly wonderful place to be, hardship or no.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Team Cherry

It’s also another, enormous example of how well Team Cherry can effectively beckon you to danger. Almost every tunnel or silo is littered with offshoots and ledges, just begging for a quick look, which often turns into a long look, which might just turn into two hours poking around a completely different area that you may have never discovered if you didn’t take that one turn.

These paths won’t always lead to something grand, or even something you can attend to immediately – this is still the M-V word – but going off-track becomes second nature when so many do lead to something interesting, or valuable, or indeed, something you just know you’ll come back to later. Also, that tingly sense of danger invoked by runback apologists? You get something just like that every time you enter a new area, creeping forward into the unknown with a watchful eye out for ambushes.

There is some backtracking, especially if you’re doing sidequests, though the sprint and those well-marked fast travel spots shave off most of the tedium. Besides, revisiting settlements makes for good opportunities to check in with Silksong’s likeable cast of NPCs, who very often have something new to say on repeat visits – about the world, about its story, about you – even if they’ve nothing new to ask in return.

Silksong’s simplest pleasure, mind, is its greatest one: hitting nasties with a sharp piece of metal. The hefty, percussive thwack of Hornet’s needle is even more of a satisfying sense-tickler than Hollow Knight’s nail, and the extra mobility – compounded by the meatiness and higher damage output of enemies – ensures that fights, big or small, routinely become dynamic back-and-forths where victory or death balance on a pin’s edge. Silksong’s combat has had the better of me dozens of times, and yet it’s so electric and frenetic that writing this paragraph still makes me wish I was back in the midst of it.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Team Cherry

After getting past the initial couple of basic bigbugs, there’s a good mixture of boss concepts in here as well. My favourites are the ones that simply have you one-on-one with direct fighters – straight duels serve as the best showcases for all your combined talents – but there’s a respectable variety across the board, ranging from giants that mess with the safety of the terrain to bullet-hell hazard spewers and, in one particularly memorable battle, twin automatons that make Silksong’s oft-balletic fighting a literal dance. They’re fun to fight, even if they’re not at all fun to lose to.

Happily, Silksong also gives you much more scope to tweak your offensive and defensive options than the original’s charm system afforded. On top of Hornet’s thread skills, replacing the Knight’s spells and Nail Arts, an unlockable array of tools provide heaps of new melee, ranged, or protective gadgets. These all plug into your selected crest, which determines base attack patterns – I ended up settling on the long, loping swings of the Reaper crest, with shorter, faster stabs or more powerful charged-up strikes emerging as alternatives. Ultimately, it all amounts to a welcome degree of flexibility, especially where bosses are concerned. As much as these fights are decided by dodging skills, I’ve definitely had some clashes go smoother after mixing up my tools.

I’m still not convinced that counterbalancing your own strengths requires a mean streak that’s quite as mean as Silksong’s. And I didn’t even have space to complain much about the trade economy, which bleeds you dry for rosary beads (Pharloom’s chosen currency) despite only half the game’s enemies dropping them. Still, when I look at Silksong in my Steam library – a strange thing in itself, given how long it took to get there – I don’t think about counting beads. I don’t even think about boss runbacks. I think about the little branches on my map, representing territory unexplored and adventures yet to be had. I think about how I can shine my needle to a keener edge, and what would happen if I thrust it into that lanky bug I couldn’t get part earlier.

In short: Silksong, I can and will get mad at you. But I can’t stay mad at you. You brilliant, beautiful bastard of a game.

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September 9, 2025 0 comments