Flaming Fowl will shift to a smaller game they can fund themselves The developers behindFablecard game spin-offFable Fortuneand the digital adaptation of dungeon-crawling board gameGloomhavenhave revealed a new upcoming co-opRPG… only to announce at the same time that the upcoming game’s development has been put on pause amid layoffs at the studio and difficulty finding funding. Between working on DLC for Gloomhaven, it seems that Flaming Fowl found time to work on something brand new for the studio, revealing it this week....

The ‘Agent Trevor’ pack would’ve accompanied zombie and alien-themed expansions As a somewhat deflating example of the money-churning might ofGTA Onlinebecoming the sole focus of Rockstar’sGrand Theft Auto 5efforts over the last decade, the actor who played Trevor in the ridiculously well-selling crime epic has teased some details of planned story DLC that would have turned the controversial protagonist into a James Bond-style spy. The pack supposedly got as far as shooting with the actors, only to end up cancelled and folded into a GTA Online heist....

One for the masochists Lords Of The Fallen, an actionRPGthat was a mixture of fun and infuriating when it first launched, has received its final free update. It introduces the “Advanced Game Modifier System”, which sounds like something creepy bachelors would pay an extraordinary monthly fee for. No, it doesn’t provide terrible advice on how to talk to women. Instead, it allows you to customise LOTF with modifiers to turn it into a roguelike....

Captain Morgens When, in townbuildingsimulationManor Lords, you erect your first manor, it feels natural to place it in the center of your humble 14th century European settlement. It presents as a locus of power, where your character avatar resides. Also, it’s right there in the title. I built mine down a side road, between oxen posts and granaries, for no real reason but free space. The more I play, the more it feels a fitting place....

Chewier on the inside Armadillos, the grumpy pistachio nuts of the animal kingdom, have been added toMinecraftin a recent mob update. You can brush them to harvest “scutes”, the boney armour plating of the animal’s back, which you can then use to craft armour for pet wolves. Speaking of wolves, this update also sees an explosion in canine diversity, with eight varieties of the wolf now appearing across different biomes. Awoooooo!...

Need a hint for Connections? Read our guide for help with Connections #318 This guide is for a previous day! Looking for today’s solution? Check out theConnections hint and answers for Thursday 12th December! Want a hint for Connections today?Piggybacking off the monumental success of daily puzzle gameWordle, the New York Times has another fantastically popular word game out now. It’s calledConnections, and if you haven’t played it before, now’s the time to start....

Erangel Classic returns for two weeks next month PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds- aka the game that inspired and then was overtaken byFortnite’sBattle Royalemode - is seemingly borrowing a leaf from its cartoony cousin’s playbook by resurrecting its original map. As well as the wider gameplay tweaks, once you’ve landed on the island the Tommy Gun will once again appear in care packages and you’ll be able to grab clothes and helmets from the floor, just like the old (seven years ago) days....

More like Bland Land, am I right? Sand Landis like a sanitised manga-ish Mad Max Fury Road, where there are fewer explosions and nobody huffs paint and screams “Witness me!”. So, arguably, a less cool Mad Max. In this incarnation it’s an open world action game with lightRPGelements; in previous incarnations it is a manga and anime by the creator ofDragon Ball. My takeaway from playing Sand Land the game is that it is a tremendous advert for the manga and anime, in the sense that everything good about Sand Land the game is from those, and I would rather be reading or watching them instead....

Heroes of might and magnets Welcome back toShould You Bother With, the RPS hardware column that combs away the fluff surrounding PC gaming gear to reveal a smooth, hairless core of pure consumer advice. This time: Hall effect keyboards, a relatively fresh flavour of desktop peripheral that’s been gaining traction with manufacturers for the switch design’s supposed durability and reliability benefits. These represent perhaps the first major challenge to mechanical keyboard hegemony, but you may be wondering: who’s Hall?...

No more time crime Players that put more than two hours into pre-purchased or advanced access games will now be exempt from Steam’s refund policy,says Steam, the maker of said policy and thus the final word on how it is implemented. As spotted bythe Verge, this change is intended to combat a loophole where filthy time criminals could fill their stolen boots with ill-gotten fun pre-release, then get their money back....

Rotwood allows you and up to three friends to kill a tree “If only you could talk to these creatures” is never more funny or true than in games likeRotwood, where you play cat people and orcs sent to biff snail worms and flies with scythes. From Klei Entertainment, the gang behindDon’t Starve,Invisible Inc.andOxygen Not Included, to name but a three of their fine games, Rotwood is out later today in early access, ready to provideco-ophighjinks in a roguelike dungeon crawl that is really a forest....

Because you can zoom out further now Against The Storm’s latest update adds a a River Kelpie, a “legendary water demon” that can mesmerise villagers in your rain-slick settlements. I’ve been mesmerised myself by another part of the update, however: the ability to zoom out 66% further than before. Why does a big zoom compel me so? Partly it’s that I often find management games leave me feeling claustrophobic, never quite able to see all I want onscreen, and thus desperately flicking across the surface of the world in an effort to keep tabs on what’s going on....

Already running better on low-end GPUs No Rest for the Wickedlaunched into early access as abit of a fixer-upper, even by the standards of its ‘buy now, play finished game later’ model. The good news is that the grim action-RPG’s wonky performance is already being straightened out, with two of its three hotfixes thus far delivering a noticeable improvements, even on oldergraphics cards. FollowingHotfix 1’s focuson the game’sdebatablyenjoyable weapon durability system, Hotfixes2and3have made a raft of tweaks aimed at getting those framerates up....