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Dead Cells developers Motion Twin and publisher Kepler Ghost have announced Windblown, a wholesome yet bloodthirsty new roguelike action game in which heavily-armed cartoon animals set out from a floating village to brave the horrors of the Vortex. It’s due in early access on PC in 2024, and we’ve got the first trailer for you below.

After the deadly (and delightful) card game of Inscryption, creator Daniel Mullins is returning to his happy land of little horses. Today he announced Pony Island 2: Panda Circus, a new genre-shifting curio described as "a phantasmagorical voyage through time, myth, divinity, and video games." I like that this description is likely wholly earnest and accurate. This news came during the pre-show for Geoff Keighley's Shopping Hour and if a game like this is relegated to the pre-show, I can only assume the main event will include Half-Life 3, Elden Ring 2, and Deus Ex 5.

Well, hello there, sequel to excellent detective game, The Case Of The Golden Idol, didn't expect to see you here. Announced during the pre-show of tonight's Game Awards, The Rise Of The Golden Idol exists as little more than a brief teaser trailer right now, but to be honest, I'm sold already. Sign me up, please.

505 Games have revealed a remake of Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, the mournful 2013 fantasy adventure from Josef Fares and Starbreeze Studios. It's due for release on 28th February 2024, and here's the first trailer.

A Tale of Two Sons is notable for having a split control scheme - you steer each brother with a different analog stick, weaving their movements together to bypass obstacles and puzzles. It's also notable for being a sad 'un: your goal in the game is to find a remedy for your sick father, which involves a journey up a mountain to a magical tree.

"It may well look like a kids-friendly game, but be warned that things do get surprisingly dark in places, and you'd end up having some pretty difficult conversations with any little ones once it's over," John Walker (RPS in peace) wrote back in 2013. "These are adult themes, presented in a mature way, via the lives of two fantastic children. And it's well worth your time."

Ubisoft will be releasing a demo for Prince Of Persia: The Lost Crown ahead of its release in January, a leaked Game Awards trailer has revealed. Posted earlier this evening by PlayStation Brazil's YouTube channel, the trailer has since been taken down, but not quite fast enough to prevent some folks from downloading it and plastering it all over the internet (good spot, VGC). Apparently the demo is coming January 11th - one week before the game's full release on January 18th.

This week on the Electronic Wireless Show podcast we give our live* reactions to the new trailer for ">Grand Theft Auto 6, a game that certainly exists! Basically none of the predictions we made two weeks ago came true, but hey, there might still be a bunch of gorillas in it. And what about the fact that it leaked, huh? Is that bad? Should we feel sad for Rockstar? Will it make a difference, really? And why did James drink so much whiskey this weekend?

The Game Awards are back tonight, as is our Game Awards liveblog. I’ll be doing the turbo-reporting solo this year, and since the show kicks off at 12:30am GMT (that’s 7:30pm ET and 4:30pm PT), you lucky readers can follow both an announcement-rammed awards gig and one hardware hack’s public crumbling into exhausted, sleepless ruin. Live!

High-quality microphones can be quite expensive - I recently reviewed SteelSeries' Alias mics which start at $180 - but you can still get a great mic for far less than you expect.

Case in point: you can get the excellent Neat Bumblebee 2 USB mic for $17 at Woot right now, using the code TECHELF to knock off an extra $3 off the list price of $20. This mic originally retailed for $100 and attracted strong reviews at that price point - but at $17, it's cheap enough to recommend to literally anyone that uses a computer.

This door on the RPS Advent Calendar is in fact not a door, but a portal. It could go anywhere - including nostalgia land.

Destiny 2 developer Bungie are staring down the barrel of a full Sony takeover if forthcoming expansion The Final Shape doesn’t meet sales expectations, according to several anonymous current and former employees. The same sources also claim that the studio are prepared to cut staff again to meet their financial obligations as a Sony subsidiary, having laid off a significant proportion of their workforce in November.

I find myself agreeing with Ed’s Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora review so closely that we may as well have plugged our USB dreadlocks into the same magic tree. This is indeed an extremely Ubisoft game, with all the busywork and go-here-shoot-that roteness that entails, and although it throws some genuinely gorgeous visuals into the bargain, these also come at the cost of steep hardware requirements.

That said, good performance ain’t out of the question, at least not for modern CPUs and graphics cards. It will just take some digging through the graphics menus – digging that I’ve now completed, so join me as my blackened fingers bash out a convenient guide to Frontiers of Pandora’s PC performance and best settings.

Feral Cat Den and Fellow Traveller have announced Nirvana Noir, a follow-up to cosmic philosophical jazz-me-whatsit Genesis Noir. Revealed as part of yesterday's Day of the Devs showcase, the game continues the adventures of spacey watchmaker No Man, who must solve mysteries that span two parallel realities, Black Rapture and Constant Testament. In Black Rapture, the Big Bang never happened. I feel 'universe in which the universe never began' is an... unpromising choice for a setting, but I am not an astrophysician, nor very much of a magic-realist, and I know eff-all about jazz. Here's the trailer.

“Moebius built a world that doesn’t exist, but you can understand it. It’s a realist world. A world you can relate you, but it’s not your world,” says Edouard Caplain, art director for Jusant, the meditative tower climbing adventure that is Life Is Strange studio Don’t Nod’s latest game. Moebius was the pseudonym of French artist Jean Giraud, and whose surreal sci-fi and fantasy landscapes, with washes of contrasting colour and impossibly huge structures of soaring rock, have influenced games for years. You can certainly see that influence in Jusant, too: a world you can understand, though it's quite unlike your own.

RPS slapped on the coveted Bestest Best sticker when reviewing it a few weeks back, calling it “a show don’t tell masterpiece”. A sentiment I can get behind as a long-standing proponent of silent games ever since the Evil Within 2 insisted on puncturing its creepy baroque ambience with consistently stupid dialogue. Jusant comes from a team that know how to write a conversation, though. So why the change of pace this time around?

Influential British developer Jeff Minter, whose four-decade career spans the likes of Tempest 2000, Polybius, Space Giraffe and Revenge of the Mutant Camels, will be the focus of the next interactive documentary from the folks behind the roundly excellent Making of Karateka and Atari 50.

Mech-farming sim Lightyear Frontier has confirmed its release for next March, landing around a year after the delayed chill space game was originally meant to touch down on Planet PC.

Baldur's Gate 3 is pretty popular, it turns out. So popular that more collective human time has been spent chatting up hot vampires, shagging bears and being turned into sentient cheese than human civilisation has existed for.

Fortnite’s much-touted crossover with Lego is almost upon us - and it’s showing off a pretty darn impressive transformation. Lego Fortnite won’t just add a few minifig skins or some blocky guns, but a completely new co-op survival and crafting game mode with more than a touch of Minecraft about it.

The Day Of The Devs showcases are always some of the brightest spots in the biannual trailer'thon gauntlets, and this year's inaugural edition for The Game Awards is no exception. There were 20 fresh-faced indie games highlighted in tonight's 90-odd-minute stream, and cor, there are some right old gems in here, too, with brand-new game announcements from the devs behind Genesis Noir, Kind Words and Tangle Tower to name just a few. We also got more in-depth looks at some of this year's most intriguing indie games that previously only had an enigmatic teaser snippets attached to them. So come and join us below, where you'll find a digest of all 20 announcements from this evening's showcase, as well as the stream in full if you'd prefer to watch it all as it happened.

Aww yeah, now we're talking. One of my personal highlights from tonight's Day Of The Devs Showcase, developers SFB Games have just announced they're making a sequel to their excellent detective puzzle game, Tangle Tower. Called The Mermaid's Tongue, this latest locked room mystery will see Detective Grimoire and his assistant Sally return for an altogether more watery adventure as they solve the strange murder of one Magnus Montuga, who's met their unfortunate demise after being seemingly spat out by a cursed cauldron that's never been opened. Come and watch the reveal trailer below - and then why not hop over to Steam to play its free teaser demo while you're at it?

Well, this is a lovely surprise, isn't it? Chill letter writing game Kind Words was a lofi hit back in 2019, encouraging players to share over 5 million anonymous notes of support and, well, kindness since launch. Now developers Popcannibal are back with a full-blown sequel, Kind Words 2 (Lofi City Pop). You're probably thinking, 'How could they possibly have made a sequel to this perfectly formed note 'em up? Have they added emails? Carrier pigeons? Inscribing on stone tablets?' Well, as the reveal trailer below shows, it's gone for more of an Animal Crossing-style city to enjoy, letting you connect with fellow players and express your deepest feelings in new, more directed settings. That's right, it's time to get out of your bedroom and touch some virtual grass.

Pour one out for Mimimi Games today, readers. Despite announcing they were shutting up shop following the release of this year's fantastic Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew, today marks the grand finale for their stealth strategy masterpiece in the form of a new free Treasure Hunt update, and the release of their two paid expansions. Each brings a brand-new pirate to The Red Marley's undead crew, as well as their own half-dozen story missions to play through spread across islands old and new, and once you've begun each of their respective questlines, they're readily available to play in any of the game's regular plunderings, too.

Mimimi have kept the identity of these pirates a secret until now, but after playing both DLCs for a big chunk of the last week, I'm confident in saying this is exactly the swansong Shadow Gambit deserves - with one of the expansions in particular bringing a poignant touch of coming full circle on Mimimi's work as a studio. Naturally, spoilers circle these waters like hungry sharks, but if you're resigned to such a fate, let's dive in below.

Rockstar has released a 90-second GTA 6 trailer! Wowee! No seriously, ignoring my cynicism for a second, it does look really impressive. As I mentioned in our RPS reacts piece, I'm genuinely excited by the prospect of a renewed Vice City and you bet I'll be there for the inevitable five-minute narrated trailer that begins with a person saying, "Welcome to Vice City".

There's no doubt Vice City is going to be dense and chaotic, going by all the twerking and the social media parodies of real life Florida folks. But really, I do hope that Rockstar doesn't just reserve next-gen's horsepower for wildness. I want some peace, some quiet, some innocuous suburbs to laze around in. That would be nice.

Ultros is one of those games you can't help but pay attention to. Back when it was first revealed in May at Sony's pre-notE3 PlayStation Showcase, its colourful, fever dream visuals from Hotline Miami artist El Huervo instantly made it stand out among all the drab multiplayer shooters jostling for attention. Then, between talk of it being set inside a cosmic uterus known as The Sarcophagus and having to use seeds and plants over successive runs to alter the shape of the map to your whim, it only became more intriguing. Now, after playing almost two hours of this Metroid-y roguelite for myself, there's still a lot about it to take in and digest, but holy moly what a thing to behold at the same time. This is surely going to be one to watch for Metroidvania likers when it comes out on February 13th next year, because cor, this is looking really quite good, folks.

Last time, you decided that Diablo's Tristram theme is better than chain explosions. I hadn't peeked at the votes while voting was still underway so I'm a little surprised by the outcome, given how much of the discussion favoured explosive practicality over emotive plucking. This week, I ask you to pick between two different types of cool missing. What's better: ricochet attacks, or blue shadows on dodges and dashes?

Prophecy's Tribes 3: Rivals broke cover earlier this month - or more accurately, came skiing out of cover with a flag in one fist and an electric crossbow in the other. The developers have now shared a bit about how it differs from Hi-Rez's Tribes Ascend, released way back in 2012, which we adored.

Created by a former Hi-Rez subsidiary that includes several of the original Ascend leads, the new shooter retains its celebrated predecessor's emphasis on agility and momentum, but will be a premium game sold for $20 with separately sold cosmetics, rather than a free-to-play affair. It also won't have a singleplayer campaign, much to the probable consternation of Tribes: Vengeance fans, and the indifference of everybody else.

In the grim darkness of the far future… I will finish my review of Owlcat’s Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader. It turns out that trying to complete an estimated 100-hour RPG during the run-up to The Game Awards is too much for this humble Scriptor. There are still many more tabletop-style planetary maps to discover and plunder, many more character levels to scale, and many more cursed artefacts to tamper with before my protagonist, the closet Chaos worshipper Bruschetta de Plonque, can pronounce herself mistress of the Kronos Expanse - assuming the Inquisition doesn’t claim her first. But after 20 hours of the game, I can absolutely say that I’m looking forward to the next 80. While it doesn’t have the cinematic swagger and raw anecdote-generating capacity of obvious rival Baldur's Gate 3, Rogue Trader has mystique and depth to spare, both in terms of its grotty narrative and its exceedingly busy combat and levelling systems.

Do you like robots and being given challenges? Then is the sixth door on this year's RPS Advent Calendar is for you!

Ah, man, this one really stings. League Of Geeks, the developers behind Armello and the upcoming Solium Infernum remake, have announced they've had to pause the development of their spaceship colony roguelike Jumplight Odyssey "indefinitely" as the studio faces mass redundancies. Over 50% of staff have been affected, including the entire Jumplight Odyssey team, and part of their publishing and operations teams.

After my time spent with open world action adventure Avatar: Frontiers Of Pandora, all I wanted was a jeep, maybe a jet to get around quicker. The jungles and the plains might be wonderful to look at, but they're too vast, filled with boring tasks, and overly reliant on level-gating to force a sense of progress. Sure, there's some spectacle in narrow escapes from the nasty humans - and their factories that make the plants droopy - but throughout the rebellion I ditched my bow for a shotgun with extended mags and a muzzle brake. For a game that's all, "the humans are bad", I was ready to defect. At least I would've been able to keep my shotgun.

Hitman 3 at 60% off. No Man's Sky at 50% off. Tetris Effect: Connected at 50% off. These are great games whether you play them in VR or not, so even if you don't own a headset you might want to check out Steam's VR Fest, which is live now until December 11th.