- The Wait Is Over - Roman Sands RE:Build & Paratopic: Overdub Are Out Now! 🎉 - 16 September 2026
🌴 Trapped in paradise after the end of time, can you find the exit in Roman Sands RE:Build? Your vacation begins today! Available on Steam, PlayStation, and XBOX:📼 Rewind the tapes in Paratopic: Overdub. Experience a surreal 3-in-1 journey - a remaster, remix and sequel to the cult-classic liminal horror.
- Here's what's coming up in the RPS Game Club in 2024 - 22 January 2024
After a successful first outing, RPS Game Club is returning for another year of gaming show-and-tells, and this time, we're publishing the schedule in advance so you know exactly what's coming up and when. Handy, say, if you want to keep an eye on certain sale prices for games you've got your eye on, or you want to clear your calendar so you can join us for our end-of-month liveblog session where we all get together book club-style to talk about the month's pick. Each member of the RPS Treehouse is getting involved this year as well, so read on below to find out what's on the Club docket. Read more
- The next game from Paratopic’s devs has a tropical Paradise Killer feel - 20 December 2022
First-person adventure Roman Sands RE:Build was announced during Nintendo’s House Of Indies holiday event, and it’s coming to Steam in summer 2023 too. Described as an “end of time adventure gacha puzzle apocalypse visual novel simulation horror trip”, Roman Sands RE:Build hails from the devs behind horror game Paratopic . It’s got a vaguely vaporwave sensibility that reminds me a smidge of Paradise Killer . Watch the trailer for Roman Sands RE:Build below, and please explain to me if you understand what’s going on. Read more
- Japanese localization added to Paratopic! - 25 June 2021
Thanks to our friends at Baltoro who have been handling the Switch port and localizations of the game, we've added a Japanese localization to the game! You're able to switch language in the settings - though if your Steam language is set to Japanese, the first time you run the game it should open by default (if I've set things up correctly).
- Stealth sim Tangiers is back on track thanks to horror short Paratopic - 16 November 2020
Five years ago, stealth sim Tangiers was due out in November 2015. But that never happened. Since then, the Kickstarted project has crouched in the shadows, forgotten by most, waiting to reveal itself once again. After half a decade of development hell, work on the game has finally resumed, all thanks to glitchy horror short Paratopic . (more…)
- Sample The Haunted PS1's scares in this week's free Demo Disk - 2 February 2020
Frequent Itch.io shoppers will have noticed the store’s gotten rather spooky of late. In the last year, it’s become near-impossible to move for all the retro-styled spookers – lo-fi horror games with few polygons and even fewer pixels. That’s largely down to the devils at The Haunted PS1 , a community of indie necromancers fiendishly resurrecting the aesthetics of early PlayStation scares. Now, they’re reviving another long-dead format – free demos. This Thursday, the group will bring 17 scares to life with The Haunted PS1 Demo Disk, a free collection of 17 short, terrifying indie horror games. (more…)
- Disco Elysium s Hardcore Mode is just one way games can meaningfully explore poverty - 31 January 2020
Last week, the haunting and hilarious Disco Elysium added an extra difficulty setting called Hardcore True Detective Mode . On the surface, it seems like a fairly standard set of tweaked parameters. More demanding dice roles to shaft dear old Harry Du Bois at every opportunity. If you take time to read the update notes though, it becomes clear that these new changes are storytelling devices as much as adjusted sliders. Since there are no monsters to make tougher, it s your wallet and psyche that take the hits. It s had me thinking about how ZA/UM s surrealist cop odyssey, and other games, express poverty through their systems. Games that invert the traditional power curve of farmhand to godhood, or make us try twice as hard to get half as far. Far from being a detached add-on, the update is a deft application of mechanics-as-metaphor that wouldn t work if desperation, isolation, poverty…
- Itch's big summer sale opens with an essential indie bundle - 21 June 2019
E3 is over, and we’ve got all that mega-budget fluff out of our system, so let’s get weird again. There’s a big summer sale on over on Itch , which has rapidly become my favourite games store. While the bulk of the discounts run until July 1st, there’s also the Itch.io Summer Selects Bundle available for one week only. It contains six hand-picked games for $9, which, all but one, I can vouch for the excellence of. While SUPERHOT may be the headliner, it also includes low-fi unsettler Paratopic and anti-fascist gay disaster road trip adventure EXTREME MEATPUNKS FOREVER , which has to be written in all caps. Below, some videos, thoughts and other picks. (more…)
- Return Of The Obra Dinn wins IGF Grand Prize - 21 March 2019
Continuing to copy the tastes of RPS, the Independent Games Festival Awards last night awarded Return Of The Obra Dinn the Seumas McNally Grand Prize during the Game Developers Conference last night, with a cheeky Excellent In Narrative award on the side too. We declared it our favourite game of 2018 so, y’know, good on ya Ian GF. Correct decision. The other prizes were won by Mirror Drop , Paratopic , Opus Magnum , Black Room, and After Hours, and ooh there’s two I don’t recognise and will have to check out. (more…)
- Best PC games of 2018 - 2 January 2019
The doors have been opened, the games inside have been devoured, and now it’s time to recycle the cardboard. Below you’ll find all of our picks for the best PC games of 2018, gathered together in a single post for easy reading. (more…)
- Nic Rueben s 5 best games of 2018 - 22 December 2018
We asked a bunch of our regular writers to tell us what their five favourite games this year were. Today it’s the turn of Nic Rueben , who is definitely a human boy. It s well known that games are an awful mistake that should have never been unleashed on an unsuspecting humanity. That said, here s five that hushed the howling primates that reside in my skull just long enough for me to consider them a worthwhile investment. Honorable mentions go to Cultist Simulator (For it s alchemical harmony of theme and mechanics), Vermintide 2 (for being the second best Lord of the Rings game ever made) and Prey: Mooncrash (For being more Prey). Not in order of goodness: (more…)
- Paratopic v1-02: Rebindable Controls - 12 September 2018
Hi all, Had a few requests for rebindable keyboard controls, just patched that into the game. If you go menu -> settings -> customize controls, you'll be able to adjust the keyboard set up. Enjoy!
- Lo-fi horror game Paratopic gains a Definitive Cut, comes to Steam - 9 September 2018
Paratopic is an indie first-person horror game that launched on itch.io earlier this year. You play as three characters—a smuggler, an assassin, and a birdwatcher—in strange adventure game vignettes. Sometimes you're trying to secret a VHS tape across the border, sometimes you're driving through the night, sometimes you're clicking on objects just to see what they're animated to do.  Paratopic's new definitive cut adds a couple of new areas to discover, more dialogue, and more interactable stuff. It's now available on Steam , as well as itch . "The game contains weirdness, dismemberment, gore, body horror and coarse language" they warn.
- Paratopic: Definitive Cut is out now, and still some cracking weird horror - 7 September 2018
“You may as well play Paratopic now because it will be one of our favourite games of the year,” I insisted to the assembled masses in the RPS treehouse yesterday, and I’ll say it to you too. I adored the first-person horror game when it first launched in March, going on to call it one of the best games of 2018 so far , and now the Cronenbergian vignette ’em up has arrived on Steam too as a ‘Definitive Cut’. This brings extra oddities to explore and fiddle with, plus a Linux version. Having revisited this expanded world of cursed VHS tapes this morning, yep, it’s still great, and still leaving parts lurking insidiously in my head. (more…)
- Paratopic launches on Steam today - 6 September 2018
We are now live. Deep breaths. Hope you all enjoy.
