While I was ostensibly there to talk about the upcoming release of The Devil In Me, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to probe deeper into the workings of the anthology as a whole, especially since Alice Bee had already dug deep into the true crime inspirations for TDIM when she chatted to Heaton during Gamescom. But I was able to bring something to the discussion that Alice perhaps couldn’t: an excruciatingly — some might say unnecessarily — detailed knowledge of the DPA series, its many branches and little connections and Easter eggs....

I’m a little tired of survival games, and games that brag about being “brutal”, but I like the look of this. Valheim is set in a “procedurally-generated purgatory inspired by viking culture”, according to its Steam description, and the loop of boss fights and house building is intriguing. Particularly when you seem to be able to build castles, and the bosses are big brutes swinging tree trunks at you. Plus, boats....

Below we’ve put together a quick overview of Viper’s abilities and dropped some tips in to help you get the most out of them. How to play Viper Fuel (Passive) To use Viper’s [Q] and [E] you’ll consume a resource called Fuel. You’ll start off with 100% Fuel, but as you activate these abilities this’ll gradually tick down. It recharges slowly once you’ve turned these abilities off, though. Decay Damage Damage dealt by toxic gas won’t harm you, but it’ll hurt enemies and allies - but it’s a different sort of damage....

Valorant characters overview Aside from their abilities, Valorant characters are all functionally identical. They have the same hitboxes, the same movement stats, the same health pools. But every single ability in the game can be used to great effect to help sway the outcome of a round, or even a match. Let’s take a closer look at the abilities and strengths of each agent in turn, starting with the most recent addition to the Valorant characters roster....

You’ll find all the recent information at the top of this page, with archived maintenance announcements below it. Valorant: When are the servers back up? July 9th MAINTENANCE The servers are currently down for scheduled maintenance. Expect them to be back online for around 7:00pm BST. So that’s 2:00pm EST and 11:00am PST. Ranked Launch UPDATE #1 Riot’s launching Ranked very soon, here’s the announcement! Original Post Below At the time of writing (June 24th) we’re expecting the servers to go down sometime this week for patch 1....

Valorant Split map guide Split map & callouts Split strategies & tips Split map & callouts Below is the full map of Split, with all its callouts clearly labelled. Feel free to peruse the map at your leisure, before heading down below where we’ll talk about some of the interesting features of Split that make it stand out against the other maps in Valorant. Split strategies & tips As time goes on we’ll be adding to this section the very best strategies and tips for Split that we’ve found....

Brendy explained Battlefield Portal in more detail after its announcement this evening during EA Play. I am here merely to celebrate that one of Portal’s six maps is Bad Company 2’s Valparaiso - aka, the best Battlefield map. Portal also comes with Battlefield 1942’s Battle Of The Bulge and El Alamein, Battlefield 3’s Caspian Border and Noshahr Canals, and Arica Harbour, also from Bad Company 2. These are all great maps....

IGN asked Valve about stick drift as part of their ongoing Steam Deck reveal. In response, designer John Ikeda said that they’ve chosen parts with reliability in mind. “We purposely picked something that we knew the performance of, right?” said Ikeda. “We didn’t want to take a risk on that, right? As I’m sure our customers don’t want us to take a risk on that either.” Hardware engineer Yazan Aldehayyat also underlined that they’ve done a lot of reliability testing on the machine....

This week’s Mystery Steam Reviews celebrates those aforementioned beasts and hotties, as we focused on video games based on folklore. It’s a simple one: both myself and Matthew had to choose three games that are clearly based on mythology. Given our lack of confidence, which you can see at the beginning of this video, I think we did rather well. If you’re new around these parts, you can see a full breakdown of the rules in the Mystery Steam Reviews Rule Bible™ below....

So, Nurgle uses a plague called the Bloom to infect planets and mutate his own forces to be stronger (and uglier). The devs say that, as part of the story, players will research how to get rid of the Bloom - a good thing to do, I think, seeing as it will develop new strains as the campaign goes on. “For example, one planet may be infected with the strain of pain, which tends to give enemies higher damage mutations,” says senior programmer Dave Reimer....

Here’s the announcement trailer, which establishes its ’80s setting and love of helicopters and tanks: WARNO, which is short for “Warning Order”, really does sound like Wargame with the name filed off. It’s a Cold War-turned-hot alt-history in which NATO and Warsaw Pact nations fight using conventional weapons across lush, tree and town-strewn battlefields. Your arsenal consists of carefully reseached real vehicles, with the aim being to depict how a World War 3 scenario might have actually played out minus the nukes....

The update also smuggled in assault rifles and SMGs to the Gulag, and you’ll now find SKS carbines dotted around the main map. There are a couple new maps for plain old Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare, too. Oh, and you can now open those mysterious bunkers - and some players have found a nuke buried beneath one of them. Just thought you might want to know. Most Wanted contracts work a little differently to the others....

Get the WD Black SN850 1TB for £140 (46% off RRP) Get the WD Black SN850 2TB for £255 (49% off RRP) The SN850 is a drive that we’ve tested and recommended here at RPS, with RPS head honcho Katharine dubbing it ’the best PCIe 4.0 SSD we’ve tested yet’ after it debuted early last year. I’ve double-checked the ‘best SSD for gaming’ archives, and it turns out that there haven’t been any better PCIe 4....

We Are OFK follows the four 20-something members of virtual band OFK as they “attempt to break into the music business, fall in and out of love, and figure out how to pay rent and make art in Los Angeles.” They’re a virtual band but not merely a fictional one, and each episode will be paired with the release of a new single. The music in the trailer above is called “Fool’s Gold”, and is the second song from what will be OFK’s EP....

Becoming overpowered It is nice when a game remains challenging throughtout by always escalating difficulty to match my own scaling, whether that’s because I’m gearing up or simply mastering systems. Yeah, that’s nice, sure. But also, isn’t it nice when a game is okay with my own power getting wildly out of control, crushing all challenges in my path with ease and generally rampaging around shouting? I’m always pleased when a game lets me become overpowered....

Demos What use is a good thing in a game if you don’t know it has a good thing? So play the demo, yeah? If it has one, these days. I’ve been glad to see a minor revival through the Steam Next Fest as well as frequent free trial weekends of whole games, games too big to shave a sliver off. I have bought so many games after playing the demo....

Where to buy an RTX 3060 The RTX 3060 is launching worldwide on February 25th at 9am PT / 5pm GMT. There’s no Nvidia Founders Edition of the RTX 3060, so you’ll have to pick from one of the many third party cards from Asus, MSI, Zotac, Palit, Gigabyte and others if you want to get your hands on one. Prices are set to start at £299 / $329, but many cards will likely be more expensive than that depending on how much they’ve been factory overclocked or how much fancy cooling apparatus they’ve got....

Give FF7R’s Nexus Mods page a quick glance and you’ll notice that modders only care about one thing: dresses. Characters simply cannot wear their default gear, as that’s boring and unglamorous. So Tifa gets her Purple dress and Wutai dress and China dress. Aerith? There’s an Ordinary dress and Cheap dress and sighs Sexy dress. Any look you’re going for is covered here. All of these dresses stay equipped for entire playthroughs as well, so you can really admire their detailing and patchwork....

That structure is also a trap. It’s an invitation to devise an opening dance that dispatches those first few waves as quickly as possible, yet following that dance too rigidly will crash you headfirst into a bonespire. Hyper Demon screams at you to go fast - though when I asked programmer Matt Bush for tips, he suggested I slow down. Here’s how I do it: I stream daggers at the first spawner, timing my last shot so the craggy mass disintegrates moments after it appears....

Wrong day? Check out the Wordle answer for Tuesday 14 February instead! Wordle July 9 hints If you’re having trouble getting the Wordle answer today, hopefully the following clues will help set you off in the right direction: This word contains two adjacent vowels. The final letter is “D”. It’s a noun referring to an act of substitution. Today’s Wordle answer July 9 Today’s Wordle answer is: STEAD. Not to be confused with a steed (which is a horse, this is not a horse), a stead is a place or role, and is more or less exclusively used to refer to someone or something filling in for the originally intended occupant of said place or role....