Category Archives: Role playing games

A beginner’s guide to Elden Ring: what it is and why you should play it

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It is being hailed as one of the greatest games of all time, but if you don’t yet know your Margit from your Elden, here is a guide to get you roaming the Lands Between like a pro

Elden Ring has a Metacritic rating of 97%. If you type its name into Twitter you will be flooded with praise and anecdotes from players who have already spent many hours immersed in its arcane world. But what exactly is it? Why are people obsessed with it? And should you join them – or is it too hard?

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The 10 best video games coming in 2022

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George RR Martin joins forces with the makers of Dark Souls, ghosts take over in Japan and a Nintendo sequel you could be playing all year

• More cultural highlights of 2022

(Xbox One/Series S/Series X, PlayStation 4/5, PC) The long-awaited fantasy epic from Dark Souls’ creators FromSoftware, with narrative input from George RR Martin. It combines a huge, detailed open world, inhabited by everything from dragons and wolves to trolls and patrolling soldiers, with the developer’s signature heart-in-mouth, swords-and-sorcery combat. An intriguing world to discover alone, or with other players.

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The 15 best video games of 2021

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Whether you’re driving a supercar through Mexico or simply unpacking a cardboard box in an utterly engrossing way, the year offered plenty of gaming joy. Our critics pick the top titles

A genuinely inventive tactical role-playing adventure that uses procedural generation to allow for player-created stories, all taking place in a fantasy world constructed from luscious papercraft set-pieces – like a digital board game.

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Elden Ring – Dark Souls’ creators and George RR Martin team up on an enticing fantasy

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Thrilling but not forbidding, Hidetaka Miyazaki’s forthcoming fantasy epic is like Dark Souls meets Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Before Hidetaka Miyazaki was given the job of salvaging his company’s embattled medieval fantasy game Demon’s Souls (2009), he was just another rank-and-file designer. For a child who grew up a voracious reader of sword-and-sorcery genre fiction, directing a grimy fantasy game was a dream. I find a great sense of poetic satisfaction in the fact that Miyazaki – now in his mid 40s and the president of developer FromSoftware, having propelled the company to global success with his demanding, distinctive, haunting and unforgettable games Dark Souls, Bloodborne and Sekiro – has been working with George RR Martin on a fantasy game. It feels like a full-circle moment for the boy who, when he couldn’t understand parts of the fantasy novels he brought home from his local library, used his own imagination to bridge the gaps.

Martin’s role on Elden Ring was completed some time ago – he workshopped the characters and their relationships, which Miyazaki and his team then integrated into the game. Aside from all the swords, Elden Ring bears almost no resemblance to Game of Thrones (it does have dragons, but if there is any complex politicking, skullduggery or mass-murder at weddings to be found here, it’s later in the game than the five hours I played). This game is more fantastical: your character can summon ethereal blades and lightning strikes, characters talk in reverent jargon about “sites of grace” and “the Tarnished”, and your horse is a corporeal ghost. After learning the basics of attacking and defending yourself, you emerge into a world called the Lands Between, where eerily glowing trees extend into the sky like mountains, bathing the forested land below in golden light.

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Subnautica: Below Zero review — life begins at minus 30

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PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Switch, PC, Mac; Unknown Worlds
Survive under the waves on a frozen planet in this freeform adventure where following the instinct to explore is the real goal

I’m planning a trip. I’m going to load my sea truck with provisions, pick a direction and travel as far as I dare before pitching camp on an iceberg. First up, I need to craft a compass; while I’m doing that, I might as well make a bunch of beacons to mark points of interest for later. I could also do with some sea truck storage compartments (you know, for all the beacons). I pin the recipes to my heads-up display and go for a dive, hoping to pick up some crafting materials, but as I explore deeper, the sentient AI that has taken up residence in spare bits of my cerebral cortex (don’t ask) notifies me that there’s something interesting nearby. Topping up my oxygen regularly to avoid suffocating as I crawl over unexplored parts of the seabed, I stumble upon an abandoned underwater science outpost and start picking through it for salvage and intel. There’s an interesting crafting recipe here… wait, wasn’t I planning a trip?

Subnautica: Below Zero is an underwater survival game where best laid plans, like my theoretical sea truck escapade, are often diverted toward interesting distractions. As scientist Robin Ayou, we descend on planet 4546B to search for her lost sister, Sam, but the more immediate priority is staying warm, fed and hydrated (and making beacons). Starting out from little more than an aquatic linen closet with a fabricator and a tiny storage locker, the early hours are spent scavenging for fish and scraps to stay alive and fashion basic tools. There is no combat, just survival.

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‘I learned about storytelling from Final Fantasy’: novelist Raven Leilani on Luster and video games

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Drawing on her own cathartic relationship with role-playing games, Leilani uses gaming as a narrative device and an inspiration in her acclaimed debut

There is an extraordinary and telling moment in Raven Leilani’s acclaimed novel Luster, about a young black woman who has an affair with a middle-aged white man and ends up living with his family. The woman, Edie, is heading back to her lover’s house with his adopted black daughter, Akila, when the pair are stopped and questioned by two police officers. Although Edie is compliant, Akila – younger and much less worldly – challenges the cops and gets thrust to the ground and restrained. The confrontation is rife with fear and tension, and when it’s over (diffused when Akila’s white mother intervenes), the first thing Edie and Akila do is go inside, sit down and play a video game.

Much of the fervid discussion around Luster has focused on Leilani’s astute and witty analysis of sexual politics and racial power structures in the 21st-century US. But a key part of her acutely realised portrayal of a millennial protagonist coping with crappy jobs and crappier love affairs is Edie’s natural relationship with digital culture and technology. At a time in which video game references are still mostly consigned to YA and sci-fi books, Leilani has made them a central component of a literary novel.

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10 short video games to play with your partner (or housemate)

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From detective missions to prison breakouts, playful puzzles to cosy diversions, here are some great games perfect for two

As the long, boring Covid winter drags on and sitting in front of Netflix together has long since lost its appeal, video games remain one of the few social pleasures allowed to us. Though most of the best multiplayer games are online – meaning you need two consoles at home if you want to join someone you live with – there are still plenty you can enjoy together on the couch. Some of these recommendations are two-player games you can play cooperatively, others are shorter story-based games that are fun to play with company, and all will happily fill an evening or two.

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Cyberpunk 2077 review – could it ever live up to the hype?

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PC (version tested), Xbox One, Xbox Series S/X, PS5, PS4; CD Projekt
Blade Runner meets Grand Theft Auto in this sprawling hellscape of a role-playing game, which is extraordinarily immersive but let down by misogyny and xenophobia

So here we finally are, in Night City. Almost a decade after it was first announced, CD Projekt’s massively ambitious role-playing game has launched into a swirling maelstrom of hype and controversy that befits its salacious, histrionic setting. Like the technological MacGuffin at the centre of the plot, Cyberpunk 2077 is highly advanced and ingenious, but also bug-ridden and irresponsible.

You play as V, a cybernetically enhanced street hustler looking to make their name on these squalid, vicious streets, taking infiltration and assassination jobs for the gangs who’ve carved up the criminal underworld. While attempting to steal a cutting-edge biochip from a powerful corporation, you implant it in your own head, unknowingly infecting yourself with the digital ghost of dead rocker and anarchist Johnny Silverhand (Keanu Reeves, essentially playing Theodore “Ted” Logan’s asshole brother). If you don’t get him out of your brain, you’ll both die.

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Among Us: the video game that has shot 100 million players into outer space

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A new hunger for social contact during lockdown has boosted participation in online multiplayer games

If “sus” and “vent” mean nothing to you, then you’ve somehow missed out on the smash-hit multiplayer game Among Us. But with numbers playing the online game heading towards 100 million, maybe you’ll find out before Christmas how good you are at being an “impostor” .

For the uninitiated, Among Us is the sleeper game hit of 2020. The premise is simple: it’s Cluedo or Wink Murder on a spaceship with four to 10 players of crewmates and impostors. The crewmates perform simple tasks for take-off, while impostors sabotage operations and kill other players. Impostors are the only players who can travel through vents – hence the significance of vent in Among Us. Gamers hold meetings to pick a suspect – which is where the word sus comes in – to jettison. The aim is to catch the impostors.

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‘It’s cool now’: why Dungeons & Dragons is casting its spell again

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Thanks to the popularity of open-world video games – and Stranger Things – a new generation has rediscovered the communal pleasures of the 80s role-playing phenomenon

Not long ago, my sons, like many other preteens, were obsessed with Fortnite. It was all they played, all they talked about, all they spent their pocket money on. But one rainy afternoon this summer, my youngest took out the D&D starter kit we’d bought him for Christmas and began to study it. Some friends came round and they played for hours. Since then, they haven’t really stopped.

This is not an isolated incident. Originally released in 1974, Dungeons & Dragons is having what we now call “a moment”. The company behind the game, Wizards of the Coast, which bought the rights from original creator TSR, estimates that there are currently 40 million players worldwide, with new starters up 25% year on year, as its popularity grows and rules are translated into new languages.

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