Graham Smith
This author account hasn't been claimed yet. To claim this account, please contact the outlet owner to request access.
Writing For
Rock Paper Shotgun 
PC Gamer Latest Reviews
Maybe I'm so enamoured by Despolete because football has been a constant companion in my own life. My childhood memories are inextricable from hundreds of hours spent playing Sensible Soccer, or from kickabouts at the park in which my friends and I provided our own colour commentary and adopted the roles of regens from our Championship Mananger campaigns. When I dreamed, I too dreamed of football. I think if you've never had that kind of relationship with the sport, Despelote might help expla...
A 1920s golden age mystery in which you plot your own path through the scheming world of an all-girls boarding school, told with energy and some bugs.
Look, I can talk all day about the parts of Lost Records that didn't work for me. If I hadn't been playing it for review, I probably would have stopped after a couple of hours and never gone back. As it is, I reached its climax and it finally introduced the drama and the stakes that were missing from the rest of the story. Lost Records is bland, derivative, lacks momentum, does not reward player agency, and it twice made me cringe so hard I had to look away from the screen. I wish it was half as long as it is. I wish it had learned to let go of the ideas that have lost their power, like Sarah does in Labyrinth. I wish it had learned you can tell your coming-of-age story about a teenage girl with energy and originality... like Labyrinth. I am, despite all of that, looking forward to finding out whether any of it pays off when the second and final part releases on April 15th.
A straightforward but wonderfully executed blend of topdown shmup action with a 2D Zelda structure.
Thank Goodness You're Here! is a funny, cheeky, innuendo-stuffed 2-3 hour adventure game about sausages, pies and slapped bottoms.
A multiplayer first-person shooter in which teams of three fight to capture cash boxes in fully destructible levels, with plentiful parkour and movement abilities.
So, Half-Life, then. I used to say it was my favourite game of all time. Now, I'd say it's a first-person shooter that is occasionally great, mostly good, and sometimes charmingly crap. Black Mesa smooths out most of the crap, and maintains the great and the good. It doesn't modernise the antiquated design - but then, it wouldn't be Half-Life if it did. As it is, it's the best way to play Valve's original design if you haven't done so before, and it's a brilliant way to retread those old ventilation shafts, if you have.
As I flicked switch after switch and roly-polyed through each generic challenge, the game's early levels and that glorious GIF felt like a distant memory. My Friend Pedro does let you realise the fantasy of conducting a bullet symphony while hanging upside down from a zipline, but like most fantasies, it doesn't survive past the initial rush of blood to the head.
Disclosure: Cara Ellison, a former writer for RPS, was the writer for Void Bastards. I'm also pretty sure she voices one of the pirates, so if you ever wanted Cara to call you 'a dobber', then playing this is the best way to do it other than being in the RPS IRC room circa 2012.
In 2011, when describing why Introversion had abandoned Subversion, their long-in-development heist game, designer Chris Delay described a problem with the genre: "In the end, after all that development and years of work, you still completed the bank heist by walking up to the first door, cracking it with a pin cracker tool, then walking into the vault and stealing the money. There was no other way to complete that level. And this would be the essential method by which you would complete every level after that."