Edwin’s annual The RPS Selection Box returns with the same blend of appetite for digital confections and self-scrutiny that has defined the feature for years. The column leans into the ritual of presenting three picks and three nested alternatives, using the format to critique both the practice of wishlist accounting and the year’s output. A running aside about Wishlist Zero—signed by a hypothetical judge to prove you’ve cleared your backlog—frames a tone that sits somewhere between mischief and a call for discipline. It is the kind of meta-jab that this feature has built a reputation for, a cultural moment where criticism and taste-making intersect with a collector’s impulse.
White Knuckle is the first of Edwin’s trio. Dark Machine Games’ standout approach to a roguelite places a lone climber in a labyrinthine dungeon, pursued by an unkillable presence that never quite lets go. Climbing mechanics hinge on cursor-based grabs and timed button presses to swing between walkable ledges, with rhythm and precision as the core skills. Some routes demand improvised tools—pitons hammered in on the fly or poles thrown to create makeshift monkey bars—adding a tactile sense of danger to every ascent. The environment threads together flowing sewer systems, residential blocks, and a host of perilous nooks, punctuated by traps of the grotesque, almost cartoonish variety and a range of level-appropriate monsters. The result is a claustrophobic, relentless chase that values speed and planning in equal measure.
News Tower, from Sparrow Night, is a stark tonal shift: a 2D management sim set in 1930s New York, where a newly inherited weekly newspaper must be rebuilt, debts and all. The production loop begins at the telegraph desk with story ideas, flows through reporters, typesetters, and page assembly, and culminates in a Sunday-night layout that must balance topic variety with reader sentiment. Time stops at the moment of publishing, inviting the player to savor a Pulitzer-worthy composition. The deeper layer adds staff morale, travel times inside a growing office, and moral pressure from powerful groups—including the mob and the military—creating a thoughtful tension between enterprise and ethics. It’s presented as a digestible sim, but with a backbone that rewards strategic decisions about coverage and presentation. A natural pairing for this game is Hollywood Animal, which situates media industries in a broader cultural context.
Necromancer’s Tale from Psychic Software is a different flavor entirely: a story-driven, D&D-inspired RPG that foregrounds a single character archetype amid a late‑18th‑century occult war. The player is an orphaned noble drawn into a web of rival practitioners, with chapters built around ritual-based objectives that require gathering knowledge and materials while navigating a web of social suspicion. The prose aims to convey the ebb and flow of opinion and trust, with spellcraft enjoyably satisfying to master as the caster ascends in influence. The combat system follows turn-based party dynamics but comes across as somewhat formulaic; a player looking for hot puzzle-based encounters or branching, choose-your-own-adventure moments may wish for more variety. Still, the writing and world-building stand out, inviting future entries that lean even more into narrative specificity and world-building ambition. Those who enjoy occult fiction or history-informed fantasy will find in Necromancer’s Tale a richly written, if imperfect, exploration of power and perception.
Image: Edwin's Selection Box cover
Edwin notes that this is a guilty-not-review style roundup, a space where enthusiasm and critique share the same page. He admits planning a formal review of News Tower in November but delaying it in the name of other coverage, including Battlefield 6. The result is a kind of covert editorial about the state of journalism, layered with reminiscences from a career in print. The column uses the medium’s own history as a lens on how games about media operate—how they reflect and distort real-world processes, and how players should approach them with healthy skepticism. The piece also signals how the writer situates each pick—White Knuckle as a punishing, kinetic test of nerve; News Tower as a studied, almost archival look at the newspaper trade; Necromancer’s Tale as a celebration of language-driven RPG design—into a broader cultural conversation about game form and authorial intent.
A final note of self-awareness comes with the reference to three nested alternatives, a mechanism that keeps the discourse from devolving into a simple top‑three list. Edwin uses the extra options to push readers toward other possibilities that share a tonal or mechanical resonance with the primary choices, while maintaining a clear line about what makes each pick distinct. The tone remains measured and critical, never inflated, and it leans on specificity about design choices and narrative ambition rather than hype. The result is a piece that serves as both a mood piece about the year in games and a catalog of design experiments worth watching.
Taken together, the selections pulse with a certain cultural logic: developers are willing to push boundaries in storytelling and systems design, even when those experiments arrive in formats as different as a dungeon-crawler roguelite, a 1930s newsroom sim, or a ritual-focused fantasy RPG. The editor’s voice remains the through-line, guiding readers through these disparate experiences with a steady cadence and a wry sense of humor. The Selection Box endures not as a definitive verdict on the year’s best games, but as a cultural artifact that captures how players talk about games—through critique, appetite, and a shared curiosity about what games can say when they push beyond conventional genre boundaries.
Ultimately, Edwin’s selections reflect a culture that values narrative ambition, tactile ingenuity, and self-awareness about the burdens of modern gaming. They remind readers that the year’s most meaningful experiences may not be the loudest blockbusters, but distinct design pressures that provoke thought about how we engage with stories, worlds, and the people who craft them. The RPS Selection Box remains a lens on the complex, sometimes contradictory, but always alive ecosystem of contemporary games.