Escape the undead in cutesy stealth roguelike Basingstoke, out now

Basingstoke looks like an adorable game about a group of scientists in a southern English town—until a group of angry alien monsters starts ripping your lungs and stomach out (and yes, the physics engine models those organs individually when you burst into bits).

It's a roguelike, out this week, about escaping the smoking ruins of a town following an experiment gone wrong, and it wants you to use its collection of craftable weapons only as a "last resort", relying primarily on stealth and distraction. That means sticking to the shadows and chucking a mixture of bottles and poisoned kebabs at your undead enemies to keep them occupied.

If you do end up in combat, which is inevitable, then you'll die in one hit, but you'll have the weapons to hold your own. You'll find enough crafting materials throughout the world to whip up a variety of powerful weapons, from flamethrowers and blowpipes to cricket bats and chainsaws.

As you play you'll unlock new characters for future runs, and they'll all have different gadgets, crafting recipes and abilities. The starting character, the tourist, can take snaps with a selfie stick (I'm not sure how effective that is against the undead, but there you go), or spend money at shops, while the Thief will be able to crack open safes and security panels, which will presumably net you some decent weapons.

I like the look of its fast pace and goofy physics, which you can see in the trailer above. If you fancy diving in, it costs $25.49/£20.22 on Steam, GOG and the Humble Store, which includes a 15% price cut until Friday.

Developer Puppygames is responsible for, among other things, tower defense game Revenge of the Titans, which was rather good.

Thanks, RPS.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.