Galaxy of Pen & Paper, the RPG about RPGs, is out now

The Knights of Pen & Paper games cast you as a player in a tabletop fantasy role-playing game—Galaxy of Pen & Paper does the same, but instead of swords and mages there's spaceships and pew-pew lasers.

Set in 1999, you customise a game master (you can change the colour of his table, if you want), pick two players and their jobs and blast off to the fictional planet Tanton to start your old-school adventure. There's lots of loot to grab, quests to complete, and '90s pop culture references galore.

It's actually fairly light on the tabletop elements, although the dialogue will give you a real Dungeons & Dragons vibe. The combat is turn-based and there's heaps of character customisation based on the items you find in the world.

Jessica played a bit of it before it came out and generally enjoyed the story and character abilities (especially the debuffs you can dole out), but felt combat was a bit of a slog, and wondered if the game had improved enough on the Knights games.

This one is from Behold Studios, the same folk behind the original Knights of Pen & Paper, although confusingly they didn't work on the sequel. So, think of this as a self-published spin-off.

If you yearn for the days of tabletop RPGs but don't have anyone around to play with, then this could be a good bet.

You can buy it on Steam for £10.99/$14.99, or for slightly cheaper in the Humble Store.

Here's the trailer:

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.