Edwin Evans-Thirlwell

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell is news editor at Rock Paper Shotgun, covering PC games with an emphasis on unusual, systems-heavy projects and the ideas that drive them. He combines daily news with criticism and longer features, gravitating toward strategy sims, management games and procedural worlds, and the labour and culture around their creation. His work focuses on angles and stories that fall outside standard announcement coverage, using design detail and developer perspective to frame why a game matters.

Strategy, management and systems-driven previews

Evans-Thirlwell spends much of his time on previews of strategy and management games that push at genre boundaries, such as Folk Emerging, a 4X strategy sim set entirely within the opening turns of a Civilization-style campaign.[anchor] He uses these pieces to explore how tight constraints and mechanical twists reshape familiar formats, foregrounding the logic of a system rather than only its setting or spectacle.[anchor]

He writes hands-on reports with distinctive indie projects like Ambrosia Sky, described as a funereal space game from one of Fallout 4’s lead level designers, treating atmosphere and authored perspective as part of the mechanical pitch. His preview of Roots Devour, a Lovecraftian management strategy card game, leans into tone and resource tension, but keeps the focus on how its card-driven systems express horror and control.

These examples sit alongside coverage of card and board-inspired games more broadly, reflecting an interest in rule-based design where small mechanical changes produce large shifts in play.

Patch and update stories also feature in his recent work, such as his report on The Blood of Dawnwalker’s first patch, which highlights bug fixes, tutorial changes and unresolved technical issues like stuttering and shader crashes. Here he treats live development as part of the game’s design story, tracking how a studio responds to early feedback and performance problems rather than simply noting version numbers. Together, these pieces show a consistent focus on the nuts and bolts of strategy and management games, from first announcement through early access and into post-launch maintenance.

Labour, politics and the conditions of game development

Beyond individual titles, Evans-Thirlwell writes about labour and organising within the games industry, including a piece on Hardspace: Shipbreaker as “the video game union movement’s final frontier.” In that work he treats a single game as a lens on union campaigns and workplace structures, connecting in-game themes to real-world organising and the changing relationship between studios and workers.

This interest in labour extends into how he covers studio responses to technical problems and player criticism, reading patch notes and developer statements as evidence of process and pressure rather than neutral updates.

He also explores the tools and practices of game makers, with articles on subjects such as why many developers use Tarot as part of their creative process.

Those pieces focus less on promotional beats and more on how designers think, decide and make meaning, situating games within broader artistic and cultural workflows. Taken together, his coverage of union movements, creative rituals and production pressures positions him as a reporter who treats games as workplaces and cultural artefacts, not only entertainment products.

Procedural worlds, progression and permadeath

Evans-Thirlwell frequently writes about games built around procedural generation, progression systems and permadeath, reflecting a sustained interest in how structure shapes player experience. In one Guardian piece he talks to developers specifically about why players are drawn to games based on these “three Ps”, using interviews to unpack design philosophy rather than individual feature lists. That focus on procedural design and roguelike structures informs his broader coverage of systems-driven games, including his work on favourites lists and end-of-year reflections at Rock Paper Shotgun.

His bylines across outlets such as Eurogamer, The Guardian, The Washington Post, Edge, Wired, Vice and PC Gamer extend this approach beyond PC strategy and management titles, applying the same interest in systems and tone to mainstream console releases, virtual reality projects and high-profile blockbusters. Earlier in his career he edited specialist videogame sites and blogs and wrote for trade publications, which contributes to a perspective that is attentive to both industry structure and player-facing design.

Across these contexts he writes about games, art, culture and technology as overlapping domains, keeping mechanics and structure central while acknowledging their cultural framing.

Role on the Rock Paper Shotgun news desk

As news editor, Evans-Thirlwell oversees and contributes to daily PC games coverage at Rock Paper Shotgun, balancing general assignment news with more focused reporting on entertainment and video games.

He has been associated with the masthead for many years through reviews, features and opinion pieces, before taking formal responsibility for the news desk. His remit includes finding “cool, interesting stories you won’t find anywhere else,” which he pursues by highlighting offbeat projects, design experiments and under-reported industry developments rather than only amplifying major marketing beats.