Surprise, Poker Night at the Inventory is returning to Steam next month in remastered form

Approximately 15 years, two months, and 14 days ago, Quintin Smith (RPS in peace) lobbed the headline ‘Poker Night At The Inventory Released Today’ onto this fine site. On this day, February 5th – approximately 479,821,535 seconds further on in time – I’m here to tell you Poker Night At The Inventory is coming back, baby.

As poker nights at the inventory are wont to do, this one snuck up on all of us, with developers Skunkape Games suddenly revealing their hand. They’ve got a remastered version of the 2010 card game which quietly vanished from Steam a little while ago, and it’s set to come out on March 5th. Ah, bollocks, my hand’s absolute trah and they’ve won the pot.

Oi, Heavy from Team Fortress 2, Max from Sam & Max, Strong Bad from Homestar Runner, and Tycho from Penny Arcade. How did none of you have a strong enough hand to stop this newcomer from hoovering up all of our chips? They’re not answering. They’re just engaging in vaguely funny banter.

Anyway, this revamped version of Telltale Games’ Texas Hold’em tussler boasts a totally rebuilt poker simulation designed to be “far more accurate” and have you opponents make decisions which better fit their personalities. It’s also gotten “a top-to-bottom visual refresh, featuring higher resolution models, a more detailed environment, crisper animation, and new lighting”. Finally, you can fiddle with some new knobs to tweak things like stating buy-ins and how much your fellow players talk.

Oh, and some of the Team Fortress 2 items you can unlock through playing Poker Night have returned as part of this comeback. So, if you fancy nabbing the Iron Curtain minigun, the Enthusiast’s Timepiece watch, the Crimestomper Combo pistol/badge, or the Dangeresque, Too? sunglasses, you’ve now got another chance to do so.

If that’s not a strong enough sales pitch, you can check out John Walker (RPS in peace)’s thoughts on the original Poker Night from back in the day. “It’s incredibly cheap, around £3, and that does make a really enormous difference,” he wrote. “And it’s animated really nicely, each character maintaining their unique style. But sadly, as funny as a lot of the lines definitely are, it doesn’t last, and it doesn’t have a workable poker game underneath it to make it worthwhile.”