Your character in Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 isn't a blank slate and will speak during dialogue scenes. New developres The Chinese Room introduced the protagonist in a new video, in which they show a couple of interactive conversation and then layout the backstory underpinning the troubled narrative RPG.
Ubisoft are "decommissioning" another slate of games next January, including Assassin's Creed Revelations, R.U.S.E., and Trials Evolution. These games will remain playable, but their online services will be switched off meaning leaderboards, online multiplayer, co-op and other features will stop working.
Narrative clambering adventure Jusant, which Alice B just labelled a masterpiece, has arrived on Xbox Game Pass today. Grungy, low fantasy stabbing sandbox Wartales has also arrived, several months after we labelled it thrilling.
But there are several more big hitters due across November including the latest Football Manager, Like A Dragon Gaiden: Really Long Subtitle, and bathhouse management sim Spirittea. To my mind, basically every major, interesting game from November is on the way to the subscription.
I am sure an honest, self-respecting Tolkienian fantasy dwarf would, if I pinched his apple cheeks and told him he's very endearing, he'd at best glare at me and at worst kneecap me with his axe. And yet! That's a large part of what I enjoy about the new subterranean survival-craft-'em-up The Lord Of The Rings: Return To Moria. It's a slower, more weighty survival game than you might be used to if you're a Valheim or ARK type, for example, and you'll spend a lot of your time in the dark. But what is this, a survival game for elves? No sir. And besides, like I said, it's rather sweet. Cosy, even.
Every weekend, indie devs show off current work on Twitter's #screenshotsaturday tag. And every Monday, I bring you a selection of these snaps and clips. Well, usually on Monday; yesterday I was instead up in the Highlands admiring autumn. But today! Today my eye has been caught by an even greater quantity of grappling hooks and slick movement tricks than usual, along with some chill scenes, typing violence, and giving ghosts the finger.
I've only just read Sin's thoughts on Akuma Kira's Lunacid and lo and behold, the PS1-styled, first-person dungeon crawler has now released out of Steam Early Access, to considerable rejoicing. Lunacid is a homage to classic FromSoftware games - no, not that juvenile upstart Dark Souls, but King's Field and Shadow's Tower, which date back to the late 1990s.
I played one of the King's Field games as a sprog and found it to be an extended cave system full of lava, demons and torment. Lunacid sort of applies the perspective and medieval fantasy combat of that series to a story reminiscent of Demon's Souls - the From-alike that spurred the Japanese studio to international fame - with a world that has been flooded with toxic mist by a "sleeping old one below". Your job, as some unfortunate outcast chucked into a pit, is to journey downward and confront this mysterious creature, using any and all combinations of rapiers, clubs and fireballs. Off you go then.
Fresh from the release of Alan Wake 2 - and apparently with a view to driving me nuts, because I haven't had a chance to play Alan Wake 2 yet - Remedy have shared some titbits about future projects. These include the modestly-known about Control 2, a sequel to the paranormal Brutalist telekinet 'em up that is seeing "good progress", and the forthcoming remakes of Max Payne 1 and 2, on which Remedy are collaborating with GTA and Max Payne 3 developer Rockstar.
Further afield, there's the mysterious Condor project, a co-op multiplayer Control spin-off (pictured above) that builds on Remedy's experience crafting the single-player component for wayward service-based shooter CrossfireX. And at the very edge of sight, there's the faint outline of something called Codename Vanguard, about which naff-all is known. Could it be that "crazy, huge budget, dark gothic fantasy" Remedy's creative director Sam Lake would like one day to make?
An Itch.io game bundle launched to fund medical services and support for Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem and Lebanon has raised $200,000 in five days. Organised by Esther Wallace of Oak Grove Games, and due to run till 9th November 2023, the Games for Gaza bundle includes 256 videogames, physical games, assets, soundtracks and books from 140 designers for $10, with all proceeds going to the UK-based charity Medical Aid for Palestinians.
Apologies to the chief, but there’s a not-entirely-accurate bit in Katharine’s post announcing Starfield as October’s RPS Game Club game. I, of the RPS Treehouse, do truly love Starfield, and have only been quiet about it because admitting you enjoy The Grey Bethesda Game but couldn’t get into Baldur's Gate 3 or Elden Ring feels a bit like going to the Savoy Grill and only ordering chips. No one will ask you to leave, but they’ll probably start questioning your judgement.
But dammit, I like chips, and I like Starfield! I like its roving space captain fantasy, I like its utilitarian aesthetic, and I like how its click-clacking guns sound like extremely violent mechanical keyboards. Especially if I get to fire them at floating pirates, while I’m also floating, and said firing punts me upwards into a ceiling.
Some people sing the praises of "visceral" games. Others extol the virtues of "immersive" games. Me, I'm increasingly drawn to "perverse" games. No, not like that. Well, not entirely like that. I mean "perverse" more straightforwardly as in deliberately awkward and unreceptive in their core design, almost self-defeating in a way that has you saying "WTF?" and hankering to know more.
Take The Great Below, a new horror... thingmabob from Porto, Portugal-based Dobra Studios. It's about exploring a strange house full of dreadful paintings in the dark. It's a 3D game with keyboard move-look controls, but the twist is that you can only move around while looking at a 2D map, with your position marked as a pair of footprints.
When was the last time you played a good 3D character platformer? For me, it was probably Psychonauts 2. But before that? Outside of Mario? I'm not sure I'd be able to tell you. For whatever reason, the 3D character platformer has become an increasingly rare breed, it would seem, which makes them even more heartening to see when they do occasionally poke their head above the parapet and leap onto our screens. Song Of Nunu: A League Of Legends Story is one of them, channelling the joyous, boundless enthusiasm of its late 90s and early 00s predecessors to create a simple, but straightforward adventure that you could just as easily enjoy alone as an adult, or with a child in tow. It did not, alas, quite make me cry as developers Tequila Works intended (that honour still belongs to Rime and Rime alone out of their back catalogue), but there's much to admire here while having your heartstrings lightly plucked at the same time. And you don't need to know a jot about League Of Legends to enjoy it.
Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion is the good kind of distraction: a silly, finite, Zeldalike in which you rollick around a pixel art pasture and tick off todo list items by bish-boshing enemies and assisting vegetables. Alice B called it the funniest game she'd ever played.
This is an advanced heads-up that it'll be free to keep from the Epic Games Store from November 2nd.
From now until Monday, Diablo 4 is free to play. The trial is available via Battle.net and includes the entire game. If you want to keep playing past Monday, it's currently 25% off, too.
The psychiatrist Viktor E. Frankl posited that humans are motivated, above almost all else, to search for meaning in their lives. He would probably be unsurprised, if more than slightly confused, to see that spirit manifest in a rumour that the rubbish performance of Cities: Skylines 2 is being caused by excessive teeth.
A widely-shared reddit post suggests that rendering the highly detailed chompers of Skylines 2’s citizenry, who lack the LOD (level of detail) implementation that would reduce their model quality at a distance, is a major cause behind the game’s inability to pump out frames per second. Developers Colossal Order disagree, and have put out a statement denying this "bizarre story."
You can probably guess what’s coming. Alan Wake 2’s PC performance has been the subject of nervous uh oh-ing since well before the release of its onerous system requirements; Remedy comms director Thomas Puha even implored players to "look at the image quality" instead of framerates, like Dean Learner exalting the storytelling of Punch of Judy.
Actually, that’s not fair. Alan Wake 2 is much more enjoyable than Punch and Judy. And, like Remedyverse predecessor Control, there is something impressive about just how much visual tech you can choose to put on show: ray tracing, path tracing, Nvidia Ray Reconstruction, frame generation via DLSS 3, the lot. This wealth of options has produced the most intricate settings guides I’ve put together in ages, and you can consult it yourself lower down this page.
Crytek's Hunt: Showdown may yet receive a single-player campaign, if the stars align, as the developers dig ever deeper into the asymmetrical multiplayer shooter's wonderfully plague-ridden narrative backdrop. Originally released out of Steam and Xbox early access in 2019, the game introduced single player PvE trials back in June 2020, much to Alice0's enthusiasm. It also now sports a scripted, voiced tutorial in which you stalk around farmhouses, learning the ropes and murdering wooden dummies at the behest of a leathery dude in the bushes. Could some kind of proper story component follow? Crytek have certainly thought about it.
You haven't even downloaded Remedy's Alan Wake 2 yet, assuming you're planning to, which means it's already time to start thinking about what you'll do once you've finished it. Apologies, the news beat is a cruel mistress and the present is always past, but in my defence, jumping irresponsibly around the timeline does make sense for a supernatural horror game that follows two characters through different dimensions.
Remedy's plans for the game include a chunky New Game+ mode, aka "Final Draft", which will hopefully arrive in late November, and two DLC packs, Night Springs and The Lake House. The first concerns Alan Wake's fictional in-game TV show, a homage to the Twilight Zone, while the second involves "an independent government organization" that can surely only be the Federal Bureau of Control.
This isn't a Mega-Scoop for the Ages, but it's a fun little story. Tucked away in one dark corner of Remedy's latest horror extravaganza Alan Wake 2 you'll find an arcade cabinet machine dedicated to the very first game the Finnish developer ever made.
What better way to follow up my interview with Just Stop Oil than by writing about a horror game set on a haunted oil rig? The game in question is, of course, Still Wakes The Deep from Dear Esther and Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs developer The Chinese Room. Set off the coast of Scotland in the 1970s, it sees you navigating collapsing gantries and flooded rooms while avoiding an unearthly terror apparently extracted from the ocean floor. Mind you, the worst thing in the game could be the weather, which you can witness for yourself in the latest gameplay trailer below. Never mind the dreadful moaning on the other side of the pipes - how about that drizzle?
At EGX earlier this month, climate change protestors cosplaying as the Ghostbusters interrupted a Tekken 7 tournament, spraying player screens with orange paint and attempting to make a speech before being hauled off by security. The three protestors, who were later arrested, are members of Just Stop Oil, a British activist group officially founded in February 2022 who carry out acts of nonviolent obstruction and vandalism in the hope of rallying support against the UK government granting new fossil fuel licenses and production agreements. In the case of EGX, which is run by Rock Paper Shotgun's parent company Reedpop, Just Stop Oil were protesting against the sponsorship of one EGX stage by Barclays Bank, who have financed billions of dollars of fossil fuel investments (Barclays have provided some official comment down the page). They were also trying to call attention to oil giant Shell's sponsorship deal with Fortnite, which includes a special themed map "powered by Shell V-Power(r) NiTRO+ Premium Gasoline".
I've written a bit here and there about the overlap between games, video games and protest movements. I've also been on a JSO protest march myself - albeit, slightly by accident (no, I didn't glue myself to anything). I was curious to hear more about the EGX protest, and specifically, whether the group's tactical use of cosplay for both dramatic effect and subterfuge represents any broader understanding of games as a form of protest art. JSO put me in touch with Oliver Clegg, a 20-year-old student who joined the group early on and has participated in some of their better-known direct actions. The below is a transcript of that conversation which has been edited down for length and clarity.
American McGee has spent the past several years trying to make Alice: Asylum, a third entry in his series of action-horror games inspired by Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. That fight produced a crowdfunded 414-page design bible but came to an end earlier this year when rights-holders EA rejected the pitch, and McGee declared that he had "no other ideas or energy left to apply toward getting a new Alice game made."
McGee reiterated similar sentiments in a new video discussing the project's end, but he did suggest one "ray of hope" to the community. "The design bible as produced is the perfect thing to feed into an AI system to have it completely build the game that is outlined in that design bible."
There have been a lot of junky Aliens games in recent years, but 2021's co-op shooter Aliens: Fireteam Elite is among the better bughunts. A new update released today fixes matchmaking errors, improves companion AI, and comes with news that its developers are working on a new game.
Nightdive Studios have made a name for themselves by remastering numerous '90s classics, mostly first-person shooters. Next in line is their Star Wars: Dark Forces remaster, which was announced in August. Now it has a release date: February 28th, 2024.
Rocksmith is Ubisoft's take on Guitar Hero, with the key difference being that you can play it with a real guitar. That makes it a good teaching tool as much as it is a game. Or made it a good teaching tool, anyway - Rocksmith 2014 has been removed from sale almost ten years to the day after it launched.
Cities: Skylines 2 is, much like the wonkily roaded, pollution-choked helltown I’ve built within it, a work in progress. Developers Colossal Order upped the citybuilding sequel’s system requirements well in advance of launch, and more recently admitted to have "not achieved the benchmark we targeted" for PC performance. Instead, future improvements are promised, to patch Skylines 2 into better shape.
I wish I could say that this is all just pessimism, born from an overabundance of caution and expectation management. But no, it is just a bit of a mess, one capable of putting freshly mixed concrete shoes on even the fastest graphics cards. I’ve worked out a best settings guide that, compared to the available graphics presets, can better balance performance and visuals – though be warned that this will feel more like urgent repair work than a dream remodel.
Excellent news today, folks. The RPS guides team is once again back at full strength as we welcome two fresh faces to the Treehouse. Please give a big warm hello and welcome to Kiera Mills and Jeremy Blum.
Snake? Snake?! SNAAAAAAAAA - Oh, there you are, Snake. This is just a quick Codec to let you know that Konami's stealth blockbuster bundle Metal Gear Solid - Master Collection Volume 1 is now available to buy. Did you ever play Metal Gear Solid, Snake? It's this sprawling philosophical epic about war, surveillance, AI, nationalism and anti-heroism, a baroque metafictional saga spanning generations that is also a complex series of videogame design experiments. I know - it's a lot to take in, Snake, but you can sort of boil the series down to the difference between two varieties of wall. There are the ones you hide behind, so as to get the drop on your foes, and there are the ones you break, because they're fourth walls, Snake. Do you see?
The Elder Scrolls 6 is going to be a mixture of new ideas and RPG systems that go all the way back to The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion, according to Bethesda's former design director Bruce Nesmith, who was lead designer on The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim and senior designer on Starfield. In particular, Nesmith reckons it will "absolutely" continue with Skyrim's approach to levelling and progression, whereby you improved skills by performing the associated actions. He also thinks the game will "probably" retain elements of the magic system he designed for Skyrim, which broke away from Oblivion and Morrowind in being simpler to understand and more immediately powerful, at the price of flexibility and inventiveness.
It's been 11 long years since the unveiling of Squadron 42, Star Citizen's singleplayer campaign, seven years since developer Cloud Imperium Games broke Squadron 42 off into a standalone purchase, five years since Crytek took them to court for allegedly breaching their CryEngine license, three years since Crytek and Cloud Imperium settled that lawsuit, and three years since director Chris Roberts sought to justify the game's long development time to Kickstarter backers, declaring that "it would be doing a huge disservice to everyone working really hard on the project and all of you that are looking forward to it to deliver something that isn't great." Well, all that waiting has finally paid off, as Squadron 42 is now officially... "feature-complete" and "into the polishing phase", meaning that the Wing Commander-inspired space sim is almost guaranteed to release before the death of our sun.
Cloud Imperium have released a new trailer walkthrough to celebrate, which does admittedly look spaceworthy. It's a whistle-stop tour of Squadron 42 gameplay and story materials - from dogfights in asteroid belts that use a new precision targeting feature, through "OMG my CO is Gillian Anderson" cinematics, to physics-based puzzling malarkey involving a Half-Life Gravity Gun-adjacent gizmo. If I were, say, Starfield developer Bethesda, I'd be particularly worried about those planetary surface flyovers. Mind you, by the time Squadron 42 launches we'll probably be playing Starfield 2. I kid, Roberts, I kid!
Sundays are for washing your headphone earcups. Before you rinse thoroughly, let's read this week's best writing about games (and game related things).
Final Fantasy 14 has crossed over with everything from Monster Hunter and Nier to Yokai Watch and Fall Guys. But there’s one video game crossover that remains at the top of director-producer Naoki Yoshida’s list: Diablo.
80 Days, Heaven's Vault and the Sorcery! games were all created by Inkle using their own scripting language, called Ink. It's a powerful tool for creating game narrative using simple markup rather than code, and it's open source so it can be used by other developers.
One drawback thus far has been that there was no native integration with the Unreal engine. That has now changed thanks to a new open source plug-in created by The Chinese Room.
Alan Wake 2 is out in a little under a week, and Remedy have just announced its PC system requirements. Things I learned: I probably can't play Alan Wake 2.
Final Fantasy XIV is once again dipping into the rest of the storied series in a new series of raids and quests for the MMO.
My normal October fun of skulking around dark and misty forests has been somewhat waylaid this year (and not just by my early Christmas movie bonanza) but I'm trying to find that Halloweeny mood. First step, catching up with horror movies. My favourite new one so far is Dark Harvest (on Amazon Prime), a nice bit of folk horror colliding with the 1960s American dream. But what are you playing this weekend? Here's what we're clicking on!
LG makes some of the best monitors going, in my opinion, with their Fast IPS panels being the basis of many great gaming monitors from other manufacturers too.
Today we're looking at one of their first-party options, the 27GP83A, which combines a winning spec sheet with a reduced price: $279.99 for a 27-inch 1440p 165Hz gaming monitor.
Lenovo's G24-20 24-inch 165Hz gaming monitor is down to just £110, a good price for a model that was previously selling for £169. Here's why we rate it - beyond the whole deal thing, obviously.
At the beginning of September, the soundtrack for Tunic disappeared from streaming services. The composers, Lifeformed and Janice Kwan, said they'd received several false DMCA takedown notices for their work, which had resulted in the removal of both Tunic's soundtrack from numerous platforms, as well as three more of their albums. For a while, things looked very uncertain about the likelihood of their soundtracks returning. Left without much recourse against their distributor, the composers eventually filed a counterclaim to try and better protect their work and get them back online. Thankfully, they were successful, and all four soundtracks are back where they belong.
It's been a messy saga about that's highlighted several issues about how DMCA claims can be manipulated like this, and they're not the only ones it's happened to recently, either. Fortunately for the Tunic duo at least, the situation's since been resolved and their soundtracks are now back where they belong - and to celebrate, they've released a whole new set of Tunic tracks that they describe as "initial piano concepts" for some of its major themes. And hey. You know me. I love a good piano collection of a video game soundtrack, so it is probably no surprise whatsoever that I've more or less had this on repeat for the last month. It's so, so, so good.
Activision Blizzard rolled out Diablo 4's Season 2, also known as the Season of Blood, this week, together with an absolute deluge of quality-of-life improvements across console and PC. The publisher have also now launched the hitherto Battle.net-based PC version on Steam, and are trying to attract newcomers with a discount on Valve's platform and a free 10 hour trial this weekend (that's 19th-22nd October) for Xbox players.
Have the Season 2 updates - which you could summarise as "slay vampires to get vampire powers" and "spend less time and have more fun grinding/farming for loot and levels" - salvaged Blizzard's action-RPG from the ashes of Season 1? I've been trawling the reactions this morning, and while the new Diablo appears to be evolving in the right direction, the big picture is still of a game with just as many raters as haters.
Cor, it sure is good to be back in Commander Video’s running shoes again. I know Bit.Trip Runner and Choice Provisions’ assorted Bit.Trip rhythm games have been available on Steam for absolutely yonks (and still are, in fact), but my memories of these are all on the Nintendo Wii. That’s where I encountered most of the games firs - and I haven’t really been back since. I dabbled in Runner 2 on the Wii U, but positively bounced off the 3D-ness of Runner 3 when it came to PC, preferring instead the clean, simple lines of its stark pixel sprites.
It's with some surprise, then, that I’ve had such a good time with Bit.Trip ReRunner, the recently released fancied up version of the auto-running original that brings its rhythmic courses kicking and screaming into that third dimension. But it’s really more of a compilation game than anything else, packing in extra protein in the form of EP soundtracks and freshly-created course selections from all eight games in the series (mashing tunes from Beat, Core, Void, Fate, Flux into a Runner-style format), as well as lots of new tricks and abilities up its sleeve. But the crown jewel in ReRunner isn’t so much the joy of getting a fresh dose of OG Runner again, but seeing what its player base has already started making with its brilliant Runner Maker level editor. Yep, much like Super Mario Maker before it, Bit.Trip has opened itself up to the whims of would-be game making audience, and they are running with it (sorry).
343 Industries' and Microsoft's well-reviewed, but fan-derided and far from chart-topping sci-fi FPS Halo Infinite is experiencing a slight revival, and it's all thanks to the magic of, er, Pokemon. Pokemon being one of several new custom gametypes knocked together by intrepid Halo players using the Forge map editor's new AI toolkit, added in the Halo Season 5: Reckoning updates, which allow you to bring campaign AI into Forge maps and tweak its behaviour at length. I choose you, Master Chief!
Immersive sims like Dishonored or System Shock can be very fulfilling, but they are also oddly stressful. After all, the flipside of the genre mantra of solving problems through imaginative application of the tools is that when you achieve a boring solution, that's all your fault. Did you miss the final jump while trying for a complex, third-storey infiltration in Deathloop, resulting in a sadly non-immersive firefight in the courtyard below? Did you fail to combo those magical abilities and terrain variables as the developers hoped - nay, dreamed you would, forcing you to rely on ye olde cover-shoot tactics to reach the checkpoint? Shame on you! Don't you know how much imsims cost to develop? Go back to Open-Ended Systems School and retake that course in The Power of Choice. Also, consider playing Mosa Lina instead.
The Amnesia games are set decades apart, but they all begin in the same moment, a moment of waking that is also a moment of erasure and disconnection, a rebirth outside the flow of events from which to descend into the machine of history afresh. On 19th August 1839, a young man opens his eyes to find himself in a vast, silent castle in the forests of Prussia. He discovers a letter from his "past self", Daniel, who urges him to murder the castle's secluded owner, a baron named Alexander, and warns that he is being hunted by a monstrous Shadow. 60 years later on New Year's Eve, the celebrated meat factory owner Oswald Mandus starts awake in the opulent stillness of his manor house in London. Hearing the distant voices of his children, he goes to look for them in the "splendid architectures" below.
On 21st July 1916, at the height of World War I, the soldier Henri Clément stumbles from his sickbed in a colossal bunker beneath the Western Front. With nobody about, and no memory of events during his convalescence, he follows a trail of blood through the collapsing tunnels towards the pantry. And on an unknown day in March 1939, the engineering drafter Tasi Trianon wakes in the wreckage of a plane, deep in the Algerian desert, and enters the nearby caves in search of her husband Salim. Four games, four forgotten pasts, four new beginnings, one descent.
Beware: major spoilers for the entire Amnesia series below.
If XCOM and Invisible, Inc. had a secret one-night stand in the back of a Cyberpunk 2077 taxi, the resulting lovechild would probably look a lot like Cyber Knights: Flashpoint. It's the next game from the Trese Brothers, the makers of Star Traders: Frontiers, and I've been playing its opening missions over the last couple of days. It's good, folks, and there's a lot to dig into with its release into early access this week.
There's a sizable story campaign and a bunch of side missions already playable here, and its emphasis on stealth and escalating security levels whisked me right back to the good old days of 2015 when I first sat down to play Klei's stealthy masterpiece. There are still a couple of rough edges here and there, but if you've been looking for a strategy RPG with a harder-edge than, say, Mimimi's recently released Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew, or just something a bit sneakier than your run of XCOM-likes, Cyber Knights: Flashpoint is definitely worth keeping an augmented eye on.
Back in the glorious Xbox One years, when every Microsoft executive was engaged in the act of putting one foot in their mouth while shooting it simultaneously, there was a giddy period of marketing conducted by means of Phil Spencer's T-shirts. He'd rock up on E3 stages like a cabaret dancer, touting tees with various new or elderly videogame licenses on them, and whipping older fans into a frenzy of speculation as to possible remakes or sequels. I myself had to go lie down after seeing Phil in a Phantom Dust shirt. Teaser-shirts, we should have called them. Look at him in the picture up there, showing off a chestful of Hexen. Shameless!
Sadly/happily, those halcyon days are behind us, but Phil still loves to dangle the carrot of an ancient IP now and then. Speaking on the Xbox podcast last night (while sporting a boring Halo championship jacket), he suggested that Microsoft could do more to revive their older franchises. Or at least "revisit" them in some fashion.
Shadowrun and Battletech studio Harebrained Schemes have "parted ways" with Paradox Interactive - or what's left of the company have, at least. Paradox have announced that they're cutting Harebrained loose to pursue publishing opportunities elsewhere following dismal sales of the studio's latest release, swaggering 1930s-set Indiana XCOMalike The Lamplighters League. Paradox will keep ownership of The Lamplighters League and other games developed by Harebrained, though the Crusader Kings publisher have no plans for a project or sequel in the same genre.
David Moralejo Sánchez's Outpath, a blend of island base-building game and idle clicker, is now out on Steam with a launch discount and a rapidly growing sackful of positive reader reviews. The gist, for those who missed out on the demo: you walk around small islands punching resources out of the landscape, building crafting stations and dwellings, and slowly amassing the means to access other islands. Or, you ignore all that, and treat the whole thing as an idle clicker, with no time limit and no real opportunity to fail.
Epic have dropped a bunch of details as to planned improvements for the Epic Games Store in the on-going race to out-Steam Steam - the Coca-Cola to Epic's Pepsi Max. Amongst other things, we can expect more robust search features, support for third-party subscriptions, better EGS launcher performance, a download manager with improved controls, and a new "for you" personalisation tab - all of that rolling out across 2024 and 2025.
Naturally, Epic will be continuing with their free games program through "2023 and beyond", and they've also put together a couple of special publishing offers for developers, Epic First Run and Now on Epic, which are designed to lure more studios from the amoeba-like embrace of Valve's gaming empire.
The Alt Controller showing at EGX this year was properly top tier stuff. There was, of course, the Future Of Play booth that our Graham organised for the show (the contents of which you can see right here), but every year the Leftfield Collection houses a couple more custom controller games that are just as illustrative of all the amazing things going on in the world of interactive entertainment these days.
Case in point, there were two games from this year's cohort that impressed me in equal measure over the weekend - and it was perhaps fitting that they were located directly opposite one another in the Leftfield Collection's long, white corridor. One was a mind-bogglingly complex, almost military-grade-looking briefcase stuffed full of switches, nozzles and buttons, and the other was an impossibly cute cardboard flip book and projector combo that let its cartoon hero Bib bound across the 3D paper environments to find a way home. Here's a little look at both of them in action.
We talk about retro and throwback game releases being a "blast from the past", but in this case, it's more like you're strolling down a sunny path amid soothing birdsong, and then one particular, innocent-looking paving stone swivels underfoot with a rustle of gears, dropping you into a dingy, yellow-panelled room. There are vacuum tubes mounted on one wall, doors to either side, and a ladder leading further down into darkness.
You click one of the doors and the perspective switches over slide-projector style to a second room with identical proportions. There are pipes emerging from the floor, here, and some kind of antique radio on a pedastel in the centre. Hang on, I know this place. I know this formless sense of dread. I know these machinations. The last time I set foot here, it was 2009 and I was running a Flash game blog, writing up choice submissions to sites like Kongregate. This is Submachine, a 14-part escape puzzle series from Mateusz Skutnik, which Skutnik has now compiled, polished-up and re-released as Submachine: Legacy.
