Donnerstag, 31. Oktober 2024

DayZ creator reveals a "Kerbal Space Program killer" with kittens and challenges license owners to sue him

Stationeers and Icarus developers RocketWerkz are making a spiritual successor to beloved space sim Kerbal Space Program, which is currently titled "Kitten Space Agency" in a flagrant display of adherence to wholesome internet trends. It's based on an actual Kerbal Space Program 2 pitch the studio threw at Take-Two subsidiary Private Division back in the day. RocketWerkz CEO and original DayZ creator Dean Hall has hired several former KSP and KSP2 developers to work on the game, and is describing it on social media as a "KSP killer".

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Only toilets will save you from the monsters in Labyrinth of Wild Abyss

From developers Cannibal Interactive, the creators of Purgatory Dungeoneer, springs forth a new labyrinth game. This one is called Labyrinth of Wild Abyss: LayeRedux and it has labyrinths. Except the labyrinths don't just have single paths to their centres, but tube monsters covered in eyes who'll stalk you slowly and methodically as you meander. Personally, it's not the vibe I'm after when I sit down in the evening and I think, "I would like to play a video game that makes me feel somewhat pleasant". But hey, it might be for you.

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Microsoft closing Arkane Austin was “stupid”, says founder: recreating “a very special group” like that would be “impossible”

Today in "person you already like says something you already agree with, but it’s still good to hear them say it" news, Arkane founder and im-simmy RPG studio WolfEye head Raphael Colantonio has spoken on Microsoft’s decision to shutter Prey (2017) studio Arkane Austin - alongside a handful of others - back in May.

Colantonio, who founded Arkane in 1999 and departed in 2017 to form Weird West studio WolfEye, recently chatted to Jeremy Peel for PC Gamer about Arkane’s closure, saying:

I think if you look a little bit, it's obvious that Arkane Austin was a very special group of people that have made some cool things and that could pull it off again. I think it was a decision that just came down to, 'We need to cut something.' Was it to please the investors, the stock market? They're playing a different game.

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Mittwoch, 30. Oktober 2024

Sony write off ill-fated $200 million shooter Concord as a loss by closing studio permanently

Sony have shut down Firewalk Studios, the developers behind ill-fated multiplayer hero shooter Concord, and confirmed that the game will not be returning to stores. In doing so, they are effectively striking a line through a big, red $200 million in their books - a number that some report is only part of the loss.

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Max Caulfield is a terrible detective - I wish her all the best

If I am ever murdered, please do not ask Max Caulfield to investigate. I've already written our review for Life Is Strange: Double Exposure, in which I celebrated the touching moments of Max's return to the series, and lamented the clunky plot that she finds herself in. In this adventure game, you're looking into the killing of a close friend, shot by an unknown assailant. You hop between two dimensions to solve the case - one world in which your pal still lives and the other in which she's dead. Unfortunately for the murder victim, you play a bona fide hot mess who could not perform a cross examination if she were standing in front of a crucifix with a magnifying glass.

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Animal Use Protocol asks: what if we put a happy little rat on Half Life 2’s gravity gun and gave it to a chimpanzee?

When they’re not doing environmental art for projects like Wasteland 3, The Brotherhood have a history making enticingly odd games. Sin very nearly liked Stasis: Bone Totem, landing positive despite giving up after several hours. That’s also my experience with Beautiful Desolation - an isometric RPG I got a real kick out of the art for before also stopping one day and just accidentally never playing it again. This might be a coincidence, but whatever else can be said about these projects, one thing is for certain: when compared to upcoming horror FPS Animal Use Protocol, they both featured considerably less monke.

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Dienstag, 29. Oktober 2024

Black Ops 6 QA staff strike over Activision return to the office policy, which has "unquestionably harmed disabled employees"

A number of Call Of Duty: Ops 6 quality assurance staff from Eden Prarie, Minnesota have walked out in protest over Activision's ending of hybrid or remote working, which was announced in December last year. They're being supported by the Communication Workers Of America union, who claim that Activision are forcing the return to the office on staff "with serious medical conditions and doctor's recommendations to work from home".

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Bungie seek to reassure everyone that Marathon is still alive... by saying almost nothing about it

Bungie have been fairly quiet about Marathon, the upcoming extraction shooter they announced in 2023. Yesterday they released a devlog in which game director Joe Ziegler seemed to want to reassure fans of the studio that the game was still in development. He talked around a lot of the game features, without actually saying much about it. As yet, there's still no footage of the game in action, making its previous release window of 2025 appear even more tenuous.

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Monster Hunter Wilds will have a spider-free mode for those with arachnophobia

Spider dislikers, your concerns have been noted. At least by Capcom, anyway. The developers of Monster Hunter Wilds are including an option in the upcoming beast-skinning action RPG that will turn all arachnid style monsters into something much less creepy and/or crawly.

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Path Of Exile 2 early access release delayed to December to ensure your POE microtransactions carry over

Path Of Exile 2's early access release has been shoved back three weeks from 15th November to 6th December 2024, game director Jonathan Rogers has announced in a brief Youtube video. The action-RPG itself will seemingly be ready in time for the original launch date, but there's a load of "server-side infrastructure work" that needs doing.

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Montag, 28. Oktober 2024

Static Dread is Paper's Please but you're a lighthouse keeper besieged by Lovecraftian monsters

I've often thought lighthouse keeping would make a fine second career, albeit mostly because in my head, it would give me endless time to write (and finish Baldur's Gate 3). You won't have much time to write in Static Dread, sadly. The world has ended, the oceans teem with squirmy, extra-dimensional lifeforms, and it's your job as the apparent sole surviving lighthouse keeper to distinguish vessels loaded with eldritch horrors from vessels loaded with people who need saving from eldritch horrors.

Going by the teaser trailer, below, this appears to be comparable to playing border guard in Papers, Please, but it's less political and more tentacular. You field queries over the radio, run your finger down a clipboard, and decide whether to kindle the lamps or beg the coastguard to blast that ship back to hell. There's a dialogue line in the trailer which I, personally, would consider highly untrustworthy. "It's consuming my team!" screams a self-described ship captain. "Please, send help! Gosh..." Look, "friend", no genuine human being says "gosh" in an emergency situation. Not even British human beings say "gosh" in an emergency situation. That's what you say when somebody tells you the pizza-flavoured crisps are back on sale at Aldis.

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Decade is a tech-noir adventure game where you send children back in time to prevent metal rain from pulping the planet

One of my biggest challenges as a writer has been tempering my love of vague gestures at metaphysical concepts with the revelation that the people who read my articles also, apparently, can’t read my mind. Pah. A skill issue if I ever saw one, honestly. Decade is a fascinating adventure game that drew me in with its apparent vagueness but then, like some sort of considerate, sensible coward, went on to explain itself well in on its Steam page.

It’s the end of the world, and you’re not too happy about it, so you’ll be shoving children in a time machine with little more than a rotting Lunchly and some instructions to help you figure out exactly what went wrong.

What are you dressing as for Halloween? Me, I’m dressing as someone trying to bring back “tray-tray” in an effort to give Edwin a seizure. Here’s the tray-tray:

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The Video Game History Foundation is “not done fighting” after US Copyright Office refuses exemption to aid preservation

Back in April, I wrote about a hearing that took place between representatives Video Game History Foundation, the Rhizome project, and the Software Preservation Network, in which they argued the case for a DMCA exemption that would allow researchers to remotely access out-of-print games in libraries and archives. Representatives from the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) and the AACS were in opposition, with ESA legal representative Steve Englund at one point fretting about some sort of hellish "online arcade that (he’d) been warning about for the last several proceedings".

Last Friday, as per a statement released by the VGHF and spotted by PC Gamer, the US Copyright Office officially denied the exemption.

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The Maw: what's new in PC games this week?

This week is the week of Halloween, a period bountiful in horror games, but I write about horror games all the time anyway. Even when I'm writing about happy, upbeat games, I'm actually writing about horror games. I'm worried that if I double-down further on morbidity I might foul the Maw's humours and give it jaundice. So let's see if we can satiate the creature with some nice, breezy open worlders and RPGs instead. I'll throw in a single horror game just to keep up appearances.

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Sonntag, 27. Oktober 2024

The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for doing things you haven't done in a long time, like a long stretch after years trapped in a languorous hunch.

Former Edge designer Andrew Hind has launched On, a premium print magazine in which he and editor-in-chief Nathan Brown invite writers to produce their dream article.

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Samstag, 26. Oktober 2024

Ys X: Nordics has set sail on PC, and this time it's got local co-op from day one

Ys X: Nordics launched in Japan last year to some critical acclaim, and it has now made its way both west and onto PC. The PC version has a bunch of graphical upgrades and keyboard support, but also - unlike predecessor Ys IX: Monstrum Nox which got co-op as a cheeky post-launch bonus on PC - Ys X: Nordics has local co-op from day one.

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Straftat recreates the experience of joining a random Half-Life or Quake deathmatch server in the year 2000

Babbdi was one of our favourite games from 2023. STRAFTAT is a multiplayer shooter from the same developers and it's exactly as transportive as its singleplayer cousin; not transportive to an unknowable brutalist city, but to the year 2000 - in the best possible way. It's out now.

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What are we all playing this weekend?

Weekends are for walks in the woods, washing your whites, wolfing down waffles, and other domestic pursuits that start with "w" - please, continue the list. Alternatively, play some video games. I will not insist that you alliterate your video game picks, but I won't tell you not to, either. Here's what the Treehouse are up to.

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Freitag, 25. Oktober 2024

The Tales Of Kenzera devs are making a Gothic horror RPG beat 'em up where two characters fight over one body

The creators of "beautifully designed yet imprecise platforming adventure" Tales Of Kenzera: Zau are working on an Afrofuturist gothic-horror RPG with isometric visuals and a body-sharing dual character premise. Currently known as Project Uso - the Swahili word for 'face', 'appearance' or 'surface' - it'll take place in the same world as Kenzera, and will take inspiration from Surgent Studio founder Abubakar Salim's experiences of parenthood. Providing, that is, the developers can find enough money to make it.

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Former Bioshock devs once worked on an XCOM game that played like Shadow Of The Colossus

Real ones know that the only XCOM spin off worth its salt is Hasbro’s 1999 play-by-mail banger First Alien Invasion, although that didn’t stop System Shock 2 studio Irrational from getting to work on an FPS set in the strategy series’ universe after being acquired by 2K in 2006. If your sentiments are anything like I remember a lot of the internet feeling at the time, you may get nightmarish flashbacks to the trailer below, first shown at E3 2010. The project was eventually canceled and adapted into 2013’s The Bureau: XCOM Declassified, but Irrational co-founder and current Wild Bastards studio Blue Manchu founder Jon Chey has shed some light on the FPS’s development, and it sounds like it was once a far more ambitious project. Kaiju ambitious.

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Donnerstag, 24. Oktober 2024

Balatro gets a second set of free card cosmetics inspired by Cyberpunk 2077, Stardew Valley and others

I played Balatro for an hour, had a pleasant time, then uninstalled it. I know a trap when I see one. Perhaps you are made of stronger stuff than I am, however. Perhaps you like that monkey on your back. For you, there's a new free update, which adds a second set of themed card art to the game inspired by the games Binding Of Isaac, Cyberpunk 2077, Stardew Valley and Slay The Spire.

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Why play a fascist? Unpacking the hideousness of the Space Marine

In order to make Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 enjoyable, Saber Interactive had to make the Space Marines less like Space Marines. That's to say, less like "semi-lobotomized, hypnotically indoctrinated slave-soldiers in thrall to an uncaring (and possibly non-existent) god", in the words of Rick Priestley, primary writer for the original Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader rulebooks back in the 1980s.

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This map ancillary might be my favourite thing a Total War Warhammer 3 patch has ever added

To be fair, there are several, far more substantial additions teased in Total War: Warhammer 3 design director Mitchell Heastie’s latest blog on the strategy game’s upcoming Patch 5.3. There’s also some interesting insight regarding design decisions, and the systems CA are hoping to tweak in the future. We’ll talk about that in a moment, but first, I must draw your attention to this magical map. I’m very excited about it. Not so much for what it does on its own - more for what its design philosophy represents and could mean for future additions.

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Mittwoch, 23. Oktober 2024

Denuvo respond to their rep for tanking games - "I'm a gamer myself, and therefore I know what I'm talking about"

Over the past week or so, you may have caught wind of Denuvo - the makers of anti-cheat and anti-piracy software - embarking on a PR campaign of sorts, intended to combat negative public perception of their software. In case you're unfamiliar, Denuvo's wares have become infamous for allegedly sabotaging the performance of all sorts of video games, from Resident Evil: Village to Tekken 7, though accounts of the severity vary, and there is an on-going shortage of independently supplied raw data.

Denuvo's attempts to clear the air include opening a Discord, which they say “ is a key step in fostering closer relationships with game developers, publishers, and players, offering a dynamic, real-time platform for meaningful interaction”. On Monday, Denuvo’s media team reached out to me to offer an interview with Denuvo’s product manager, Andreas Ullmann. Here’s that interview, edited for brevity.

RPS: In a recent public statement you said “we will stop letting every claim about our product go unanswered". What claims are you referring to?

Andreas Ullmann: It's basically really about the stuff that's posted by the community. So you just need to check out Steam forums, for example. Very toxic, very hostile environment. If a game announces to use any of our products, if you check out the Steam forums, all the claims are popping in. SSDs are destroyed by our solution. The usual performance topics, and we simply don't want to leave the floor to these people who are posting all things about us anymore. We want to also be there for a person who has not heard about us before. We also want to share our view, our opinion on these topics, and also act as a trusted source of information.

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Don't mind me, I'm simply microwaving an instant frog in Creature Packets

I feel this one largely speaks for itself, honestly. I could theorise on the fictional conceit of bringing packaged creatures to life using a microwave and also, sometimes, a blender, but to do so would be to stare into a gift horse’s abyssal oat hole so intently that…

…I was going to finish that with something about its molars staring back, but I had to quickly Google “do horses have molars?” only to misspell it. “Yes, horses can have a strong sense of right and wrong, and what is fair,” went the AI overview. “Some say that horses can teach people to live in the present and to be authentic.”

Thanks for that.

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Shin chan: Shiro And The Coal Town review: a nostalgic collectathon I can't stop thinking about

When I was little, I really liked what I saw of Shin chan, even if it was just largely flashes of his bare arse on Japanese TV. He seemed mischievous, a bit of a menace, and part of a fun family dynamic. Flash forward to now and I can only describe the lad as… jarring. At least, I think he's an odd flag-bearer for a series of games where you live out a nostalgic, Japanese summer in the countryside.

And I think it's doubly weird that Shin chan: Shiro And The Coal Town opts for a collectathon approach, that doesn't necessarily make the act of living out a Cicada Summer all that mesmerising. But, and this is a big but: I can't stop thinking about it. Of all the games of 2024, Coal Town may have left the biggest impression on me. In a way, I hope it does for you, too.

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Dienstag, 22. Oktober 2024

How Sonar Shock became the boldest immersive sim of the year: "I don't think a big game developer would have done it this way"

Not many people hit the refund button on Sonar Shock, the indie immersive sim that’s rated Very Positive on Steam. But those that do tend to complain they couldn’t get the hang of the controls. You can understand why. Try to strafe left to dodge an attack from a blubber monster, and you’ll instead rotate on the spot. Attempt to turn the camera with a flick of the mouse, and you’ll discover that your view remains fixed in place - the cursor moving across the screen as if searching for an icon on your desktop.

"The controls are actually one of the biggest points that make people bounce off the game," developer Raphael Bossniak admits.

And yet they’re also a unique selling point. Where last year’s extraordinary System Shock remake embraced the interface and keyboard conventions of modern gaming, Sonar Shock leans into the experimentation of pre-Quake control schemes - long before WASD and mouselook became standardised for the sake of ease and sanity.

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Dave The Diver's creator wants to make games about Dave's backstory and explore different genres

Dave The Diver is getting a story DLC and, possibly, more games set in the same universe. This comes from an interview with developer Mintrocket's new CEO Jaeho Hwang, who spoke to VGC at Gamescom Asia about their plans to expand Dave and his diving. A future Dave may not even dive, but like, connive. Keep a beehive alive. Jive. Collect tithe.

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AMD’s Ryzen 9000X3D processors, with their fancy-pants cache, are launching November 7th

‘Tis the season for new gaming CPUs. While Intel gear up to release their efficiency-focused Core Ultra 200S chips, AMD have announced a November 7th launch date for their Ryzen 9000X3D series – the latest to use their framerate-juicing 3D V-Cache. No specific CPUs have been named, for some reason, but we can be reasonably sure from leaks and retail listing whoopsies that this launch will include at least one of the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, Ryzen 9 9900X3D, and Ryzen 9 9950X3D.

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Caves Of Qud teases a 1.0 release date with a tricksy riddle about beetle moons

The Caves Of Qud developer has posted a cryptic riddle that sounds a bit like a release date in disguise. A post on the game's Steam page yesterday reads: "{n} purple wardens beseech the Chair, What is death, if one rose is fair? How long from beetle moon to beetle moon?" That means absolutely nothing to me. But at least one fan in the comments knows their lore enough to have translated it, resulting in a specific date later this year. If their solution is correct, this could be a characteristically cryptic way for developer Freehold Games to announce the date for the roguelike's 1.0 release. So, let's double check those numbers.

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Montag, 21. Oktober 2024

In action strategy builder RailGods, Cthulhu is a train and you'd better keep it fed

RailGods Of Hysterra is one of those games that, as it were, shovels a bunch of relatively dried-up concepts into the squirming furnaces of something appealingly ghastly. On the one hand, it's burdened by talk of "crafting", "base-building" and "survival" - all things I have enjoyed but am currently weary of, and which together make the game sound interchangeable with half of Steam. But it's elevated, on the other hand, by talk of living helltrains that eat crocodiles for breakfast. Without further ado, here's a trailer.

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Final Fantasy VII fan translation restores every lost instance of Cloud saying "let's mosey"

In a climactic scene of the original Final Fantasy VII, hero and amateur snowboarder Cloud Strife stands with his fellow adventurers as they are about to face a final, possibly fatal battle. With the steely glare of a polygonal warrior on the verge of killing god, he turns to them and says: "Let's mosey!" It's an unintentionally comical moment - an easy-going phrase, as if they're all going to the shops and not jumping into a big glowing pit at the end of the world.

It's a result of the RPG's famously rushed translation. But maybe not in the way you think. A fan translation of Final Fantasy VII has now fixed a bunch of mistakes that were present in the original, and "let's mosey" is one of them. The fix? Have Cloud say it way more often.

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Here’s Gary Oldman fighting space Goombas in over an hour of new Star Citizen Squadron 42 gameplay

Earlier this month, we learned that Star Citizen studio Cloud Imperium Games were mandating overtime for employees in the lead-up to their fan convention, Citizencon, which was held this past weekend. Additionally, this TOIL (time off in lieu) wouldn’t be made available until the release of space game Star Citizen’s accompanying single player campaign, Squadron 42.

At CitizenCon over the weekend, CIG head promiser Chris Roberts said that he’s “confident” that Sqorty-two will release next year, 2026, via Ian Games. CIG also released a video of the entire first hour and fifteen of the game, which you can watch below.

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The Maw: what's new in PC games this week?

Happy this week, everybody! In my efforts to achieve the absolute tranquility needed to spend five days shovelling PC game news stories into a ravenous otherworldly monster, I often go for an early morning walk. I tend to do this while wearing my trusty, enveloping Honcho Poncho, because the UK summer is thoroughly behind us and the very air has begun to squelch. Anyway, while walking this morning I think I actually scared somebody into crossing the road. It turns out roaming around at sunrise near Halloween looking like a ringwraith is a great way to become a figure of menace. Sorry, neighbour! I'll wear that nice top hat and opera mask from my socialite days in future. Anyway, let us FEED THE MAW.

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Sonntag, 20. Oktober 2024

What's on your bookshelf?: slightly useful useless edition

No cool industry person this week, I’m afraid, but I do have a consolation prize for you. A comment from valued RPS community member #1694 a few weeks back reminded me that I once spent a long time tracking down good SF/Fantasy/Horror short story magazines. Partly for pitching purposes, and partly because I was just really excited such things still existed.

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The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for reconnecting with old friends, reminiscing about good times, and eventually going to bed feeling an unbelievable sense of calm, contentment, and a newly invigorated sense of self. Lol nah I’m going to play Mechabellum and eat gnocchi from a packet. Asda’s vegan pumpkin pesto is very good though. Here’s some writing I personally found interesting about games (and game related things!)

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Samstag, 19. Oktober 2024

Ballionaire is a pachinko roguelike where you build your board as you play

A trend of gambling-inspired games has surfaced in the wake of poker-like deckbuilding roguelike Balatro. The recipe? Take a standard game of chance you might find in any casino and mash an uncountable number of bells and whistles and gizmos and weirdnesses into it, then slather it in a "one more turn" roguelike dressing, and make it as tactile and punchy as humanly possible. The ongoing Steam Next Fest has no shortage of these gambley gimmickers, but here's one demo that stood out. Ballionaire is a colourful pachinko-inspired roguelike, but you choose where the wacky widgets will go.

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Freitag, 18. Oktober 2024

The Silent Hill 2 remake dev's new horror game is a time-travelling jaunt through apocalyptic Eastern Europe

Bloober Team have announced their next horror game at last night's Xbox Partner Preview showcase. It's called Cronos: The New Dawn and it's about - bear with me here - going to the past, harvesting souls, then going to the future so they can help you. It's all because you are, um, wanting to find a special rift in the future, so you can go back to a special version of the past. I think. Anyway yeah, it looks kinda fine to good.

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Dunebound Tactics brings terrain manipulation to a strategy RPG where you can sacrifice companions to power your ship

Genre tags are slippery, fickle things at the best of times, but I feel like each one I use to label Dunebound Tactics almost diminishes it, as I’m sacrificing something precious for the sake of powering on through the arid sands of easily comestible, digestible, poop-estible online content. Ah well, circle of life and all that. Plus, at least it’s thematic: you’ll have to make sacrifices yourself if you want to progress across its unforgiving deserts. This one’s got shades of roguelite, RPG, strategy, and turn-based tactics. Nothing too uncommon, but it’s the shades of Red Faction, Frostpunk, and Sunless Sea that have me interested.

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Donnerstag, 17. Oktober 2024

Hades 2 adds a boss fight against Prometheus and a lot more in a chunky update

Praise the gods, it's Hades 2 update day, and developers Supergiant are not mucking about. They have bolstered the nippy roguelike with a heap of shiny new things in this "Olympian Update", including a new weapon with homing attacks, a liver-pecking boss fight, two new animal familiars, and the home region of the Gods - mount Olympus. It's probably the biggest update they've made yet in terms of fresh sights. And by "fresh sights", I mean Dionysus sporting a leopard-print thong. Yikes.

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The demo for Streets Of Rogue 2 lets you roleplay as the world's most violent chef

I punched a cultist in the face in Streets Of Rogue 2, just because. He started running away - something I would not allow. When another robed cultist spotted what was happening, he tried to intervene, and a kind of Benny Hill pursuit chain began. We ran across a beach, through public toilets, and into the surf. In the end I had to knock them both out. As they lay unconscious, I worried they might soon wake and tell someone what I had done. This can't happen, I hate accountability. I punched their unawake bodies toward the sea in an effort to float the evidence away. But after a few punches the first man exploded into chunks of flesh. I am a murderer now. I was supposed to be a chef.

Streets Of Rogue 2 has a demo out for Steam Next Fest, and while a lot of features are locked up behind the word "UNAVAILABLE" in red font, there's still quite a lot of mischief for you to get up to.

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Mittwoch, 16. Oktober 2024

Riot lay off more workers for the second time in a year - and add "evolving" to our big list of nonsense words companies use to describe job cuts

Riot Games are cutting more jobs at their studios, the company announced today. This is the second time in a year the League of Legends developer has laid off workers. Chairman and co-founder of Riot, Marc Merrill, made the announcement yesterday, claiming that by cutting these jobs the company was "evolving League" and "investing heavily in solving today’s challenges". A total of 32 people have lost their jobs, mostly workers on League of Legends, according to a figure the developer gave to our sister site Eurogamer.

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I am happy to report that Building Relationships has more than one joke, and most of them are pretty good

You might have caught this one during Day Of The Devs earlier this year. It’s stuck with me since because the developer Tanat seemed like a rad dude, and also because there’s nothing I cherish more than taking a bad pun and just absolutely going to town on it, marrow and all. Building Relationships is about buildings forming relationships in a Love Islandy scenario, though without the reality TV framing you might find in say, Crush House. But the real gag here is the commitment to the bit. Besides that, it’s just a really charming and fun N64-style 3D platformer.

It also features the sort wonky physics that definitely wouldn’t get Ninty’s seal of quality, but work brilliantly here, especially since your character consists largely of angles but still insists on, you know, performing motions.

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Dienstag, 15. Oktober 2024

Should devs tell people about launch bugs in advance? “It’s an interesting problem” says Starfield and Skyrim designer

How do official Bethesda bug compilation videos coinciding with a game's launch sound? Or at least, a proper list of known bugs on day one, to preempt any compilations created by vengeful players? Skyrim Lead Designer and Starfield Systems Designer Bruce Nesmith has spoken a little about the “interesting problem” of how open developers should be about technical issues on day one, given the expectation some players have that every game should be "flawless".

When asked by Videogamer if lists of known bugs (Nesmith throws out ‘700’ as an example for Skyrim) should be shared with fans on launch "to temper expectations," he responded:

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My Arms Are Longer Now is a thievery game where the thief is a stretchy boneless flesh tube

If I could extend my arm forty times its normal length, while also granting it the flexibility of a sock filled with mince, I’d probably just use it to take the bins out without leaving my chair. But what if someone were to use this power... for evil? That’s the gist of My Arms Are Longer Now, a cartoony "stealth-comedy" game about worming a single stretchy limb into people’s valuables, which has a Steam Next Fest demo out now.

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Commandos Origins looks like a solid and satisfying return for the legendary tactics series

My earliest memory of the Commandos series of tactical stealth games was my dad bringing home a box copy of the original. “The missions take months. Months!” his mate had told him. Get less shit mates, thought I, for I had already played it elsewhere, and knew that the missions took mere minutes if you put the game on easy then rushed your objectives, bonking nazis along the way. I did not rush the new Steam demo for Kalypso’s revival, Commandos: Origins, but it’s still doable inside half an hour. I had expected a little more, but what’s here has certainly given me some optimism that the full game might well be worth sinking - if not months - at least more time than it takes to wildly lunge at a few nazis en route to your objective.

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Montag, 14. Oktober 2024

Until Dawn actors hint at a sequel, but there's reason to be sceptical

I loved the original Until Dawn - a spruced-up horror take on those old FMV adventure games, with just the right mix of B-movie self awareness and creature feature scares. I was very close to buying the recent remake, actually, until I watched the extended prank scene online and realized, oh no, they’re taking themselves seriously now. They prestige-ified it. It insisted upon itself, Louis, so I didn’t bother. I still wouldn’t say no to a sequel though, and based on a couple of (admittedly vague) hints from two of the game’s actors, one might already be in the works.

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The Maw: what's new in PC games this week?

Merry mid-October all! It's chucking it down here. This week I'm mostly playing a game of my own devising called There's A Hole In My Raincoat And I Can't Find It. The Maw is unlikely to be sated by such flotsam, so it's just as well there are also a bunch of new PC games on the cards. Please run your eyes over them while I experiment with putting my coat over a lightbulb again.

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Sonntag, 13. Oktober 2024

There's a future where you and this bucket that fits over your head decide what a game meant to say, not the useless idiots that made it

It's not far away, you know. The promised land of never having to experience a game the way it was intended again. That long sought after holy grail of sticking your fingers in your ears and going wahwahwah. But it’s not going to be something created by people with talent, vision, expertise, drive, a dream, or a story in their hearts. No, as with everything in our imminent future, it will be achieved by putting a bucket over your head.

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The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for making and freezing a bunch of sandwiches so I can later toast them at my leisure. Not sure why, just fancied becoming the sort of person with a bountiful hoard of sandwiches. Before I get seriously locked in to some rhythmic bread slapping, here’s some writing I personally found interesting about games (and game related things!)

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