Welp! Just yesterday, Sand: Raiders of Sophie devs Hologryph and TowerHaus shared the release times of the desert-set extraction shooter where you have your own steampunk mobile fortress, which was set for release tomorrow, June 10th. Today, however? That release date has gone out the window.
Give me a game where I can hoof an enemy over the side of the cliff like a cut price Leonidas, and I'm happy. (It seems I'm not the only one.) So, yes, while I was sad to see no swarms of rats in Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy, I was very happy with the switch from stealth gameplay to scrappy melee. I might have been more worried going in if I knew just how little experience developer Asobo Studio have making combat games.
"Nobody did a combat game before Resonance," lead level designer Valérian Robert told me, and then he explained how they pulled it off.
Fumito Ueda, creator of Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, and the Last Guardian, showed off his new game at this weekend's Summer Game Fest showcase. Gen Atlas sees you step into the shoes of a scavenger in a desert world littered with the carcasses of vast robots. It falls to you to piece one of these machines back together and… well, what your aim is exactly is unclear. However, as stark as the landscapes of the dead world, was that your character has a machine gun slung across their back and, judging by a couple of sequences in the trailer, they're not afraid to use it.
This might not sound surprising, games have had guns since Spacewar!, but Ueda's games have either steered away from doing violence or, particularly in the case of Shadow of the Colossus, made you feel ruddy awful for killing something.
But, have no fear, reader: Fumito Ueda says he's not become trigger happy in his old age.
I've been a fan of dogfighting games since playing Elite with my dad on his old Acorn computer. He'd do the flying and I'd fire the weapons. Maybe that division of labour is to blame for my biggest weakness as a pilot: knowing when to pull out of a strafe. Once I've my gunsights on an enemy I'll continue flying at them with my guns firing until either they explode or I do. In roguelite dogfighter Wind Runners, that cavalier approach is proving my downfall over and over.
The Wind Runners demo popped up on Steam over the weekend and I've been trying to complete a single run of its bullet hell dogfighting since then.
There are very few studios with an output as varied as Strange Scaffold's. They've got games about trading organs and babies, NSFW clicking, cooking delicious meals for kaiju, and, soon enough, sending pedestrians into a fantasy world to help an elf girl level up by running them over with your car. As it turns out, however, as revealed during today's PC Gaming show, Strange Scaffold have another, slightly familiar card up their sleeve: a sequel to El Paso, Elsewhere.
Sundays are for recovering after a late night of trailerblogging and oop, no, wait, there’s another two full-length showcases just this evening. It’s too late for me, readers, but you can save yourselves with some more thoughtful, maybe even calming reads on games and not-games. I bet none of them even have the words "great experience for our players."
Here's one I wasn't quite expecting: Silent Hill 2 remake and Cronos: The New Dawn developers Bloober Team are working on a Star Trek game in collaboration with license owners Paramount. As you might imagine, given Bloober's pedigree, it doesn't appear to be a very uplifting Star Trek game. It is not a Star Trek game in which you would expect to have an Earl Grey teaparty on the Holodeck, with Data playing the viola. Called Star Trek: Shadow Frontier, it's a "psychological thriller" set on an uncharted planet that has become a spaceship graveyard. Something with tendrils lurks hereabouts, and it's trying to eat your mind.
