Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 might be what it is (a bit of a mess), but that doesn't mean the series is dead in the water. In fact, a whole new game is on the way! It's called Vampire: The Masquerade - Oaths and Ashes, and it is still technically an RPG, just one mixed up The Fly style with a visual novel.
Following confirmation that Greedfall 2 developers Spiders are being liquidated, the French Syndicat des Travailleureuses du Jeu Vidéo (STJV) union have issued a statement claiming that the studio's fate is "a premeditated and deliberate choice by Nacon’s management". They've also called for a boycott of the publisher.
.jpg?width=690&quality=85&format=jpg&auto=webp)
Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era is out in early access today, April 30th. It's taken just over a decade for Might & Magic Heroes VII to get a mailine follow-up that'll keep things heroic, mighty, and strategic, with Hooded Horse/Ubisoft-backed devs Unfrozen doing the honours.
Well, this is a nice suprise. Just a couple of weeks on from me revisiting it to check out the DLC it'd gotten since my review run, Rebellion have announced that their Cumbrian post-apocalyptic survior Atomfall's being adapted into a TV show.
Fresh off adding a new feature that'll make my reckless driving a bit easier to recover from, SCS Software have announced a release date for American Truck Simulator's next expansion, as the game continues its trek from US west coast to East. Illinois is the latest destination and you'll be able to take to its highways on May 14th.
I'd class few of Cyberpunk 2077's endings as unflinchingly happy, most are at least a bit bittersweet - as you might expect, given the grave situation the game's protagonist finds themselves in. If you've ever wished the one added with the Phantom Liberty DLC was a tad more upbeat or wanted a conclusion that sees V run off with braindance-programming love interest Judy Alvarez, you're in luck, as a veteran Cyberpunk modder's now brought that to life.
Nothing will put me on to a game quicker than having a concept so laser-focused on the thing it's trying to do, and, seemingly, doing it well. This is the case for The Crane Rider's Tale, the next game from the developer of Butterfly Soup, a visual novel/adventure game hybrid that takes cues from Disco Elysium and Zero Escape where a serial killer is on the loose who has killed your friend, so you ferry around your local townsfolk around on your giant crane to figure out who did it, all wrapped up in a medieval Chinese painting and woodblock print aesthetic. It is so much, and so much my exact vibe.
If Dig In were called a 'historical wave defence strategy base-builder' or similar I wouldn't have been jarred by it. Odds are I'd have skimmed right past. Instead, Icelandic developers Vitar Games are calling it "a WW1 trench warfare colony sim", and this wigs me out a little. We are colonising the Somme! Nothing is too sacred for artistic depiction, and people have been commodifying memories of the World Wars for decades, but throwing in an ultra-compacted gravitational mass of a concept like "colony" really turns it all up to 11/11.
It's a gift to cultural essayists. Within the combinatory logics of Steam, it's also a harbinger for such genres as the "WW1 life sim" or even "cosy WW1". I am trying to imagine what Wilfred Owen might have written about bladder gauges. Here is a trailer.
Magic: The Gathering Arena developers at Wizards of the Coast are set to unionise with the Communications Workers of America (CWA). The CWA say they've secured a "supermajority" in favour of unionisation among the workers, and have given Wizards of the Coast until the end of the week to voluntarily recognise the union - dubbed United Wizards of the Coast—CWA - and filed an election petition with the US National Labor Relations Board.
Just like the 'Apple tax' of a certain phone and laptop manufacturer, the 'ROG tax' is an increasingly well-established concept in PC hardware circles; Asus' components do often carry a bit of a premium to them, for various reasons. Nonetheless, Amazon UK currently have a decent deal on the 850W 80+ Platinum ROG Strix PSU, taking it down to £120. That's the lowest price it's ever been, by the looks of price tracking graphs, and a tasty 33% saving on its £180 RRP.
It's been well over a year since the announcement of Alien: Isolation 2, or whatever Creative Assembly and Sega end up calling the sequel to 2014's xenomorph horror romp. There's been no further word about the game, and the protracted quiet may have given you a false sense of security. "False Sense Of Security", by happy coincidence, is the title of a spooky new video just uploaded to the Alien: Isolation Youtube channel.
True, there are no Aliens in the footage, and they don't explicitly label it "Alien: Isolation 2" or similar. It could be wholly unrelated! In much the same way that a rogue dot on your motion tracker is probably just a cat trapped in a locker. Go on, then. Open your locker.
Sundays are for realising that you aren't who you thought you were. You thought you were Jonathan Frakes. You thought you'd starred in both Star Trek: The Next Generation and 1995 video game Multimedia Celebrity Poker. You thought you'd played an unnamed dug dealer in a 1982 Hill Street Blues episode named 'Of Mouse and Man'. You thought you'd directed an episode of Girlfriends' Guide to Divorce called 'Rule No. 155: Go with the Magician'. You thought a man named Trim Jinca had used your face as a profile picture a time or two. You were wrong on all counts.
You are Jonathan Frakes. But not that Jonathan Frakes. You don't ask the questions here. You answer them. And so I ask: who are you?
There is a Titanfall-shaped hole in this world that could be filled by Respawn, yet won't be, for silly reasons like money. I hate money! It is a scourge we must do away with. Until that point, we could of course moan and lament the absence of a Titanfall 3. That sounds quite dull, so instead I will point you towards ShatterRush, a game that is oh so evidently picking up what Titanfall 2 left behind, and adding into the mix some fresh elements of its own.
Welp, the game Assassin's Creed Hexe may have been a few months ago probably won't be the game it will be. Back in February, the still quite mysterious Hexe lost its creative director, Clint Hocking. Now it appears that the game has also lost its game director, Benoit Richer.
It is happening again. By that I mean Final Fantasy 14 is getting a new expansion, once again ensuring my timeline will be flooded with thousands of screenshots of tall bunny women and regular sized cat boys. It's called Evercold this time around, seemingly bringing about a cold snap to Eorzea, if the lengthy teaser trailer is anything to go by. The new overarching storyline started with the previous expansion, Dawntrail, has a name now too: the Godless Realms Saga. Sounds cosy!
I’m sitting in the pit lane at Donington Park circuit.
My car’s a 1992 Mercedes 190E Evo 2, a blocky German touring car ideal for close-quarters racing. I’m hoping I’ll be able to get it into first gear. You see, while the new Logitech RS H-pattern gear shifter I’ve been testing out has proven easy to set up with 99% of my racing library, introducing it to Raceroom Racing Experience has proven a bit more eventful.
This weekend, the decorating begins. Yes, I have bitten off more than I can chew, but what is life if not enthusiastically inviting choking hazards? I'll be removing cabinets, sanding and priming carpentry, cleansing walls with sugar soap, and, if I've done everything, covering the kitchen in B&Q's Chorizo matte emulsion paint.
The most horrifying thing that ever happened to me while playing Game Boy was a school 'friend' flicking the power switch while getting off the train, just as I'd finally beaten that one maddeningly obscure block puzzle in The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening. He's lucky he's not buried somewhere under the railway lines between Shipley and Baildon. There were Game Boy horror games, but they were mostly crammed-down approximations of Resident Evil and the like, and I found them about as spooky as a frowning Potato Head. The Third Shift is out to address this lapse, and so far, it is doing it extremely well.
Days after announcing a price cut for the existing Xbox Game Pass tiers, which'll no longer get new Call of Duty games at launch, it appears Microsoft have an all-new tier lurking up their sleeves. Dubbed Game Pass Starter Edition, leaks suggest it'll be something akin to the the established baseline Essential Game Pass tier, but bundled in with a paid subscription to Discord Nitro.
I delight in looking at shapes, I suspect we all do. They are the building blocks of life, often turned into literal building blocks handed to us as wee babes to help us make sense of the world. Games like Shapez 2, then, feel like a natural through line from this point, a mechanical orchestra that lets you put all sorts of shapes together to build factories that produce more shapes endlessly. And now that line has seen its end, as Shapez 2 has left early access today, arriving at its 1.0 release a little less than two years on from its original launch.
I've used Logitech's MX Master office mice for the best part of six years by this point, beginning with the MX Master 3, then the 3S and now the MX Master 4. Weirdly, the best one to pick up from a value and features standpoint is the MX Master 3S, which I noted in my original 2022 review to have the same excellent ergonomics as its predecessor, versatile wireless connectivity, a zippy 8000 DPI sensor and much more. For £69 from Amazon (nice), it's a return to one of the best prices I've seen on this rodent in a few weeks and in a general sense.
If you've spent days trapped in a loo after Samson cheekly locked you in one during a mission, then I bring good news. Liquid Swords' latest patch for their buggy crime sim's freed you from your bondage, while also adding some new tuned cars for you to race around while you celebrate no longer being stuck in the shitter.
Another Crimson Desert patch is upon us, with developers Pearl Abyss delivering more of the additions they outlined earlier this month. Though, they didn't get as deep into specifics on the likes of new difficulty settings and extra pets back then as they have in their latest notes, which also run down a raft of fixes for the red pudding.
Naval warfare won't be coming to Crusader Kings 3 with the big merchant republics expansion Paradox are set to roll out towards the end of this year. The studio say that they want to make sure they do sea battles justice, and so didn't want to shoehorn them into a DLC which already comes with "a fair amount of risk", while also blowing up their planned development timeline.
Valve, Epic Games, Microsoft, and the Roblox Corporation have all been issued transparency notices by the Australian government's eSafety commissioner, with the body seeking to learn what steps are being taken to keep kids safe on Steam, Fortnite, Minecraft and Roblox. The Australian government say this step's been taken as without action, all four platforms risk "becoming onramps to abuse, extremist violence, radicalisation or lifelong harm".
The less buttons I have to press a game, the better. I am not doing a bit here, no japes to be found, a refined, paired down control scheme is like a cherub's smile to me. KAZ, then, is arguably almost the perfect game, perhaps three buttons away from such a status, as it only requires four of them. Those will be the up, down, left, and right arrows keys (or the WASD keys, depending on your hand preference (and okay you do also need to press enter occasionally, I'm getting away from myself here)).
"This game contains depictions of violence, self harm, and general misery," opens Casualties: Unknown, a short but still considerate content warning for the survival game ahead. Boy howdy is that last one accurate! We'll get back to that, first, how about some setup.
Pragmata is the new third-person moonbase shooter from Capcom in which you play Hugh, a gruff spacedad, with a small girl android named Diana riding around on your back. The game's core gimmick is that Diana can (and, indeed, must) hack the robots you're battling to nix their shields and so forth, using a real-time holographic minigame in which you move around a grid to reach a green square. There are also simpler varieties of hack for opening doors and springing traps.
The Turtle Beach Burst II Pro is one of the newer kids on the block in the burgeoning category of ultralight gaming mice, and is a veritable treasure trove of features, with a sub 60g mass, a zippy 30,000 DPI sensor and comfortable frame. When this rodent was first released, its only real problem was its price - an issue that has since been addressed with a hefty 45% discount that's brought it down to just £66 on Amazon. A far cry from its £120 RRP.
As if catching the same briny breeze as early access darling Windrose, unannounced but blatantly obvious Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag Resynced, and, uh, Soulframe, there’s yet more pirates coming in yet more pirate games. Publishers Hooded Horse have announced Corsair Cove, an island citybuilder and freebooter colony management sim in the works at Tropico 6 and Park Beyond devs Limbic Entertainment.
Pensive and flamboyant action-RPG Soulframe has just received a new update that adds a pirate class, together with rapiers, cutlasses, and a flouncy sailor's outfit. The class in question is the Duelo pact, which boasts of "swashbuckling abilities": these include an artful dodge that spawns a decoy phantom, an enemy-slowing sword flourish, and the old classic 'flintlock to the face' manoeuvre. They're also introducing a haunted shipwreck environment, plus a bunch of new enemies, another siege infiltration activity, and the ever-popular quality-of-life improvements.
"WHY ARE ALL GAMES ABOUT PIRATES NOW," I lamented to James, before starting this article. James ignored me, being engrossed in his own piece on forthcoming Tortuga-tender Corsair Cove, but the large green parrot on his shoulder screeched "pier pressure!" Mortally wounded by the pun, I staggered across the swaying deck to the Captain's cabin, only to be knocked flat by a barrage of yo-hoing from Ollie's on-going game of Windrose. Flopping around on the planks like a walloped albatross, I cried out to Mark for a restorative glug of rum, but alas, we've not seen him for days; he was last spotted paddling in the spectral wake of Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced.
AMD's Ryzen 5 9600X has traditionally been the most affordable entry point into Team Red's latest generation of processors, which yielded modest gains in gaming performance over the 7600X but much larger gains in its efficiency to make it a more optimal choice. It's usually been a deal when I've spotted it at £160-£180 in the past, although you can currently snag an 'As New' condition for £131 on Amazon with its Resale section (formerly the Amazon Warehouse). There was a deal running to get a new one for £135 earlier today, which went very quickly, and this is technically even cheaper than that was.
Grim and grubby mercenary tactics game Menace is getting a big update that removes a "not-so-popular" promotion tax, gives all units the ability to clear away wrecked vehicles, and reworks the major Construct enemy faction, deemed by developers Overhype to be "severely lacking in uniqueness, variety, and style".
Sundays are for watching Youtube videos about different types of laminate primer and working out if you've taken on too much by redecorating the kitchen. One video will recommend one brand and 120 grain sandpaper, another will talk about MDF undercoats and sugar soap, a third will say to ignore the haters and just use a vinyl wrap.
I don’t know about you, readers, but this past week’s gone by in a bit of a blur. Did I volunteer to take WAWAPs for today, or was I forced at Ziff Davis canteen sporkpoint? I can’t even remember, but perhaps relaxing with some PC games – and/or reading about what you’re all playing – will help lift the brainfog.
Centuries ago, before 2022, before the Good Darkness of 2020, before the Before Times of 2015, the ancient age before even that of 2013, and perhaps, some fringe scholars suggest, even before the beginning of this sentence, there was Arcen Games.
Band of soldiers + building. What does that equal, Civ 7? It's ok, stop panicking. I know you've been struggling with some late-game maths, and Firaxis have gotten you a tutor in the form of a fresh patch, which also rolls out 2K's teen accounts. The latter allow parents to cut off access to a few elements of the strategy game, in an effort to keep under 18s safer from forces that aren't nuke-happy Confucius.
To be a live service game, in any shape or form, is to seemingly make some kind of agreement to eventually make some kind of licensing deal. And it is happening again. This time with Phasmophobia and, to its credit, the quite thematically appropriate Alan Wake 2, which is coming to the co-op horror game as part of a limited-time event.
Hooded Horse and Eridanus Industries are finally adding a singleplayer narrative campaign option to Nebulous: Fleet Command, the outrageously nerdy space navy strategy game that makes Homeworld look like bashing rubber ducks together in a star-spangled bathtub. The first act of that campaign launches on May 29th, and puts you in charge of a fleet operating behind enemy lines in a wartorn star system, over the course of 17 missions.
You know what this means, don't you? It means I have to remember how to play Nebulous: Fleet Command, a year on from my last session. Let me experiment with pushing these dashboard buttons REACTOR PURGE INITIATED hang on, I've got this WARNING: TORPEDO TUBE BLOCKED, LAUNCH IMMINENT oh fak fak fak run! Run on through to the next paragraph, before they seal off the deck!
As you may have gathered by this point, I'm a sucker for a cool Cyberpunk 2077 mod. Hence, when I saw that the modder behind some of the RPG's most unique custom vehicles had dug up some of CD Projekt's abandoned models to bring to life a flying police interceptor that never made it into full game, you best believe I stuck that on my must cover list. It's called an and they've also put together a short quest to unlock it.
You may not be remotely surprised to learn that while making Black & White, the god game in which you can care for a three-story tall cow, many of the developers at Lionhead were smoking marijuana. As Peter Molyneux tells it in a recent anniversary piece for Eurogamer: "If there's any stimulant that aids creativity, it's weed."
The developers interviewed do point out that this wasn't everyone on the team. "It would get to six o'clock, which was the official end of the day, and the 'normal' people with families would go home, and we'd just skin up," says Mark Healey, who went on to found Media Molecule. "I'd just sit down in the office smoking a big fucking reefer."
While you may not be shocked by this revelation, I have to tell you, it's thrown me into something of an existential crisis. You see, in 2006, I spent a week doing work experience at Lionhead's offices and I was never once offered a toke, let alone a bowl of the weed-laced chilli con carne that apparently came out at office parties.
Open world vampire RPG The Blood of Dawnwalker makes use of AI-generated voice acting, Rebel Wolves CEO Konrad Tomaszkiewicz has revealed, but doesn't actually feature it in-game. The devs deployed the soul-regurgitating tech to create placeholder voice performances early in development, in order to tinker with quests and the like without re-recording the associated dialogue.
Tomaszkiewicz says this has kept costs down, citing his experience at CD Projekt working on The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and Cyberpunk 2077. He claims that all of the sinister chatbot tomfoolery has since been erased, and that every voice line in The Blood of Dawnwalker is now the product of genuine human lips and lungs.
Star Trek: Resurgence, the Telltale-style Trek game which came out back in 2023, is set to be delisted from Steam soon. Unlike the mysterious spate of Disney delistings the other day, Resurgence developers Dramatic Labs have been upfront about the reason it's being pulled.
Labyrinth.os is the kind of game where I'm not entirely sure I can tell you what it is exactly. It is, as the game's itch.io page says, a "new 3D Dungeon Crawling Dream for Windows Machines." A brief, seemingly in-world description explains the setup for the game too: "Before dying out, the smartest of the world from before left a machine, A machine with the power to restart the world, The Thirteen Architects who were built to maintain this machine dubbed it: The World Egg." But beyond that, it stays shrouded in mystery up to the point of playing it, which is the exact kind of game that draws me in quickest.
It is, as I write this, one year to the day since I and two fellow, newly-orphaned siblings finished the process of auditing, packing, and clearing out our childhood home. The final task: enduring the fearsome rattling and suspect braking of our dad’s neglected Renault Megane, just long enough for it to sputter to someone mad enough to buy it off us. The irony, that this clanking full-stop on the end our bereavement’s lengthy administrative aspect could so feasibly kill me, was not lost.
That process, from the last beep of hospital machinery to the unhaggled exchange of French scrap metal, took 11 months, so it’s good that A Storied Life: Tabitha condenses its own house clearance to just a couple of hours. Posthumously asked by an elderly friend to give her cottage a tidy, you spend half your time in A Storied Life rummaging through her things in a kind of reverse Unpacking, selecting which bric-a-brac to throw away, which to keep, and which – with her blessings – to auction off for cash. The other half is spent taking inspiration from the objects you’ve kept to rewrite her water-damaged memoirs, a bittersweet series of word puzzles that still achieves a certain warmth – provided you can come to terms with the peculiar writing style.
Bloodborne. It's still not on PC and doesn't look to be getting a remake which might bring it to PC any time soon. There is some good news, though. Sony have announced an animated film adaptation of the game about crimson juice and goths in hats is in the works.
Krafton have quietly disappeared from the publisher sections of Subnautica 2's Steam and Epic Games store pages. The changes appear to be recent, with SteamDB suggesting the former was made just last week to that platform's listing. Developers Unknown Worlds - now once again operating under CEO Ted Gill, amid long-running legal action between parent company Krafton and three current and former studio leads - are now cited as the game's sole publishers.
Playground Games have taken to the socials to reiterate that their Fable reboot is still currently set to arrive in autumn 2026, while a report claming that it could slip beyond that point buzzes around.
As you may well know, Edwin has been devoured by The Maw more than once in his time as news editor. Though you cant say he's not learned from the experience of being a digestee. Knowing that The Maw becomes particularly agitated in weeks stuffed with new releases, I suspect he saw the bloated Steam Upcoming chart and hastily booked his holiday, leaving us to wrangle the beast.
Stop Killing Games, the campaign group seeking to prevent online games being rendered unplayable when publishers shut down their servers, have moved to support a Californian bill that in its current form would require studios to either update games with impending server shutterings to they keep working independently aftwards or provide full refunds. The movement also claim their UK efforts are "far from dead in the water", noting they were called in to advise the Department for Culture, Media & Sport last week.
