Forza Motorsport 7 is driving off into the sunset in September. Turn 10 Studios have announced that Motorsport 7 is reaching its "end of life" status, which mostly means they're removing any way for you to buy it. It's a routine part of the Forza game lifecyle, they explain, so they've got plans in place for current owners to keep playing online and Xbox Game Pass folks to snag a permanent copy.
I would be a terrible potion barterer because I simply cannot be coy about cool things. On that note, crafting and haggling sim Potion Craft is excellent. If you happened to miss giving it a shot when it showed up in the Steam Festival from February, not to worry. Potion Craft has just brewed up a new playtest that you can tackle for the next two weeks with all sorts of new characters and its mysterious alchemy machine.
More than likely, I'm not the only person whose first reaction to the Steam Deck was something along the lines of "didn't Valve already try this?" Valve's hardware products have really run the spectrum from the VR gold standard Valve Index to the less impressive console-like Steam Machine. Sure enough, Valve say that "Steam Deck feels like the culmination of a lot of that earlier work." They say that Proton has been the route to help them solve the "chicken and egg" problem that the Steam Machine fell victim to.
The extraterrestrial survival game Icarus may have just made RPS's list of top games in August but, oh dear. It's now delayed until November, actually. It will still be playable for some folks next month though, it turns out. RocketWerkz have announced that they'll be running a handful of beta weekends for pre-order players focused on different areas of the game beginning at the end of August.
The next major update for viking craft 'em up Valheim is still being cooked up in the kitchen, but it's starting to smell just about done. Iron Gate have previously revealed several new foods and tasty cooking stations, but now they're taking us down into the cellar. That's right, iron cells, treasure chests, and giant piles of gold are also getting thrown in the Hearth & Home pot when the update lands this autumn.
It has been a hot minute since I hit you with some fun new indie games (I was on holiday! Gimme a break!) but I'm very excited to be back with some crackers this week. I was too tired to come up with a theme, though, so instead here are just some fun games that I think you'll like, woooooo!
In fact, I've managed to pick three games that are so disparate in style and tone that I don't think I could link them by a theme even if I really, really tried. I can start with a more topical one, though. Yes, it's about vaccines. But like, in a fun way. I promise.
The Artful Escape has been a long time coming for Beethoven & Dinosaur founder and designer Johnny Galvatron. While his side-scrolling platformer - about a teenage musician going on a fantastical journey to find and create his own stage persona - made its initial debut back in 2017, Galvatron tells me this game has really been 38 years in the making. He's a professional musician himself, having been the lead singer of electronic rock band The Galvatrons in the mid noughties, but he's also been raised on a diet of video games since the days of the Sega Master System. He started designing his own games during the Nintendo 64 era, but it wasn't until 2012 that he finally decided to make a proper go of it.
"Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP really made me want to make an indie game for iPad," he tells me, "[while] Kentucky Route Zero pushed me into the mindset of making something for PC. And, look, things spiralled out of control and here we are."
