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I’m not sure I’ve ever been so quickly transported back in time than I have in I Write Games Not Tragedies. It’s not that I completely relate to what takes place in the game, but its sense of place, of atmosphere and feeling, is one I understand in my soul. The emo amongst you have probably already caught on to the vibe with its title, and for those of you that haven’t, the game’s aesthetics, writing, and soundscape certainly will.
I think Horizon Zero Dawn was much more of a turning point for Sony than most people really discuss. The argument for PlayStation used to be its exclusives, those tentpole games like Uncharted, Ratchet and Clank, LittleBigPlanet, the list does go on but you get the point. On the PS5, completely original first-party games feel few and far between, as Sony has joined in on the whole intellectual property above all else train that every other company has hopped aboard. So hearing Guerilla Games’ studio director Jan-Bart van Beek say the Horizon series was always thought about as a multiplayer game feels like the last piece of the puzzle has been inserted.
Video games don’t have mysteries any more. There are too many people and too much internet to allow for such a thing, anything without an answer can, must, and will be solved by someone, often in a timeframe faster than developers expect. So I appreciate when developers refuse to divulge details, or indulge individuals in their desire to know exactly how much they have on their checklist, one such developer being Tonda Ros of Blue Prince developer Dogubomb.
I do have to admit that bringing up Concord feels like digging up a dead dog that perished in a horrendous, preventable accident, but it feels important given how quickly it died and what the means for how we engage with it. You see, it seems that this week the largely panned hero shooter was revived through community-run custom servers. Except it seems like this may be over before it truly begins.
The leads behind the, potentially surprisingly, hit superhero game Dispatch, AdHoc Studio, have been all over the place. Telltale Games, Ubisoft, Night School Studio, some pretty notable names, but today we’re honing in on their time at Ubisoft in particular. That’s because a recent report that dives into the long story that led AdHoc to making Dispatch revealed that before doing so, they were working on a completely new Splinter Cell game at Ubisoft.
Woe unto people who like making smaller, prettier versions of themselves kiss: the Paralives developers are delaying their homey life sim following playtests, to fix some bugs and fill out the game’s town with activities. Paralives had been due in early access this December, but will now launch on May 25th 2026.
Cicadamata” – yes the rogue apostrophes are part of the official title, yes I will exclude them in future because they make my thalamus itch – is one of those games that makes me incandescently sorry I didn’t spend the past 20 years studying graphics design so that I could, for example, tell you what exactly is going on with that icecream bar HUD, those landscapes of bright diodes and cubes sliding through checkerboard obelisks, those twirling android digits, that wrist-rolling Muji paperweight of a shotgun.
The rough beast that is Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 has cracked its shell and slouched towards the wincing light of day. They’ve released it, I mean. No verdict from us yet: our reviewer is still picking their way among the exploding motorbikes and mocking spectres of deceased Nicaraguan terrorists. But I can at least tell you with some confidence that if you’re a fan of pausing games or mid-mission checkpoints, you might want to give it a miss.
I remember having a chat with my old barber last year about the Skate trailer. We weren’t concerned with the popular gripes. We were just stoked to record new edits and re-enter the classic Skate flowstate on a new engine that would hopefully have more grounded physics. My barber happened to be the frontman of Syracuse straight-edge hardcore band All 4 All. This was a punk rock barbershop, and fittingly, we both shared a fixation on landing tricks in Skate 3 as sketchy as possible.
To land sketchy is to land imperfectly, to look as if not in control. The leather jacket-wearing, kitchen-tattooing pro skaters in Baker, Zero, and Emerica videos were famous for making sketchy look really cool in the early 00s. I no longer live in Syracuse, but I imagine my old barber (shout out Sam, hope you’re well) is just as disappointed as I that the new Skate doesn’t even allow players to land sketchy.
Tomb Raider developers Crystal Dynamics have announced another round of layoffs, their third round of jobs cuts this year. The studio say “just under 30 team members across various departments and projects” are losing their livelihoods, and claim this is necessary “to optimize the continued development of our flagship Tomb Raider game, as well as shaping the rest of the studio to make new games for the future”.
This year alone had already seen Crystal Dynamics lay off staff in two waves, with 17 employees being let go in March and an unspecified number of others handed their marching orders in August.
