“Justice for Lost Odyssey”: Clair Obscur creative director calls for remaster of cult 2007 RPG

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 creative director Guillaume Broche of Sandfall Interactive would very much like to play a remaster of Lost Odyssey, the mournful 2007-released Xbox 360 RPG from Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi and development studio Mistwalker. He feels the game was cruelly dinged by reviewers of the era for adhering to certain conventions. He also reckons it’d have done better if it had released for hardware other than the Xbox 360, which was trying to make in-roads among Japanese consumers at the time.

Read more

Inkle’s amazing Heaven’s Vault used to be a Dr Who pitch, but the BBC left them on read, and I’m kind of thankful

80 Days and A Highland Song developers Inkle once pitched a Doctor Who game to the BBC, narrative director and writer Jon Ingold has revealed in a Bluesky post. While the BBC never responded to their overtures, the pitch became the basis for Inkle’s very excellent and bodacious astral archaeology sim Heaven’s Vault. I consider this a cool thing to know, and so do our friends at Eurogamer. They’ve just published an interview with Ingold, which includes tantalising details of a forthcoming Heaven’s Vault reveal of some kind.

Read more

EA and Codemasters are skipping a year with their F1 games, right as the sport gets some big rule changes

There’s a bit more excitement than usual, even among veteran car-watchers like me, for next year’s F1 season. You see, the series is bringing in some new rules governing what its cars will look like and how they’ll perform, meaning there’s more potential on paper for serious changes to the established pecking order. Given that, I’m a bit unsure how to feel about EA and Codemasters having announced they’re not making an F1 26, instead skipping ahead to 2027 with a DLC to fill the gap.

Read more

Guild Wars Reforged, a free 20th anniversary revamp of the original Guild Wars, arrives this December

Guild Wars Reforged, a big update to 2005 MMORPG Guild Wars that’s designed to make it a lot more convenient to play on modern hardware, is set to hit Steam on December 3rd. Steam Deck verification, modern controller support, and an interface revamp are among the tweaks developers ArenaNet and 2weeks have made, with the possibility of further “improvements” down the road being teased.

Read more

Morsels review

The word “morsel” comes from the Latin “mordeo”, meaning “I bite”. Every time you play Morsels, you are bitten and eaten by a horrible cat. The beast’s incisors crash shut around the screen, and you tumble slowly down its oesophagus after the game’s squealing mouse protagonist.

I could write a whole article about the bastardly antics of cats – there’s one living next door who’s at that stage of feline youth when she really, really enjoys playing with her food. But the first time I succumbed to those jaws, I thought instead of the plughole in my bathroom sink, a trivial hellmouth full of hair and toothpaste. I thought, too, of the tenacious little flies that keep emerging from that soap-scummed porcelain sphincter, the life that keeps surfacing from a conduit of my filth.

Read more

Battlefield 6’s California Resistance update delivers a new map and mode today, plus aim assist and gun accuracy tweaks

Battlefield 6‘s latest set of additions, dubbed the California Resistance update, have arrived today, November 18th. Alongside the unboxing of the new suburban skirmish setting that is the Eastwood map and a sabotage mode, the update brings a sizeable patch with tweaks aimed at the likes of ensuring bullets do end up where you intend and making sure mortars are clean enough to eat meals off of.

Read more

Angeline Era, an Irish mythology inspired bumpslash action game from the devs behind Anodye, gets a December release date

I really don’t think it’s appreciated how much of a powerhouse Analgesic Productions are. Comprising just two developers, Melos Han-Tani and Marina Kittaka, their work always manages to present new takes on established genres, or games that have become genres. There’s both Anodyne 1 and 2: Return To Dust, which borrows from various Zeldas in fresh ways, Sephonie, an involved and conscious take on the 3D platformer, and now Angeline Era, a nonlinear action-adventure game inspired by the early Ys games and Irish mythology, which just got a release date.

Read more

In a rare bit of good news, Hytale lives on, with its original devs buying the rights off of Riot

Right, here’s your prescribed dose of actual nice news in the games industry for the week. Hytale is back from the dead! Despite a decade’s worth of development, the game was canned with Hypixel Studios forced to completely shutter. Hypixel founder Simon Collins-Laflamme did say he wanted to talk to previous owner Riot about re-acquiring Hytale, and as it turns out, that’s exactly what he did!

Read more

Nier creator Yoko Taro would like you to know he has been working on games, they just keep getting cancelled

It’s been a while since Yoko Taro has made a game, hasn’t it? That last public (key word here) thing he worked on was a mobile game about how Sega controls pretty much everything called 404 Game Re:set in 2023 (it shut down in 2024). Before that was a trio of Voice of Cards games in 2021/22, and before that the Nier Replicant not-quite-a-remake and also now defunct mobile game Nier Reincarnation. In terms of the big thing that everyone wants, a non-gacha Nier game, things have been very quiet, but that can be said of Taro’s work as a whole. Apparently, though, that’s not for lack of trying.

Read more

Ahead of its early access release this week, Prologue: Go Wayback gets a roadmap filled with big ambitions

Prologue: Go Wayback is due out in early access later this week, and ahead of that developer PlayerUnknown Productions laid out a little roadmap of updates you can expect in the coming… months? They didn’t specify, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing – I think setting expectations of when certain features may arrive encourages a more demanding audience – but they did give a good overview of what’s to come.

Read more