When the website of Highguard suddenly began blaring that it was “unavailable” not long after news broke of layoffs at developer Wildlight, you could have been forgiven for thinking a Concord-style pulling offline might be in the shooter’s near future. That doesn’t look to be the case, though, with the studio having just announced a couple of new additions set to arrive in the game this week.
There’s now a mod for Yakuza Kiwami 3 & Dark Ties which swaps out the likeness of actor Teruyuki Kagawa. Kagawa’s casting in the remake, which saw him lend both his voice and likeness to secondary villain Goh Hamazaki, caused fan backlash due to a 2022 report from Shukan Shincho detailing sexual assault allegations against the actor.
Kagawa apologised at the time, but didn’t specify what he was apologising for or confirm the events reported in the article. Kiwami 3 & Dark Ties director Ryosuke Horii recently said Kagawa’s casting was the result of developers RGG Studio having “tried to think of someone who makes you go, ‘This guy’s a creep'”.
For months, I’ve been keeping an eye out for Denshattack!, an enticingly loud stunt-action game that’s somewhere between an autorunner and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, if Tony Hawk was an electric locomotive and not a man of mortal flesh. I played it last year and was instantly smitten with its speedy, tricksy rail riding, and now that there’s a newly released Steam demo, perhaps you will be too.
The next big update to Destiny 2, Shadow and Order, has been delayed as it undergoes a substantial round of tweakage and expansion. Such a substantial round of tweakage and expansion, in fact, that it’ll no longer be called Shadow and Order when it returns.
In the aftermath of reports claiming that the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) deepened their reliance on Microsoft’s cloud technology last year, No Azure for Apartheid have issued a statement demanding the company cut ties with the agency.
“I mean, look, I think everybody knows why we announced it that way then.” Stay calm, I’ve got to get my dinner first. “We know some things we’re doing.” Please stop trying to jump on the bench. “It’s going to be a while yet.” Some of these are things I often have to say to my cat when the clock ticks to within an hour of feeding time. Some of them are things Todd Howard has said about The Elder Scrolls 6 in his latest bout of interview chatter about the RPG. He’s confirmed it’s running on a new version of the Creation Engine, but will also be a return to Bethesda’s “classic style”.
I’ve been shying away from The Killing Stone because it’s a deckbuilding card battler, and we do get a lot of emails about those. The game launches into Steam early access today, so it’s time to have a proper gander. Ho now! This is a deckbuilding card battler… set in a mansion somewhere in the Arctic during the 17th century… created by Question Games, developers of ‘unfinished game’ game The Magic Circle and weird suburbia sim The Blackout Club. Yes, the same Question who were founded by people who worked on Bioshock, Thief and Dishonored.
What’s more, The Killing Stone reminds me of Inscryption, in that it appears to be divided between a hellish table-top game and hellish goings-on in the world around that table-top game. To be specific, you’re playing that table-top game against a series of demons, with the souls of the cursed Svangård family hanging in the balance.
Ironically, considering the rampant dysentery moving through my campground in brown, sputtering waves, the problem I’m facing in Transport Fever 3 is a blockage. The trucks I’ve loaded with antibiotics are stuck in a traffic jam that stretches all the way to the pharmacy in the next city over. If I’m to save the inaugural Woodstock festival, I must find a way to get traffic flowing again before the timer runs out.
Replaced, the long-in-development dystopian platformer from Sad Cat Studios, has had its release pushed back a little further. The studio have taken on feedback from the demo they recently released on Steam – that’s the one which kept surnaming me – and reckon a few more weeks of acting on it are in order to get the game ready to go.
Why is everything rolling sideways on my desk all of a sudden? What’s this mysterious force, dragging my chair towards the wall? Why are all the cars in the vicinity tumbling and rolling in the direction of *checks press release* …North Carolina, USA? It can only be gravitational disturbance caused by the impending 1.0 release of a massive strategy project. This time it’s Heart of the Machine, a “4X-style”, “dimension-busting” sci-fi game developed by Arcen Games and published by Hooded Horse.