We’ve been negligent in our duty as watchkeepers of extreme sports games. Parcel Corps is a light-hearted bicycle courier sim set in a colourful totalitarian regime where the police do not like things to be delivered in time, or at all. Perhaps that’s why the game, which was due to arrive on Steam tomorrow, has been delayed until an unspecified date. That’s okay, half the news stories we write seem to be about release setbacks. At least the developers announced the delay in a funny and thematically appropriate way.
Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week – our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! I’ve moved on to Wolfe’s Sword Of The Lictor this week and, readers, I’m starting to think that Severian might not be a very good dude. This week it’s Still Wakes the Deep, Little Orpheus, and Robocraft designer (along with many others) and current lead technical level designer at Half Mermaid, Robert McLachlan! Cheers Robert! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?
I’m debating re-reading Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban. It’s set in a past/near/far future Kent, a post-apocalyptic mix of horror (black trees, black forests, mud, dogs and death) and beauty (Punch and Judy, St Eustace, rebirth), written in a version of English as wrecked as the nuclear-blasted landscape. It’s bleak – though not quite as brutally resistant to re-reading as The Road – and now I’m older with kids in this modern world, the thrill of reading the apocalypse is replaced with uneasiness and fear, but what an amazing piece of work. Apparently Hoban couldn’t spell properly for the rest of his life after finishing writing it.
Hoban was an American who spent half his life in London, and this superficial fact made a connexion (in Riddley Walker speak) in my mind with another book I read this year, by a genius writer who also made England their home – W. G. Sebald. The Rings Of Saturn is also written around the East of England and its boundary with the North Sea, although there’s so much more to the book than that. There’s a real desolation and liminality in his descriptions of the towns and landscapes which lie along the restless North Sea coast… Who knows what secrets lie beneath those waves?
Another week, another Steam Fest looms. From September 2st until the 9rd you’ll be able to find intergalactic discounts and demos in the Steam Space Exploration Fest.
Against The Storm already contains a zoo’s-worth of animal-people to order around as you attempt to build a town that can survive the perma-rain of the Blightstorm. That doesn’t stop new expansion Keepers Of The Stone from adding one more. Come September 26th, you’ll be able to welcome the frog people as you venture into a new biome.
I took a longer lunch break today, and must now Pay The Reaper by staying after work. Fortunately, I’ve spent my penance playing the demo for Witching Stone, which applies the magic of shape-matching to the magic of, well, magic. Out on 16th September, it’s a pixelart charmer that “combines elements of puzzle games, roguelites and deckbuilders”, much as you’d combine a red circle and two golden triangles to spark a lightning bolt.
It is with quiet anticipation (and some nervousness) that I await to be stepped upon by a freaky mech in The Forever Winter. If you missed its announcement in May, The Forever Winter is a co-op extraction shooter set in a grim future where you struggle to survive amid an unending hyperindustrial war. Since that reveal developers Fun Dog Studios have mostly been sending out small “burst transmissions” – essentially footage from the hellfront – like this patriotic beheading and some panicked gunfights. But today they’ve made a longer video revealing an early access release date. And – oh! – it’s quite soon.
Here’s one we missed from this week’s release round-up, possibly because Konami appear to have given it precisely zero promotion: the Castlevania Dominus Collection, a four-game bundle spanning PC ports of three well-regarded DS Castlevanias, plus a redesigned version of Castlevania Haunted Castle, the first Castlevania game to grace an arcade machine. It’ll set you back $25, £20 or €25, and my drive-by analysis of the trailer below is that they’ve done a decent job with the ports.
Darkest Dungeon 2‘s Kingdoms mode – a free turn-based boardgame reimagining of the hellish roguelike roadtrip RPG – will release in three modules, Red Hook have announced. The first of this fearful trio, Hunger Of The Beast Clan, is down to launch in Q4 2024, which translates to sometime during the period 1st October to 31st December.
It’ll accompany a new paid Darkest Dungeon 2 DLC, Inhuman Bondage, which introduces a new region, a new hero with “…unique” mechanics and a fresh faction of seemingly excrement-themed fiends to slaughter.
The first time I encountered Jack King-Spooner’s work, it was when he sent me a copy of Sluggish Morss: Pattern Circus over hospital wifi late at night. The game was a bright spot in a bad time, which might seem peculiar given that Sluggish Morss often looks like a whale’s upset stomach, but it’s such a feverishly inventive creation. It blew the dust from my synapses.
The same appears true of King-Spooner’s upcoming Judero, on which he is collaborating with Soul Searching developer Talha Kaya. It casts you as a “pagan seer” armed with a big stick, who is searching the mythical Scottish borderlands for evil creatures to clobber. It looks cheerier and airier than Sluggish Morss, with a more overt emphasis on mechanics such as combat, but it has the same pickled 3am energy to it. It’s also now got a release date – 16th September – and a new trailer below.
The situation: Sumo Newcastle are making a dystopian on-foot multiplayer racing game called Deathsprint 66, in which you control one of eight Running Men hurtling through the spiked and bladed contours of a futuristic megacity. The complication: competing against other actual human beings isn’t always pleasant or desirable, especially when hurtling through the spiked and bladed contours of a futuristic megacity. The solution: Deathsprint 66 is getting a set of PvE-focussed “Episodes” in which just one human player plus optional bots hurtle through the spiked and bladed contours of a futuristic megacity.
