Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Bungie have released a trailer for a trailer for extraction shooter Marathon. Last week the studio teased the possibility of an announcement with some cryptic tweets. The alien code was garbled but the message was clear: some substantial news about the upcoming FPS would likely be shared soon. We’ve still not heard that news, really. But now we at least know when it’s coming, thanks to the teasey video of an off-screen gunfight featuring a pink cyborg cat. It is a visual missive for impatient fans: sit down and wait until this weekend.

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Right, anybody fancy a new Abiotic Factor update? Well, it’s not ready just yet, but developer Deep Field Games did share a look at the game’s upcoming Cold Fusion update that looks like it’ll be a beefy one. As you can probably guess by the title of the update, there’s a bit of a chill coming, specifically in a new area called the Residence Sector. This new locale has “something” going on that’s making it a bit too cold for anyone to hang out in, though the mystery behind it is something you’ll likely have to play to discover.

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You know, I’ve always loved me a sky island in a video game. Can’t really tell you why, I just think they’re neat! So right from the get go I was pretty easily won over by Lost Skies, another one of those open world survival crafting type games. It’s a genre I’m not easily won over by, I don’t care for building things all that much, but the pull of the open air is pretty alluring to me. And I won’t even have very long to see if I’ll bounce off of its craftiness or not, because developer Bossa Studios announced today that Lost Skies is releasing into early access later this month on April 18th.

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I think if you were to show someone the trailer for Mewgenics, complete with cats you-know-whating, a musical number, and a poop joke, they’d probably be taken quite aback. However, if you were to tell them that it’s from the same people that made Super Meat Boy and The Binding of Isaac, I’m sure they’d be able to understand much quicker. Aside from coming from some pretty notable indie devs, there still might be the question of why it’s such a big deal that Mewgenics finally got a trailer, and the answer to that is (kind of) simple: it was announced 13 years ago.

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It’s not exactly much of a secret that a lot of indie devs are struggling to stay afloat these days given the economic *gestures vaguely at a world map.* No one has an exact solution either, but last December, just before the release of its latest game Hyper Light Breaker, noted indie developer Heart Machine announced that they were opening a Patreon. I won’t act like this is exactly a novel concept, I’ve seen a few other devs, typically on the smaller or solo size, try the same thing. But it still felt like a sign that Heart Machine needed a bit of a boost to keep things going.

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Fishing! It’s a feature that’s been included in many games over the years, one that varies in quality from game to game. Sega Bass Fishing? Probably top of the line, as long as you have that unique fishing rod controller. Stardew Valley? I like it, but I know plenty of people that hate it. Personally I normally find it quite a relaxing thing to do, particularly in games that are otherwise combat focused. Fallout 76 is one such game that’s more about shooting rather than chilling out, but over on the public test server you can now try out its version of fishing.

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The international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement are calling on people to cancel Game Pass subscriptions, avoid Microsoft-owned video game properties such as Minecraft and Call Of Duty, and boycott all Microsoft Gaming and Xbox-branded products in protest at the company’s reported business connections with the Israeli military.

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Eremite Studios and Hooded Horse’s bestest best city-builder Against The Storm is getting a free update and a new paid expansion, featuring a new biome, mechanics and faction. Details are thin on the ground, but we can safely say that it’ll involve bats. I know: bats! Let the wannabe Hunter S. Thompson write-ups abound. Back in the halycon days of New Games Journalism we’d have had a field day with this. Come now, help me word this introduction more appropriately: “we were somewhere around the Smouldering City, on the edge of the Blightstorm, when the DLC packs began to take hold…”

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City-building can be an exhausting affair, once you’ve evolved beyond the initial joy of cottage windows lighting up at night and start having to deal with things like traffic congestion and rubbish collectors going on strike. As such, it’s nice to play a city builder in which you can rest easy in the knowledge that any urban sprawl you engineer will soon be obliterated. It’s even nicer that said city builder is free.

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Last year Assassin’s Creed Shadows associate game director Simon Lemay-Comtois made headlines by revealing that Ubisoft’s latest open world game had a “smaller” map than its predecessor, Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla. He compared it instead to Assassin’s Creed Origins, which recreates roughly 80 square kilometres of ancient Egypt, next to Valhalla’s exhausting 250 square kilometre expanse of land and sea.

That story sparked a couple of thoughts for me. A surge of relief, of course, because life is short and video games are often far too long. And secondly, the realisation that I don’t really know what “bigger” and “smaller” mean in a video game, and I’m not sure anybody else does either.

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