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After two years slumbering in the coffin of early access, vampire survival game V Rising is lifting off the lid and rising into a full 1.0 release. Having previously been announced with a somewhat vague Q2 launch window, we now know exactly when V Rising’s 1.0 release date will be: May 8th.
Not content with being one of the best single-player experiences of 2023, Sea of Stars is readying the modern-classic RPG to become one of this year’s most delightful multiplayer games. Developers Sabotage Studio have revealed that three-player co-op is on the way, letting you adventure through the entire campaign with a party of pals.
In some respects, Helldivers 2 did come as a bit of surprise. Not a huge amount of marketing, no betas, and review codes didn’t go out until it basically launched. Before it landed on my PC, there was a small part of me that thought it was going to be a rocky ride with severe performance issues or the like. Nope! It’s easily slid into one of my favourite games of the year without question, and presumably, for the hundreds of thousands of others who’ve also opted into preserving democracy.
But there seems to be this sentiment that Helldivers 2’s roaring success has come as a shock, so much of a shock that top execs and investors are doing YouTube thumbnail faces in boardrooms with mini-nuke explosions erupting from their heads. Should its success come as that much of a surprise, though? No, probably not.
CCP Games have shared a few more details about Project Awakening, a new game or at least, “experience” set in the Eve Online universe, which is getting a closed playtest from 21st May 2024. Project Awakening is a single-shard affair – that is, one in which all players inhabit the same world, rather than being split up across servers or instances. It’s “built upon the principles of freedom, consequence, and mastery within a living universe”, and “represents the next step in CCP Games’ journey to create virtual worlds more meaningful than real life”, which, you know, wind your neck in.
One of my favourite ‘jokes’to do is parody Raymond Chandler, i.e. I shout “She had legs all the way up to her thighs!” and then laugh at myself. Chandlers’s trademark “blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window” kind of zingers are very hard to do well, so it’s better to say you’re doing Philip Marlow badly on purpose. The trailer for Nobody Wants To Die seems like it’s self-seriousness is actually self-awareness. I mean, I kind of refuse to believe that hard-boiled future crime detective James Karra saying “I’m in the business of secrets… But it’s more of an addiction… And I like ’em straight… No chaser…” while sipping from a glass of amber liquor isn’t indulging in some amount of winking and nudging.
Palworld developers Pocketpair have announced a new Palworld Testing program that asks players of the wildly popular monster-catching survival game to help test future updates and provide feedback on the game, ahead of new content drops being released to the general public. Players can sign-up via a Google Form now if they wish, though Pocketpair stress that “the testing branch is not intended for free play or experiencing new content early, so we hope that only those of you genuinely interested in bug hunting and testing will apply.” And presumably, those genuinely interested in also not being paid for their free QA support.
Stealth games in which you can become “one with the shadows” cover a wide range, though I guess spectrum is the more appropriate word here. You’ve got sober infiltration games like Thief, which metes out gradations of light and dark with the care of somebody calculating their tax expenses, and stylised affairs such as Mark Of The Ninja, in which stepping into shadow desaturates you and sort of makes your character far too fancy for enemies to notice.
There are games such as Splinter Cell, in which hiding in shadows rests on a gentleman’s agreement with NPCs not to perceive the big green torches attached to Sam Fisher’s head. And then you have games like Ereban: Shadow Legacy, which has just been given a release date – 10th April. In this mystical third-person stealth-platformer, your character can literally disintegrate and travel through shadows as a ripple of dark energy – a transformation that puts me in mind less of Thief than of squid-mode in Nintendo’s Splatoon.
There are 137 Pals in Pocketpair’s monster-catching simulator Palworld, which might sound like plenty, but the serial Palworld player is an insatiable creature, always clamouring for new beasties to capture, pet and exploit, even as the developers encourage fans to play other games while they wait for the next Palworld update. If you’ve already bagged all the available Pals and are hungry for more, you might be interested in Palworld mod Breed Unreleased Pals, created by ShameIHaveNoFriends, which grants access to three animals who exist in the game’s files but are not, strictly speaking, available to players.
Who is Jeff Minter? Unless you’re a long-term fan of his work, you might have asked that upon hearing about Llamasoft: The Jeff Minter Story, the latest interactive documentary from Digital Eclipse (following on from The Making Of Karateka and Atari 50: The Anniversary Celebration). You might have heard Minter’s name in connection with the remake of the unreleased Atari arcade game Akka Arrh in 2023. Maybe you played his mind-warping shooter Polybius in VR. You might remember as far back as the Atari Jaguar and Minter’s phenomenal Tempest 2000, the unexpected highlight of the console’s library. Or perhaps you recall his work from the 8-bit glory days. You could just know him from the daily videos of him feeding his sheep on YouTube.
The point is that Jeff Minter has been making games for a phenomenally long time – more than 40 years, in fact. And in all that time, he has stayed true to what he believes in. “One of the things we say in the game itself is the idea of him being the last indie developer,” says Chris Kohler, editorial director at Digital Eclipse in California. “The last of the people from the early 80s who very consciously never sold out, never took the money, never looked to expand or do anything other than [be] just Jeff at his computer, making the sorts of video games that he wants to make.”
Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom already has a descriptive name, but its new trailer omits it in favour of a better encapsulation of its pitch: “You’re a N64 taxi and there’s no jump button?”. The video itself is sixty seconds of pure, colourful joy, and it ends on a release date: April 9th.
