Ubisoft boss Yves Guillemot recently said Skull And Bones is a “quadruple-A game”, which I think is very accurate, actually. “AAAA” is the sound that escapes my lips as I embark on yet another hour-long sail to retrieve some logs, or when I’m doing my little deliveries and a brigantine starts on me. After 11 years in development, Ubisoft’s pirate game isn’t necessarily a disaster, I just think its live service model has transformed piracy from a roguish lark on the waves into a tremendously dull series of shipping tasks.
Lil Guardsman is a game that wears its heart on its sleeve. In a victory for normative determinism, this is a fantasy adventure about a small girl named Lil who somehow becomes the first (and seemingly only) line of defence at a city’s border patrol as a guardsman. At various points, both Lil and those around her frequently call attention to the fact that, yes, you are merely a 12-year-old child who is massively underqualified for this task, and that if you’re going to continue filling in for your good for nothing father who’s down the pub gambling on the latest ball game, then really, what do your superiors expect? It’s very self-aware in that sense, and occasionally verges on breaking the fourth wall. This alone will probably be a fairly good indicator of whether you’ll gel with Lil Guardsman’s sense of humour or not, but for the most part, this is a sweet and jovial narrative adventure whose characterful animation and charming voice cast help bring this oddball tale of fate and consequence to life.
It’s also not shy about where it’s taken its main source of inspiration from either. This is fantasy Papers, Please through and though, albeit one that’s more about interrogating and probing would-be citygoers for information than checking documents and spotting inconsistencies. During the day you’ll be working your post, dealing with the increasingly large, but fixed queues of fantasy species all trying to enter the city gate to go about their business. When you’re off the clock, it’s time to pick up the game’s wider plotlines, with Lil able to travel around the city to set locations where she can chat with other townsfolk, sometimes partake in the odd mini-game or two, and visit the local shop before toddling off to bed. It’s admittedly quite a straightforward interpretation of Lucas Pope’s magnum opus, with star ratings denoting clear right and wrong answers for how you deal with each day’s horde, but you know what they say about first impressions. Good ones go a long way.
I know this sort of thing has been said before around these parts, but in scanning through the endless reams of Steam Next Fest demos earlier this month and trying to work out what these games are and whether they’re worth downloading, I truly believe it’s a sentiment that’s worth repeating. When I first saw the name C.A.R.D.S RPG: The Misty Battlefield appear on the Next Fest landing page, I instantly thought, ‘Yes, here we go, now we’re talking’.
Well, my first thought was actually, ‘Gee, if only there was an easy way to know what this game’s about based on just the title alone,’ but that’s just me being facetious. Ultimately, I have a lot of respect for this kind of naming convention, and the fact it’s also being made by the Octopath Traveler developers Acquire is really just the icing on the cake.
Credit to Nightingale, I’ve been enjoying the early access form of Inflexion’s gaslamp fantasy survival crafter a fair bit more than I did its older stress test build. The UI is cleaner and tighter, and I’ve had more space to explore (and enjoy) the mysterious nooks of its magic ‘n’ moustaches world. There’s potential here, but it’s very much the raw kind, especially when performance needs as much work as it does.
Besides relying on upscalers like DLSS for truly smooth running, Nightingale currently has a serious stuttering problem, and bumping into an ugly graphical artefact or even a hard crash is worryingly common. I’ve pulled together an optimised settings guide (down below) so that you don’t need to drop the visual quality lower than is strictly necessary, but do keep in mind that this is early access with emphasis on the early.
Yesterday I was off sick with a fever and, as I often do when I’m laid up ill, immediately set out to consume the most nihilistic and depressing entertainment media I could find. On the film front, I watched Session 9, in which some men hired to remove asbestos from a collapsing 19th century asylum do not have a very nice time. On the game front, I played The Tribe Must Survive, a colony management sim from Walking Tree Games GmbH and Starbreeze Publishing, which is now available in early access.
After launching Nightingale into early access on Tuesday, developers Inflexion Games (led by former BioWare CEO Aaryn Flynn) have quickly realised a big miscalculation: lots of players want an offline mode. The gaslamp fantasy survival game requires you be online even if you want to play by yourself, which dovetailed poorly with server issues at launch to frustrate folks. Inflexion say that early in development they needed to make a choice between focusing on co-op or offline first, and now think they made the wrong call. They plan to remedy this, but it’s not yet clear when they’ll actually add an offline mode.
From Software president Hidetaka Miyazaki has acknowledged that members of the Dark Souls studio had misgivings about Elden Ring‘s shift to a full-blown open world format, while qualifying that Elden Ring’s vision for an open world was never “traditional”. Rather, Elden Ring is an “open world” game in the same way that Dark Souls is a “hard” game, Miyazaki feels. Confused? Well, this is the godfather of the notoriously unforthcoming Souls series we’re talking about. I’ve never interviewed the guy, but I suspect he composes his responses using the game’s soapstone messaging system.
Intel’s Optane drives are legendary in PC tech circles, offering random performance and low latency that remains unmatched amongst PCIe 3.0 drives. This Intel Optane 905P drive is the biggest they ever made at 1.5TB, and now it’s reduced to $380 when you use code SYADP2Z384 at Newegg.
For systems that accept PCIe 4.0 or PCIe 5.0 drives, I’d recommend sticking with our usual gaming SSD recommendations, but for PCIe 3.0 systems this is a fascinating option that emphasises random performance against sequential speeds. I recorded some of the very fastest game load times with this drive when I tested it against other PCIe 3.0 options, and its random write speeds are competitive even with later generation PCIe 4.0 alternatives.
Nvidia’s RTX 4070 is a popular mid-range graphics card that delivers good rasterised performance with best-in-class RT and upscaling/frame generation features. Normally it costs around $550, but today you can get a three-fan Gigabyte Windforce model for just $530 thanks to a $20 off voucher at Newegg. To get this price, just use code VGAEXCGBET625 at the checkout.
Project L, Riot’s long-gestating fighting game which is focused on 2v2 tag team fights, finally has a real name. It’s “2XKO”, which is both awkward to type and to say.
