Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

“Your grace, the act of assigning blame is often as satisfying as resolving the issue itself,” opens brilliant little browser strategy Vox Regis by Sheepolution. From your tower, you gaze down at four factions, each with their own members and complaints. If any one faction gets too large, they’ll rebel against you. Luckily, you’re very good at speeches, which you can use to blame all the realm’s ills on other people. “It was the lion faction! They raised taxes!” you shout and point with one hand, holding a big bag emblazoned “taxes I done stole from the people” with the other. It worked! Now, the members from the other factions that are personally annoyed about taxes will come cull the lion faction down to a more manageable size. Bloody love a bit of politics, me!

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Many moons ago in the Before Times, a mysterious cataclysm scattered a number of seasoned BioWare developers across the face of heaven. The developers fell upon the mortal planes like comets. Where each landed, a game development studio took root. Inflexion Games. Summerfall Studios. Humanoid Origin. Worlds Untold. Archetype Entertainment.

Summerfall appears to be prospering, but many of the studios founded by former BioWare devs have fallen on hard times. In particular, Humanoid Origin and Worlds Untold have respectively closed and “paused operations” without releasing a single game. I’m raising a tentatively congratulatory glass, then, to Yellow Brick Games, a studio founded by former Dragon Age director Mike Laidlaw. The company’s debut game Eternal Strands will release on 28th January, and there’s now a PC demo.

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Or months ago, maybe. I don’t know and I have no time to check, because I’m playing the Steam demo for The King Is Watching. I wrote about it last year, but that was an older demo build. Things were different then, but the core of this minimalist city builder strategy remains: you’ll need to actively train your kingly eyes on your feckless underlings if you want them to do any work. Don’t watch the wheat fields, no food. Don’t watch the barracks, no knights. You’ll need those knights to defend from attacks too. Do you see how it all connects?! Do you?! Please, do your research. Here’s a trailer to help:

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The relaxing fish catchin’ and scratchcard gamblin’ of Webfishing proved itself deeply attractive to anyone looking for an easygoing escape. So it makes sense at least one other developer is looking to apply the same lo-fi principles to their own “hangout game”. The simply titled Sledding Game looks like a chill afternoon of standing around on mountains with your mates and going for a big slide downhill every now and again. It’s still early in development, as you can tell from the trailer below. But you’ll be able to embody penguins, frogs, and polar bears as they drink hot cocoa in log cabins and ragdoll into one another willy-nilly. Other cute animals are to be confirmed, but I am putting my money on an dopey-faced ermine.

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Steam are throwing a Real-Time Strategy Fest this week, encompassing discounts and demos, and people who like clicking on Orc-emitting huts are eating well. Of the new strategy game demos I’ve spotted so far, the one that interests me most is Calyx, in which you are at war with a mass of alien vegetation, which expands toward your base in a blossoming, suffocating avalanche of green moss and purple tendril. It seems a bit raw at the level of controls and performance, but the concept is very promising: basically, imagine if Creeper World 4 were a bit more like Ground Control. Here’s a trailer.

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Capcom have declared that they hope to bring down the recommended PC specs for open world dinosaur-tipping simulator Monster Hunter Wilds, just a month before release day on 28th February, and a few weeks ahead of the final open beta. Much like an exhausted hunter applying a carving knife to the flanks of a steaming heap of Rathalos, they shall trim and whittle their prize to its essential organs – hmm, actually we never see the concluding butchery in Monster Hunter games, now that I think of it. You just waft your knife around dramatically while the slaughtered quarry peacefully disappears and chunks of dino component materialise in your inventory.

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One piece of worldbuilding advice I’ve always found useful is to go at least one level deeper than the obvious. To wit: why have a lantern, asks FPS Mohrta, when you can have a horrible vulture-esque creature called a lantern beast that lives on your head to light up the dark for you? “Found a good’un,” I wrote in Slack shortly after playing Mohrta’s Steam demo. “It’s so rad and strange!”. Well, that’s the pitch, reader. It’s a “nonlinear FPS game blending action, exploration, and light dungeon crawling”. Very rad. Very strange. Nom nom.

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Cyclopean: The Great Abyss appears to have glorious dungeon graphics but I can’t say for sure because I can’t get torches to work. I think your character is supposed to kindle them automatically when you venture into a dungeon – at which point the view switches, classic Ultima-style, from top-down into first-person. My character never deigns to light a torch, however. Possibly this is because, no matter how many torches I loot or buy from the underworld’s infrequent traders, my character page always tells me I have none. Is my character eating them? Are they too afraid to light them and expose what those dungeons contain? Do I need to read the manual properly? Or is it just a bug?

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An unannounced “PvE Action RPG” set in one of Games Workshop’s fantasy properties was apparently in development until being cancelled late last year, according to a new report from mp1st.

News of the project was pieced together by mp1st from several LinkedIn profiles belonging to former employees of studio Thought Pennies. Different sources alternately describe the project as a “multiplatform, social role-playing game” and a “fantasy live-service RPG”, although it’s possible these refer to different projects from the same time period.

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Please excuse the eyeball jelly. I’ve just got done tearing my face away from the screen it was attached to by the glitter and amphetamine-infused superglue secreted by Mindwave‘s minigame barrage. The current Steam demo is a generous slice of a wonderful thing its developers describe as a “cerebral microgame frenzy”. It’s the sort of thing you play for five minutes before realising, not unpleasantly, that you are most definitely inside of it now. It has wrapped you all up, and it’s going to be quite difficult to escape. Trailer below:

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