Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Room for another mass layoff post, before we end the day? This one is actually two separate stories but in a bid to conserve resources and make our frontpage slightly less depressing to read, I am going to roll them together. Black Forest Games, the Embracer-owned creators of the Destroy All Humans! Remake, are reportedly cutting 50% of their workforce – around 50-60 people. Outriders developers People Can Fly, meanwhile, have laid off 30 developers who were working on an unannounced Square Enix game.

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We at the Electronic Wireless Show podcast have our finger on the beating pulse of current events, which is why we’re going to talk about the accusations that are flying around Palworld, the new and extremely popular Pokémon-meets-Rust. Does it contain AI? Did it directly steal from Pokémon? Can The Pokémon Company sue? Probably not. But why does everyone care so damn much anyway? We give our vibes-based takes on the whole affair, which seems to be escalating every day (and will therefore presumably disappear soon).

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Who’d have thought toilet plungers would make for such good jumping assistants when it comes to propelling yourself over big, thorny brambles and angry animals? Well, clearly the trio of developers at Phoenix Blasters did, as their upcoming platformer Telmari puts them front and centre as its main form of traversal. Your titular tiny heroine can’t jump very far on her own, you see, so to save her beloved sunflowers from the spiky thorns of an ominous-looking tree, she’ll need to fire them around the environment to help hoist her over obstacles to get to the, err, root of the problem. I’ve been playing its Steam demo this morning, and while it’s a little rough around the edges, there’s definitely something here for those trained in the Super Meat Boy school of pixel perfect platforming.

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Friends, it is finally time for me to discourse unto you about my great love of balls. The roots of my enthusiasm go back to pinball machines – both the fancier, arcade variety that transmogrify into e.g. screaming robot skulls when you achieve a high-enough multiplier, and the crappy, play-at-home variety that are basically a canted wooden sheet with some numbers drawn on it. But it wasn’t till I embraced the holy medium of videogames that I realised the full potential of balldom.

Initiated, of course, by Sonic the Hedgehog, I descended into a frothing ballpit of ball variations, encompassing everything from the squashy rolling UFOs of Exo One through Katamari Damacy to the overcrowded chutes of Marble World and the spectacle of Overwatch’s Hammond clearing out a capture point by means of sheer, delicious torque. I am always up for a game in which you either control or become a ball, and Go Mecha Ball looks like one of the better ones.

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The august representatives of the Pokémon Company have descended from their hilltop PokéMansion, approached the hushed masses of PokéFans with their flaming Torchics and shocked Pichaku placards, and asked everybody to please, please, please, please, please stop yelling at them about Palworld potentially breaching Pokémon’s copyright. Or at least, that’s what it sounds like they’re saying between the lines of a statement published a few hours ago, in which the Pokémon Company acknowledges messages sent by the concerned PokéFaithful about “another company’s game released in January 2024”.

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Graham remarked the other day about how strange it can be to see which indie megahits spawn waves of homages and which ones don’t, noting that Lucas Pope’s Papers, Please has surprisingly few immitators. His post reminded me of Pope’s other hit, Return Of The Obra Dinn. The closest we’ve come to a “Dinn-like” is probably 2022’s outstanding The Case Of The Golden Idol, though as I said in my review, its fill-in-the-blanks murder tableaus felt just about distinct enough to be their own separate thing.

Happily, the “Golden Idol-like” appears to be having a bit of a moment of its own right now, as Playstack, the publishers of Golden Idol, have just announced the delightful-looking Little Problems, a detective game that turns its word-shuffling problem-solving to the altogether more relatable conundrums of everyday life. And I couldn’t be more here for it.

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Frontier Developments, the British developer-publishers behind Elite Dangerous, Planet Zoo and Warhammer games including Warhammer 40,000 XCOM-a-like Chaos Gate: Daemonhunters and last year’s Age of Sigmar RTS Realms of Ruin, will host a new monthly developer showcase starting next week.

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For those of us who don’t have a garden to grow plants in, an allotment is one way to get your green-fingered fix of tending to nature in return for its peaceful healing properties. When an allotment is a bit too cold, or muddy, or expensive, or outside, upcoming gardening sim Peaceful Oasis looks to be a fine digital alternative.

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Want to build a high-end gaming PC in the US? We’ve got you covered – or rather, Newegg has. They’re bundling an AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D processor, one of the fastest gaming CPUs of all time, with an Asus ROG Strix B650-A Gaming WiFi motherboard and G.Skill Flare X5 32GB DDR5-6000 RAM for just $595, saving $132 over buying separately.

In fact, if you buy the same parts on Amazon, you’d still pay $119 more, making this a genuinely good deal.

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Rival survival sims Palworld and the just-launched Enshrouded are now openly battling for hearts and minds on Steam, and here comes genre supremo Valheim out of the blind corner like, errrr, one of the celebrity WWE wrestlers who hasn’t turned out to be Problematic – I don’t know, maybe Zack Sabre Jr? Educate me, wrestling fans.

Valheim isn’t waving a folding chair or a small flight of stairs, mind you. It’s holding a development diary for the forthcoming Ashlands update, due sometime in the first half of 2024. The update introduces the titular Ashlands biome, a blend of graveyard and volcano level notable for the presence of burning skellingtons, some of whom emerge from glowering stone totems.

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