Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Where’s your asthma inhaler? Is it in your hand? Good, because you need it to stay alive in this horror game about getting stalked through metro stations by a tall creep that nobody else on the platform can perceive. Crowded Followed is basically a playable It Follows, the 2014 horror movie and overt metaphor for sexually transmitted disease. Only this time the slow but unstoppable entity is following you because you picked up a mysterious briefcase from a dying man in an alleyway. I thought I told you to stop accepting random bloodsoaked objects from strange men? Quit it! Anyway, there’s a demo for it on Steam if you like.

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One blemish on Throne and Liberty’s barnstorming release – one day in and it’s so far up the Steam charts it’s only visible by telescope – has been some unexpected Steam Deck trouble. Despite the fantasy MMORPG having worked fine on the Deck in previous betas, a celebrating Amazon employee must have drunkenly nudged the ‘Break game on Linux’ lever at the office launch party, as reports began trickling in of handheld players being kicked from servers. The cause: Easy Anti-Cheat, Throne and Liberty’s hacker thwarter of choice, declaring an error.

Fortunately, as of right now (October 2nd), all seems well again – I’ve got Throne and Liberty running on a Steam Deck OLED as I type this, and can mosey around next to fellow online players without issues. A lot of them are turning into wolves. Most of them, in fact. Maybe too many.

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We pitch our tents outside Constantinople and crack open the ale. In the light of the campfire I examine my travel companions as they party. There’s an Ashkenazi rabbi, a Saxon serf, some French knights, a Czech spy, a German dwarf, and a pair of inseparable Italian peasants. This rowdy band of roustabouts I’ve collected in the Crusader Kings 3‘s Roads To Power expansion has the feeling of a found family, each fellow wanderer sporting their own ambitions and quirks. They won’t all make it. Many of the people I’m looking at in the glow of these embers will fall on the road, victims of robbery, landslides, and animal attacks. One of them will sacrifice their life to save the rest of us. All will bring me a step closer to my goal: I am walking from Ireland to China.

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Look. Having basically sold both of my best standing legs to buy more Kingdom Death Monster expansions, I can’t bemoan anyone spending silly amounts of money on whatever plastic tat makes them happy. But I love Baldur’s Gate 3, and it makes me sad to see all the wonderful art, writing, and acting that went into its characters reduced to $6 miniatures that look like their limbs would melt if I rubbed them between my thumb and forefinger.

As spotted by PC Gamer, WizKids have recently opened pre-orders for a set of greasy pre-painted fetishes based on Larian’s RPG. WizKids, of course, being the maker of supermarket-discount-aisle-ass toys but, ah, they’ve got a base on them so we can pretend they’re proper models and charge you accordingly. Moaning about toys now, are we Nic? Is this what the profession has been reduced to? And to that I say: videogames are toys anyway, they’re just slightly better at hiding it. Also, several of them are worth owning.

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Smite 2 developers Hi-Rez Studios have laid off an unspecified number of workers, as part of what they call a “internal reorganization and reprioritization”. The layoffs would ultimately benefit Smite 2, claimed the company’s boss, who added that the cuts “disproportionally affect” those working on cosmetic skins and game “system features”, as well as people in marketing and publishing roles.

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Hexworks and CI Games are working on a sequel to 2023 action-RPG Lords Of The Fallen, itself a sequel to 2014 action-RPG Lords Of The Fallen. It’s slated to launch in 2026. Will the new Lords Of The Fallen also be called Lords Of The Fallen? Will it build on the exciting innovations of Lords Of The Fallen, or will it seek to recapture the nostalgic charms of Lords Of The Fallen? Perhaps in ten years time we’ll do a list feature, “Lords Of The Fallen Games Ranked”, with just one entry. I’m pretty sure that in 10 years time, generative AI plagiarism will have rendered everything interchangeable anyway.

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For reasons that seemingly amount to japery, Google have unveiled a double-sided, endlessly looping keyboard design – but only in Japan, and they’re not actually making it. However, the blueprints for 3D-printing it are freely available on GitHub, which is enough to convince me that someone needs to develop some kind of chaotic party game that uses the Möbius strip-shaped Gboard (good spot, Tom’s Hardware) as a controller.

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I do not wish to dwell overly long on the incredible stop motion sheep in the trailer for folk horror game Daemonologie, because it’s got so much else going for it – from the gorgeously haunting vocal and string melodies to the extremely dark character interactions that offer your witch finder the choice between ‘talk’ and ‘torture’. And yet, living in Wales for the last decade must have rubbed off. The sweet sheep, they sing to me. The relative rarity of stop motion and other practical effects in horror media is surely one of the greater tragedies of our age, although not too surprising given the incredible amount of work it takes. Flock toward the trailer below, and I’ll see you on the other side of the pasture, hopefully as deeply altered by the experience as I was.

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Throwback turn-based RPG Sea Of Stars will get the free update that adds a local co-op mode next month, letting up to three players waddle through the game’s story side by side (by side). The update will also include commonly requested features, say developers Sabotage Studio, like tweaks to the combat and a “revamped prologue” that’ll see players able to get stuck into the action quicker. We’d previously heard about this update, but now we know the actual release date.

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Wild-eyed stickman brawler Judero appears to have kicked off a small wave of pagan-themed games – or rather, it has recalibrated my brain to be more aware of pagan-themed games. The latest to catch my fancy is party-based RPG Banquet For Fools, out in Early Access today with a demo. Created by two-person Hannah and Joseph Games, it casts you as one of the Vollings – a race of gaunt elven humanoids, hailing from the same school of manky action-figure as Judero, who have been shunned by their gods and have accordingly turned to paganism.

Specifically, you’re a lord who has set up a spice farm on a “cursed” island, the former home of a long-dead civilization. This certainly sounds like a foolish thing to do, and it’s no huge surprise that everybody on your farm has gone missing. So off you trot with a team of four custom-generated companions to solve the mystery, and also make up gnarly spells by daubing your blood on trees.

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