Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Adventure mode was one of my favourite things about Dwarf Fortress, mainly because it made the infamously complex management game more approachable by letting you play it like a more traditional roguelike. I’m excited, therefore, that Adventure mode is coming soon to the Steam version of the game, and excited even more so that it’s aiming to make it even more accessible.

A new update on development which outlines exactly how the new premium version of Adventure mode differs from the original, including its plan for tutorials to guide new players.

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It’s been a good few years for relaxing, puzzle-strategy games about spreading nature’s glory. The future looks bright, too, thanks to Preserve, which seems to blend Dorfromantik’s lush hexes with Terra Nil’s gradual ecological recovery. You’ll find the announcement trailer below.

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Back in 2022, Blizzard announced that they were working on a survival game set in an “all-new universe”. Not much more was known about the game except that the studio were actively ramping up recruitment, seemingly after having been working on the project since 2017.

This survival game has now been cancelled alongside today’s news of sweeping layoffs across Blizzard and other divisions of new owner Microsoft.

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When I sat down at my desk after lunch today, I thought, I’m just going to give this demo for Balatro a tiny go, just to get my head round its poker-based roguelike deckbuilding. Cut to several hours later and I’ve had to forcibly shut the game down and wrench myself away from it just to write this post, because listen, you need to go and play Balatro’s demo right now, because hot damn this is the good stuff if you’re into roguelike deckbuilders. I also say this as someone who’s never played or understood a game of poker in her life, because let’s face it, regular poker is quite boring. Balatro, on the other hand, is poker that’s turbo-charged with magic Joker cards, tarot card multipliers, and blind conditions that make a successful hand increasingly tricky to pull off. And it’s coming out in full real soon, too.

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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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