Tangle Tower devs’ love letter to Resident Evil hits Steam in May

Crow Country and its spooky, mutant-stuffed theme park will be opening its gates on Steam on May 9th, developers SFB Games have announced. It’s the first of two games from the Tangle Tower micro-studio coming to PC this year, the other one being The Mermaid’s Tongue, which will be picking up the adventures of their Tangle Tower detective duo on a marginally less spooky-looking submarine later this year. Crow Country, however, is a very different kettle of fish, combining chunky, PS1-style Final Fantasy 7 character models with early Resident Evil tank controls and panicked monster shooting.

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Saber Interactive splits from Embracer, taking 3D Realms, Slipgate, Metro devs and more with them

Saber Interactive have parted ways with Embracer Group, buying back the rights to both themselves and numerous other studios in a deal initially valued at $247 million. The deal includes 38 ongoing game development projects plus the rights to 3D Realms, Slipgate Ironworks, New World Interactive, Nimble Giant, Mad Head, Digic, Fractured Byte and PR agency Sandbox Strategies, as well as Metro developers 4A Games and Pinball FX maker Zen Studios via options.

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The Lord Of The Rings: Return To Moria’s next major update adds a sandbox mode and single player pause

While we felt it wasn’t an amazing game, we quite liked The Lord Of The Rings: Return To Moria’s dwarven survival antics. It was a bit of cosy fun for a group of pals, and thankfully, open-ended co-op play looks to be the focus of the next big update, which adds a new sandbox mode that lets you pick rocks and sink pints free of storyline constraints. Not to mention new armour, weapons, and quality of life improvements like the ability to pause your single player sessions.

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What’s better: Highlighted interactive objects or retrievable reusable ammo?

Last time, you decided that a little hand for a cursor is better than left-handed FPS options. I dearly hope that when you clicked on your vote, your Windows cursor was a little gauntlet or skeletal hand or such. Onwards! This week, I ask you about grabbing (and poking, pulling, burning, pressing, activating, and otherwise using) stuff. What’s better, highlighted interactive objects or retrievable reusable ammo?

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Sea of Stars is adding co-op multiplayer to the dazzling Chrono Trigger-inspired RPG

Not content with being one of the best single-player experiences of 2023, Sea of Stars is readying the modern-classic RPG to become one of this year’s most delightful multiplayer games. Developers Sabotage Studio have revealed that three-player co-op is on the way, letting you adventure through the entire campaign with a party of pals.

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The success of Helldivers 2 shouldn’t come as a surprise

In some respects, Helldivers 2 did come as a bit of surprise. Not a huge amount of marketing, no betas, and review codes didn’t go out until it basically launched. Before it landed on my PC, there was a small part of me that thought it was going to be a rocky ride with severe performance issues or the like. Nope! It’s easily slid into one of my favourite games of the year without question, and presumably, for the hundreds of thousands of others who’ve also opted into preserving democracy.

But there seems to be this sentiment that Helldivers 2’s roaring success has come as a shock, so much of a shock that top execs and investors are doing YouTube thumbnail faces in boardrooms with mini-nuke explosions erupting from their heads. Should its success come as that much of a surprise, though? No, probably not.

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EVE Online dev CCP’s blockchain “survival experience” Project Awakening is getting a closed playtest in May

CCP Games have shared a few more details about Project Awakening, a new game or at least, “experience” set in the Eve Online universe, which is getting a closed playtest from 21st May 2024. Project Awakening is a single-shard affair – that is, one in which all players inhabit the same world, rather than being split up across servers or instances. It’s “built upon the principles of freedom, consequence, and mastery within a living universe”, and “represents the next step in CCP Games’ journey to create virtual worlds more meaningful than real life”, which, you know, wind your neck in.

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Check out the trailer for this cyberpunk-noir detective game with a hard-boiled private dick

One of my favourite ‘jokes’to do is parody Raymond Chandler, i.e. I shout “She had legs all the way up to her thighs!” and then laugh at myself. Chandlers’s trademark “blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window” kind of zingers are very hard to do well, so it’s better to say you’re doing Philip Marlow badly on purpose. The trailer for Nobody Wants To Die seems like it’s self-seriousness is actually self-awareness. I mean, I kind of refuse to believe that hard-boiled future crime detective James Karra saying “I’m in the business of secrets… But it’s more of an addiction… And I like ’em straight… No chaser…” while sipping from a glass of amber liquor isn’t indulging in some amount of winking and nudging.

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Palworld devs want players to help test new content and find bugs

Palworld developers Pocketpair have announced a new Palworld Testing program that asks players of the wildly popular monster-catching survival game to help test future updates and provide feedback on the game, ahead of new content drops being released to the general public. Players can sign-up via a Google Form now if they wish, though Pocketpair stress that “the testing branch is not intended for free play or experiencing new content early, so we hope that only those of you genuinely interested in bug hunting and testing will apply.” And presumably, those genuinely interested in also not being paid for their free QA support.

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