One of the best things in games is the freeform ability to type commands for another character, then having them respond with voiced dialogue recognising your weird directions. That’s one of the joys of Cryptmaster, an upcoming typing-driven dungeon crawler where one of the first things you can do in the demo is get your disembodied necromancer pal to lick a mysterious metal object to help identify it (it’s a helmet). He’s like if Hand Of Fate’s dastardly dealer was a bit of a dingus and also your only hope of escaping the underworld. I love this guy.
Steam Next Fest may be over for another few months, but dozens of demos are still alive and kicking, it seems – which is good news for me, who still has a good half dozen on my to do list, and also good news for you, as it means you still have time to check out the really quite good demo for Stand-Alone, a fast, 2D hack and slasher where you play as a robot-powered sheep packing a very large sword. Wolves have broken into your home and murdered all your friends, but you play as the one sheep who got away – or rather, a sheep that’s been fused with a surprisingly powerful robot capable of producing a honking great greatsword to make their escape with. Thus begins the wolves’ hot pursuit – not least because this robot also seems to be kind of sleeper agent for them – and your roguelike-shaped quest to avenge your fallen friends.
Much like a lone Super Earther descending from orbit, only to Nope The Heck back to their spaceship after glimpsing the insect hordes, Arrowhead have released and swiftly pulled a Helldivers 2 patch designed to address the new shooter’s server capacity and progression issues. The bugs were too much to handle, I guess! Lord, this news post practically writes itself.
To be specific, he thinks calling time on Dead Cells is an “asshole move” and “a one-way strategy that leaves people behind” and is designed to clear the decks for Motion Twin’s forthcoming Windblown. Benard initially posted about the news when asked for his thoughts on Discord. Here’s what he wrote, via Eurogamer.
“Since you’re asking me, I’d just say MT did the worst imaginable asshole move against Dead Cells and EE. Having seen first hand the actual situation behind the scene, I can honestly say I’m glad to not be part of this anymore. The official statement is total marketing bullshit, the way this situation happened is on a whole different level. I never imagined my former coop studio would turn out to be such greedy people. I wish the absolute best to EE for their next things, and hope people working there will survive this sudden economic cut.”
SSD prices have been on the uptick recently, following a record-breaking 2023 where oversupply caused the best deals on high-capacity SSDs we’ve ever seen. That means that current prices aren’t going to beat out last year’s Black Friday deals, but there are still some decent options that carve out a better value proposition than their peers. One example is the Kingston NV2, a 1TB PCIe 4.0 SSD going for just £50 on Amazon UK at the moment – some £14 below its UK RRP.
The Asus ROG Ally has dropped in price in response to the release of the Steam Deck OLED, and now a 10% off code at Very makes this handheld gaming PC even better value. You can now get the top-spec ROG Ally with the Z1 Extreme chipset and 512GB of PCIe 4.0 storage for just £539 with code VTQ8C, a brilliant price that puts it in direct competition with the 512GB Steam Deck OLED.
The owners of Elden Ring developers FromSoftware have dampened hopes that long-awaited DLC Shadow of the Erdtree might release in time for the soulslike’s second anniversary this month – despite recent rumours and behind-the-scenes Steam updates indicating otherwise.
When I first saw Never Grave: The Witch And The Curse rising up the Steam Next Fest charts at the end of last week, I thought, “Oh! That’s a neat Hollow Knight-looking Metroivanida roguelike, I’ll definitely give that a go.” And having played its demo over the weekend, I can confirm: it’s certainly an intriguing little thing that I’ll be keen to keep an eye on when it launches into early access, possibly sometime next month.
The biggest surprise was that, despite its very Hollow Knight-looking visuals, it actually plays more like Dead Cells in practice. Instead of being a sentient lump of flesh able to inhabit infinite bodies, you’re a magical witch’s hat that can possess, discard and rematerialise your chosen sack of limbs at the touch of a button. The second thing that surprised me was that it also has quite a substantial base/village building aspect to it on the side, and the third – well, perhaps this isn’t so much of a surprise given everything I’ve just said, because it also turns out this is the next game from Palworld developers Pocketpair. Yep, it all makes a bit more sense now.
The major thing Inflexion’s fantasy survival sim Nightingale gets right is that it makes procedural generation feel like sorcery. “Procgen” has become a ubiquitous concept in game design and especially survival game design, and I fear we’ve all lost sight of how magical it is to summon a landscape full of idiosyncratic flourishes from a hidden dataset. It’s partly, in fairness, that many semi-randomised settings feel indistinct, smooshed together with little of the character you’d get from a “hand-made” environment and setting. Nightingale slices through the ennui in a couple of ways.
One is that this is a relatively storied and text-driven survival experience, with a self-summoning fairy narrator, Puck, who immediately buries you in Shakespearean turns of phrase as he weaves the history of a multiple-dimensional universe of “Fae” realms, roamed by creatures of Irish, English and Scottish myth and legend. I’m not sure Puck will be everybody’s cup of tea as principle quest-giver and narrator – according to Inflexion boss Aaryn Flynn, some early players have struggled to make head or tail of his dialogue. But he helps conjure up an eldritch mood that sets Nightingale apart from most genre fantasies, including the Dragon Age titles Flynn once worked on at BioWare.
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