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Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is out today, and after reading Nic Reuben’s RockPaperShotgun review, my finger hit buy faster than you can believe. For those on PC and looking to save some coin, Fanatical already has it at 20 percent off on launch day.
As a Steam Deck game, I already prefer The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered to the original Oblivion, and for reasons mirroring why the Deck itself still beats newer, faster handhelds: the performance might be lower but everything, as Toddy H himself would say, just works. Spend two miserable minutes trying find a custom controller configuration that makes thumbing through OG Oblivion’s menus even remotely comfortable, and you’ll appreciate all the more how the remaster gels with the Steam Deck immediately.
That said, its 2025-ified visuals do present a relatively distinct challenge. Indulge too enthusiastically in their fancy lighting and hyper-detailed Patrick Stewart facial creases, and the Steam Deck’s hardware is quickly overwhelmed. But, drop the graphics settings to their lowest, and Oblivion Remastered simply looks like bum, to the point of undermining the point of the whole ‘Remastered’ thing. The solution: a healthy, balanced mix of low and medium settings, which you can find further down in case you don’t want to run your own trial-and-error experiments on how Cyrodiilian bush rendering affects framerates.
There’s still no solid release date for Subnautica 2, but the studio making the fishy survival game have given folks a glimpse beneath the surface of development in a devlog video. There are shots of a bubbly submarine speeder pod, and a brief sighting of a sea creature that does an annoyed underwater bark at you, before headbutting something it doesn’t like. We also get some idea of co-op, with footage of two players helping each other out – a feature that’ll be new to this sequel.
Tenderfoot Tactics is a wistful and dreamlike turn-based indie that I had a real soft spot for the year it released. It’s still available on Steam and well worth a look, but won’t be available on the Xbox Store from today. In an act of solidarity with the BDS boycott of Microsoft following their reported connections with the Israeli military, the development team have removed their game from sale on Microsoft’s storefronts.
There’s no official mod support for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered. But when has that ever stopped modders from forcibly isekai-ing their favourite anime characters into the wrong realm? Not even 24 hours have passed since the fantasy RPG remaster was released in a “surprise” announcement by Bethesda, and the modding scene has already created 90+ mods and counting (and that’s just on one popular modding website). What’s most intriguing is that they’ve discovered some old mods for the original game still work in the remaster. It’s an exciting time to be an Elder Scrolls modder.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is Sandfall Interactive’s debut, which tells me two things about the French studio. Firstly, that they’re a bunch of utter show offs and, secondly, that they’re a bunch of utter show offs. You can’t do this, Sandfall. You can’t just come storming out the gate with a turn-based RPG possessed of all the flash and experimentation of Lost Odyssey or Legend Of Dragoon plus all the haunting playfulness and bizarre beauty of both Miyazakis having a thumb war while Yoko Taro rolls around on the floor beside them.
I don’t know how they do things in France, but where I’m from, pulling off such clarity of vision on your first attempt is illegal – as is this much earnest outpouring of feeling on any attempt. Indeed, I can see some of you finding Clair Obscur a little too cute, a little too eager to dazzle and move with its operatic spectacle and Lisa Simpson-ish virtuosity.
Me? I find it hard to even get lost in games I love these days. I’ll usually settle for anything that stops me checking my email for an hour. But if Clair Obscur’s brilliant combat had me hooked, the journey it offers had me enchanted. It would appear that they really do make ’em like this anymore.
What is a video game NPC, if not a scared creature that needs a bit of help? That’s exactly what the just announced PANIK cuts right to the core of, and I’ve been charmed by it quite quickly. In PANIK, there are Panikers, which are a type of scared creature that are just so unbelievably anxious they cannot move from where they stand. This is where you come in, a, uh, well they didn’t name the player character so I’ll just keep saying you.
In a free world, all Overwatch 2 heroes would be playable no matter how annoying they might be to face off against because sometimes them’s the breaks. We don’t live in a free world though, not anymore at least, as Overwatch 2 season 16 starts today. Most notably it’s introducing its new mode Stadium, but also something that’ll change up the competitive aspect of the shooter quite a bit: hero bans.
Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3 is not the third game in a series about creepy rednecks and dinosaurs in a mansion. I’d forgive you if that was where your mind went, given the number three in its name, but I assure you, it’s a brand new game that just came out today! It is also a match-3, survival horror, comedy RPG metroidvania, a combination of genres that I never thought was possible, and yet here we are with a game that looks pretty fun.
Remember Spore? I never played the original one myself, just that crappy one Spore Creatures on the DS, but I’ve long appreciated what Spore was trying to do from afar. There’s an almost whimsical macabre feeling to it, playing god and all that, leading a creature down the path of evolution. You don’t see too many games like that these days, though today’s a bit of an exception given the announcement of Voidling Bound, a monster-taming/ gene splicing game from a team made up of former Skylanders devs.
