Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Indie developers love making retro-styled games that look like PlayStation games you rented from Blockbuster and blitzed through in a feverish winter weekend. I’m glad, so here’s another. Cold And Afraid is a murder mystery that aims to channel the 1990s with chunky characters and lots of lovely dithering. You play a detective out to stop a serial killer with a grisly pattern who’s preying on the young women of an unnamed US city. On top of the obligatory tank controls, it aims to have “consequential dialogue choices” and a “Time Event system where you must meet certain people at specific times to forward different story threads”. Ah, forgive me, you’re here to see the chunky limbs. Here’s a recent trailer that shows ’em.

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I reckon I’ve got quite a strong long term memory. For instance, I can recall that time I read Stoner on a backpacking trip through Italy and realising that I particularly like sad books. I can also recall the delicious taste of a Mars Delight chocolate bar. But my short term memory, whew. Yeah it’s not so good. And the demo for Disposition, a liminal escape room game where you’ve got to remember how things are arranged in rooms, has hammered this point home.

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A year and a day after wonderful horror visual novel Slay The Princess first released, the promised Pristine Edition is arriving this October on the 24th. Like a very loud sticker on a very large bag of crisps, it promises to have “roughly 35%” more stuff in it. It’s a great game, and this sounds like the perfect time to pick it up, especially if you previously pirated it after the devs said they didn’t mind.

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Resident Evil’s awkward middle child, Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, is now available via GOG. It follows in the leaking, shambling footsteps of Residents Evil 1 and 2, which likewise oozed onto the platform in June and in August respectively.

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I don’t know why it’s throwback racing game Christmas, but it is. Parking Garage Rally Circuit came out September 20th, Golden Lap is out tomorrow, Victory Heat Rally is out October 3rd, and today – today brings the Steam Early Access release of #Drive Rally, an unfortunately hashtagged arcade racer trying to recapture the “spirit of the 90s”.

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Metaphor: ReFantazio is either a high-fantasy Persona or a Shin Megami Tensei with cool fonts and a warm heart. Edwin dug its hybrid combat system, while James was moved by its mad libs monster design. It has an October 11th release date, but you don’t have to wait until then to begin plotting it and you along these various axes. There’s a demo you can play out now.

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The AssCreed faithful have waited a thousand years for a sequel set in feudal Japan, birthplace of ninjas and samurai. Woe unto ye dreamers of Ubisoft takes on Tenchu, for you must carry that candle for a little longer. Assassin’s Creed Shadows has been delayed till next year. It was due to launch on 12th November 2024 – now, it will release on 14th February 2025.

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Not technically an Indiescovery-type deal, this, as Edwin already called attention to breathless FPS Echo Point Nova back when the demo came out. The full game has just released, though, and as someone with such chronic Titanfall withdrawal that I’ll ingest anything with a decent wallrun, I’ve bought it, played it, and am here to tell you why it rocks.

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There is an absolute carkfest of a headline to be written here involving the words “head” “not” “enough” and “giving”, but I am a journalist of grace and discretion, and will resist. Treyarch, Raven Software and Activision have popped up a note-to-players covering a range of improvements they’re making to Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6 in the aftermath of August’s beta. Specifically, they’re tweaking the damage from bullets to the cranium, while trying to ensure that bullets to the cranium don’t “significantly affect the consistency of time to kill”.

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If you’re a nerd of a certain age, I apologise – that headline has probably caused you to rupture something in the wizened meat of your lower back, or the swampy catacombs of your cerebellum. If you aren’t, let me explain: Zachtronics are or were a US-based video game developer founded in 2000 by Zach Barth, who put the studio on ice in 2022 and now works at Coincidence Games, a “flexible business framework” involving many former Zachtronics devs. Zachtronics have thrown together all kinds of things – Infiniminer, a block-builder from 2009, is probably the single greatest individual influence on Minecraft, while Eliza is a tremendous visual novel about AI chatbots and labour politics. But if there’s a type of game they’re known for, it’s engineering puzzles and factory games.

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