Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The number of people playing Starfield on Steam has slipped under the concurrent player count for the 12-year-old Skyrim, just two months after Bethesda proclaimed the sci-fi exploration epic as their biggest game launch to date.

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Alan Wake and Control developers Remedy Entertainment have announced that their untitled co-op shooter, the artist formerly known as project Vanguard, will no longer be a free-to-play game – largely, it seems, because the free-to-play business is looking a bit dicey. The game has been given a new codename to celebrate: Kestrel. It’s still a co-op multiplayer affair, however.

The reboot follows an evaluation period during which Remedy and publisher Tencent discussed a proof-of-concept version of the game, as we reported last month. They’ve now kicked it back to the concept phase “due to uncertainties in creating a successful game [in] the rapidly changing free-to-play market and associated risks”. A few members of the old Vanguard development team have moved to other Remedy projects, while the core leadership and certain select developers carry on with Kestrel.

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Behold, all the best early Black Friday gaming monitors that have shown their square, light-emitting faces ahead of the main event on November 24th. There’s already quite a haul of attractive offers at this stage, both the UK and US being spoilt for choice on well-appointed gaming monitors with up to three-figure discounts. As in, hundreds, not £1.35 or something. Only the good stuff here, obvs.

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Studio Ghibli’s Spirited Away is a film about a spoilt young girl who is obliged to work at a bathhouse for supernatural creatures, after her parents are turned into pigs by a wicked witch. Spirittea from Edmonton, Canada-based Cheesemaker Games is Spirited Away in the guise of a Stardew Valley-style management sim. Released today, it casts you as a wholesome young entrepreneur who has just arrived in a town full of rogue supernatural creatures. To free the town from its spectral infestation, you must renovate an old mountain bathhouse and treat each phantom to a jolly good scrub. You might also need to deal with some Unfinished Business, such as tracking down a lost possession. At least there’s no witch to worry about. That I know of, anyway.

I have fond memories of Spirited Away – it was the film that re-introduced me to anime as an undergraduate, following the traditional early-career middlebrow otaku phase of obsessing over Akira, Cowboy Bebop and Ghost in the Shell while turning my nose up at stuff like Naruto, because it’s “just for kids”. I was on the brink of pitching a Spirittea review, but then our reviews editor Ed Thorn emerged howling and gibbering from the floorboards and asked me to review a 100-hour RPG instead (won’t spoil), so I’ll have to settle for trying the demo.

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You might have heard of the “horseshoe theory” in political science, which holds that far-left and far-right groups are actually closer to one another in terms of values and objectives than the political centre, coming together like the prongs of a horseshoe. I would like to propose an analogous theory for horror games and cute games whereby past a certain point of cuteness, the videogame in question teeters over dramatically into dread and nausea.

As evidence of this, please witness the unholy magnificence of Saccharinity of Starfield, a Starfield mod from lucyprrrr that treats Starfield‘s items, spaceships, buildings, vegetation, planet models and, worst of all, people to a barbie-doll makeover reminiscent of a seriously overclocked shoujo anime. Do you like pink? No you don’t. Not this much.

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The best early Black Friday SSD deals combine nippy solid state storage, freshly slashed prices, and an impeccable sense of timing. Not only are the increasing girth of game installs making capacity more valuable than ever, but some new games are so reliant on fast loading that they can’t even run reliably on creaking old mechanical hard drives. Looking at you, Starfield and Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty. Little scamps.

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I enjoy games where enemies are a resource as much as a hazard. It’s not enough that you can farm them for XP by killing them while they respawn, though. I also want to make the monsters appear myself.

So it is in Mob Factory, a blend of tower defense and factory management in which you quickly set up defenses against waves of worms, spiders, skeletons and so forth – and then set up spawners to create more waves, so you can turn their fallen remains into conveyor belts, walls, and eventually new islands to expand your monster-chewing factories upon. It just came out on Steam.

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Dungeon Keeper is a stone cold, never-bettered classic of the management genre, no matter how many other games try to mimic its devilish setting and moreish progression. The only issue is that the 1997 original is a little ugly and constrained by modern standards.

Enter KeeperFx, a long-running open source project to make the original Dungeon Keeper run at higher resolutions, with widescreen support, improved AI, online multiplayer, modern controls and user-made levels. After fifteen years of on-off development, it just hit 1.0.

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It’s the Steam Deck’s fault. I picked up Valve’s handheld with the aim of using it to play anything and everything, but instead I’ve used it almost exclusively to play topdown racer Circuit Superstars and Amiga-era throwback racer Horizon Chase Turbo.

Enter Super Woden GP 2, which just released yesterday. It’s a blend of Circuit Superstars with the simple car tweaking and progression of early Gran Turismo and it’s already heating up my Deck.

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What is a birthday but a celebration that, despite all your struggles, you survived? It has been almost a year since the release of Warhammer 40,000: Darktide, meaning it’s been now a full year of apologies, paused expansions, and transformative patches. And yet it lives.

The co-op shooter now seems on firmer ground, and to celebrate it’s getting a two-part update called The Traitor Curse. Part one will add a new zone and mission, among other updates.

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