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Vampire Survivors is getting an Adventures update that will add “self-contained miniature story modes that reset and remix the game’s content, following the Survivor’s cast on a series of wacky sidequests”. That’s according to developer Poncle, who are clearly in a whimsical mood this week. After all, if there’s one thing this game about auto-massacring ever larger crowds of kamikaze night creatures has been lacking, it’s some proper narrative context.
What a great little thing. You’ve surely seen a hundred post-Minecraft games about building a base to smelt iron to build a base, and probably even thought to yourself that they look entirely fine but kind of… redundant? There’s only so many times you can walk back and forth from a cave to a forge.
But what if instead of trudging around a grey cave, you were driving a big drilling machine instead? It’s so simple, and yet it makes all the difference in GeoDepths.
Final Fantasy XIV’s world of Eorzea is a utopia. Sure, there’s the looming threat of Garlean invasion and/or the possibility of world destruction throughout A Realm Reborn and its expansions – but on the plus side, almost everyone you meet is up for a round of cards.
Over the last quarter-century, Triple Triad has managed to escape its origins as a fun side minigame in Final Fantasy VIII to become a fully-fledged phenomenon in XIV. The Gold Saucer runs regular tournaments, random strangers are happy to be challenged to a match – often throwing in one or more of the game’s many variant rules (though Chaos can do one) – and might even give up one of their prized cards when defeated, with almost 400 to collect as of the game’s latest patches. Emphasis on the “might”: I dread to think of the hours spent replaying NPCs in the hope of a random drop as I filled out my collection.
I headed along to Final Fantasy’s London Fan Fest last month with a fetching deck of Triple Triad cards in hand. (Square Enix provided entrance and accommodation for the event.) Where better to try and live the dream of challenging random strangers to a card game, and learn more about the community that has fallen in love with the MMO in the 10 years since A Realm Reborn released?
Pull switches, press buttons, unscrew panels, mix chemicals, switch broken parts, and pray that following procedure is enough to save you from impossible horrors. That’s the fun of Unsorted Horror, a cracking free collection of short first-person horror games with dramatic, doomful scenarios and big, weird machines. No, absolutely you do not get a gun. If you enjoy figuring out how doodads work while feeling like the world has possibly already ended and everyone just kept on going, do play!
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it a FLASHBANG COMING RIGHT AT YOUR FACE – QUICK, LOOK AWAY oh wait it’s just a bird after all. That’s not just me hallucinating after one too many cups of Joe – it’s a description of recent events in Valve’s bomb-fiddling FPS Counter-Strike 2, where players keep mistaking the avian decorations on certain maps for bouncing balls of death.
I have a confession to make, readers. I’m mildly obsessed with Starfield‘s cuboid food brand Chunks. In all honesty, I’m kinda obsessed with Starfield’s food in a more general sense, and I have almost as many screenshots of its tube-like meal boxes, stale toast slices, vacuum-packed sachets of rice balls, steak slabs and spiced worms – and, of course, Chunks – as I do its planets and NPCs. I’m weirdly fascinated by what Bethesda think our future meals will look like when we eventually start travelling across the stars, and not just because I like ragging on their somewhat plastic-looking textures and marvelling at how everything from orange juice to beer and wine comes in kid’s size cartons with a little straw on the side.
Chunks are my favourite food of the lot, though. These cubes of faintly glistening organic matter are bite-sized monstrosities that are quite possibly some of the most unholy things I’ve ever seen. How this became the dominating foodstuff across the known galaxy is a mystery worthy of its own sidequest, because let’s be honest, I’m all for eating wonky fruit and vegetables, but would you truly go to shop, sit down at a table and order an apple that’s been squeezed into a perfect cube? Or a cube with yellow skin that professes to call itself grilled chicken? I would probably try them once for curiosity’s sake (it’s the food of the future, of course I want to know what that tastes like!), but it’s also exactly the kind of thing I’d swear off immediately because nope, nuh uh, I just can’t even contemplate it anymore. And then it dawned on me: this is exactly how I feel about Starfield as a whole.
“Star Ocean” is a fantastic name, evoking a sense of adventure, 16-bit blue skies, the majesty of space. “The Second Story R” is a terrible subtitle, evoking WhatsApp messages where I accidentally press ‘send’ too soon. Combined they produce Star Ocean: The Second Story R, a beautiful-seeming 2.5D remake of a Square Enix PlayStation JRPG. It’s out on Steam now and there’s a demo.
Payday 3‘s launch was rough, with long queues awaiting would-be heisters in the always-online game, and issues with progression and absent systems awaiting those who could login. Starbreeze Studios have now begun the process of making good on promised fixes to those criticisms, with patch 1.0.1 live now. It mostly includes “minor fixes”, but lots of them.
Owlcat Games have whisked the wrappers off Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader‘s co-op functionality, explaining how you and up to five other players can team up to navigate the Games Workshop RPG‘s 100-plus hours of grid-based combat, violent religious differences and unrepentant planetary colonisation.
Like when Sir Alex Ferguson oversaw his final game at Old Trafford, there’s a complicated atmosphere surrounding this year’s Football Manager. Football Manager 2024 is the last iterative game in the series before Project Dragonfly arrives next year, through which Sports Interactive plan the most radical overhaul of the game since the introduction of the 3D match engine in FM 09. This includes a complete rebuild of Football Manager in Unity, implementing brand new animation technology, and the inclusion of women’s football. But there is a reason why the studio has stuck with this tried and tested formula for so long. Big changes come with big risks, and as any Man Utd fan will know, those changes don’t always pay off.
But such concerns are for the future. FM24 is with us right now, and while it may be swapping the dugout for the stands ninety minutes from now, this isn’t some ceremonial exhibition match. It’s business as usual, and in mostly good ways. Sports Interactive have made meaningful changes to the management game both on and off the pitch, all built on top of fundamentals that remain as complex and compulsive as they have for years. That said, FM24 also demonstrates why a change is welcome, as in its current form it can struggle to strike the balance between authenticity and fun.
