Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

War Hospital, out now on Steam, is about subsisting on the periphery of a war and keeping it firmly off-screen by means of adept time management. Set in 1918, it puts you in charge of a field hospital in northern France, a few minutes drive from the frontline. Here’s how all that works: casualties arrive from the trenches by ambulance or stretcher, and are carried by your medics to a clearing station, where nurses look after them before they’re seen by a doctor. Patients may be lightly or severely injured, but they will all eventually die if they’re left unattended.

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Lost Boys Interactive have reportedly been hit by “sizable” layoffs, as overall owner Embracer Group continue the “restructuring” program that claimed over 900 jobs at various studios last year.

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Do you like trapping innocent, extinct animals in diabolical, broken worlds of your own devising, miring them in a purgatory of genre comparisions from which they may never escape? Because Ark: Survival Ascended developers Studio Wildcard and Grove Street Games are promising/threatening to “put the power of unbridled game creation directly in your hands” with the game’s next major dev kit update, which will release by the end of January.

This will greatly expand the game’s moddability, though concrete details are thin on the ground. It’ll ship with a “Mario-inspired” platformer to show you how. There’s also a dev kit update planned next week for multiplayer spin-off Ark: The Survival Of The Fittest. This will allow you to “sculpt the ultimate battlegrounds where your fellow ARK survivors will fight to see who will be the ultimate survivor”.

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Time for another week desperately shovelling quotes, release dates and trailers into the Maw, our weekly news liveblog and also, an abyssal abomination poised to guzzle the waking world and all forms of existence, unless we can satisfy its hunger for headlines. The year is starting to pick up, with a few intriguing titles slated to drop this week in addition to the widely acclaimed Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, out 18th Jan, which Katharine has called “a deep and challenging Metroid-like with some of the best platforming this side of Moon’s Ori games”.

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Bethesda has already laid out their update schedule for Starfield in 2024, which includes updates every six weeks beginning in February. There’s an update coming before that, however, and arriving on the Steam beta branch next week. It won’t add major new features but includes “over 100 fixes and improvements”.

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Overwatch 2 is going to receive some changes designed to make teamwork easier, and to make bad teamwork less frustrating. The latter is more interesting, because one of Blizzard’s proposed solution is giving Tank and Damage heroes “a modified, tuned-down version of the Support self-healing passive”, which would make them less reliant on Support players to heal everyone.

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11-year-old game Resident Evil Revelations recently released an update that apparently introduced DRM, only to swiftly roll back the patch after complaints from players that it reportedly caused performance issues. Capcom aren’t giving up that easily on their vow to crack down on mods, though.

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It’s been almost seven years since Danganronpa V3 brought a close to the trilogy of gloriously twisted murder-mystery visual novels. With several of the series’ biggest names going on to release their next game as an exclusive for the Nintendo Switch, there’s room for a properly good successor on PC. Or why not successors? Last year’s exceptional Paranormasight is definitely in the running, and 2024 is already looking promising thanks to the reveal of Kumitantei: Old-School Slaughter.

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A fan-made remake of Team Fortress 2 in the Source 2 engine has been cancelled after the ambitious project, three years in the making, ran into a double-whammy of recent development issues and a legal takedown from Valve.

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The two best parts of a Choose Your Own Adventure book are when you initially feel out the shape and paths at the start, and then when you grow tired of dead-ends and faff and just start cheating. The same seems true for Reigns: Three Kingdoms, the latest in the decision-making story series, which arrived on PC (and Switch) yesterday after a year exclusive to Netflix’s inexplicable library of mobile games. Once again, you will decide the fate of a kingdom (this time, China) by swiping left or right on binary decisions. Unfortunately, you cannot cheatily flick through to interesting parts nor use your finger as a bookmark. Not even if you jam it into a USB port. I did try.

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