Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

It’s rare that a developer explicitly introduces their game to you as “boring”, and Indika seems anything but. Created by Odd Meter, the studio behind the well-received fantasy VR bow simulator Sacralith: The Archer’s Tale, and published by Frostpunk developer 11 bit Studios, it’s a “very serious adventure game” set in 19th century Russia, which casts you as a troubled young Orthodox Christian nun. Awash with doubts about her faith, and persecuted by a mysterious creature, the woman flees her nunnery and falls in with an escaped convict, who tells her of a mysterious “holy elder” who might ease her troubles, drawing on the power of a sacred artefact.

The game’s setting is naturalistic, with motion-captured facial animations and photorealistic buildings and interiors, wrought using Unreal Engine. But it is also a “fairy tale” landscape, in the words of studio co-founder Dmitry Setlov, shot through with phantasmagorical flourishes – monochrome or blood-red filters and apparent hallucinations, to say nothing of the aforesaid creature, a skulking mass of tendrils that puts me in mind of the Shadow from Ursula K Le Guin’s novel A Wizard Of Earthsea.

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Frontier Developments have announced that they’ll be undertaking an “organisationl review” of the company after “disappointing financial performance and more challenging industry conditions”. The news came yesterday in a note to investors, signalling yet another wave of industry layoffs.

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The Amnesia games are set decades apart, but they all begin in the same moment, a moment of waking that is also a moment of erasure and disconnection, a rebirth outside the flow of events from which to descend into the machine of history afresh. On 19th August 1839, a young man opens his eyes to find himself in a vast, silent castle in the forests of Prussia. He discovers a letter from his “past self”, Daniel, who urges him to murder the castle’s secluded owner, a baron named Alexander, and warns that he is being hunted by a monstrous Shadow. 60 years later on New Year’s Eve, the celebrated meat factory owner Oswald Mandus starts awake in the opulent stillness of his manor house in London. Hearing the distant voices of his children, he goes to look for them in the “splendid architectures” below.

On 21st July 1916, at the height of World War I, the soldier Henri Clément stumbles from his sickbed in a colossal bunker beneath the Western Front. With nobody about, and no memory of events during his convalescence, he follows a trail of blood through the collapsing tunnels towards the pantry. And on an unknown day in March 1939, the engineering drafter Tasi Trianon wakes in the wreckage of a plane, deep in the Algerian desert, and enters the nearby caves in search of her husband Salim. Four games, four forgotten pasts, four new beginnings, one descent.

Beware: major spoilers for the entire Amnesia series below.

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If XCOM and Invisible, Inc. had a secret one-night stand in the back of a Cyberpunk 2077 taxi, the resulting lovechild would probably look a lot like Cyber Knights: Flashpoint. It’s the next game from the Trese Brothers, the makers of Star Traders: Frontiers, and I’ve been playing its opening missions over the last couple of days. It’s good, folks, and there’s a lot to dig into with its release into early access this week.

There’s a sizable story campaign and a bunch of side missions already playable here, and its emphasis on stealth and escalating security levels whisked me right back to the good old days of 2015 when I first sat down to play Klei’s stealthy masterpiece. There are still a couple of rough edges here and there, but if you’ve been looking for a strategy RPG with a harder-edge than, say, Mimimi’s recently released Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew, or just something a bit sneakier than your run of XCOM-likes, Cyber Knights: Flashpoint is definitely worth keeping an augmented eye on.

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Back in the glorious Xbox One years, when every Microsoft executive was engaged in the act of putting one foot in their mouth while shooting it simultaneously, there was a giddy period of marketing conducted by means of Phil Spencer’s T-shirts. He’d rock up on E3 stages like a cabaret dancer, touting tees with various new or elderly videogame licenses on them, and whipping older fans into a frenzy of speculation as to possible remakes or sequels. I myself had to go lie down after seeing Phil in a Phantom Dust shirt. Teaser-shirts, we should have called them. Look at him in the picture up there, showing off a chestful of Hexen. Shameless!

Sadly/happily, those halcyon days are behind us, but Phil still loves to dangle the carrot of an ancient IP now and then. Speaking on the Xbox podcast last night (while sporting a boring Halo championship jacket), he suggested that Microsoft could do more to revive their older franchises. Or at least “revisit” them in some fashion.

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Shadowrun and Battletech studio Harebrained Schemes have “parted ways” with Paradox Interactive – or what’s left of the company have, at least. Paradox have announced that they’re cutting Harebrained loose to pursue publishing opportunities elsewhere following dismal sales of the studio’s latest release, swaggering 1930s-set Indiana XCOMalike The Lamplighters League. Paradox will keep ownership of The Lamplighters League and other games developed by Harebrained, though the Crusader Kings publisher have no plans for a project or sequel in the same genre.

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With the release of Intel’s somewhat underwhelming 14th-gen processors today, I feel a lot of people are going to be looking once more at AMD Ryzen 7000 systems. These CPUs offer the same access to DDR5 RAM and PCIe 5.0 components as Intel’s latest offerings, yet typically consume less power while delivering better gaming performance at the high end. That makes it easier to build a balanced system, especially with deals on Ryzen 7000 CPUs and motherboards starting to become more commonplace.

Case in point is this AWD-IT bundle deal on a Ryzen 5 7600X and an MSI MAG B650 Tomahawk WiFi motherboard for £400, versus £445 for the two items separately. That’s a pretty fair deal!

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CD Projekt RED’s Colin Walder, engineering director for management and audio, has shared a few thoughts on how the Polish developer’s next Witcher RPG, codenamed Polaris, will improve on the cataclysmic development of Cyberpunk 2077. There’s not a lot to share at this stage, of course, but what there is sounds like a step in the right direction.

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Having dipped into some deathmatches in Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 3‘s beta over the weekend, I have come to the conclusion that – surprise! – it’s more Call Of Duty! But the biggest surprise? How familiar it felt. So, it might be a bit odd that MW3 is wholly unsurprising for being more COD and simultaneously, a surprise for being more COD. Really, I think it comes down to developer Sledgehammer’s decision to mash some of COD’s previous triumphs with some of its finest maps.

Despite COD extending its hand with a warm welcome back, I can’t help but feel it’s one trembled with nerves. MW3’s beta suckered me in with its nostalgia hits but there’s definitely an air of it being a stopgap as devs figure out where it should turn next.

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The fleetingly Epic Games-owned online audio distribution company Bandcamp have shed “at least” half their staff in the course of being sold off to Songtradr as part of mass layoffs at Epic this summer. That’s according to the union Bandcamp United, who are even now restarting discussions with Epic in the hope of obtaining a better outcome.

It’s terrible news for those affected, of course, but it also doesn’t bode well for the future of independent music. Bandcamp, which has now traded hands twice in two years, is one of the few places where indie musicians can make a living. There are plenty of angry reactions from musicians and bands on social media, as you’d expect, but game developers are also rallying in support of Bandcamp United, with criticism aimed at Epic and Songtradr in equal measure.

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