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Guild Wars publisher NCSoft’s long-rumoured Horizon: Zero Dawn spin-off is a full-blown MMORPG codenamed Project Skyline, will run on Unreal Engine 5, and is coming to PC and mobile with a PS5 release still TBC, according to a brace of job listings and CVs fished from the post-apocalyptic robo-wilds of yonder internet. Also according to the said listings, it won’t be out for a while.
Tim Cain wrote what is perhaps gaming’s most famous and influential monologue: the introduction to Fallout. “War never changes,” he says. “People loved it. I’m like, ‘I must be a writer.’” Yet much more recently, when Cain sat down to write his memoirs, nobody really liked what came out on the page. “I was really, really bad at it,” he says. “I had half a dozen people read it, and they all pretty much said that the stories were good, but my writing wasn’t.”
Cain’s writing strengths, as fellow Fallout originator Leonard Boyarsky has suggested, lie in shortform. Which was bad news for anyone who wanted to read the definitive account of his four decades at the heart of Interplay, Troika and Obsidian, three of the most important RPG studios of all time. Thankfully, though, it turns out Cain is a natural raconteur. The same anecdotes that appeared flat and toneless in his memoirs go down a storm on YouTube. There, for the past seven months, Cain has been delivering his stories straight to camera, as if at a dinner party with 73,500 other people. “When I started the channel, I would effectively just look at something in the book and be like, ‘I’ll tell that story today,’” he says. “Now I spend as much time answering questions and doing videos based on things people ask about.”
Listen, I know we’ve spent the better part of the holidays harping on about all our favourite games of 2023 (and many more besides as part of our bonus Selection Boxes), but here’s another one for you that I mainlined in a single day over Christmas and absolutely loved. It’s Makoto Wakaido’s Case Files Trilogy Deluxe – a collection of not three, but four detective stories in which you go about solving grizzly murders across different towns and villages in Japan. In short: if you like the investigation bits of Ace Attorney and need something to whet your appetite before the Apollo Justice Trilogy comes out on January 25th, this will be 100% up your street. It’s currently just over a fiver in the Steam Winter Sale, and there’s a free demo you can try as well for good measure.
Every weekend, indie devs show off current work on Twitter’s #screenshotsaturday tag. And every week, I bring you a selection of these snaps and clips. This week, let’s return kick off the new year with a jumbo-sized edition with even more games from across our Christmas holiday. Expect unexpectedly laid-back stressful horror, slow-motion stunting gunfights, a watercolour world, spaceships, mecha, and far too many legs. Check out these attractive and interesting indie games!
Happy new year all. What’s the weather like where you are? We’ve got Amber and Yellow warnings in London – I do not understand what these terms mean, but I’m going to add a Sapphire warning for escalating Maw activity. The creature was pretty lively over the Xmas weekend, but Graham managed to soothe it with posts about gaming-related new year resolutions and, of all things, the Spike Video Game Awards. We can expect the Maw’s petulance to mount during January, a lean month for announcements and revelations, but there are a few tasty morsels in the offing – a new Prince of Persia and Tekken 8, for instance. Fingers crossed we can build up some kind of momentum.
Some new game releases we are pointing our telescopes at this week: Skeleton Rebellion (4th Jan), a scrappy offbeat RPG with claymation elements in which you are a skeleton trying to overthrow some mages, and The Night Is Grey (5th Jan), a point-and-click adventure about a beardy bloke and a little girl stuck in the woods with some weirdo wolves. If you like, you can also play a free drinking game I’ve just invented in which you do a shot for every time I accidentally write 2023 instead of 2024.
Fallout: London has been in the works for five years now, culminating in a seriously impressive mod for Fallout 4 that’s essentially a brand new game set in a radiated England rather than North America. After missing its planned release window in 2023, it now has a full release date – and it’s only a few months away.
The director of Tekken 8 has responded after a video of the upcoming fighting game’s colourblind mode was reported to have caused migraines and vertigo among players, with accessibility experts expressing their worries that the filter could cause even more serious side effects among those with epilepsy and other photosensitive conditions.
While the weather outside is still a bit chilly and everyone’s bank accounts are recovering from the holidays, visiting an escape room with friends might not be at the top of your to-do list. Fortunately, you can currently get some of the same puzzly satisfaction for free – and without having to go outside – by nabbing Escape Academy over on the Epic Games Store for the next 24 hours.
Happy Wintermas, dear reader. And happy new year, I guess. Are you enjoying yours? I’m writing this in the distant past of mid-December, a period of total spiritual desolation. If all has gone to plan, I am currently waving a goblet over my head like some kind of hipster barbarian, and trying to finish all the dodgy vegan Xmas food I’ve cooked which the rest of my family won’t eat, the savages.
I have now read our so-called RPS 2023 Advent Calendar and found it to be woefully deficient in flirty rebels, lunar deities and stage coaches packed with damned adventurers. Never fear, however, because by happy coincidence I have also now written an end-of-year/start-of-year round-up article about these very things.
Promise you won’t tell the other children, but the RPS staff are actually complex magical spells cast by the Sugar Plum Fairy, as part of an age old pact with the ents of the forest where the RPS treehouse was built hundreds of years ago. Each year the Sugar Plum Fairy has to collect more wishes to power the spells every year (you can help to make the spells more powerful by joining the RPS supporter program). While she’s out wish-hunting, here are some Christmas Crackers to distract you.
Time to enjoy your lovely joke!
Q: What’s a fisherman’s favourite carol?
