Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I’ve griped before that Warhammer 40,000 Darktide hides satisfying challenges behind tedious grind, but another interesting challenge is easily missed and forgotten at the opposite end of the scale. Darktide is hard when you start a new character, with weapons that barely scratch some foes and no talents to back them up. It’s a challenge unlike the official high difficulty levels, which lean towards drowning you in special enemies. So after hitting level 30 on all four classes and grinding out great gear, I’ve started a new character who’ll never learn skills or get a good gun. She’s quite bad, and that’s quite fun.

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Chymicalia is an adventure game and/or visual novel “about causing chaos in a small Yorkshire town with unlicensed alchemy”. Hey, I’m from a small Yorkshire town originally! I recognise that chip shop with the palsied neon sign! And hey, that looks like the underpass they told us kids to stay away from! And the textile mill they eventually turned into an old folks home! And the teleporting sentient potion shop where we used to hang out and play pogs! Wait, scratch the last one.

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Today I learned that ‘Wanko’ is Japanese for dog, rather than just being Aussie slang in the vein of ‘smoko’ or my favourite, ‘bottle-o’, which is what they call an off-license. I learnt this because of Doronko Wanko, a lovely free game about a dirty pomeranian where you try to score as high as possible by doing actual, financial damage to your owner’s home.

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Sonic Dream Team developer Hardlight and Total War studio Creative Assembly have been hit with a round of layoffs by publisher SEGA Europe, affecting around 240 roles across Creative Assembly, SEGA Europe, and Hardlight, via IGN.

Staff were notified by an email sent around this morning from SEGA Europe’s managing director Jurgen Post, alongside the news that Relic Entertainment, makers of Company of Heroes and Dawn of War, would be sold. As IGN point out, SEGA Europe studios Sports Interactive and Two Point Studios, makers of Football Manager and Two Point Hospital respectively, were not mentioned in the email.

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More than three years after former Dragon Age lead designer Mike Laidlaw was revealed to have joined forces with fellow games industry veterans behind the likes of Assassin’s Creed under newfounded studio Yellow Brick Games, the developers are finally teasing their first game. And yup, it’s definitely a fantasy game!

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After delaying the launch of Homeworld 3 by two months to address criticism of the spacefleet shoot-o-strategy game’s demo, developers Blackbird Interactive have now laid out what they’re changing. Improved controls, tougher ships, more useful formations, better Attack Move command, more HUD options, and more types of War Games mode objectives are among the tweaks and improvements detailed by game director Lance Mueller in a 3000-word blogblast. “This past month, everyone was heads down discussing every post we saw from Steam, social, Reddit, Discord and beyond,” he explained. They have plans.

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Xbox Cloud Gaming, Microsoft’s game-streaming platform, finally lets you actually use a keyboard and mouse to play on PC. There’s a bit of a catch for now, though, in that it’s only a beta test for now with a small selection of games supported. Still, it’s something!

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I went into Open Roads pretty cold, knowing only that it was a story-driven road trip game with some element of mystery to it. The mystery is really just a backdrop, though – a device to better bring forth the themes of family and secrets. Most specifically it’s about mother-daughter relationships, as we join single mum Opal and her sixteen-year-old daughter Tess on a short (from our point of view) but bittersweet road trip when, going through Opal’s mother’s home post-funeral, they discover she may have had an affair decades before. Can you ever really know the people you love? Does it matter? If you left your daughter’s early-00s flip phone back at the motel, would you turn around and lose four hours, or hope it’s still there on the way back?

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When Herbert Spencer coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” to describe Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory, I’m pretty sure he didn’t envisage the rise of a species of videogame, the survival sim, which would one day itself suffer an unsustainable population explosion during the layoff-ridden years of 2023 and 2024. What does it take to survive as a survival sim, in these days when every other game seems to be a survival sim? What separates the fit from the extinct? If you’re Palworld, the answer is gleefully borrowing and travestying monster concepts from a celebrated Nintendo series. If you’re Enshrouded, it’s all about having a really neat building system. And if you’re Dune: Awakening, the next game from Conan Exiles developer Funcom, the trick may lie with sandworms.

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Is there a definitive geological difference between rock and stone? Google tells me the main consensus is that stones are just smaller rocks, which sounds like a flimsy distinction to base a catchphrase on. I’m not sure when this would come up, unless maybe you were a biblical heretic trying to dunk on the people bludgeoning you to death by correcting them in some last gasp pettiness, but it still bothers me. Anyway, colony survival game First Dwarf cares not for rock, only stone, along with the wood you’ll use as the building blocks of your colonies. This is me burying the lede deeper than the mines of Moria, of course, because First Dwarf also has a tiny talking dragon companion that sits on the shoulder of the giant dwarven mech you use to swing a hammer at horrible toxic shitlizards. The dragon learnt your language by sneaking herself in a library. Do go on, game.

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