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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.
While Rishi Sunak bundles nerds into Bletchley Park, we at the Electronic Wireless Show podcast are investigating the real danger of AI: somewhat rubbish text-to-speech voicelines making The Finals less fun. We discuss the arrival of AI voices in big-name games, the disappointingly businessy thinking behind it, and whether we can think up some uses for AI-generated material that we can actually get behind. All sparked by voice actor Gianni Matragrano’s video compilation of the lines in question, which you should probably watch before listening to this episode, or there’ll be a bit where Nate appears to bellow “THE KING FISH” for no reason. Well, maybe not no reason. It’s still Nate.
Plus! We talk about what we’ve been playing this week, which coincidentally for me was The Finals, while Nate’s been digging deeper into the Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor demo. I also recount the teeth-based controversy surrounding Cities: Skyline 2, in turn begging the question: what are they going to do with all those teeth?
The android is unresponsive, standing frozen mid-step with one foot off the ground. I hold its metal head in my hands, tilting it this way and that as I stare into its cold red eye. It offers no resistance to my pushes and pulls, as though I was a hairdresser directing a patron’s head. Based on Stanisław Lem’s 1964 novel of the same name, The Invincible’s Firewatch-like first-person adventure is intent on exploring how machines will come to shape humanity’s future. Over the course of its ten-hour story, where you step into the Soviet-styled space boots of biologist Yasna, you will take on her desperate search for the missing crew of her research ship, The Dragonfly, lost somewhere on the rocky, sandstorm-whipped world of Regis III.
Using a logbook filled with hand-drawn maps and scrawled notes, I’ve tracked Yasna’s crew to a makeshift game to the east of where they originally landed. Instead of humans, I find the lifeless robot. I want the android to give me answers, to tell me where my crew mates are, to explain what happened on Regis III, and why I can’t remember anything before I woke up in the desert with my possessions scattered around me.
Stand RoboCop: Rogue City next to other FPS games in a police line-up, and you’ll quickly notice the difference. This big guy is clunky, boxy, and has insane system requirements devoted to creating dazzling reflections. However, stand it next to other RoboCop games (maybe even the movies?) and it suddenly looks like a masterpiece in chrome. This is a filmic and faithful adaptation that’s likely to get instant fan approval, but didn’t leave my shooty thumbs that impressed.
