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Every weekend, indie devs show off current work on Twitter’s #screenshotsaturday tag. And every Monday (well, unless it’s a holiday), I bring you a selection of these snaps and clips. This week, my eye has been caught by decorating tapes, a wide range of wet worlds, a spread of cool violence, a murderous squirrel, and yes, immersive sims. Come admire these attractive and interesting indie games!
Vampires might be the themed threat for Diablo 4‘s second season, but it was arguably its own player base who drew first blood when season one started at the end of July. As you may have heard by now, Diablo’s Season Of The Malignant didn’t exactly go down all that well, with much of the hissing and fang-bearing directed toward its nerf-heavy balance patch that arrived a couple of days before the season started in earnest – a series of events that Blizzard’s franchise general manager Rod Fergusson describes as “a perfect storm of a couple of situations” when I sit down to talk with him at Gamescom.
“Season one was exceptional, because we did something we’d never do again,” says Fergusson. “As part of listening to players wanting to carry over their renown, we had to put the patch out a couple of days before the season. The intention is that a season and a patch would go [live] the same day, so at the time we make a balance change and you start a level one character, it feels differently to go through the progression with the new balance.”
What’s the first derelict and/or abandoned (but is it really abandoned???) spaceship you ever visited in a videogame? I’m struggling to pin it down through the growing white noise of early middle age – as with much else in my life, everything blends into a gritty soup of Metroid and DOOM beyond the turn of the millennium – but I suspect it might have been a level from Rebellion’s amazing 1999 Giger ’em up Aliens versus Predator, which I now recall only as screenfuls of fangs illuminated by Smart Gun fire.
Does Sonic 2’s Flying Fortress Zone count as abandoned, given that almost every NPC aboard is robotic? Blargh. I’m more confident picking my favourite space derelict, which would include choice excerpts from the debris field of trashed starcraft you traverse in the otherwise-questionable Dead Space 3. I’m hoping for more of that kind of thing in Starfield, in which you’ll encounter a wide range of scuttled vessels plus still-crewed, decidedly hostile “Legendary” ships that could play a part in the hotly upcoming Bethextravaganza’s capacious endgame. There’s fresh news on this front from senior level designer Zach Wilson, who has been waxing lyrical online about “the tragedies and perils of space travel”.
Many attempts have been made to recapture the JRPG’s glory days. In Tokyo RPG Factory, Square Enix founded a whole studio dedicated to the craft, and more recently Squeenix’s “HD-2D” style has come to define both their own retro work and that of others. But it’s arguably the RPGs from outside Japan that have been doing a better job of propping up the SNES nostalgia tent. Last year’s Jack Move and Chained Echoes were both infinitely more refreshing to me than the slightly tired Bravely Default and Octopath Traveler sequels, for example, and now we have The Messenger studio’s latest, Sea Of Stars, which is probably one of the few Japanese-inspired RPGs I’ve played in the last decade that’s even come close to bottling the mighty Chrono Trigger and lived to tell the tale. If you’re the sort to cry, ‘They just don’t make ’em like they used to anymore’, well, you can dry your tears, because Sea Of Stars is the one that is.
But you know. In a good way. My waking hours are, currently, beset by stress and anxiety from a number of different directions, and I’ve only had time to play about about an hour of Mediterranea Inferno so far. It’s quite a short game, though, and I’m sort of transfixed. It’s about three men in their early 20s who, pre-pandemic, were the toast of their party scene in Milan, and after a couple of years apart enforced by a lockdown they’re reuniting for a summer mini-break. Having blazed through my early 20s I no longer really remember that unique, potent mix of feeling simultaneously fragile and invincible, but it’s captured in this almost occult, yet hyper-real visual novel.
I may be playing on a Steam Deck on a rainy day, but the bold colour contrasts and the desperate enthusiasm of the dialogue really get over the feeling of a too-hot summer, of trying to force fun and recapture a friendship when you all want different things. The most intense segments of Mediterranea Inferno are the Mirages, visions that merge past and present and metaphor, giving explicit form to each character’s wants and anxieties. It’s unreal and yet a distillation of reality. It’s quite an intense ride so far, but it’s a good one.
I like Warframe, Digital Extremes’ shockingly enduring free-to-play action RPG, but I do find its sci-fantasy direction a bit much. The mashing together of tinted alloys and astral flame, the blend of over-the-shoulder shooting and swordplay, the environments that occasionally look like GPU boxart on steroids – it’s impressive, but a lot to digest.
The Canadian developer’s new project Soulframe has the same sense of swagger, with menus consisting of beautiful, quasi-medieval illustrations decorated with scrolls and dancing figures. But it’s a quieter thrill, a stately and absorbing world of hazy forests and sun-pierced catacombs, which calls to mind both Dragon’s Dogma and the overlooked tiny MMO Book of Travels. After catching a hands-off presentation in advance of this year’s Tennocon, I am pretty keen to play.
Alien Hominid was a run-and-gun Adobe Flash game originally released in 2002 via influential website Newgrounds. It then got a vastly improved HD release on various consoles between 2003 and 2007.
That HD re-release is now being re-released, and this time it’s heading back to PC. It’ll have upgraded graphics and weekly and monthly leaderboards when it arrives sometime this year, alongside a sequel.
Warhammer 40,000: Darktide features fun, grisly, co-op combat, but at launch was criticised for live service cruft – from an incomplete crafting system to meagre progression rewards. Some criticism also fell upon its four classes, who lacked the ‘career’ subclasses of its developer’s previous game, Vermintide 2.
Darktide’s classes will therefore get an overhaul October 4th, when an update will introduce skill trees for each class.
Factorio developers Wube have been teasing an expansion for a couple of years, but they’ve now announced what it is. It’s called Factorio: Space Age, and it’s about constructing space platforms in orbit and then visiting four new planets, each with their own resources for you to exploit and challenges for you to overcome with conveyor belts and robot arms.
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