Station To Station delivers minimalist railway management in October

Developer Galaxy Grove have announced that the minimalist railway game Station To Station is wheeling to release on October 3rd. That’s an already packed month for exciting games, but I’ll forgive this one based on how damned good those voxels look. Plus, a relaxing railway management game might be the perfect antidote for Big Game Burnout in the coming months.

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Baldur’s Gate 3’s first major patch fixes 1000+ bugs and brings back “Short King Summer” smooching

Consistent with the spirit of the game, Baldur’s Gate 3’s first “major” patch notes are too large to even fit into Steam’s usual text character limit. Developer Larian instead published a portion of the patch details on a Steam blog and the rest on their forums, which were briefly down – probably either due to an online traffic jam or just, again, the patch’s sheer size. Regardless, we have well over three thousand words worth of details on today’s patch, which addresses around one thousand bugs and graces us with “Short King Summer” before it’s too late. But beware: there are some spoilers in the patch notes.

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Stardew Valley’s fishing gets the Wordle treatment in this new browser game

Whenever my eyes see the phrase “it’s like Stardew Valley, but…” sparks pop off in my brain, imagining futures farming in the zombie apocalypse or courting my favourite pixel caveman. The next one of those instead focuses on the game’s lovely fishing mini-game and is basically Stardew Valley but Wordle, the other bite-sized juggernaut that’s inspired countless others.

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S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2’s irradiated world is dreadfully peaceful, if a bit confusing at the moment

Devs GSC Game World are going through an unimaginably difficult time right now on top of leaks and hacker attacks. That has to be taken into account when we think about the development of the game, and it could be why, after 20-minutes spent exploring a bit of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart Of Chornobyl‘s irradiated world, I’m unsure what to make of it.

Maybe I played a very early build, but while the world itself looks every bit the eerie post apocalyptic survival wasteland you hope, NPC interactions aren’t in as great shape. Chats with friendlies are unclear, and in firefights the enemy AI is shonky – to the extent that I think it’ll be more useful as a preview to just tell you exactly what happened to me as I played.

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Ghostrunner 2’s cyber bike is the closet I’ve felt to a modern F-Zero in years

I will hold my hands up and say that I didn’t get on too well with One More Level’s first Ghostrunner game. While its one-hit-kill combat was fast, flashy and infinitely more appealing than some of the other neon lambs being led to the cyberpunk slaughter in the back end of 2020, its precise platforming and marksman-grade enemies made it a hard game to love while you were actually playing it. But having sat down for 45 minutes with Ghostrunner 2 at this year’s Gamescom, I’m pleased to report that this is a sequel done right, building on everything you know and (probably) love about the first game, while also ushering in new, optional concessions to help make its still wonderfully gory swordplay much more approachable for old two-left-thumbs-McGee over here. Then there’s the motorbike, which… phwoar. Let me tell you about the motorbike.

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Rejoice, Citizen Sleeper 2 is heading to Game Pass

After formally unveiling Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector during this year’s notE3 season, solo developer Jump Over The Age have confirmed that it will also be launching day one on PC Game Pass (and the cloud) when it eventually comes out. Announced during today’s Xbox Gamescom showcase, the original game will be “sticking around on the service” after the release of the sequel, too – which is very good news for my still-mid-DLC Game Pass save file. And if you’re as pumped about Starward Vector as I am, Jump Over The Age have also given us a sneak peek at one of the locations we’ll be visiting during our escape across its Starward Belt system. Come and get the low-down on Citizen Sleeper 2’s Hexport in the trailer below.

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Summer holiday turns treacherous in horror visual novel Mediterranea Inferno, out today

Even cursed years such as 2020 can occasionally hide small nuggets of greatness. One such nugget was the curious visual novel Milky Way Prince, which beautifully mixed surreal 2D images with even more surreal 3D backgrounds, all wrapped up in a toxic love story. Just when you thought a visual novel couldn’t get any more stylish, developer Lorenzo “Eyeguys” Redaelli comes back to one-up themself with Mediterranea Inferno, a rare game that makes you want to gobble its colours up with your eyeballs. Oh, and it’s out right now.

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