Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

In the nicest possible way, and with the greatest of respect, Remedy’s comms director Thomas Puha would like people to stop fixating on frame-rate and resolution and get on with their bloody lives. Or at least, that’s my summary of his thoughts following the recent announcement on Xitter that Alan Wake 2 will have a performance mode on PS5 and Xbox Series X, allowing consoleers for whom responsiveness is a priority to eke a higher frame-rate out of a game “built from the beginning as a 30fps experience focusing on visuals and ambiance.”

Puha has subsequently been chatting to press about the creation of the mode and Alan Wake 2’s visuals at large. In what has become a time-honoured ceremony for any AAA game developer a month or two before release, he took a moment to observe that focussing on frame-rate vs resolution is missing the wood for the trees. (The trees in question do take a toll on Alan Wake 2’s performance, but we’ll get to that further down the page.)

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I do love a game that tells you upfront what it’s about while making nary a lick of sense, and visual novel Stop Burying Me Alive, Beautiful is certainly that. You are, indeed, being buried alive. The person burying you is your girlfriend, who waves aside your protests that you aren’t dead yet, pointing out that this is exactly what a dead person would say if they were trying to avoid being buried. Can’t fault the logic.

Click the downward arrow below the animated image of your girlfriend burying you alive and you’ll discover a murky fungal blackscreen where cartoon rats periodically try to eat you, unless you click to get rid of them. Below that, there’s a kind of Alice in Wonderland-style alcove in which a tousled lady with a rat on her shoulder reassures you that being buried alive ain’t so bad. As she points out, “underground is like, the only place to escape capitalism, plus it’s nice and cool”. Again, I can’t fault the logic. Then she offers to play cards with you. The cards in question have rats doodled on them, including a wonderfully festive rodent Joker. There is passing mention of a “rat god”.

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Every weekend, indie devs show off current work on Twitter’s #screenshotsaturday tag. And every Monday, I bring you a selection of these snaps and clips. This week, my eye has been caught by a retro-styled infinite city, a dramatic spellcasting, dinosaurs, and heaps more. Check out these attractive and interesting indie games!

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“Baldur’s Gate II set the model, and I obviously loved that model,” says James Ohlen. “But there were a ton of people at BioWare who didn’t like it.” During leadership meetings over the course of the Canadian designer’s 22 years at the RPG studio, he’d sometimes feel totally outnumbered when talking about the importance of story. “Game developers don’t get into the industry to create stories, they get into the industry to create games,” he says. “And so there’s this conflict between game developers and story – my entire career it’s been a constant fight.”

Ohlen picked his side early. He was telling BioWare stories even before he joined the company. The meeting of Minsc and Boo, one of the most enduring partnerships in PC gaming, came about in a tabletop Dungeons & Dragons game he ran as a teenager. Then a comic book store manager, he took advantage of his premises to guide no fewer than three concurrent D&D groups through their campaigns. “I didn’t really have much of a life outside of Dungeons & Dragons,” he says.

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Fans of grassy stone megastructures, winding scholarly backstory, and dinky robot guys are in for a treat this week, as Croteam and Devolver Digital have released a demo for The Talos Principle 2, offering a “specially tailored” assortment of first-person puzzles and philosophical musings ahead of the game’s November release.

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The custom controller space returns to EGX next week, offering a variety of strange, wonderful and one-of-a-kind ways of playing games – including cranks, wheels, a firelighter, a morse code tapper, and dozens of big, glowing buttons. Many of these games and controllers are only available to play at the show, so grab your ticket for EGX now.

If you need more convincing, hop below for a list of the controllers and games we’re featuring this year.

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Redfall was a disappointment upon release, thanks to its open world which felt – as Ed wrote in his Redfall review – like “playing through an already abandoned live service.”

Yet though its sparsely populated world made it feel that way, Arkane haven’t abandoned Redfall. Yesterday they released its second major patch with a spate of fixes and attempted improvements.

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Just last year, QA contractors working on Dragon Age: Dreadwolf voted unanimously to become Canada’s first-ever video game industry union. Now, sadly, the Keyword Studios employees working on the RPG have all been laid off after developer BioWare decided not to renew their contract.

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We’ve all imagined ourselves as the stars (or the villains) of a reality show, right? What could we say, how could we act, or who could we woe to bag the ultimate prize? Everyman Trevor Hills – with his office getup, dad-sized ‘tache, and lanky build – isn’t quite so lucky in the upcoming American Arcadia. You see, he’s unknowingly stuck in a reality TV show where the penalty for unpopularity is death, and considering he has the personality of a pencil, his only option is to escape in genre-bending fashion. See below!

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Cyberpunk 2077 – now redeemed and somewhat rebuilt after the car crash that was its initial launch – is looking ahead at the even further future. CD Projekt Red have expressed that they have “no regrets” about switching from a third-person camera to a first-person one in the transition from The Witcher to Cyberpunk, however, for future games in Night City, the studio are still undecided.

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