The Great Fluctus is No Man’s Sky with beans, slug milk, alien volleyball, egg arguments, and a massive flying frog

In case you skipped the headline, I’ll repeat myself. Among the wonderful sights contained in space-poking adventure game The Great Fluctus are: beans, slug milk, alien volleyball, egg arguments, and massive frog. Additional screenshots suggest this frog later acquires wings. Like a captive Generation Game host, I am helpless but to shout out more incredible sights as they flutter past on the conveyor belt of pure flippin’ videogame before me. It’s got dance parties with horrible gorilla aliens. It’s got building, namely the Statue Of Liberty out of goop, just as George Washington’s goop clone intended. It’s also got just sitting on a bench, enjoying some lovely serene space scenery. Feast your famished face on the trailer.

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Chivalry 2 is now feature complete, say developers, but new projects in the same universe are on the way

Few acts in games feel quite as gleefully gratifying as removing a knight’s shiny dome with a halberd swing in medieval multiplayer melee Chivalry 2. In a pastime that’s had several decades to perfect the art of hitting men with sharp objects, that’s quite the accomplishment. Since releasing in 2022, Torn Banner have lavished the player base with free horses, angry peasants, and most recently, the Regicide update – hosting a climatic tete-a-tete between two angry crownmen. With work on No More Room In Hell 2 well underway though, Torn Banner have decided to call it on Chiv 2, which they now consider “feature complete.”

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The official Olympics game ditched Mario & Sonic in favour of mobile & PC – but it’s also pushing NFTs

For the past couple of decades, the official Olympics video games have starred Mario and Sonic and been exclusive to Nintendo devices. Not so, this year. Olympics Go! Paris 2024 is free-to-play and available for PC via the Epic Games Store.

Hear the curl of the monkey’s paw? Yeah, it’s a mobile game port with the touchscreen prompts seemingly still intact, and its publisher is also pushing a “commemorative Paris 2024 NFT Digital Pin collection”.

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Michael Bay’s Skibidi Toilet movie production company has apparently sent DMCA takedowns to Garry’s Mod

Earlier this month it was reported that Skibidi Toilet, the YouTube phenomenon, may be heading to film and television via director Michael Bay. Now Invisible Narratives, a production company co-owned by Bay, has apparently sent a DMCA takedown notice to Garry Newman, citing the large number of Skibidi Toilet games and assets advertised within Garry’s Mod.

Skibidi Toilet uses assets derived from Half-Life 2, however, and owes a lot to the Garry’s Mod machinima scene. And the animation’s original creator, best known as DaFuqBoom, is claiming innocence over the DMCA.

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Mysty-eyed point-and-clicker Neyyah brings back the glory of pre-rendered backdrops in August

If you miss Myst, but feel only vertigo and disgust for its recent 3D reinventions, you might find yourself salivating over first-person point-and-clicker Neyyah – a Mystalike or more precisely, Rivenalike from Defy Reality Entertainment and MicroProse, which has just been dated for early access release on 27th August. Real-time movement and exploration? Rotatable polygons? Pfff. These are firmly pre-rendered worlds, just like Grandpappy Atrus used to bake.

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Thank Goodness You’re Here! review: edges towards greatness and won’t take you long to beat

British comedy is too often defined by its relationship to America: either as merely irony and sarcasm, which we’re told Americans don’t understand, or as a sprightly ideas factory for works such as The Office, which Americans can bless by re-making at scale.

Peel back the curtains of American cultural hegemony however and you may find the true pulsing core of British comedy that lies beneath: innuendo. No American network is in a bidding war to import Vic and Bob or remake Bottom, and Carry On and Benny Hill are assumed to be anachronisms in our modern times, but Thank Goodness You’re Here! enters the conversation with a nudge and a wink. It’s a cheeky 2-3 hour adventure through a small northern town, and it’s here to educate the entire world of our nation’s obsession with sausages and bare bottoms.

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Beta Decay is a low-poly dystopian RPG whose grimy cover-shooting shows promise

Edwin spotted this game called Beta Decay that’s not got a release date yet or anything, but looks very cool. It’s being developed by Rotoscope Studios and it’s a low-poly, 90s-inspired mix of dystopian RPG, survival, third and first-person shooter, with some roguelike bits slapped in there, as well. Whew, that’s a lot. Potentially too much. But hey, I am here for something ambitious and interesting, of which it ticks both boxes.

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Booby-trapped based-building FPS Meet Your Maker has another free trial

In Behaviour Interactive’s post-apocalyptic multiplayer FPS Meet Your Maker, you raise grim forts of rusty blocks, pop-out manglers and robot ambushers from the desert sands. Each base harbours a cannister of genetic material and other resources, and the idea is to fiendishly arrange traps and defences to stop people taking your precious genmat while doing your best to clean out their bases. Sound like good wholesome fun? You might want to check out the current free trial on Steam.

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Creepy card game Arsonate is a very short race to be the last person burning

2024’s small but growing avalanche of games that trap you in a room with a nasty little freak continues with Arsonate, in which the nasty little freak wears a gasmask and wants to set you on fire. He wants to do this using cards. There are 47 of them – a forest of silhouettes, laid across the blood-stained table between you. Every turn, you flip a tree card to reveal a flame. When the flames spread to a player’s Tower card, it’s game over.

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Enshrouded’s latest update adds a new survival preset, complete with hunger and backpack drops on death

How do you like your survival games? A nice bit of wood chopping while the birds chirp? Gathering some mushrooms while you deflect a little goblin’s swings? Stumbling parched through a desert as a bed of scorpions prick your ankles with deadly venom? Well, Enshrouded may provide some or none of these experiences, but what its latest update does is capture their spirit. You’ll now be able to choose from several difficulty presets to dampen or spice up the game’s challenge. Otherwise, there’s new customisation options and some quality of life tweaks, too.

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