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The Wholesome Games Celebration has kicked off on Steam, offering steep discounts on many, many cosy games that you’d typically see featured in various Wholesome Directs – downtempo puzzlers, non-violent explore ‘em ups, games starring cute woodland critters, and so on. Scrolling through all the good stuff might take a while since nearly 250 games are discounted, so let’s run through some highlights here.
Microsoft have announced the next batch of games coming to Game Pass, and just like the last line-up, indie gems are carrying this fortnight’s offerings. August begins with venerated A Short Hike, which crosses paths with fellow hiker Death Stranding on its way off the Game Pass mega mountain.
I can almost remember the moment in the original Dishonored when I realised, “Crap. Chaos is coming, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.” It was around the halfway point of the game that the world of Dunwall was visibly starting to sour before me, and it was all because I hadn’t quite taken the time to truly understand how its chaos system worked. I’d let too many of my mistakes get away from me, killed one too many people in the process, and now its Low Chaos ending seemed permanently out of reach. I thought in vain that if I behaved really nicely for the rest of the game, it might balance out my former transgressions. But alas, it was not to be. I ended the game in High Chaos, and I was furious. For whatever reason, getting a game’s ‘good’ ending really mattered to me back then.
It was this personal failing that drove me to some extreme lengths when Dishonored 2 came out a couple of years later. Not only did I resolve to do a Clean Hands run this time, guaranteeing a Low Chaos ending by refusing to kill anyone, but as I cast my eye down its list of Steam achievements, I also got it into my head that, ‘You know what? If we’re going no-kill, let’s Shadow run it as well and do it completely unseen at the same time.’ A great idea at the time, I thought, if a little unusual for me. Cut to my fifth hour trying to clean out Kirin Jindosh’s Clockwork Mansion on a review deadline, however, and you might think that decision would have worn a little thin. But you’d also be totally and utterly wrong.
Dishonored 2 is an immersive sim stealth ’em up by Arkane and it’s been in my brain a lot more than usual. Partly due to this year’s RPS 100, but also because of the mess that was Redfall. Arkane swung at the live service hero shooter and missed, with some comments writing off my sadness in the review as an inevitability. Sure, there’s definitely truth to Arkane having changed over the years, of course it has. But I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being hopeful.
I think of Dishonored 2’s A Crack In The Slab mission as both a beacon of Arkane’s past pedigree and a symbol of their situation in the present. While I can’t look into the future, I still think there’s worth in turning to an all-time classic of a stealth level.
The Expanse is one of those TV shows that I’ve started to watch about three times now. Matthew (RPS in peace) and I keep hearing great things about it, but every attempt we make has always ended the same way. We get a couple of episodes in, determined to make it a little bit further than we did before, but there’s just something about it that can’t quite hold our interest long enough to properly stick with it. One day, though, I do hope to finish the first season of The Expanse, and my ideal scenario is for the episodic prequel game from Telltale and current Life Is Stange custodians Deck Nine to be just the kick up the bum I need to get through it.
The Expanse: A Telltale Series started the fortnightly release of its five episodes on the Epic Games Store last week, and I played through the first, Archer’s Paradox, over the weekend. As you’d perhaps expect from a first episode, the plot scales lean heavily toward setup here as opposed to actionable ‘so and so will remember that’ choices. Still, its centrepiece of exploring a big exploded battleship to find some sort of money-printing macguffin is also like such a sedate, threat-free version of Dead Space that it can’t help but feel a little lightweight at the same time – and that’s not just because you’re floating around in zero gravity for half of it. It does a reasonable job of laying down what I hope is some good groundwork for the origin story for TV favourite Camina Drummer, and her fellow crewmates are a fun, bubbling pressure cooker of personalities just waiting to spill over into conflict, but I do also worry that the game will have the same truncated fate as my attempts to watch the show.
Four years ago, Baldur’s Gate 3 was announced with a trailer that showed how a human could succumb to the small illithid tadpole stuck inside his noggin, thus becoming a mind flayer. The process begins with excruciating headaches, escalates to fingers twisting by themselves, and culminates with an octopus head spouting out of the body. That gross transformation is what you’re (maybe) trying to avoid at the start of Baldur’s Gate 3, but developer Larian Studios have now explained how the parasites “tie into” its RPG systems. Yep, you can choose to either embrace or resist the tempting corruption, with the former giving you some pretty cool party tricks, while the latter means you won’t be subjected to David Cronenberg-esque body horror. Tough decision, I think.
Final Fantasy 14 has teased what to expect from the MMO’s upcoming patches, the last updates to hit the game before the release of incoming expansion Dawntrail next year. As usual, there’s a lot of stuff planned, from new dungeons and trials, to quests and XIV’s upcoming Fall Guys crossover.
Transformers owners Hasbro have said they would like to see older video games based on the beloved toy franchise to make a return – except those games are lost somewhere on a hard drive inside Activision.
Amazon Prime Video have been relatively tight-lipped about their upcoming Fallout TV adaptation, but that hasn’t stopped photos and clips leaking online. A new batch of images and a short video have leaked from the set of the streaming series, showing what appears to be the Vault-Tec headquarters, a group of survivors, and all the decayed foliage you’d expect from the brown post-apocalypse.
