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Alas, more sad news today, folks. Our brilliant guides writer Hayden Hefford has just completed their final day at RPS. From the end of September, they’ll be starting a new life of scholarly enlightenment as they head off to university, undertaking that most noble of pursuits: the quest for infinite knowledge. We’ll miss them dearly, so please join me in the comments below to say farewell.
One of the things I like best about Die Gute Fabrik’s forthcoming Saltsea Chronicles is an optional feature. It’s a card game, Spoils, which you can play while sojourning upon the game’s islands and searching for clues about your ship’s missing captain, Maja. Here’s how it works: two teams of two characters take turns to play cards, moving in clockwise around a table. Player must follow the lead player’s suit, and the highest-scoring card wins the trick, with four tricks comprising a round. It might sound like a straightforward competition, but different islands offer different house rules, and there are twists that reflect the game’s ethic of community, mutual respect and diversity, and help animate the detail of its gently post-apocalyptic oceanic world.
The winning card from each trick is handed to the loser, so victory is, in its way, an act of generosity. Score more than 100 points in a round, meanwhile, and the “Hoarding” rule means you must relinquish those points to the other team. As Die Gute Fabrik’s CEO and creative lead Hannah Nicklin observes, this fits the post-capitalist politics and mythology of Saltsea, in which “hoarding is sort of seen as the apocryphal cause of the flood”. The Spoils tutorial menus riff on this with a cute but mildly unsettling image of a sinking ship.
A big shout out to indie games that are successors to existing games in all but name. It’s gotta be one of my favourite trends. Fed up of waiting for a big publisher to revive a series that’s been lying dormant for decades? Simply do it yourself instead. 11 years after the release of Jet Set Radio Future, and with Sega seemingly unwilling to exhume their cult-favourite rollerblading series outside of weird crossovers with Ubisoft’s Roller Champions of all things, Team Reptile have done exactly that.
Enter Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, as authentic a sequel to Jet Set Radio as you can get. Dripping with style and oozing cool, the team have crafted a carefully observed love letter that both respects and advances the original duology in meaningful ways, while taking a step back in others.
US author and artist Bill Willingham has rather dramatically announced that he is placing the Fables comicbook property in the public domain, including all Fables spin-offs and characters. This means that – pending a judgement from third-party legal experts, anyway – anyone can now create art of any kind set in the Fables universe. “What was once wholly owned by Bill Willingham is now owned by everyone, for all time,” the author wrote on his Substack. “It’s done, and as most experts will tell you, once done it cannot be undone. Take-backs are neither contemplated nor possible.”
You might recognise Fables as the universe in which Telltale’s The Wolf Among Us is set. It’s a grubby noir fairytale world in which bedtime story characters like Snow White and Prince Charming live discreetly among regular humans, aka Mundies, having been driven from their homelands by a mysterious Adversary. I confess I’ve not read any of the original comics – I’ve only ever played the Telltale adaptation, which I enjoyed. I feel guilty about that in hindsight, because Willingham seems to have a pretty dim view of Telltale’s work, though that’s partly to do with what he considers to be his longstanding unfair treatment by Fables publisher DC Comics.
Riot Forge have been quietly building up quite the catalogue of League Of Legends side story games over the last couple of years. In November 2021, they launched the double whammy of rhythm runner Hextech Mayhem and turn-based RPG Ruined King, and this year alone we’ve already had action RPG The Mageseeker and narrative platformer Conv/rgence. As you can probably tell, they’re all focused on different genres, different League heroes, and have all come from different developers – and soon they’ll be joined by Song Of Nunu, the next game from Rime developers Tequila Works.
I got to play a very small slice of it at Gamescom last month, and yep, if you’ve been craving another low stakes adventure that’s all but guaranteed to wrench at your heartstrings and wibble your tear ducts, Song Of Nunu will almost certainly fill that Rime-shaped hole in your life when it comes to PC on November 1st.
Supergiant have announced that Hades 2 – sequel to one of gaming’s smoothest and sexiest underworld capers – will release into Early Access in Q2 2024 on Steam and the Epic Games Store. It’ll drop with at least as much stuff to do, hack apart, loot, fanship, etcetera as the original Hades, and will be preceded by a limited access technical test.
Cyberpunk 2077‘s Update 2.0 – which adds new skill trees and perks, vehicle combat, and revamped police responses to the FPS-RPG – will launch on September 21st. That’s a little before the release of the paid expansion, Phantom Liberty, on September 26th.
The release date was announced today as part of a developer stream, which also included a new cinematic trailer for the expansion featuring a little of Idris Elba’s character before the events of the game.
American Truck Simulator has, by my count, now added eleven extra states as DLC over and above the two it launched with. That means there’s a long way to go before it completely unites the states as one country under 18-wheels, but SCS Software are continuing their efforts with the announcement of a third in-development expansion: Arkansas.
The first three Tomb Raider games are being remastered and re-released. The awkwardly named Tomb Raider I-III Remastered Starring Lara Croft refreshes the graphics, adds quality-of-life features, and will release next year on February 14th.
I wouldn’t say I’ve been itching to return to Amnesia: The Bunker, Frictional’s perfectly ghastly blend of horror game and immersive sim, but I’ve certainly been itching to write about it. The terrible beauty of that generator-based exploration and scavenging loop. That moment when you walk just a little too quickly down a corridor, and hear the awful rummaging in the walls. The agonising discovery that not only is it possible to roam with the lights out, but pretty much required, beyond a certain point. The dense burden of grasping more or less where to go, without knowing how to survive the journey – and above all else, those goddamn rats, always encountered where least convenient. Shoo! Shoo!
It’s by far the most oppressive and demanding horror game I’ve played in recent memory, and it’ll get considerably worse with the release of the Halloween update.
