In a move that I already know I’ll live to regret making, this week the Electronic Wireless Show podcast takes a look at the discourse that flared up in and around the release of Baldur’s Gate 3. Larian’s epic RPG had people asking: why aren’t all games like this? But in an angry tone of voice that we feel left some things out of the conversation. Also, Nate challenges a Times columnist to single MMA combat, and we talk about the games we’ve been playing this week (spoilers: none of them are Baldur’s Gate 3!).
The brutish “X curio is like Y behemoth” logic of mass entertainment nooze requires me to associate Selkie Harbour’s The Anglerfish Project with Starfield. They do form a pleasant contrast, in fairness. Both are space games but one doesn’t have a fishing mechanic, whereas the other is all fishing mechanic. One is about visiting strange new worlds, establishing outposts and shooting or romancing the heck out of the locals, while the other maroons you on a single asteroid. The Anglerfish Project deserves better than to serve only as a counterpoint for the Bethesda colossus, however – it’s a sweet and tidy stargaze ’em up with a dry sense of humour, and you can download it for free on Itch.io.
The rest of the RPS Treehouse might be fully engrossed in Baldur’s Gate 3 at the moment, but the main thing that’s been on my mind for the last couple of weeks is stealthy strategy games. Primarily, the exceedingly excellent Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew, but also Harebrained Scheme’s upcoming turn-based tactics ’em up, The Lamplighters League, a game I’ve been quietly looking forward to ever since it was announced earlier this year.
Specifically, I’ve been playing through a handful of missions from the middle of The Lamplighters League’s campaign, getting to grips with its full roster of agents and their unique set of skills. It continues to be just as stylish as the opening mission I played in May, but I’m not gonna lie. I’ve had quite a bit of whiplash coming straight from Shadow Gambit into this, but even if I’d arrived fresh and green, I don’t think even all my years of tactics playing and XCOM-liker-liking would have been enough to prepare me for just how gosh darn difficult it is.
Hear me now, Penitent Ones, for thou are subject to an intro that borrows its style from thine video game. With divine expedience you must go forth into a world from which all unworthy creatures impart their knowledge with great excitations, entangling their speech with a verbosity comparable only to how the holy miracle does imbue our city with its fearsome illumination. If you think this a questionable affectation then guard thyselves, oh Penitent Ones, for you really are in store for an awful lot of this.
Beyond that, Blasphemous 2 is a cracking Metroidvania rooted in satisfying combat and rewarding exploration of the ‘ooh, I didn’t realise this bit was connected to that bit’ vein. Neither element is on the same level of Dark Souls, but then what is?
Bethesda’s vaunted space bonanza Starfield is available for preload today on PC Game Pass – if you’re downloading it on Steam, you’ll need to wait a little longer (even longer, if you plan on playing Starfield on Steam Deck). The file weighs in at 139.84 GB, so be sure to clear some disc space before you force this galaxy’s worth of grey rocks, NASApunks and hopefully extensive Event Horizon comparisons into your protesting PC, which has only ever lived to serve you and bring you joy. Might be an idea to double-check those Starfield system specs, too, and make that final call on whether to invest in a new SSD.
Hybe, the company behind immensely popular K-pop stars BTS, is getting into video games. The first release from the Korean company’s newfounded games publisher Hybe IM (with IM standing for “Interactive Media”) will be Astra: Knights of Veda, a 2D RPG with more than a touch of Dark Souls and Elden Ring to its heavily-armoured bosses and big scary dog monsters, if its first gameplay trailer is anything to go by.
Hold onto your warp nacelles and hyperdrives, Starfield aficionados. The game’s lead designer Emil Pagliarulo and lead quest designer Will Shen have hosted a Discord Q&A about Bethesda’s forthcoming space colossus. Self-despising fool that I am, I sat up late at the office taking notes throughout – please accept a modest avalanche of new details.
First off, a note on the subject of Starfield and housing. You can own property in “all the major cities in the game”, according to Pagliarulo, with some dwellings being purchaseable and others, quest rewards.
Much like Fallout 3 and Fallout 4, the game features a Kids Stuff trait that generates parents based on your choice of custom character, allowing you to inflict your terrible physiognomical experiments on at least two other in-game entities. “No spoilers, but I think fans will really appreciate the actors we got to play those roles,” Pagliarulo added.
I keep forgetting that Netflix have their own games offering, despite the streaming giant keeping it well stocked with a fairly solid library of free (if you’re a Netflix subscriber anyway) games – including the likes of Oxenfree 2, Kentucky Route Zero and Immortality. If you wanted some more proof that Netflix is pretty serious about this whole “getting into video games” thing, the movie streaming platform-turned-games publisher is now looking to unite their two fronts by experimenting with game streaming.
The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood is many, magical things, but initially, at least, it is a card game in which you create your own cards. This takes the form of an MS Paint-esque editor in which you glue together a background, character assets and a collection of props, rotating, duplicating and altering the size of each asset with the mouse. Each asset soaks up a certain amount of arcane energy, divided between the four elements, which mean somewhat different things here than in the spell systems of other games. And each final design generates a different combination of meanings, some of them contradictory at a glance, all of them keys to the game’s weird, whimsical and sorrowful wider universe.
It seems an overly rudimentary system at first, though that’s coming from the perspective of somebody who’s reasonably familiar with Tarot, one of the game’s chief influences, and partial to devising their own crummy decks of visual poetry cards. In particular, I grumped to myself about the limits on shrinking and enlarging: I wanted to fashion more abstract, prog-rock designs with faces in pixellated close-up, whereas The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood sort of defaults to “dude holding thing against landscape” setups familiar from the Rider-Waite Tarot. While there are pieces you can plug in and leave out as you see fit, the system also insists that you include certain props from each batch, and I’ll admit to using the layer tool to hide unwanted skulls, floral wands and so forth behind other assets.
I haven’t played Dungeons & Dragons before, and I don’t know much about it besides the obvious. I know there’s a dungeon master, or DM, who directs proceedings behind a cardboard shield. I know you lob some dice to determine the outcomes of an adventure that’s contained in the heads of everyone at the roundtable. And that’s about it.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is based on D&D’s 5th edition and it’s meant to honour its rules to the absolute tee. I’m sure it does! To be honest, though, I haven’t exactly learned much about D&D by playing it. I don’t even think of myself as playing D&D, instead I’m just playing an RPG whose complexity adds a nice mystery to proceedings.
