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Airborne Kingdom was about constructing a floating city in the sky; you figuratively and literally balanced your construction of homes and industry as you floated around and interacted with settlements on the ground to gather resources. Nate called it an “absolute delight” two years ago.
Now there’s a sequel on the way. Airborne Empire starts with the same basics of citybuiilding, but now your constructions will be under siege from sky pirates.
Wholesome Direct is my favourite showcase from not-E3, because I feel like it’s a show directly catered to my interests. Cats, cooking, seaside towns, pretty landscapes, magical girls – Wholesome Direct has it all. This year we from the RPS Indiescovery Podcast watched the show and have plucked out a handful of games that we’re looking forward to the most, which was pretty difficult. There were a lot of great games this year.
There were around 70 games spotlighted during the showcase, so there was no way we could possibly list them all, but we’ve done our best and here are our bestest best picks. If you’re after more gaming news and announcements from this year’s not-E3 check out our coverage of not-E3 2023, Summer Game Fest round-up, and Day Of The Devs round-up. For now though, have a pleasant scroll through which wholesome games we have our eyes on.
Adorable exploration and platformer game Smushi Come Home has just been shadow-dropped as part of this year’s Wholesome Direct, meaning you can play it right now. The game follows the titular Smushi, a small mushroom, as it makes its way out of a forest to get back home. Along the way, it’ll meet and help out many of the forest’s inhabitants. If the combination of tiny shroom guy, chill exploration, and light puzzling hasn’t convinced you, take a look at the game’s launch trailer below.
Earlier today, Mr. Diablo at Blizzard Rod Fergusson tweeted what the most played class was in Diablo 4 so far. To my great surprise, it wasn’t the Rogue, which is currently sitting at the top of our tier list. Rather, it’s the Sorcerer, which currently sits at the bottom of our class rankings. Presumably, everyone loves watching ice shards and lightning bolts leave their fingertips. So, is the majority of Diablo 4’s player-base wrong, or are we? Feel free to come defend your spell-slinger in the comments.
The glut of “old school” shooters has largely passed me by, not least because I can easily play Doom today if I want to. But Kvark looks to Half-Life instead of the Doomquake clone era, and is all the better for it. You’re a worker/prisoner in a sinister nuclear facility deep under 1980s Czechoslovakia where things, as you might guess, have gone terribly wrong.
The satirical Soviet posters and propaganda reels are here, but used sparingly, and more convincingly than the usual “Russia, haha! Vodka! lol!” fare, and although all its parts are fairly familiar, Kvark feels distinct enough that I had a hard time actually putting it down.
Like lots of people in the RPS Treehouse right now, I’ve been squeezing in bits of Diablo 4 around the various Summer Game Fest streams happening this week. I’m having a decent, if mildly monotonous time so far, mostly because I haven’t unlocked all my Druid‘s abilities just yet, but I’m keen to keep going with it, mostly because I just like turning into a bear and a wolf every three seconds to whack some evil skelly boys, innit. When I was logging off the other day, though, I had a fleeting glance at Diablo 4’s shop. Not to actually buy anything, I should stress. I’m not one for cosmetics in any shape or form. But I just wanted to see what ludicrous things it was trying to sell me for real human money. And one item for sale was, of course, some fancy horse armour, and it cost six English pounds and thirty nine pence. £6.39! For a mangey rope bridle and a bone dagger on its side! (You can see it in the header image up top there). Ridiculous, I exclaimed, and promptly shut down my PC.
The next morning, I was talking about this daft bit of armour with the RPS Treehouse when Alice0 suddenly introduced me to the weird and wonderful world of cheap horse games on Steam. After all, why spend upwards of £6 on a pointless cosmetic item when you could feasibly put that money toward 6 whole horse games that have actually dozens of horses in them? So join me as we discover how many horse games you can buy on Steam for the same price as Diablo 4’s horse armour.
It’s impossible to determine just how long ago 2014 was. Wisdom would dictate it sits around the 9 year mark, but no one truly believes that. Endless Legend? That was no more than two years ago, and I’ll throw hands if anyone suggests otherwise. But apparently enough time has passed that just about every 4X game that came out that year has now been superceded by a newer title in the series. Civilization: Beyond Earth, Galactic Civilizations 3, Age Of Wonders 3, and Endless Legend made 2014 an incredibly strong year for strategy games, but nowadays, who really still plays these older entries?
I don’t mean to sound derisive. It’s a sombre truth. At 233 hours, I’ve put more time into Endless Legend than any other 4X strategy game in my Steam library, and loved every minute of it. To this day it’s still the best in the genre when it comes to sparking the imagination of my chronically fantasy-loving brain. The music, the amazing variety in terrain and units, the sheer quantity of words bringing to life every last quest, minor faction, creature, and environmental anomaly. It’s a simply splendid game. The question is whether it’s still worth playing today.
Welp, it feels like this has been a long time coming. Friday The 13th: The Game will no longer be on sale by the end of the year, due to license expiration. The asymmetric multiplayer game, based on the film series of the same name, has had a rough time over the years. In 2018, it was caught up in the dispute between the original film’s producer and writer, causing publisher Gun Media to halt all DLC plans. In 2020, the game’s dedicated servers were killed, but online play limped on via peer-to-peer matchmaking.
A game of Paradox’s sci-fi strategy Stellaris can take so long that, in all honesty, I’ve never finished it. I always lose interest at some point and start a new civilisation because I mostly want to try out new weird ideas for a new weird empire, not actually rule that empire and fight its endgame wars. That makes me mighty interested in Stellaris Nexus, an upcoming turn-based spin-off which aims to offer a full multiplayer 4X experience in under an hour.
The honestly named survival sandbox ’em up Wizard With A Gun got a chunky new gameplay trailer at tonight’s Devolver Digital Direct showcase, along with the news that you can try it all out for yourself right this second thanks to a hip new demo. If you ever thought Bastion could do with some crafting, this will probably be right up your street.
