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If there’s one thing I’d like to get across about my time with Dragon Age: The Veilguard – perhaps a surprise given Bioware’s recent history, Anthem, and some of the early marketing for this game – it’s that in my 50 hour return to Thedas, I very rarely felt I was playing something cynical.
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In case you don’t know the headline reference, Orpheus was a mythical Greek musician who famously descended to the underworld to rescue his snake-bitten lover, Eurydice. The underworld’s rulers, Hades and Persephone, were massively bummed out by Orpheus’s emo lyre-playing, and swiftly agreed to let him lead Eurydice’s soul upward to the waking world, with the extremely simple proviso that he not look back at her till they’re both on the surface.
Being a love-drunk spannerhead, however, Orpheus couldn’t resist a quick peek at Eurydice after crossing the threshold – and the result is a timeless moral about human frailty and the specific truism that you should absolutely never date musicians, which Australian developers Oppolyon Studios have totally ignored in their otherwise-redolent game about kicking your brother’s soul out of hell.
I’ve often thought lighthouse keeping would make a fine second career, albeit mostly because in my head, it would give me endless time to write (and finish Baldur’s Gate 3). You won’t have much time to write in Static Dread, sadly. The world has ended, the oceans teem with unspeakable biofauna, and it’s your job as the apparent sole surviving lighthouse keeper to distinguish vessels loaded with eldritch horrors from vessels loaded with people who need saving from eldritch horrors.
Going by the teaser trailer, below, this appears to be comparable to playing border guard in Papers, Please, but it’s less political and more tentacular. You field queries over the radio, run your finger down a clipboard, and decide whether to kindle the lamps or beg the coastguard to blast that ship back to hell. There’s a dialogue line in the trailer which I, personally, would consider highly untrustworthy. “It’s consuming my team!” screams a self-described ship captain. “Please, send help! Gosh…” Look, “friend”, no genuine human being says “gosh” in an emergency situation. Not even British human beings say “gosh” in an emergency situation. That’s what you say when somebody tells you the pizza-flavoured crisps are back on sale at Aldis.
One of my biggest challenges as a writer has been tempering my love of vague gestures at metaphysical concepts with the revelation that the people who read my articles also, apparently, can’t read my mind. Pah. A skill issue if I ever saw one, honestly. Decade is a fascinating adventure game that drew me in with its apparent vagueness but then, like some sort of considerate, sensible coward, went on to explain itself well in on its Steam page.
It’s the end of the world, and you’re not too happy about it, so you’ll be shoving children in a time machine with little more than a rotting Lunchly and some instructions to help you figure out exactly what went wrong.
What are you dressing as for Halloween? Me, I’m dressing as someone trying to bring back “tray-tray” in an effort to give Edwin a seizure. Here’s the tray-tray:
Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week – our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! Most of us know about the novel, the novella, and the rare novito, but did you know that Penguin briefly tried to market the ‘big nov’ – single sentences of much larger works, bizarrely serialised into hardbacks weighty enough to club the equally rare giga-seal? Some things are best left forgotten, but not Dragon Age! It’s Dragon Age month, and here’s Dragon Age veteran and good YouTuber, Mark Darrah! Cheers Mark! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?
Ys X: Nordics launched in Japan last year to some critical acclaim, and it has now made its way both west and onto PC. The PC version has a bunch of graphical upgrades and keyboard support, but also – unlike predecessor Ys IX: Monstrum Nox which got co-op as a cheeky post-launch bonus on PC – Ys X: Nordics has local co-op from day one.
Cities: Skylines received its final piece of DLC last May, as developers Colossal Order shifted their focus to its sequel, Cities: Skylines 2. Eighteen months and the release of Cities: Skylines 2 later… Cities: Skylines 1 is getting new DLC again.
The “Mountain Village” creator pack add 45 new buildings designed to help you construct quaint and picturesque destinations.
The precision-platformer is a torturous genre at the best of times, and now developers Brlka and publishers Ysbryd Games have seen fit to combine it with Silent Hill. Their forthcoming Love Eternal is the story of Maya, a girl whisked off to a “castle built of bitter memories” by a weird, lonely god, and obliged to make her way “through over 100 screens filled with spikes, lasers, switches, and traps”.
When not getting spiked or lasered, Maya appears to spend her days in a kind of metaphorical suburban household. Here, she will contend with things like people crawling on the ceiling and coming over all John Carpenter’s The Thing. Maya does have one thing going for her: the ability to reverse gravity. Here’s a brand new trailer.
Rock Paper Shotgun has a fuzzy conception of “news”, in that we regard the “new” element of news as sorely overrated, more of a guideline than an obligation. The trick to selling this mindset gracefully is to overclock your obnoxious narcissism until it levels up into stylish solipsism. “It’s news to me,” I sternly insist, while announcing a game you might pedantically observe was actually announced in 2019. “I can obtain no reliable empirical evidence that this existed prior to my noticing it,” I declare, writing about my discovery that Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6 requires a permanent internet connection, even when you’re playing the campaign.
Rebecca Jones (RPS in peace) really liked 10 Dead Doves when she wrote about it back in 2022, saying it reminded her of why she “loves weird low-budget spooks so much”. Discovering such an interesting project speaks to curiosity and taste on her part, but me? I am simply a pun enjoying buffon who got an email promising that “Dovecraftian horrors await”. The thrust of said electronic mail was that the game now has a release date of this December, but it looked neat, so I doved right in. I coo-dn’t resist. I too love weird low-budget horror. I have been pigeonholed.
