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Abandon all hope, ye who are shackled to your workmates in Chained Together. The “co-op” game about escaping hell now has a map editor that’ll let you make your own infuriating obstacle courses for condemned souls to throw themselves upon. Finally, you can make the endless mountain of perdition you have dreamed about since being emotionally scarred by Getting Over It.
There’s something about mostly empty urban centers in the US that depresses me and disturbs my soul. Whenever I visit family in the States and find myself in a derelict shopping plaza or some other place affected by America’s depressing sense of architectural planning and overreliance on cars, I can’t help but feel a sense of dread.
Devil’s Hideout, a point and click horror game made by indie dev Cosmic Void, takes place in one such abandoned American city, and manages to deliver on this sense of dread even if its eerie hellscape is rough around the edges.
According to Ukrainian government-run website United24 Media, Ukraine’s armed forces are using Steam Decks to remote-control gun turrets in the course of the on-going war with Russia. The site has shared a video of a new turret system, ShaBlya, which was apparently developed by Ukrainian engineers and approved for mass production earlier this year.
I’ve been looking forward to playing Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 for yonks, but had convinced myself that performance-testing it would have some of my lesser graphics cards quivering in their PCIe slots. All those onscreen ‘Nids, yeah? And the stutterfest that was the recent preview build? Surely enough to make a Tech-Priest shed at least one oily tear.
But nah, turns out it’s fine. Pretty good, actually – perhaps not to the extent that you should tackle Space Marine 2 on a crusty notebook (or, for the record, a Steam Deck), but it runs decently on minimum specs and is noticeably more stable than in that preview. The only thing that might offend your PC’s machine spirit is some quality setting weirdness, where dropping or raising the graphics options can produce inconsistent results.
Fair warning then that this might be a ‘whack on DLSS/FSR and be done with’ kind of job, if it’s faster framerates you seek. But we’ll get to that further down; first, a newly post-launch sitrep of how Space Marine 2 performs on different hardware.
In March, the CEO of Embracer announced that the company’s widespread removal of workers across their many owned studios was over. That has turned out to be false, as the megacorp continues to enforce layoffs and close down studios. Now, a support studio for Diablo IV and Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands has suffered further layoffs, with over half the employees at the studio losing their jobs.
Frontiers Of The Mind is cursed, by which I mean that 7-Zip turned red while I was extracting the file. What unsightly encounter deep within the bowels of my download file caused this temporary anomaly? No time to think about that. After playing this horror game, I’ve now got too many other questions.
I recently moved to a suburban neighbourhood where there is lots of relatively “wild” parkland and a few raggedy patches of woodland. I like to walk in the woods around evening time, after a hard day of writing stupid listicles about Call Of Duty. Forests are a critical preoccupation of mine, actually – check this lumpen thinkypiece I wrote about Alan Wake 2 – but they’re also spaces for retreat and reflection, where I can shrug off the angst and lose myself in the spectacle of sycamores and silverbirch, arching over the path. Except. Except that sooner or later I start thinking about the roots.
Monica Harrington isn’t one of Valve’s official co-founders, but she was heavily involved in its formation and initial success – working by day as a marketing manager at Microsoft with responsibility for the games division, while helping her partner, Mike Harrington, and Gabe Newell get the Half-Life studio off the ground. In a lengthy post on Medium – which Nic has already covered in the most recent Sunday Papers, but which I think deserves a piece of its own – Harrington takes us through those heady early days.
When Warner Bros released a fairly abysmal trailer for the Minecraft Movie last week, there could be only one possible result: the game’s legions of fan filmmakers, modders, texture pack creators, and garden-variety players would attempt to upstage it. That process begins with the speedy release of several fan reworkings of the trailer that use something like vanilla Minecraft graphics, rather than the original, unholy fusion of LB Photo Realism and Jack Black. This’ll teach Johnny Hollywood to run his grubby hands all over our beloved Creepers, eh.
Well, if this isn’t a vastly impressive little gem I’m not sure what is. Qanga is a space exploration game set in a loading screen-less solar system. It features ship travel, combat, trade, and base building, and you can do all of it alone or with space mates. It’s got a demo, but it’s also on the cheaper end if you fancy buying into early access. Considering the pricing, I’d say it’s a real looker, too.
