Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Every weekend, indie devs show off current work on Twitter’s #screenshotsaturday tag. And every Monday, I bring you a selection of these snaps and clips. The difficulties of writing a column reliant upon a collapsing platform continue to be felt in a week when the #screenshotsaturday tag became overrun with spambots, but the games still shone through. This week, my eye was caught by colourful driving experiences in run ‘n’ guns and visual novels, multiple terrible squiggly beasts from horror games, a cute N64-style platformer, and lots more attractive and interesting indie games. Come see!

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Planet of Lana has all the hallmarks of a story-rich platformer. Across its six-hour run time, you’ll encounter a string of environmental puzzles, an evil plan concocted by a group of baddies, a rich orchestral soundtrack that swells at all the right moments, a cute animal companion, and a gorgeous world that needs saving.

On paper, it has everything you could possibly want from this kind of game, but in practice, it can also be Lana’s undoing at times. It does everything well – admittedly some much better than others – but it feels like this sci-fi tale is missing something. That gut punch, that sigh of relief after a thrill, that unexpected surprise… You know, that extra edge to really make it sing. It’s still a very enjoyable adventure, but its lack of emotional highs means it doesn’t linger long in the memory once you’ve seen the credits roll. Is that a roundabout way to say that Planet of Lana is a solid 7/10? Maybe, but we don’t do that here.

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Add another one to the list of weird and delightful ways to play ye olde Doom: teletext. A new mod converts Doom to a teletext signal, letting you play the seminal shooter rendered in blocky teletext art on a telly. You can even control it with your TV remote. Have a look in the video below! I really, really like the smiley face replacing Doomguy’s gurn.

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Prison Architect has received “the Sunset Update”, which developers Double Eleven say is “focused on improving the player experience as much as possible.” That’s because it’s their last update to the prison simulator originally created by Introversion Software. The update was also released alongside a trailer thanking fans for supporting the game, which also seemingly teases a 3D sequel.

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American Truck Simulator‘s first released version included only the state of California, and its developers have been working their way eastward with each new state added via DLC. Work is currently ongoing on both Oklahoma and Kansas.

SCS Software have got better at replicating the long roads and countryside of the United States, however, so they’ve also been going back periodically and revamping their very first. Five cities in northern California were updated last year in a second update, and work is ongoing on a third phase of revisions that should arrive soon. SCS Software this week shared screenshots of their new Santa Cruz, which has been “revamped from the ground up”.

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Crypt Of The NecroDancer developers Brace Yourself Games have laid off around half their staff. Employees began tweeting about being affected cuts yesterday, with Brace Yourself Games later confirming the decision to “lay off a portion” of staff. The studio had around 43 employees before the cuts, according to LinkedIn.

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Extremely high-speed DDR5 memory is becoming eminently more affordable, with this DDR5-7000 kit costing just $125 for 32GB at Amazon US. That’s an awesome deal, especially for a RAM kit with RGB lighting addressable via Corsair’s popular iCUE software.

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Razer’s BlackShark V2 X is an incredible value gaming headset even at its £60 RRP, but today you can pick it up in a fetching white colourway for just £37 at Amazon UK. That’s by far the cheapest we’ve ever seen this model and a pretty much unbeatable bargain for a gaming headset of this quality.

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Kujlevka is a strange, clever game about an ageing village bureaucrat already troubled by political upheaval and dreams about death and trauma, suddenly given responsibility for communicating with and controlling access to what appears to be humanity’s first contact with an alien intelligence.

All those themes suggest a heavy, self-serious game. But Kujlevka’s great strength is its levity. While not particularly funny, its consistent wry humour perfectly counterbalances all the talk of political chaos, existential futility, and petty greed. Its opening should have been a clue, really, considering you hang out with skeletons while drinking and commenting on the food on a train in outer space.

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Of the various corporatised fictional universes out there, Star Wars is the one I’m most emotionally invested in. But my affection for George Lucas’ brain-baby is less about the stories and characters, and more about the general vibe of the galaxy itself. I love its retro-futurist junkpunk style, the rusty spaceships, dusty planets, and fusty aliens. That’s why I’ve more fondness for games like Dark Forces and KotOR than any of the films or TV shows, as they let me poke around locations like Tatooine and Ord Mantell at my own pace.

Hence, the idea of being properly, immerse in Star Wars, to be physically surrounded by it and able to touch it, is probably my ultimate VR fantasy. Sod the imaginatively inert virtual spaces of Horizon Worlds, if Mark Zuckerberg really wanted to sell the Metaverse to me, he’d build the whole thing out in Mos Eisely chic, and let me run my own virtual cantina selling NFT space-drinks to legless bounty hunters and idiot Web3 prospectors.

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