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When I think of quintessentially British games, a few highlights come to mind. Fable‘s fairytale world of stocky goblins and poverty-stricken orphans with Victorian-era voices is definitely very British, as is Banjo-Kazooie’s dry wit and sarcasm. A decent bucket of contenders, but the crown has to go to the Greggs Simulator, a free shop sim that tasks you with managing a Greggs pasty shop that’s a staple of every UK high street.
Wonky launch woes aside, The Last Of Us Part 1’s PC release is a net positive. A new audience can now experience one of PlayStation’s best exclusives, but even better, modders can get their hands on Joel and Ellie’s trek, rejigging a familiar story in new ways. There aren’t too many exciting ones available to download just yet, but one “in-progress” mod reimagines the game in first-person, and it’s stunning.
Fans have likely spent endless seasons in the comfort of Stardew Valley, and now the chill life sim is getting even bigger. Stardew Valley’s creator Eric Barone (otherwise known as ConcernedApe) is “taking a break” from working on his highly-anticipated Haunted Chocolatier. Barone will instead work on Stardew Valley’s upcoming 1.6 update, which focuses on improvements for modders, alongside some new content as well.
For hardware that’s all about searing speed, advances in SSD tech can be a Beckettian waiting game. Microsoft’s DirectStorage has only so far only found support in the ho-hum Forspoken, and PCIe 5.0 SSDs still aren’t widely available despite the first compatible CPUs and motherboards launching in 2021.
However, the latter are coming soon, and I’ve been testing out an engineering sample of the Crucial T700 to see how PCIe 5.0 – also known as PCIe Gen5 – drives could perform in an honest-to-goodness gaming PC. The short version: with maximum read and write speeds that tower over the current generation’s best SSDs, albeit with less impact on game load times than such explosive pace would suggest.
Publisher Nexon have filed a lawsuit against Ironmace Games, the developers behind the multiplayer looter Dark And Darker, accusing the studio and two individual developers of copyright infringement. The two Korean companies recently went public with their dispute, but now their beef has extended to the US legal system where Nexon is demanding a trial by jury.
Shardpunk: Verminfall smooshes together a bunch of different ideas you’ll have seen before. It’s got turn-based tactical combat against rats with magic rifles in a steampunk world already in ruins. It’s got the need to keep on moving, lest an approaching rat horde overwhelm you. It’s got bunkers in which your party rests, de-stresses, and tools up before moving on.
Kind of a Fallouty, XCOMy, FTLy, Vermintidey mix, then – which together seems very cool. It’s out now, and there’s a demo.
Occasionally I wonder if the market for wholesome town builders has reached saturation, but then a trailer pops up for another one and I’m never less than intrigued. The latest is Fabledom, which promises the pastoral fields and castle wall construction I adore, then adds a twist by being set within a fairytale kingdom. It’s in early access now.
If you’re starting playing Ghostwire: Tokyo after it came to Game Pass this week, I have a hot tip for you: prioritise upgrading movement abilities. The freedom to glide from rooftop to rooftop over haunted Tokyo will bring you so much more joy than any incremental damage upgrade. That’s the most important thing I have to say, that it makes for good virtuatourism.
Oh, and I suppose a free content arrived this week too, adding new side-missions, handy new combat abilities, and a new “rogue-lite” mode. The update, uh, apparently also added Denuvo, over a year after the game launched? Cool, cool.
I’d planned on starting with a line about how Loretta is an exception to how psychological horror games are about trudging around an abandoned mental hospital with the worst torch in the world until the girl from Ringu menaces you. It was already interesting and good enough pretty much right away to earn a recommendation, but after one of what will definitely be several playthroughs, leaving my praise that faint would do it a terrible injustice.
Loretta is goddamn excellent by any standard. Where other games use the mentally unwell narrator to explain everything away with “turns out you’re secretly crazy”, it’s instead just one layer of a complex horror mystery with splashes of drama and noir, whose surprises I’m straining not to spoil.
I’m always up for trying new and odd foods. I mean, I barbecued some womb in a restaurant in Japan recently, and I can confirm that it was like calamari but tougher, and, largely, a lot worse. So, that’s why the idea of Pringles releasing a limited-edition Minecraft Suspicious Stew flavour intrigues me! I would like to give it a go and see if it’s actually quite nice or makes me barf.
