Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

In first-person stealth game Skin Deep you are a “deep freeze insurance commando” who gets defrosted whenever pirates board the space vessel you’re aboard. The ships you work are crewed by talking house cats with big personalities and a poor track record in information security. It’s your job, when things go wrong, to save them from their captors. We’ve seen a couple of trailers for this sci-fi Die Hard homage before but now we have a full demo to blast through, in which you can throw fishbones at elevator switches and overflow an entire laundry room with soap suds, useful if you want your enemies slip up and donk their heads. Just be careful, because it’ll do the same to you. The demo takes about 90 minutes (if you’re taking your time like me), but it already feels like Blendo Games at their most playful.

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Warner Bros are closing three video game development studios as they seek “to get back to a ‘fewer but bigger franchises’ strategy”, according to a leaked staff memo from Warner Bros head of games and streaming JB Perrette. The three studios in question are MultiVersus developer Player First Games, free-to-play specialists Warner Bros Games San Diego, and Monolith, the 30-year-old studio behind No One Lives Forever, F.E.A.R., Condemned: Criminal Origins, Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, and a troubled forthcoming Wonder Woman adaptation that has now been cancelled.

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World Of Warcraft‘s Undermine(d) update launches tomorrow, 26th February 2025, as part of the long-hauling MMO’s War Within expansion. It adds a whirring underground goblin city complete with nickel-plated palm trees and quarrelsome cartels, a new raid, a new four-boss dungeon, a PvP arena and a host of smaller, systemic adjustments. I do not play a lot of World Of Warcraft, so when Blizzard came knocking about an interview, my reaction was a blend of being caught dozing off in history class and being casually asked to defuse a bomb. But Undermine(d) does harbour at least one addition that an Azeroth tourist like myself can understand: cars.

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Silent Hill 2 remake wranglers Bloober Team have emerged from the newly high-resolution, volumetric fog to threaten us with the prospect of another “game based on Konami’s IP”. Thank heavens, I was beginning to think we’d never get a new Frogger. Whatever the project is, we won’t hear about it for a while.

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A question, readers. What sounds more fun: doddering about on your own two feet – like an idiot – or storming through deserts on a cannon-packing megacrab? I only make such a clearly self-answering inquiry because for some reason DuneCrawl, or at least the Steam Next Fest demo that shows off its isometric action, seems to think both sides have valid points.

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My lunch yesterday consisted of air fried lumps of failed pizza dough from a disastrous first batch. One of my new year’s resolutions was to learn how to make flawless pizza. This might be against the spirit of asceticism these goals usually incorporate, but such puritan edicts have no place here. The platonically perfect slice, like hailstones battering the word ‘bum’ into soft cement, is a natural marvel impervious to notions of morality both spiritual and profane.

Would the dough have turned out better if I’d sought the help of Into The Restless Ruins’s harvest maiden, who grants the desires of those who petition her? Oh. Oh. The ‘harvest’ refers to slaughter, not grain. Should have guessed really.

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Two Point Museum is a game about how the crushing practicalities of life eventually force you to spend less and less time on the things you truly care about.

More specifically, it’s a game where I started every stage as an enthusiastic interior design sicko and gradually devolved into the sort of dispassionate bean counter who’d happily shove a snack machine next to a priceless prehistoric armadillo skeleton if it meant raking in a two percent bump to customer satisfaction. Feast on snacks, you swine. Feast so I may harvest your fulfilment to unlock a wall hanging that looks like melted cheese.

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In typical shinobi style, Assassin’s Creed Shadows has slipped through the cracks of physical and digital retail and sneakishly released itself a month ahead of schedule. The game is due to launch on 20th March, but people are already posting photographs of boxed copies, while others say they’ve managed to lift a code from the crevices of the PlayStation store.

Videos of the game have been popping up on Youtube like Ninja Whac-a-Moles, no sooner seen than shurikened by Ubisoft’s lawyers. Quite how all this has happened remains to be explained, but Ubisoft are naturally rather annoyed. They’ve put out statements asking people to avoid sharing spoilers, plus the boilerplate cautionary note that any footage you encounter isn’t representative of the quality of the final game.

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Sorcerous cardgame Balatro and slot machine RPG Luck Be A Landlord have been reclassified as fit for people aged 12 years and over by the Pan European Games Information board, after they were initially slapped with an 18 rating for “glamorising… the simulation of gambling”.

PEGI have made the change following a successful appeal against the 18 rating by Balatro’s European publisher Sold Out and Luck Be A Landlord’s Switch publisher Fangamer. They’re also going to develop “a more granular set of classification criteria” for games that reference gambling, to distinguish jingling parodies of rentier capitalism from the one arm bandits found in actual casinos.

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I like to think that, having been supplanted by autoshooters and twig-picking survival games as the Steam Next Fest genre du jour, 2D puzzle-platformers can circle back from ubiquity to becoming cool and clever again. In any event, I’ve definitely enjoyed As I Began To Dream, a charmingly hand-drawn side-scroller that delivers its puzzles with a tactile clickiness straight out of your childhood toolbox. The demo is out now.

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