The dwarven engineers of The Lord Of The Rings: Return To Moria have formally entered the Golden Age of Steam. The game is now available on Valve’s digital storefront, after a year in the comparatively barren underdark of the Epic Games Store, and developers Free Range Games have also released a Golden Update, which adds offline single player pausing, around 100 building objects, and a sandbox mode allowing for non-story-led excavation and settlement of the game’s procedurally generated mountains. Plus, new hats and axes! Try not to get dragon sickness.
The slugcat of Rain World is a distinct little character. He flops around, squeezing through narrow tunnels with a movement that’s both cute and mildly gross. When he is eaten by a passing disco lizard or ravenous skull-faced vulture, it is because he is basically a delicious Squirmle existing in a horrifying cryptozoological ecosystem. He is, however, never stepped upon by a mech with a missile launcher. He is never given a shotgun and tasked with shooting the other animals. Yet that basically seems to be the elevator pitch for Uruc, a sci-fi metroidvania set in a distant future where strange life battles mechanical monstrosities.
This morning I left my torpid flat in search of coffee, sniffed the restive wind, noted with approval the gloom gathering beneath the trees, and thought: at last, summer is over. At last, we quit the disgusting sunlit months. At last we leave all that is green and good behind, and return to the time of monsters.
Supermassive Games and Behaviour Interactive must have gotten the memo too. They’ve just released a demo for their next horror game The Casting Of Frank Stone, in which you are a policeman, Sam Green, who is investigating the disappearance of a child. The search leads you to Cedar Hills Steel Mill, “where chilling secrets await, revealing a far more sinister truth than anyone could have anticipated”. I am anticipating: QTEs during escape sequences, branching choices that get people killed, and General Mature Content appropriate to the coming of Halloween.
Almost a decade after his acrimonious departure from Konami, the shadow of Hideo Kojima still looms over Metal Gear Solid. He’s there, barely camouflaged, in the undergrowth of Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater – a remake of the fifth MGS game, originally released in 2004, which tells the tale of a lone US special operator hunting superweapons and old mentors in the jungles of the southern Soviet Union.
I say “remake” but this feels more like a re-release, in spirit. True, it now runs on Unreal Engine, with the option of a manual, third-person perspective and cover-shooter controls in addition to the old top-down viewpoints. Yes, it boasts new flourishes, such as wounds now leaving scars, and clothes picking up stray leaves. Yes, there’s a new interface with floating in-world menus, which makes shuffling between the layers a bit less awkward. It’s the product of much labour, with development split between Konami and external support partner Virtuos. But where Konami’s other big restoration project, Bloober’s Silent Hill 2 remake, is a creative dialogue with the original game, Delta seems consumed by faithfulness to Kojima’s original design.
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! As is customary, I must jam my new cat into every article. I’ve tried to offer her several books, but she’s failed to turn even a single page so far. What a big dumbo. The best dumbo. The sweetest, smartest dumbo in the world, yes she is. Ahem. This week, it’s Supermassive, Niantic, and Sensible Object narrative designer and Limit Break mentor, Anastasia Dukakis! Cheers Ana! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?
Stranger Video is a website that wants access to your webcam. Grant it and it will show you a close-up of your own face, the background around you cropped out. Close your eyes to tell it you’re ready, and open them again when you hear a chime. It’ll now connect you to a stranger doing the same thing: first person to blink loses.
If you like jumping on enveloping pixelly architecture while basking in an atmosphere of pathological sadness, set aside some time on 20th September, because that’s when Rubeki’s first-person spelunker Lorn’s Lure launches on Steam. Ah, I’ve been waiting a while for this one. Catch a new trailer below.
Everything I know about the French Revolution has hitherto come from two literary works: Hilary Mantel’s excellent doorstopper A Place Of Greater Safety, and Kate Beaton’s webcomics. Neither Mantel nor Beaton mention mechs, which are a core feature of Studio Imugi’s new “ideology driven” turn-based strategy game Bonaparte: A Mechanized Revolution. I, for one, feel like I’ve been grossly ill-informed. Kate, Hilary – I’ve been quoting you for years at parties and it seems like all this time, people have been silently judging me for my ignorance of the role giant clockwork soldiers played in the fall of the Bastille.
Take the ballroom scene from Disney’s Beauty And The Beast, swap the wailing utensils for an army of chibi cats, endow Belle with low-key Doctor Manhattan-grade powers of matter transformation, and you’re perhaps beginning to approximate the experience of Infinity Nikki – an open world dress-up adventure from Singapore-based Infold and former Legend of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild developer Kentaro Tominaga.
Trailered this week at Gamescom 2024, it’s the fifth installment in the hitherto mobile-focussed Nikki series and it’s seemingly going down a storm, with over 12 million pre-registrations so far (albeit, many of them motivated by the prospect of collectively unlocked in-game bonuses). It’s also a free-to-play game, and I have the usual unanswered questions about currencies and gacha, but I’m willing to give it the benefit of the doubt for the minute, because I have not spent nearly enough of my life considering the tactical applications of ballgowns. Here’s that trailer.
A few months back, I enjoyed lurking a conversation on the RPS Discord about the proliferation of cyberpunk/steampunk/atompunk/what-have-you-punk variants and how most of them in fact lack the rebelliousness and counter-counter elements that punk actually entails. That discussion was back on my mind as I sat down to play Reignbreaker, a new action-roguelike from Studio Fizbin, at Gamescom 2024 – slightly wary of its self-described medievalpunk styling. However! Turns out you’re trying to kill the queen. Yep, that’s, uh, that’s pretty punk.
