My Time At Sandrock’s multiplayer beta next week will be set in a simulation

Stardew Valley-like town simulator My Time At Sandrock is running its first open beta for multiplayer next week, allowing owners of the game to hop into a separate multiplayer area set in a “semi-fictional” version of Sandrock’s past that includes “compressed stories happening 50 years before single-player events”. A pseudo prequel is an interesting form for a multiplayer mode to take, especially considering this is the pseudo sequel to My Time At Portia.

The beta will run from January 12th – January 20th, after which any progress you’ve made will be wiped.

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Atomic Heart’s latest trailer shows off its ray-tracing chops

Atomic Heart seems chock-full of weird, mostly robotic things that want to kill you, and its latest trailer shows off all the ray-traced reflections and particle effects you can admire as they do so. We’ve seen a lot of this before, but it doesn’t half look pretty – and now at 4K, if you can handle that. I worry for my poor 1080p-tier GPU, though at least there’s also freshly-announced DLSS 3 support.

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EA corrupt 60% of Madden 23 saves for players who logged in during two days last week

Madden NFL 23 during at least a 22-hour period last week, there’s a good chance your Connected Franchise Mode saves have been permanently corrupted. If that wasn’t galling enough, the corrupting period (from Wednesday December 28th to Thursday 29th) came immediately after EA gave people the go ahead to log in.

EA have said they expect to recover 40% of the saves, the wallies.

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In my week off work, I made PowerWash Simulator my job instead

great plans for the games I was going to play over the Christmas break. Elden Ring! Tunic! Our game of the year Vampire Survivors! And I did try to play some of them, for a bit. Elden Ring and Tunic were both too hard for my state of mind, which was as robust as pink candyfloss. Even Vampire Survivors wigged me out because it’s so visually busy by the end game, and I was in a more “Ferrero Rocher and jigsaw of the London Underground map” sort of place. My downfall was seeing PowerWash Simulator on sale on Steam. I bought it, and then played it for 40 hours.

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