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.
I can guarantee you that a zombie survival game called God Save Birmingham wasn’t on your “2024 Video Game Announcements” bingo card. It takes place in 14th century England, and tasks you with fending off the rampant zombie hordes of a populace who’ve succumbed to a mysterious case of reanimation. Perhaps the cause is that there’s no Maccies or TK Maxx at the local Bull Ring yet.
Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, Odyssey, and Origins all have one thing in common: they’ve got a Discovery mode, which replaces murdering with learning. You can, quite literally, go on tours curated by historians around each of the game’s respective maps. Instead of diving off a Sphinx and plunging your hidden blade into someone’s spinal column, you can look up at the Sphinx and read a paragraph on its significance. Maybe view an actual, real life bit of ancient Egypt from an actual real life museum collection in-game. Perhaps embody an Anglo-Saxon lad in Valhalla, instead, and like, cook up some nettle soup having just got a fresh “Friar Tuck” at the local hair choppers (no guarantees on this last bit).
This is all to say that Black Myth: Wukong deserves such a mode, too. There were so many times throughout my review time where I stopped and stared and wondered as to something’s meaning. Not only in the architecture, but in the characters, too. So here I am with a proposition: how about instead of thwacking things with my staff, I can use it as a walking stick and point it at things I want to learn about.
We haven’t written about Diplomacy Is Not An Option since it launched in Early Access in 2022, when it was a light and frothy strategy game about smashing thousands of peasants to bits with physics magic. It’s still that, but now it’s getting a 1.0 release on October 4th.
We’ve been distracted by Gamescom, several game releases, the rapid dwindling of the British summer. Or I assume we have, for why else would we not have yet posted about the Steam Rhythm Fest, which began on Monday and runs until August 26th at 10am PT/6pm BRDST*.
Ubisoft have announced Heroes of Might & Magic: Olden Era, a fresh instalment in the exceedingly olden turn-based strategyRPG series, which began life under New World Computing in 1984. The new game will “return to the world of Enroth and the origins of the legendary saga”, inviting “both veterans and new players” to go on a quest to Jadame, “a mysterious continent in turmoil”. Expect new factions, biomes and creatures, together with such M&M standbys as castle management, army clashes, hex-based maps, and, who knows, maybe some heroes.
It is perhaps deeply ungrateful of me that, when presented with the squirrel with a gun of Squirrel With A Gun, my immediate reaction is to thrust out my bowl like a ballsy victorian urchin and ask for additional squirrel information. It’s not that developer Dee Dee Creations haven’t shown off the game in action. It’s just that I find myself rooting so hard for this not to just be a vapid bit of meme-ware that I’m getting more concerned as we rapidly approach its 29th August release.
I shouldn’t be too surprised really. If a park sim based on Tim Burton’s 1996 B-Movie homage Mars Attacks wasn’t on my bingo card, it’s because I’ve recently binned it and replaced it with a bobble head that simply nods in amused acceptance at whatever videogames decide to do next. And conceptually, Jurassic World Evolution with captive humans instead of dinos isn’t not a potential winner, is it? Still, I was mildly bemused to learn that Mars Attracts, coming sometime next year, is the film’s first licensed game. But then I realised that I’d never thought to check before, which might go some way to explaining the lack of them. Do you reckon they did the pun then worked backwards from there? Respectable, honestly.
Earlier today, old man James wagged a finger at us all sternly for not writing about Atomfall before. My turn to puff out my cheeks and look not angry, just disappointed: why haven’t we covered The Stone Of Madness prior to the below Gamescom 2024 story trailer? I mean, it’s only a real-time tactical stealth game set in a cursed 18th century Jesuit monastery, developed by the people behind gorgeously gross metroidvaniaBlasphemous. It’s only got isometric art inspired by Goya and a sanity/trauma system redolent of Darkest Dungeon. Sounds like an automatic RPS write-up to me.
I’ve yet to discover a SteamWorld game I don’t like. Whether plundering the earth in SteamWorld Dig 2 or mucking about with magic in SteamWorld Quest, these are solid and approachable adventures that enthusiastically embrace whatever theme the developers have decided upon. Cowboys? Sure. Wizards? Why not. It barely matters, as long as it results in some good puns. As a studio, Thunderful have a reputation for hopping from one style of game to the next, boiling entire genres down to their essence, and reconstituting them with competence and style to exist within a now-familiar steampunk world of colourful pals and Saturday morning cartoon jokes. The studio is a perpetual notion machine. Yes, with SteamWorld Heist 2, they’re revisiting the sci-fi bullet-bouncing of their 2016 tactics game SteamWorld Heist, but they’re also introducing significant changes to create a compulsive XCOM-like full of sea-faring submariners that may be their best work yet, even against a back catalogue of blinders.
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