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Looking for a new gaming monitor? I don’t mean to tempt you, but this is one hell of a deal. Beating its most recent Black Friday pricing ($1179) by over $200, the Samsung 49″ Odyssey G93SC Series OLED Curved Gaming Monitor is now down to $949 at Amazon. That’s $650 off its original list price, and one of the best deals of the year so far.
Cast your mind back ten years. Done? Good, you survived the hideous form of time travel known as long-term memory. Now, do you see a horrendous first-person shooter anywhere back there, full of memes and intentionally terrible font choices? Congratulations, you may have remembered 420BlazeIt, a freakish eyesore of a game developed during a 7-day game jam by one of the people behind Crossy Road, of all things. It briefly did the YouTuber rounds, back when YouTube was not yet the anxiety-inducing ad factory it is today.
Now I’m going to ask you to come back to the present. But prepare for a bit of a shock – there’s a sequel coming to that bong huffing shooter. 420BlazeIt 2 has been announced for some months, but now there’s a demo you can play too.
Neva is the Sophomore effort from Nomada Studio, who you may remember from their beautiful, dreamy platformer Gris. Neva is not a literal sequel to Gris, but it certainly seems to be one in a spiritual sense, as it, too, is a floaty hand-illustrated platformer fond of metaphor. Neva introduces some drama, with combat and a health system (if not actual stakes because of near-instant restarts), and although neither the platforming nor combat are precise enough to be neat bedfellows, I think we should be willing to forgive most of the mess.
Credit where it’s due to Silent Sadie, whose Steam Next Fest demo is out now: even within the confines of a 2.5D platformer, I don’t think it could lean any harder into its love of pratfallin’, piano-tinklin’ 1920s comedy cinema.
One of the most important lessons in skiing is, presumably, to look where you’re going. You wouldn’t want to ski with your eyes closed or while viewing yourself from a drone pointed back at the mountain from above. That’d be daft.
Or maybe not. Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders is the frosty followup to the mountain biking original, Lonely Mountains: Downhill, and like its predecessor it’s about going fast while barely able to see what’s coming. Yet also like its predecessor, initial frustrations melted away until I was eagerly hitting the slopes in the Snow Riders demo for just one more quick go.
Normal games for normal people, that’s what everyone loves. Cosy experiences where nothing goes wrong and you have absolutely zero things to investigate and no otherworldly mysteries to worry about. It may shock you to learn that we were recently duped by “normal” gardening sim Grunn, which was not normal at all. But don’t worry, it won’t happen again. Today we bring you the ordinary and not-one-bit-suspicious Trip, which sees players wandering from carriage to carriage, chatting pleasantly with passengers during a long train journey. How long? Let me look at the timetable here, let’s see… “Forever,” it says. Hm. Must be a misprint.
Write travel journalism to imaginary places, my spaghetti once spelled out. Do package holidays count? In Nahantu’s jungles, I linger to take shots of vines spilling from verdigris-kissed cages, of footfall-slicked stone paths and mesoamerican mosaics. Even Vessel Of Hatred’s malignancy feels like a grimly gorgeous tourist trap. Trip Advisor-recommended cyclopean polyps. TikTok viral demonic cysts. I’ve even got a leopard cub to pose with. He’s not sedated, promise. He’s just like that. I told him how much the ultimate edition costs and he’s been catatonic ever since.
I’d like to stick around, but I keep getting ushered along to the next leg of the tour. There are mobs to pop into goo like ripe spots, each fight as slick and frictionless as a pygmy hippo in a butter bath. There are a dozen different tiered resources and event types designed to make repetition feel like progress, until hell freezes over then melts again. It’s fine, Blizzard packed me some wellies. It’s all so comfortable I suspect they’d have thrown in some Xanax and a back rub if they could.
I loved the original Until Dawn – a spruced-up horror take on those old FMV adventure games, with just the right mix of B-movie self awareness and creature feature scares. I was very close to buying the recent remake, actually, until I watched the extended prank scene online and realized, oh no, they’re taking themselves seriously now. They prestige-ified it. It insisted upon itself, Louis, so I didn’t bother. I still wouldn’t say no to a sequel though, and based on a couple of (admittedly vague) hints from two of the game’s actors, one might already be in the works.
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! I need to start getting a ‘Gene Wolfe referenced’ reaction image for these things, I swear – although this reference is at least hidden behind a couple of links. Which links? That’d be spoiling the layered environmental storytelling that keeps you coming back. This week, it’s Senior Technical Narrative Designer at Remedy, previously of Fullbright, Bioshock 2, and Where The Water Tastes Like Wine fame, Johnnemann Nordhagen! Cheers Johnnemann! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?
It’s not far away, you know. The promised land of never having to experience a game the way it was intended again. That long sought after holy grail of sticking your fingers in your ears and going wahwahwah. But it’s not going to be something created by people with talent, vision, expertise, drive, a dream, or a story in their hearts. No, as with everything in our imminent future, it will be achieved by putting a bucket over your head.
