Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Albatroz is a “backpacking adventure RPG” that takes place in The Forbidden Lands, a photogenic wilderness “where two worlds converge”. You are jaded city worker Isla, and you are here to search for your missing brother, who was himself searching for the mystical mountain of Albatroz – locally known as “the walking mountain”, for reasons that you will never guess. There’s no combat, and no enemies that I can see – instead, you’ll occupy yourself with equipment management, repairing your dinky car, and improving your hiking skills using points earned by doing favours for villagers along the way.

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YouTube is a stocked repository of hours upon hours of Elden Ring lore. Ranni’s ending? No worries. Miquella and St. Trina? We got you. Mohg and the Formless Mother? Say no more. Turtle Pope? Sit back. The frenzied flame? Make yourself comfortable. The Elden Ring itself? One page is not enough to contain it all.

And yet, what use are any of you when I cannot find a single solitary lore snippet about these idiot worms?

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When the ageing, silent character you play in puzzle adventure Selfloss performs a roll, it is a tumble of such poignant melancholy I spent the first five minutes of my time with its Steam demo just keeling about in the starting area. It’s a ponderous, pained roll, creaky and ancient. If it has i-frames, the ‘i’ stands for “I would like to not do that again for at least five minutes, please.” Each time you roll, or sprint, your character wipes beads of sweat from his brow, and you can tell the exertion is genuinely taxing. My man is exhausted. Also, surrounded by fish, both symbolic and literal.

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I mentioned it briefly in my Shadow Of The Erdtree review, but there’s one area of the DLC where your steed Torrent is so scared they refuse to be summoned. That’s because said area is a woodland that’s been steeped in shadow and chaos for so long, large goats don’t dare clop their hooves. What I hadn’t expected was that relying on my own two trotters would be so… revelatory. It’s made me reconsider exploration in Elden Ring’s open world, and conclude that using Torrent as a taxi service contributes to a feeling of disconnection.

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You will be able to arrogantly ignore the advice of your wife and councillors in whole new ways in Crusader Kings 3, thanks to a small but mighty update to the game’s message settings. Players are due to be given much more granular control over what scrolls and missives appear on their troubled monarch’s war table, thanks to the free update that will accompany the Roads To Power DLC. Paradox talk about this and other upcoming changes (including a new start date) in an update post on Steam. Some rulers among you will be excited by all the Byzantine bureaucracy that will headline the DLC. But real kings care about filtering information in extremely picky detail. Still don’t know why this is big Crusader Kings news? Come with me, you insolent wretch.

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From ShadowPlay to OBS, there’s no shortage of tools and apps that can record and share your finest gaming moments and/or hilarious failures. No matter to Valve, who’ve updated the Steam beta client with a replay system of their own.

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Dragon Age: The Veilguard consultant and former Dragon Age executive producer Mark Darrah has published a Youtube video addressing the question: “why do AAA games take so long?” It’s a tidy 25 minutes or so, and gets a fair way into the weeds of a variety of topics, from the current enthusiasm for live service “forever games” over ‘finite’, narrative-led affairs, to the “misleading” announcement of highly-demanded sequels years before they enter full production, in order to pump up a publisher’s brand during a dry spell.

One thing I wanted to fish out and drop on your plate is Darrah’s discussion of what he terms “the fidelity death cult” – that is, the desire for ever greater levels of lifelike visual detail and “intricacy”.

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We’re only a couple of days away from the early access launch of Dawntrail, Final Fantasy XIV’s latest expansion and first in over two years since the climactic Endwalker. As the summery story expansion prepares to drop, Square Enix have run down everything else arriving in the MMO’s 7.0 patch, which notably includes its long-awaited graphical overhaul along with several other nice-to-have improvements whether you’re playing Dawntrail or not.

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The thing everybody forgets about Sisyphus is that he was an absolutely awful bastard who deserved everything he got. Prior to being the guy who has to push a boulder up a hill for all eternity, Sisyphus was a crafty Ephyran tyrant who used to murder his guests for kicks, and who once fathered children with his own niece in a bid to depose his own brother. Charming! The Ancient Greek gods were outraged both by the king’s violation of the norms of hospitality, and by his general insistence on being too clever by half – and I feel a similar way reading the Xitter feed of Bashir “ManliestDev” Kashalo, who is making a game in which you play as Sisyphus after his eventual demotion to the rank of the underworld’s chief rock-pusher.

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The internet doesn’t exist in the world depicted by the film Aliens, though variations of it crop up in the expanded universe. Nor does the idea of a digital society. There’s networked communications tech, but it consists of signals between bodies in deepest space, light years apart, of lonely video terminals in cramped dockloader apartments, and of maniacally collaged CCTV feeds of Marines getting their asses kicked, man. There’s no ocean of online interactions, corroding the everyday from all directions, just 1-to-1s through boxy, retro-futurist screens that are so dingy and inadequate it feels like Ripley and Burke are peering at each other through a letterbox. Small wonder, given that Aliens was released in 1986, when what would become the internet was still mostly the province of universities and the military.

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