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Alice Bee (RPS in peace) covered the announcement for Forgotlings back in 2003. It’s a metroidvania by ThroughLine Games, them behind Forgotton Anne – one of my favourites from 2018. Forgotlings, however, managed to completely slip by me until I recently noticed it had a Steam demo. This is such good news I’ve basically forgiven them for doubling down on the funky spelling.
I had trouble sleeping last night, due to a combination of press trip excitement, chugging too many complimentary coffees, and my hotel room being opposite a strange, insistently symmetrical building that reared over my dreams like Sauron’s penthouse. So to settle my nerves, I got up and played a game about being a horrible tree. Just the worst tree. A total shit of a tree. That game was Roots Devour – and great news, if you’re having trouble sleeping you can play it too, for there is a demo in the wilds.
Watch out for that falling breezeblock! It’s about to– ah, too late, you’ve been donked. A clip of loud wreckage, gunfire, and bazooka’d buildings has fallen dustily into our lap via a promotional video for Battlefield 6 (or whatever the developers plan to call the next of these large-scale first-person shooters). Mostly, it’s a lot of producers talking a big game about “levelling up” the “core experience”, which seems to remain blasting a building you don’t like with a rocket-propelled grenade. We can tell from the final 10 seconds of the video, which show some of the game’s actual running and/or gunning.
Once upon a time, Alice B (RPS in peace) was frustrated that the villagers in Early Access medieval townbuilder Foundation would not eat their bread and were furiously starving. Then it turned out Alice was the one starving them. Hoho! Pure japes.
Five years later, Foundation has just hit 1.0.
After several hours of battles, sieges, imprisonment and torture in Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, a groggy Henry of Skalitz is woken by a servant girl in a castle outside Kuttenberg. She greets him like a nobleman. I have Henry push back. He’s a blacksmith’s son. He might have some blue blood care of his biological father, but he grew up in the soot and clamour of the forge. The girl nervously insists, however: Henry must be from the upper crust, or he wouldn’t have been welcomed and feasted by the lord of the estate. He wouldn’t be lying in his very own chamber with its very own hole for shitting in – and in any case, it’s more than her job’s worth to treat him otherwise. In a timid, not quite spiteful show of reverse class policing, she refuses to end the dialogue until she’s dismissed in a manner befitting her station.
There was a moment in gaming history when it looked like all games would succumb to the dullest colours imaginable: brown and grey. Resident Evil 4, Fallout 3, Gears Of War – all bleary examples of a grubby visual style. This peaked in Clive Barker’s Jericho, a shooter so desaturated it felt like the colour settings on your monitor were banjaxed. I have heard this called “the piss filter” and generally lamented in industry circles. But it was always a puposeful choice, intended to add some grittiness to the world. And there’s at least one developer who is reviving “smeared dirt” as an art direction. As Time Surrenders is a very brown stealth game that takes a lot of inspiration from Metal Gear Solid V.
Friendly skateboarding game OlliOlli World and its rollerskating gun friend Rollerdrome have been delisted on Steam for unknown reasons. If you go to the store page for OlliOlli World, you’ll currently see the classic delisted message: “Notice: OlliOlli World is no longer available on the Steam store.” The same thing appears on the Rollerdrome page. No, we’re not sure why.
As rumoured, The Sims 1 and The Sims 2 have returned to (official) PC stores. Kindly Uncle EA has taken a break from his busy layoff schedule to rustle up a pair of Legacy collections that include a bunch of DLC. It’s the very first time the original Sims has graced a digital retail platform, I believe – it was first released in 2000, back when people used to access the internet using smoke signals and semaphore. Anyway, here’s the reveal trailer.
Warner Bros’ licensed free-to-play fighting game MultiVersus – aka, the one where Velma Dinkley and Arya Stark can team up to kick Superman’s face in – will no longer be playable online as of 30th May. It’ll be pulled from Steam, the Epic Games Store and the PlayStation and Xbox stores at the end of its next season, though you’ll still be able to get your fill of Bugs Bunny bashing offline against either friends or bots.
The creator of frying pan simulator Arctic Eggs is working on a fishing game that I am certain will replicate the act of angling in an entirely ordinary and accurate fashion. Its approach to hooks, lines, and sinkers will combine the fishing from Animal Crossing, Sega Bass Fishing, and Webfishing, says developer The Water Museum in a post on Bluesky. It may have a splash of Dredge when it comes to inventory management too. Oh, also, a strange man might imply you are “disappointing someone”. Nothing to worry about. And the ocean may or may not turn completely red. These decisions have not been finalised. Everything is okay. It is possible the fish are safe to eat.
