Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Mandragora: Whispers Of The Witch Tree is a 2.5D Soulsvania from Primal Game Studio, in which you electrify, bisect or incinerate handsome, ravening night creatures in a world of heaped skulls and burning spires. Yes, I’m well aware that “2.5D” and “Soulsvania” are nonsense words, woven by pestilent market forces. Samuel Johnson is turning in his grave, I expect. He has risen from his grave and equipped himself with an ironbound dictionary and is even now making his way through the layers of the English language, hellbent on slaughtering every ‘vania yet coined.

But never mind Samuel. Oversized rodents and spiders aside, Mandragora is notable for being written by Brian Mitsoda, writer of the original Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines and the former narrative lead for its sequel at Hardsuit Labs, which lives on in the hands of The Chinese Room. Primal have just announced a release date – 17th April. Here’s a trailer.

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Don’t get too comfortable. As an RPG that puts you in the synthetic boots of an escaped robo-person, Citizen Sleeper 2 often has you on the run. It’s a crunchy, dicey machine of vibrant world-building that sometimes forgets itself in wandering prose. A compelling universe to sail through, with more habitats and hovels than its predecessor, more stations and stellar gateways. It can’t – for me – escape the dense gravity of the first game’s compact storytelling and novel character building, no matter how often it funnels you from one space caper to the next. But it has a good time trying.

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Bioware released a statement yesterday. It talked of “turning towards the future”. It dreamed of “a more agile, focused studio”. Nowhere in the post did the word “layoffs” appear. But this is what the post was actually about. The closest it got to addressing the facts of what happened to an unspecified number of workers is the phrase: “we don’t require support from the full studio.”

It’s one of the most disingenuous announcements of job cuts in a recent and plentiful history of job cuts. A weirdly impressive feat from BioWare, considering the last two or three years have seen some spectacular verbal gymnastics from games companies when it comes to shitcanning people. Let’s take a look at some of our “favourite” mealy-mouthed press releases in which people have their jobs poetically “sunsetted” rather than, say, dropkicked out the window.

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The last Minesweeperalike I wrote up was a sparkling slurry of mind-altering pop-ups and resinous AI cleavage. It was David Cronenberg’s Minesweeper: The Substance Edition, and I was sincerely worried that I’d put you all off Minesweeper for life. But before you mop your last munition and turn in your index finger for good, give Dragonsweeper a try. It’s Minesweeper with an altogether less atrocious twist which you can hopefully deduce from the name.

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The layoff train has come for BioWare. A number of Dragon Age: The Veilguard staff are leaving the celebrated RPG company in the course of plans to become “a more agile, focused studio”, as BioWare move ahead with the next Mass Effect game. Posting on Bluesky, senior systems designer Michelle Flamm, producer Jen Cheverie, editor Karin West-Weekes, lead writer Trick Weekes and narrative designer Ryan Cormier have all announced that they’re looking for work.

All of which feels like it warrants a mention in general manager George McKay’s recent blog about BioWare’s future, but he comments only that they’re “taking the opportunity to reimagine” how BioWare operate between projects, and “have worked diligently over the past few months to match many of our colleagues with other teams at EA that had open roles that were a strong fit.” Which is a very slippery way to say that you’re making a load of people redundant.

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Mere hours before it’s January 30th release – wait, that’s today! – Sony have finally spilled the beans on system requirements for Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, as well as the eye-blistering, GPU-rending special features that more powerful rigs can support. Happily, all these ray tracing and frame generation accoutrements seemingly won’t preclude Spidey 2 from working on older, slower PCs as well, as the minimum specs are surprisingly reasonable.

Granted, they’re only rated for 30fps at a lowly 720p, and you’ll still need to find a honking 140GB of SSD space, but the basic GPU and CPU requirements aren’t too lofty at all. The likes of an RTX 3060 for 60fps/1080p are quite reasonable as well, though you’re staring down the barrel of Nvidia’s pricey RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 cards for high-rez ray tracing.

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It’s easy to feel pride when you’re flying through space at 1000 metres per second. “Look at my spaceship go,” you say to yourself, “look how fast it crashes into that other, smaller ship.” Building your own galactic snowpiercer from scratch in Space Engineers 2 will bring a smile to anyone who once revelled in clicking together Lego podracers and bashing them into one another on the living room carpet with a violence eight-year-olds should not yet have mental access to. That said, this is the precise extent of the things you can do in the game so far. Build ‘n’ crash. Every feature fits in this opening paragraph. There’s good reason to trust the developers’ ability to deliver the rest of this crafting and survival game. But right now, it’s all core, no loop.

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You’ll have to bear with me for this one, because the press release we received for Demeo X Dungeons & Dragons: Battlemarked contains about an 86/14 split between scrambled hypeguff and actual tangible information. In brief, it’s a VR collaboration between D&D traffickers Wizards Of The Coast and Demeo studio Resolution Games that aims to simulate a tactical co-op tabletop experience without any of the boring bits, like seeing your mates’ genuine reactions to things or having your frigid digitised soul warmed at the hearth of human kinship. Here is – in a sense of the word so loose I fear imminent smiting by a bellicose scribe god for typing it – a trailer:

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Has any genus of graphics card been as dramatically storied as the GeForce XX80s? The RTX 3080 was a thing of beauty, only to be tarnished by the worst wheeler-dealing spree (and crypto mining misappropriation) in PC component history. Then the RTX 4080 rocked up with its laughable £1269 / $1199 price tag, a miscalculation so severe that the RTX 4080 Super looked good – despite hardly being any faster – simply for not repeating it. For the new RTX 5080’s sake, you almost want it to be boring.

It isn’t. But then, neither is it a blood-boiler like the RTX 4080, nor a largely aspirational show-off piece like the RTX 5090. By maintaining the 4080 Super’s course correction on price while tooling up on compelling DLSS 4 improvements, the RTX 5080 is an agreeable GPU from the off. Particularly, if you’ve got the 4K monitor to take full advantage of it.

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Friend, I regret to inform you that ant nests are computers now. Which is to say, somebody’s finally made a video game version of Hex, the sentient glass hive from Terry Pratchett’s Unseen University. In spooky automation-driven strategy sim Microtopia, you manage a swarm of what could either be ants who’ve been to the ripperdoc, or PC components who’ve grown legs and antennae. Your goal is to expand an insect colony that is also a motherboard, where glittering pheromone trails double as silicon circuits.

The developers Cordyceps Collective have just announced a release date – February 18th – and what’s this, there’s a demo as well? Catch the trailer below.

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