Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I miss the height of Wordle mania not because of the game itself, which I still play on occasion, but because of the torrent of delightful, experimental browser-based puzzle games that followed in its wake. Worldle, Octordle, Moviedle, Waffle, Who Are Ya?, Cloudle and many, many more were a gold rush of bandwagon jumpers I was fully onboard with.

Scrambled Maps takes me back to those good old days. It bears little relation to Wordle, but it is a browser-based puzzle game that offers one new challenge each day, and it is just as delightful a distraction.

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“Turn-based” games are, as we know, all derived from Turn, the strategy game about a dog digging for coins released for the BBC Micro in 1987. Prior to this, all actions in games simply took place simultaenously, as fast as the player or players could make them.

Fast forward to today and many games are now “turn-based”, from Tactics Ogre Reborn to Age Of Wonders 4 to chess. In celebration of their orderliness, Steam is currently running a turn-based RPG fest featuring discounts and demos for “turn-based games where you grow stronger with every battle”.

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Yesterday, Valve dropped a Steam client beta update focused largely on Game Recording – the beta version’s recently added clip-capturing utility. It’s a pretty wide-spanning array of improvements, adding support for ultrawide monitor resolutions up to 32:9, the high-quality H.265 (HEVC) video codec – on Windows only for now, apologies to the Steam Deck – and the option to “record a specified game indefinitely with no specified time limit.”

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Out 17th October on Steam, Mask Quest is a platform game in which you hold and release a button to refill your character’s lungs while dodging police batons, bullets, gas grenades and drones. Neglect to do so, and you’ll pop your clogs. It’s the kind of mechanical tomfoolery you’d associate with Peter Molydeux, but in this case, it’s all the fine work of Stephen’s Sausage Roll developer increpare and Quadrant developer undef. The developers have somehow gotten 50 levels out of this meme-ish premise, and it looks like quite an elaborate hop-and-bopper with some less-cheerful political overtones. Here’s the trailer.

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As I type these words, specialist wifeguy assessor Brendy is rambling through the fog of Bloober’s Silent Hill 2 remake. Knowing Brendy, he’ll be sauntering down Neely Street like a gentleman dandy from 1920s Oxford, throwing out his cuffs and elbows and winking merrily at all the shambling depression metaphors who are trying to chew his legs off. While we await his verdict, here’s another excerpt from a chat with Bloober earlier this summer, in which I pop the extremely imaginative question of what they’ll do after remaking Silent Hill 2. The answer, in brief, is more games with a manual third-person view that rely on ambience, suspense and the thrill of the unknown, rather than monsters going “boo!”

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Edwin and I have a sort of running ‘joke’, in that whenever we’ve got him down to review something, the game gets delayed. Sometimes, it gets delayed multiple times. We’ve taken to calling it “The Curse”, such is its power to utterly obliterate video game development, by virtue of it being a phantom that floats into PC vents and fries motherboards. I think the curse has evolved then, as we hadn’t even discussed 11 bit’s upcoming third-person management adventure The Alters… but Edwin had played it at this year’s Geoffcom. And yes, it has been delayed.

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Whenever I read the words “The Rocky Horror Show”, I am swept into a time warp back to the fan screening I attended in 2005. Most of the audience for that screening rocked up fully equipped with suspenders, feather boas, extravagant lipstick, and a cherished selection of deliberately unfunny heckler’s lines to deploy at key moments in the movie.

Have you not seen the Rocky Horror Show? It’s a wildly camp musical and B-movie homage for stage and screen, in which two homely, heteronormative Americans seek shelter in a castle run by Tim Curry’s high-kicking mad scientist Dr Frank-N-Furter. I can’t speak for how well it has aged, but it was a hit work of sexual counterculture in the 1970s, and is absolutely Curry’s finest hour outside of Command And Conquer.

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Any plans for the weekend, Star Citizen developer? Had a dog walk planned, did you? Nice little roast dinner? With the gravy? Spoon of mint sauce on the lamb, eh? Bit of pudding afterwards? Lovely little slice of pud? Lol. Lmao. No you didn’t. You absolutely did not, says Cloud Imperium. According to internal memos obtained by Insider Gaming, the Manchester (game?) studio have mandated its workers to pull two seven day weeks in the leadup to Citizencon on October 19th.

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Where’s your asthma inhaler? Is it in your hand? Good, because you need it to stay alive in this horror game about getting stalked through metro stations by a tall creep that nobody else on the platform can perceive. Crowded Followed is basically a playable It Follows, the 2014 horror movie and overt metaphor for sexually transmitted disease. Only this time the slow but unstoppable entity is following you because you picked up a mysterious briefcase from a dying man in an alleyway. I thought I told you to stop accepting random bloodsoaked objects from strange men? Quit it! Anyway, there’s a demo for it on Steam if you like.

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One blemish on Throne and Liberty’s barnstorming release – one day in and it’s so far up the Steam charts it’s only visible by telescope – has been some unexpected Steam Deck trouble. Despite the fantasy MMORPG having worked fine on the Deck in previous betas, a celebrating Amazon employee must have drunkenly nudged the ‘Break game on Linux’ lever at the office launch party, as reports began trickling in of handheld players being kicked from servers. The cause: Easy Anti-Cheat, Throne and Liberty’s hacker thwarter of choice, declaring an error.

Fortunately, as of right now (October 2nd), all seems well again – I’ve got Throne and Liberty running on a Steam Deck OLED as I type this, and can mosey around next to fellow online players without issues. A lot of them are turning into wolves. Most of them, in fact. Maybe too many.

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