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If you miss Myst, but feel only vertigo and disgust for its recent 3D reinventions, you might find yourself salivating over first-person point-and-clicker Neyyah – a Mystalike or more precisely, Rivenalike from Defy Reality Entertainment and MicroProse, which has just been dated for early access release on 27th August. Real-time movement and exploration? Rotatable polygons? Pfff. These are firmly pre-rendered worlds, just like Grandpappy Atrus used to bake.
British comedy is too often defined by its relationship to America: either as merely irony and sarcasm, which we’re told Americans don’t understand, or as a sprightly ideas factory for works such as The Office, which Americans can bless by re-making at scale.
Peel back the curtains of American cultural hegemony however and you may find the true pulsing core of British comedy that lies beneath: innuendo. No American network is in a bidding war to import Vic and Bob or remake Bottom, and Carry On and Benny Hill are assumed to be anachronisms in our modern times, but Thank Goodness You’re Here! enters the conversation with a nudge and a wink. It’s a cheeky 2-3 hour adventure through a small northern town, and it’s here to educate the entire world of our nation’s obsession with sausages and bare bottoms.
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Edwin spotted this game called Beta Decay that’s not got a release date yet or anything, but looks very cool. It’s being developed by Rotoscope Studios and it’s a low-poly, 90s-inspired mix of dystopian RPG, survival, third and first-person shooter, with some roguelike bits slapped in there, as well. Whew, that’s a lot. Potentially too much. But hey, I am here for something ambitious and interesting, of which it ticks both boxes.
In Behaviour Interactive’s post-apocalyptic multiplayer FPS Meet Your Maker, you raise grim forts of rusty blocks, pop-out manglers and robot ambushers from the desert sands. Each base harbours a cannister of genetic material and other resources, and the idea is to fiendishly arrange traps and defences to stop people taking your precious genmat while doing your best to clean out their bases. Sound like good wholesome fun? You might want to check out the current free trial on Steam.
2024’s small but growing avalanche of games that trap you in a room with a nasty little freak continues with Arsonate, in which the nasty little freak wears a gasmask and wants to set you on fire. He wants to do this using cards. There are 47 of them – a forest of silhouettes, laid across the blood-stained table between you. Every turn, you flip a tree card to reveal a flame. When the flames spread to a player’s Tower card, it’s game over.
How do you like your survival games? A nice bit of wood chopping while the birds chirp? Gathering some mushrooms while you deflect a little goblin’s swings? Stumbling parched through a desert as a bed of scorpions prick your ankles with deadly venom? Well, Enshrouded may provide some or none of these experiences, but what its latest update does is capture their spirit. You’ll now be able to choose from several difficulty presets to dampen or spice up the game’s challenge. Otherwise, there’s new customisation options and some quality of life tweaks, too.
Overwatch 2 director Aaron Keller has posted a lengthy blog on Steam about the transition from 6v6 player matches in the first Overwatch to 5v5 in the poorly received free-to-play sequel. It’s a juicy read for armchair designers and lapsed Overwatchers like myself, packing in analysis of class roles and the shift from the free choice of heroes to single hero picks and enforced team compositions.
In broad strokes, Keller summarises how the Overwatch experience has drifted away from “player freedom and creativity in order to create a more balanced, consistent and competitive experience for players”. It’s possible, however, that Overwatch 2 will swing back in the other direction, as Blizzard are now “exploring how we can test different forms of 6v6 in the game to gauge the results”, with a view to restoring some of the joyful chaos that saw entire teams of Reinhardts charging the objective in formation.
A time capsule is a boxful of objects from today’s world, buried or otherwise hidden away so that people from the future can rediscover and understand current Hot Trends such as wearing mismatched socks or electing washed-up businessmen with fascist tendencies. Unless, that is, it’s a time capsule in sci-fi ocean survival game Subnautica, in which case it contains: THE FUTURE. Developers Unknown Worlds have been sneaking pictures of the forthcoming Subnautica 2 into the original game’s time capsules, offering glimpses of its flora and fauna.
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! Except, as reader’s of last week’s edition will know, this is a lie. There are no industry folks, cool or otherwise, in this week’s column. It is simply a placeholder – as voted for by you ravenous spine-fiends – while I take a break for the rest of July.
