Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I think It’s safe to say that Trigger Happy Interactive’s upcoming survival horror Total Chaos is a bit of a palette change from their last offering – the frenetic, neon-drenched, chainsaw-legged Turbo Overkill. Still, it’s not often we see psychological horror combined with ultraviolence, and anything that gives off even a whiff of Condemned: Criminal Origins has my attention.

Total Chaos started life as a popular Doom 2 mod, and while I dare the say the limitations of that game sell the atmosphere a little better than this much sleeker update, I certainly trust Trigger Happy enough to make the most of the new engine. The game is set in New Oasis, a “once bustling haven for coal miners” that is now most definitely not bustling, nor haven-like.

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Dogubomb’s Blue Prince boasts my favourite shapeshifting house in a video game, which admittedly isn’t setting a very high bar. Perhaps surprisingly, most video game houses do not shapeshift. Despite being made out of pure imagination and carbon emissions, they remain nostalgically shackled to the limitations of brick, mortar and Euclidean geometry. Blue Prince’s abode is different. It is a house made of house. You’ll actually design the layout yourself every time you wander through it, picking from a selection of mismatched room types whenever you open a door.

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4X strategy and RPG stalwarts Shiro Games have announced SpaceCraft, a “massively multiplayer management and crafting adventure” set in Normandy during the Middle Ages, haha, of course not – it’s set in space. They won’t be winning the T.S. Eliot poetry prize with that title, but I guess it gets the job done. Here’s a trailer.

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One of my favourite anime shows is Sakura Quest. It’s the story of an unemployed lady from Tokyo who accidentally gets herself appointed “Queen” of a struggling backwater village by the regional tourist board. From that case of mistaken identity proceeds 25 whole-ass episodes of Machiavellian haggling with crusty bigwigs over things like organising a concert. It’s playfully dull, heartily mundane entertainment. No supernatural flourishes here – just the magic of paperwork and the thrill of bureaucracy.

I’m reminded of Sakura Quest by Danchi Days, a forthcoming cosy adventure with irresponsibly enticing Game Boy Advance-style visuals. It casts you as Hoshino, a teenage girl who’s just moved to an old “danchi” housing complex and is trying to revive the yearly tradition of a summer festival. How will she do this? By means of haggling – haggling, and a bit of CSI.

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Developed by Mistwalker, a studio founded by Final Fantasy dad Hironobu Sakaguchi, Fantasian was originally released on Apple Arcade in 2021 and locked within the big fruit’s exclusivity cage. Now, though, Mistwalker and Square Enix have come together to re-release the RPG for us PC heads, calling it Fantasian Neo Dimension. It’s actually out today, too, if you’re interested in an interdimensional journey to reclaim some lost memories.

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The world is changing. Geopolitics are fractious and unnerving, environmental catastrophe seems more likely each day, and rampant digitally-disseminated disinformation further erodes our trust in one another. But I’ll let lesser reporters tell you about that stuff. I’m here to report that Capcom have made the big bonk feel good again. They’ve heard player feedback on the missing weapon oomph caused by the lack of hitstop in the Monster Hunter Wilds beta, and they’re bringing back the bonk.

Here’s a handy breakdown of the issue by X user Blue Stigma, but briefly: hitstop is the brief pause in an attack animation the moment the weapon connects with an enemy, giving you a real sense of bonkitude and making say, a hammer feel different from a dagger. As the video showed, the hitstop was greatly reduced in Wilds compared to previous Monster Hunters, and many players reported the combat just feeling a bit off as a result.

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I’ll come out and say it: I had no idea, really, what Infinity Nikki was about before I dove in. I knew from some trailers that it was a free-to-play game about collecting pretty dresses and exploring a relentlessly positive open world. In those respects, I was correct.

I’d just missed the really big part – the fact it’s a pacifistic Genshin Impact wearing a pretty dress. And as that realisation sunk in for the first time, my heart also sank with it. I really tried, I mean really tried to get into Nikki’s gacha offerings; to delight in its menagerie of menus and cash in countless currencies for fun socks or glitzy tiaras. Sadly, I won’t be logging back in ever again.

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Hang on, before you enter today’s door, take off your shoes at do– Ach, it’s everywhere. Take off your socks as well. Damn, it’s in all my trouser pockets and– How did it get in my ears? I hate this stuff. Let’s just hose ourselves down on the frontstep before we go in.

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Friday The 13th: The Game and Predator: Hunting Grounds developers Illfonic have announced that they’ve laid off an unspecified number of staff as they “re-align” to “a refined strategy”. No reasons for the layoffs are given in the statement, beyond a cursory gesture towards “the state of the industry”.

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Dragon Age: The Veilguard won’t receive any major story DLC. It also ends pretty decisively, save for a few hints about the future of Thedas in a secret post-credits scene. How final is that air of finality? Is Dragon Age going back on the shelf for the forseeable? Fear not, say game director Corinne Busche and series creative director John Epler, for the universe of Dragon Age has many yarns yet to spin. The next game won’t necessarily be an action game with RPG trappings, either, for much like Final Fantasy, Dragon Age exists in a state of continual “reinvention”.

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