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Arrowhead Games Studio CEO Shams Jorjani has criticised other games industry executives for letting rank-and-file developers take the fall for what he styles “very unsound business decisions” over the past two years.
Reburn’s posh-looking near-future shooter La Quimera now has a release date – April 25th 2025. Which is mighty soon for an FPS project we first heard about this very February, though nothing to be alarmed by – it’s been in development since around 2020.
In case you missed it, Reburn are a rebrand of Metro studio 4A Games Ukraine – they’re not to be confused with 4A Games in Malta, who are still working on the Metro series. La Quimera doesn’t look much like Metro. I compared it to Call Of Duty: Advanced Warfare and Cyberpunk 2077 in our announcement post, and the below trailer’s worth of exosuit punching and heatvision railgunnery is doing nothing to dissipate that characterisation.
In these days of combing online imagery for symptoms of genAI “hallucination”, it’s easy to forget that once upon a time, mutant video game visuals were beautiful. There’s a whole genre of art dedicated to them. Here to remind us is Babushka’s Glitch Dungeon Crystal, a gorgeously scruffy 2D platformer in which an old lady explores a big magic cellar, hitting graphics card malfunctions with a broom. Think Animal Well, but both you and the simulation aren’t as young as you used to be.
There are at least hundreds, probably thousands, and possibly tens of thousands of potential houses in first-person labyrinth puzzler Blue Prince. I am genuinely tempted to review them all, but I am not a realtor and Graham’s kneecaps inflate when a review strays above 2000 words, so I’ll settle for describing just four. The first is the house you discover. It waits eternally behind doors that give you a choice of three, semi-randomised rooms when you reach for the handle, each “drafted” on a 9-by-5 grid map that is blank save for the opening foyer and the antechamber skulking at the far end. Every time you enter the house, the layout wipes itself clean and must be filled in again.
As behemoth live service shooters struggle to retain audiences with seasonal events and “classic” modes that sometimes just channel nostalgia, one small PvP shooter is simply plugging away adding map after map after map after map. Straftat, the 1v1 online FPS that sees you duke it out with a friendfoe in cramped concrete arenas, has just added another 35 deathpits to its rotating menu of shooty locales. It now has 226 maps on which to kill and be killed. That is beautiful. That is sublime. That is Straftat.
Bungie have released a trailer for a trailer for extraction shooter Marathon. Last week the studio teased the possibility of an announcement with some cryptic tweets. The alien code was garbled but the message was clear: some substantial news about the upcoming FPS would likely be shared soon. We’ve still not heard that news, really. But now we at least know when it’s coming, thanks to the teasey video of an off-screen gunfight featuring a pink cyborg cat. It is a visual missive for impatient fans: sit down and wait until this weekend.
Right, anybody fancy a new Abiotic Factor update? Well, it’s not ready just yet, but developer Deep Field Games did share a look at the game’s upcoming Cold Fusion update that looks like it’ll be a beefy one. As you can probably guess by the title of the update, there’s a bit of a chill coming, specifically in a new area called the Residence Sector. This new locale has “something” going on that’s making it a bit too cold for anyone to hang out in, though the mystery behind it is something you’ll likely have to play to discover.
You know, I’ve always loved me a sky island in a video game. Can’t really tell you why, I just think they’re neat! So right from the get go I was pretty easily won over by Lost Skies, another one of those open world survival crafting type games. It’s a genre I’m not easily won over by, I don’t care for building things all that much, but the pull of the open air is pretty alluring to me. And I won’t even have very long to see if I’ll bounce off of its craftiness or not, because developer Bossa Studios announced today that Lost Skies is releasing into early access later this month on April 18th.
I think if you were to show someone the trailer for Mewgenics, complete with cats you-know-whating, a musical number, and a poop joke, they’d probably be taken quite aback. However, if you were to tell them that it’s from the same people that made Super Meat Boy and The Binding of Isaac, I’m sure they’d be able to understand much quicker. Aside from coming from some pretty notable indie devs, there still might be the question of why it’s such a big deal that Mewgenics finally got a trailer, and the answer to that is (kind of) simple: it was announced 13 years ago.
It’s not exactly much of a secret that a lot of indie devs are struggling to stay afloat these days given the economic *gestures vaguely at a world map.* No one has an exact solution either, but last December, just before the release of its latest game Hyper Light Breaker, noted indie developer Heart Machine announced that they were opening a Patreon. I won’t act like this is exactly a novel concept, I’ve seen a few other devs, typically on the smaller or solo size, try the same thing. But it still felt like a sign that Heart Machine needed a bit of a boost to keep things going.
