Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Astrometica is Subnautica in space and to developer BeryMery’s credit, the game makes zero effort to hide this. It’s right there in the dog Latin of the title. It’s got Subnautica’s premise of being a shipwreck survivor starting afresh from an escape capsule, piecing together the backstory signal by signal, database entry by database entry. It’s got Subnautica’s core loop of exploring while dealing with the problem of decreasing oxygen, scavenging fist-sized chunks of raw material and scanning wreckage for blueprints, then crafting items and gear back at base.

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Jett: The Far Shore and Sword & Sworcery developers Superbrothers are making a new “2D mystery action pixel videogame”, in partnership with an unnamed publisher. In what feels almost like a pivot away from the developers’ previous, magnificently hipster experiments, it’s billed as “satisfyingly finite, immediately legible, entertaining, funny, and generally satisfying for a broad audience”.

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If you’re the naughty sort, legend has it that on Christmas Eve a portly bearded chap will descend down your chimney and leave behind a lump of coal. The dwarven heroes of today’s game are much the same, except instead of using the chimney they will deploy pickaxes and power tools to burrow straight through your living room wall, and will make off with any minerals in the house rather than leaving them behind in a sock.

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Ubisoft have discontinued their PvP shooter XDefiant and laid off roughly 277 employees at the studios who worked on the multiplayer game. “[We’ve] not been able to attract and retain enough players in the long run to compete at the level we aim for in the very demanding free-to-play FPS market,” said Ubisoft executive Marie-Sophie de Waubert in a statement to workers that was later posted on Ubisoft’s website. Over half the team who worked on the game will lose their jobs at Ubi studios in San Francisco, Osaka, and Sydney. The remaining workers are “transitioning to other roles within Ubisoft.”

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When I downloaded Creeper World IXE’s demo, I had it pegged as a bizarre original. It is, in fact, the latest in a series of real-time strategy games in which you position turrets and terraform maps to repel surging, simulated tides of purple liquid. This is a war between flesh and mineral, solidity and fluidity that dates back to the age of Gillen. Alex Wiltshire (RPS in peace) interviewed creator Virgil Wall back in 2019 – amongst other things, we learn that the original Creeper World was based on a “failure” – and Sin has an enthusiastic piece from 2021 about Creeper World 4, the first 3D instalment.

What does Creeper World IXE bring to the party? Well, 1) it ain’t 3D, and 2) it’s billed as an exercise in “dominating” the titular Creeper, rather than keeping it at bay. For too long has this sloshing, coruscating hooligan been allowed to wash over and corrode our precious starports. We will take the fight to it in the shape of an upgradeable 2D starfleet, equipped with lasers we can use to chisel away the geography and re-rout the flow of villainous Vimto.

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Tic-tac-toe, known to British people as noughts and crosses, is a famously boring game that is nonetheless often played by anybody with a sweet wrapper, a pencil and five minutes to burn while waiting for any form of public transport. It’s boring because it’s a “solved game” whose outcomes can be safely predicted regardless of where you place your first nought or cross, allowing the “perfect” player to at least draw their opponent. It gets played regardless because a lot of people don’t know it’s a solved game – specifically, young children you may wish to humiliate using your superior grown-up brain, because when you were a child somebody did the same to you.

How many twisted adults were born from the experience of being bullied via the medium of tic-tac-toe? We’d be better off without this game. But look! Here comes Tic Tactic to shake things up with a touch of Balatro.

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We don’t know yet if the AI revolution of our reality will go full Skynet or simply end with the robots unceremoniously dumping us like a sad Joaquin Phoenix. But at least video games can help us speculate. Heart Of The Machine is a cyberpunk 4X strategy game that will let players choose how a newly awakened AI sentience might behave once set loose upon a big future city. Developers Arcen Games call it a “turn-based sci-fi 4X RPG”, which is a lot of genres fighting for supremacy in one small phrase. It was announced last year, but today it gets a release date and an updated demo.

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Are there any sights more quintessentially Christmassy than a street lit up by warm and glowing decorations, as seen through a snow-graced windowpane? Why, I could gaze through this wonderful window all day. Let’s just hope no-one decides to smash through it, eh? Why, I’d get bits of glass in my lovely warm milk, which would massively downgrade my biscuit-dunking experience. Wait. What’s that? Oh no!

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As Graham pointed out earlier this year, A Difficult Game About Climbing is a difficult game about climbing. A Bennett Foddy’s Getting Over It-inspired limb-flailer, where hoisting yourself up a mountain as a bald man is painfully moreish. Well, let me introduce you to A Difficult Game About Driving, a difficult game about driving. Again, you play as a bald man (called Jeff) who sits in a 4×4 bathtub and must ascend a series of difficult roads. There’s a demo out now and let me tell you, it’s awfully good.

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Every now and then, somebody has the marvellous idea of developing technology that makes video games smell. I have never been more grateful for this recurrent Quixotic daydream’s mass market failure than when watching trailers for Urge, an open world survival shooter that is both fuelled and plagued by piss.

“But hold your horses, young Edwin,” you sternly interject. “I do not wish to hear about, let alone play an open world survival shooter that is both fuelled and plagued by piss, on a website that children might read. It sounds like a cheap, taboo-jabbing gimmick.” Friend, I once thought as you. But then I did a little research, as is my journalistic responsibility, and it turns out Urge’s notions about piss – bladdergold, as they call it in the West Country, or Crusoe Cola, as it’s known in the States – are rather in-depth. I’m still very glad I can’t smell the game, but I definitely have the urge to play it.

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