Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

As I’m sure as is the curse of anyone who’s watched the entirety of Peep Show multiple times, I cannot read the name ‘Marko’ without hearing it in a nasally Australian accent, inquiring about cocaine. This is probably a disservice to the hero of colourful metroidvania Marko: Beyond Brave, who a quick goog tells me may be based on Krali Marko – a popular character in the folklore of Studio Mechka’s native Bulgaria. Folk hero or not, Marko certainly has some heroic facial hair: his moustache floweth so bountifully that it can’t be contained in his character portrait. Extremely powerful of him.

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As per EA’s recent generative AI tugathon, the third game in Respawn’s action adventure Star Wars trilogy has been confirmed again to be in development. According to EA, it’ll be the “final chapter” in the now-trilogy, following 2019’s Jedi Fallen Order and 2023’s Jedi Survivor.

The existence of the game was first confirmed by Cal Kestis actor Cameron Monaghan, during an Ocala Comic Con panel. “We’re working on a third and we’re in the process of doing that right now,” said Monaghan, which is about as straightforward an affirmative as one could want. It was also double-confirmed this February, following news of layoffs at EA, via Eurogamer.

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The upcoming skate. game now has an (admittedly vague) early access release date of 2025, according to a post by the developers on Xitter. It’s difficult to write about the new skate. game because if you choose to write skate. with the imposed stylings which skate. publishers Electronic Arts insist, you end up putting a full stop after every instance of skate., which makes your sentences about skate. sound fucking stupid. and. belaboured. with. pauses. Game makers, please stop putting punctuation in your game names.

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Having gone to bed last night with Final Fantasy XVI installed yet unplayed on a Steam Deck, I awoke to find Valve have slapped the moody RPG with Unsupported status for the handheld. Its crime: an inability to “run well” on the Steam Deck’s internals, regardless of settings changes. Dammit, Clive.

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What are you LYMBUS? In what vat were you grown? I feel like I’ve sluggishly ambled my way down to the fridge and tried to scoop a gherkin from the jar, only to find a disconcertingly tasty sliver of my own brain. Like a creature from Flatland trying to play 4D chess, and all the pieces are just tiny carvings of my face with “lol get a load of this prick” whittled into the forehead. I quite like it.

“We combined your favorite genres into one grotesque piece of software! You’re welcome, game journalists,” reads the Steam page for the demo. That is a very polite way to kick me in the head and call me a bitch, LYMBUS.

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Last month, Helldivers 2 studio Arrowhead thrust a white flag out from their shelled position in an attempt to placate mutinous fans of the co-op shooter. In response to a community sentiment best summed up by a popular Reddit post titled “Let the super earth burn”, Arrowhead released a statement. “In short, we didn’t hit our target with the latest update…what matters most now is action. Not talk.” Said action (which it must be pointed felt a bit troublingly reactive to the loudest and most histrionic voices in the roo..uh, subreddit) was foreshadowed in a list of issues to be tackled over the coming months.

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Frostpunk 2 was an ambitious gambit. With survival achieved, and the introduction’s excellently sinister advisor whispering evil Tory ideas, the whole city you built in Frostpunk is now just the headquarters for a sprawling expansion effort, and your rule is no longer absolute. Rather than retread the same “prepare for ultra-Winter” ground, your biggest obstacle will likely be your own people, now formed into shifting political parties, and looking outward with colonial eyes. The result is a complicated, laborious survival citybuilder that’s two parts compelling, and one part frustrating for the wrong reasons.

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I really wanted to like action adventure The Plucky Squire more than I do now, having given its charming 2D to 3D platforming a proper whirl. Yes, it’s lovely to look at. Yes, hopping out of a storybook and making friends with an illustration on a coffee mug is cool. And yes, everyone can have a mildly fun time with its puzzles and fights. But that’s the problem: who is everyone? At first I thought, “This game is for young kids and that’s fine!”, given its relative simplicity. Then I hit some puzzles and thought, “Ain’t no kid figuring this out”.

Then it hit me. It struggles to balance the fine line between being approachable for tiny tots and layered enough for people who’ve graduated from “goo goo ga ga” to “oo oo aa aa my back hurts”. And that’s down to how plucky you’re allowed to squire at any given time, because it can be surprisingly limited and, sadly, a bit underwhelming.

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You can’t travel back to the 1980s. But what if I told you it was possible to gently warp your memories of that time? UFO 50 is a kart of 50 games that once existed for an old computer system, all lovingly restored by a gang of coders. The old console, of course, is a fiction. The LX-I never existed. But it’s a fun pseudo-history against which to create a grab bag of small games (some throwaway, others mighty) all designed with a distinct 80s look. It’s an exercise in adhering to an aesthetic. Like an oil painter working with a limited range of colours, the developers of this bundle have stuck to a 32-bit equivalent of the Zorn palette. Yet play a little of each game, and you start to sense the smirk of chronos. These games aren’t stuck in the past, but they are enjoying a holiday there.

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Strange Scaffold’s newly released FPS I Am Your Beast is very fun for quite a few reasons, but chief among them is a deep appreciation for the poetry of good videogame violence. I’m not using the big P word just to throw out an overly worthy comparison to something we might associate with craft or beauty, but as a nod toward the game’s playful application of what I previously called ‘a euphoric splurge of murderous game verbiage’ one morning where I had clearly eaten my wordy Weetabix. The way its hurled knives and curb stomps and inexplicable decapitations flow together have an assonant, almost Suessian quality to them.

But it’s also, well, just a bit like Mad Libs. You play as Harding, a man who’s mythical lethality is established very early on. The showing is there in the moment to moment, but the telling is conveyed through cute tricks like how everyone you meet is so deeply afraid of Harding that they loudly keep track of exactly what weapon he’s holding at all times. The Mad Libs comes in through the fact that you can draw Harding a route between A and B, and it’s a given that multiple heads are going to come unstuck from necks along the way. You’re sort of just casually filling in the verbs that seem the most fun to you in the moment. One of the verbs is ‘hornet’. Hornet is a verb now.

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