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Here are some orc names I quite like. Haters will tell you these “aren’t real orcs”, but those fools are forever trapped in a stifling prison forged from the failures of their own imaginations. Suck it, haters:
Video games in general have a surplus of weapons. It’s gotten to the point that if I had any freelance budget, I’d commission somebody to count them up. Just give me an approximate running total for the industry at large, so that whenever next a shiny-eyed producer regales me with the prospect of enchanted lazurite rapiers at a preview event, I can quietly ask how many enchanted lazurite rapiers we’re talking about, then open my laptop and generate a scrolling image akin to those comparison pages for stars and planets – a cosmic mountain of points and pommels, with the new game’s armoury forming a pixel-wide foothill in the bottom left corner. “Are there not enough enchanted lazurite rapiers,” I will kindly enquire, as the producer sobs brokenly into my shoulder.
Sometimes a home only becomes a home when you leave. I recently moved out from a London flat I’d rented for over a decade, for instance, and this has properly done a number on me. Being given my notice transformed the place from a transient pile of cadaverous lino and spasmodic plumbing into something mythical and unnerving – a whole chapter of my life completed and reduced to a piece of masonry in the rearview mirror, a relic I had been living in for years without quite realising.
A few video game developers have investigated emotions like these by recreating their current and prior homes as virtual environments: places of mingled memory and invention, expressive of both nostalgia and surprise. At this year’s Game Developer Conference in San Francisco, I interviewed a couple of teams who are coming at this premise with very different objectives, and somehow, meeting in the middle. One of the games in question is a work of daydreaming fondness, the other of comical anger. Both find a focus in the figure of a matriarch who is kindly in one game, abusive in the other.
When and where did the Steam demo for horror game New Life first find its way to me? When did its non-descript, black hooded protagonist first wriggle, with the transgressive delight of an unbidden slug between naked toes embarking on a 2am fridge odyssey, into the as yet uncolonised crevices of my ‘demos’ library? The specifics, I fear, are but the fumes of memories, lingering like armies of mice in trenchcoats at supermarket cheese sample platters, at once painfully obvious and immune to detection in their uncanny shroud of stifling human decorum. “For who is madder?!” I shout, in a normal and cool manner. “The mice – so very mad for cheese – or the madmen who screams ‘Mice! Mice!’ in the middle of the cheese aisle?!”
And if I can’t remember how it got here, how can I make it go away?
Many are the horror games that involve you going down. Down is where much of the Badness in the world is traditionally located, after all, whether you’re talking about geology or psychology or theology. White Knuckle reverses the flow. You are already Down; by extrapolation, you must now go Up.
Possibly, you are Down because you are a manifestation of the aforementioned Badness. Possibly, the monstrous things trying to thwart your ascent are merely trying to stop you contaminating the surface world. Possibly, they are the Real Heroes. It doesn’t really matter, because you don’t have a choice. There is a wall of unspeakable flesh coming up the tunnel behind you. To avoid becoming part of it, you must climb.
“James, please don’t just make half your Black Friday deal posts about Steam Deck stuff again”, warns a steely-eyed Graham. “I won’t”, I reply in sing-song while quietly adding pictures of the JSAUX ModCase to the CMS. That’s right, Amazon and a bunch of other retails have launched their BF sales a week early, which is annoying, unless you’re in the market for a Steam Deck case upgrade. If so, consider the compact, multifunctional ModCase, which is down to just £24 / $24. That makes for savings of 33% and 20% respectively, on what was already a nicely affordable alternative to the luxury of Dbrand’s similar Project Killswitch.
The enemies of survival shooter Stalker 2 have a funny habit of showing up right behind you, like a panto villain with an AK-47. Far from being a premeditated ambush by intelligent AI-controlled soldiers, this is just a result of the game’s janky spawns. Those botched encounters are unlike previous games, where roaming bands of factional murderfolk would patrol the radioactive wastes, seemingly according to their own whims. Back in the day, this wandering baddies feature was dubbed “A-life” by developers GSC Game World – basically a jargon word for the simulation of enemies that would lead to “emergent” moments of violence and conflict. It was promised as a feature in Stalker 2 but many players have noticed it seems to be absent. Over the weekend, GSC insisted the simulation is technically present in the sequel. It’s just broken.
Manor Lords developer Greg Styczeń, aka Slavic Magic, has emerged from his keep with news of a forthcoming patch for the medieval city builder. It’ll add new maps, building upgrades and reworks for various economic systems.
The announcement post is mostly image-based, in keeping with the classic saying that “a picture is worth a thousand words, as long as the words in question are mostly synonyms for ‘hut’, ‘mud’, ‘tree’ and ‘mountain'”. Fortunately, Styczeń threw in a few captions to light the way.
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! This week, it’s Looking Glass Studios’ legend, Deus Ex director, and Otherside’s Warren Spector – who I suspect might have realised the very secret goal of this column. Cheers Warren! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?
If you want to bump up the storage for your Switch or Steam Deck, then Black Friday is going to be a fantastic time to do just that.
