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After watching the announcement trailer for Whispers of the Eyeless, I have one request: please, do not have that voiceover in the full game. It is hammier than a hamster eating a ham sandwich in Hamburg during a performance of Hamlet. It starts with “The Whispers [of the Eyeless] call to me!!!” and does not improve from there. Beyond that, colour me fairly enthused.
I’ll admit it, I downloaded the free prologue for horror game Baby Blues Nightmares mostly because I couldn’t stop giggling at the offer to “utilize the unique abilities of a toddler”, encompassing “stealth gameplay”, “survival elements” and “upgradeable abilities”. It’s as though a toddler were actually an undersung class of special operator from a Tom Clancy shooter, rather than a wailing, hyperactive ball of tears and poop. Then again, I imagine Sam Fisher was a toddler once. Perhaps this is how he got started: escaping a smashed-up house full of roaming demon toys.
In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only widescreen. No ultrawide for the moment, sadly. As and when they add support for ultrawide monitors, perhaps they should call it “ultramarinewide”. Ha ha! Ha. Anyway, here’s what’s coming in the first round of Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 patches.
Not too long ago, Arrowhead dropped a vague list of improvements coming to Helldivers 2, as they admitted “inconsistencies” in their “approach to game balance and direction”. They’ve now published another blog post that torches the vagueness of the previous post with the righteously democratic flames of specificity. Overhauls to enemies are on the way, less-loved guns will be more effective, reworks to armor penetration and health values are on the boil, and they’re taking inspiration from “player fantasies” for certain weapons and stratagems. All of these tweaks are set to go live on the 17th September, so not long to wait.
About 12 years ago, we drew our breath in pain to report that Lone Survivor developer Jasper Byrne’s new “Zelda x Demon’s Souls” action-RPG was no more. “It was too big for a single person to make,” Byrne wrote at the time. “This is the root of the problem. It wasn’t that I fell out of love with the idea, just that I can’t physically do it.” That was then and this, thankfully, is now. Byrne has tentatively returned to the project and begun sharing screens on social media.
Black & White was a god game that frustrated more often than it delighted, but which was nevertheless delivered with enough verve and ambition to be worth playing. It’s a crying shame that it’s not currently available to buy anywhere digitally, presumably because the rights are soaked in a gutter between EA (the original publisher) and Microsoft (who bought and closed developers Lionhead).
If you do still own a physical copy of Black & White however, you might be interested in Openblack. It’s a fan-led project to create a modern, open source engine for running Black & White, and its first build was just released yesterday.
Every week of late I seem to pop up here with another new arcade racer to talk about, and well, I wouldn’t want to break the streak. This week’s new hotness is Parking Garage Rally Circuit, which is about powersliding around multi-storey car parks and is designed to look like a lost Sega Saturn game. It now has a release date: September 20th.
The second season of animated show Arcane is due to arrive on Netflix this November. After an initial teaser trailer back in June, Netflix have now released a more substantial two-minute trailer that you can watch below.
Did you forget about Baldur’s Gate 3? Because Baldur’s Gate 3 did not forget about you. Specifically, it did not forget about the incorrigible evil-doers amongst you who’ve been gunning for some additional plot catharsis. Larian’s very bestest RPG has been biding its time in the shadows while you’ve been busy with other games. It has lingered silently while you occupy yourself heisting on Tatooine or messing up Golden-Eyed Beasts, waiting and waiting for the perfect moment – and now, it has finally struck with an unholy new patch, which adds 13 new Evil Endings, revamped splitscreen and an official modding toolkit. Foolish summer child! It is too late to flee.
“Do not forget to turn the system off before touching anything,” says my astronaut colleague over the radio. I grab the faulty power transformer without listening, and am immediately electrocuted. Worse still, I have to hammer a quick-time button to recover. This is what it is like to be Jerry, the janitor of a cheap and poorly maintained space station. Jerry is being tasked with repair work beyond his job description, learning the ins and outs of an escape pod’s machinery from his co-worker via radio. This may come in handy, as the station is about to explode. Tin Can is not a new game (it came out in 2022) but it is on sale as part of Steam’s space exploration fest. And I enjoy a space game that makes me panic while alarms go off everywhere.
