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I took a longer lunch break today, and must now Pay The Reaper by staying after work. Fortunately, I’ve spent my penance playing the demo for Witching Stone, which applies the magic of shape-matching to the magic of, well, magic. Out on 16th September, it’s a pixelart charmer that “combines elements of puzzle games, roguelites and deckbuilders”, much as you’d combine a red circle and two golden triangles to spark a lightning bolt.
It is with quiet anticipation (and some nervousness) that I await to be stepped upon by a freaky mech in The Forever Winter. If you missed its announcement in May, The Forever Winter is a co-op extraction shooter set in a grim future where you struggle to survive amid an unending hyperindustrial war. Since that reveal developers Fun Dog Studios have mostly been sending out small “burst transmissions” – essentially footage from the hellfront – like this patriotic beheading and some panicked gunfights. But today they’ve made a longer video revealing an early access release date. And – oh! – it’s quite soon.
Here’s one we missed from this week’s release round-up, possibly because Konami appear to have given it precisely zero promotion: the Castlevania Dominus Collection, a four-game bundle spanning PC ports of three well-regarded DS Castlevanias, plus a redesigned version of Castlevania Haunted Castle, the first Castlevania game to grace an arcade machine. It’ll set you back $25, £20 or €25, and my drive-by analysis of the trailer below is that they’ve done a decent job with the ports.
Darkest Dungeon 2‘s Kingdoms mode – a free turn-based boardgame reimagining of the hellish roguelike roadtrip RPG – will release in three modules, Red Hook have announced. The first of this fearful trio, Hunger Of The Beast Clan, is down to launch in Q4 2024, which translates to sometime during the period 1st October to 31st December.
It’ll accompany a new paid Darkest Dungeon 2 DLC, Inhuman Bondage, which introduces a new region, a new hero with “…unique” mechanics and a fresh faction of seemingly excrement-themed fiends to slaughter.
The first time I encountered Jack King-Spooner’s work, it was when he sent me a copy of Sluggish Morss: Pattern Circus over hospital wifi late at night. The game was a bright spot in a bad time, which might seem peculiar given that Sluggish Morss often looks like a whale’s upset stomach, but it’s such a feverishly inventive creation. It blew the dust from my synapses.
The same appears true of King-Spooner’s upcoming Judero, on which he is collaborating with Soul Searching developer Talha Kaya. It casts you as a “pagan seer” armed with a big stick, who is searching the mythical Scottish borderlands for evil creatures to clobber. It looks cheerier and airier than Sluggish Morss, with a more overt emphasis on mechanics such as combat, but it has the same pickled 3am energy to it. It’s also now got a release date – 16th September – and a new trailer below.
The situation: Sumo Newcastle are making a dystopian on-foot multiplayer racing game called Deathsprint 66, in which you control one of eight Running Men hurtling through the spiked and bladed contours of a futuristic megacity. The complication: competing against other actual human beings isn’t always pleasant or desirable, especially when hurtling through the spiked and bladed contours of a futuristic megacity. The solution: Deathsprint 66 is getting a set of PvE-focussed “Episodes” in which just one human player plus optional bots hurtle through the spiked and bladed contours of a futuristic megacity.
Baldur’s Gate 3 publishing director Michael Douse has reopened the topic of video game pricing, commenting that prices have not kept pace with inflation (the general increase of prices and goods) in certain markets, and thereby, with the cost of making blockbuster games such as Star Wars Outlaws.
Unionised workers at Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 studio Raven Software have filed a complaint with the US National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) against parent companies Activision Blizzard and Microsoft, as reported by Game File (paywalled), and covered by Game Developer. The complaint, write Game Developer, is over “bad faith bargaining” and “concerted activities” – which covers “retaliation, discharge, [and] discipline.”
Step this way please, fans of pre-rendered backgrounds and pixellated blood spatters. There is something waiting for you in the window of the local internet video game store, GOG.com. Resident Evil 2, the original 1998 survival horror, is now buyable, downloadable, and yes, even playable on PC.
Back in March, Bungie announced a leadership reshuffle on their Marathon reboot project, with former Valorant dev Joe Ziegler replacing veteran Bungie designer Christopher Barrett as director. It seems there was more to that story than concern about the progress of Marathon. According to a new Bloomberg report citing anonymous sources, Barrett was in fact fired this spring after he was accused by several female Bungie staff of inappropriate behaviour.
