Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Paradox Interactive have not had a rosy couple of years. While the company’s core business in grand strategy remains prosperous, their approach to games outside this niche has been mired by delays, cancelations, closures and layoffs. Let’s run through the big setbacks: The Lamplighters League, which we overall liked, was a $22 million financial flop – Paradox have now parted ways with creators Harebrained Studios. Cities Skylines 2 should have been a victory lap, after the success of the first game, but it launched with severe bugs and performance issues. Prison Architect 2, another follow-up to a hit game, has been delayed indefinitely, and Paradox have split from developers Double Eleven. Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 is borderline vapourware: originally announced in 2019 with Hardsuit Labs at the helm, it’s currently in the hands of The Chinese Room, and was recently delayed for the umpteenth time into 2025.

And then there’s the abrupt cancellation of Life By You, a life management sim designed to compete directly with The Sims 4, and the closure of its creators Paradox Tectonic. Writing-down the development of Life By You cost Paradox around 208 million krona, or $19.2 million. It was the primary contributor to a 90% decrease in the company’s operating profit for the second quarter of 2024, versus the same quarter in 2023.

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It’s a stubborn little beggar, but the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 Ti’s pricing has been dragged down enough in recent months that it’s now a far tastier prospect than it was at launch. Now, the Amazon Prime Big Deal Days sale has a twin-fan Asus model down to £340 in the UK – the lowest this particular graphics card has ever been, and as far as I can tell, the least you’d have to pay for a brand-new RTX 4060 Ti in the current market.

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Traveller’s Hymn is a top-down, grid-based, open-world adventure game (and breathe), set in a dark fantasy land. The tileset is lovely, as are the little dialogue boxes and menus and the gentle bob of your backpack-ridden character as they walk. Basically, it looks like it’s worth everyone’s time, particularly because there’s one big twist here – it’s entirely free.

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One of the more compelling arguments for gaming graphics degrowth is that all those extreme-fidelity moss textures and Master Chief helmet dents are producing some horrifically engorged installation sizes. That’s a recipe for an SSD upgrade, and if it’s space you’re after, then Amazon Prime Big Deal Days has the 4TB Crucial P3 Plus on some big discounts. It’s down from £250 to just £192 in the UK, and down from $360 to $210 in the US.

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Tiny deck builder Combo Critters exhibits the winning combination common to both small games and radical breakfast cereals – it’s very crunchy, but also bright, sugary and moreish. If Thaddius Cornflakes had recommended struggling families play Combo Critters instead of eating Cookie Crisp for dinner, I imagine the backlash would have far more reserved. Cookie Crisp tastes like like someone poured Splenda on a packing peanut fished out from a puddle. Combo Critters, though? Pretty tasty, and also free from Itch here.

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Found a dead rat in my inbox this morning. When I examined the entrails it spelled out the following: PaThoLoGiC 3 aNnOuNcEd ToDaY. Ah, I see. Developers Ice Pick Lodge are working on a sequel to their infamously oppressive plague town simulator, only this time the follow-up will feature “a time-travel mechanic, allowing players to go back and see how their decisions change the lives of the townspeople.” It will also put you in the fancy-schmancy shoes of the Bachelor, a doctor fond of quoting Latin phrases, who will have the ability to order quarantines and request patrols of entire areas of town. There’s no firm release date yet, but we’re told it’ll be ready some time next year.

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Halo creators 343 Industries are having a bit of a glow-up. They’re now calling themselves Halo Studios, a piece of rhetorical doubling-down that reminds me of those dril tweets about “James Bond, author of James Bond”. They’ve also abandoned the proprietary Slipspace game engine used by Halo Infinite in favour of Epic’s Unreal Engine 5, which will be the basis for “multiple new games”. To celebrate the occasion, Halo Studios have released some footage of Project Foundry, an expansive Unreal Engine 5 prototype and spawning vat for actual Halo games, which is billed by the Xbox Newswire as a kind of ur-Halo – “a true reflection of what would be required for a new Halo game using Unreal, and a training tool for how to get there”.

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Graham asked me if I’d discovered what the metaphor in Metaphor: ReFantazio might be, and I replied, “I don’t know haha”, or something along those lines. Having given it more thought, I think there are two metaphors: 1) It plays quite like Persona. 2) Its story is like a commentary on our society… or something to that effect.

Metaphors aside, though, the game is a gigantic fantasy RPG that’s technically better than Persona 5 in a lot of ways. Structurally, it feels less repetitive. It has more animated cutscenes that elevate those key story moments. You can brush aside weaker enemies in real-time combat, rather than face them in tiresome turn-based tangoes. And overall, I think it’s the best game Persona or Persona-like Atlus have put out – it really is brilliant. But there’s a part of me that feels like it’s missing something that’ll leave it less ingrained in the memory than Persona 5 once its final chapter has closed.

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My default movement mode in horror games that actually scare me is: meandering. I seek to approach without approaching, scooting back and forth across the path like a stray hamster, worrying at the corners and avoiding clear perspectives of the route ahead, while keeping the route behind me in my peripheral vision. I have been trained to do this especially by Amnesia, where tilting your gaze too decisively at anything nasty drives your character nuts.

Lurks Within Walls has no time for my hamstery antics. Developed by Here Be Monsters, it’s a grid- and turn-based first-person dungeon crawler – a long-lost cousin of Etrian Odyssey that has wound up in an asylum jammed with internet cryptids, reminiscent in cinematic texture of F.E.A.R. In keeping with other grid-based dungeon crawlers, it only lets you turn the view by 90 degree angles and travel in straight lines. Going by the demo, it’s a promising restraint for a horror game, though they really do need to expand on the combat, which is currently a slight waste of some terrific creature art.

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Epic Games laid off over 800 people a year ago, following what CEO Tim Sweeney confessed was an “unrealistic” period of investment designed to “grow Fortnite as a metaverse-inspired ecosystem for creators”. Now, it’s time to start talking about brighter, metaversal tomorrows and hopefully, not do the whole thing all over again. Epic have detailed early plans for Unreal Engine 6, which Sweeney says will combine Unreal Engine with Fortnite’s easy-to-use Unreal Editor to create a gigantic, “interoperable” metaverse platform that lets developers sell stuff that can seamlessly be transferred to other games, whether they run on Unreal Engine or not. Stealth blockchain post? Genuinely, I can neither confirm nor deny.

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