Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

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.

Read more

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! It’s a double feature this week – Zach Barths and Matthew Burns of former Zachtronics fame! (Do read Edwin’s interview with Zach on their unrealised 40K factory game). Cheers Zach and Matthew! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelves?

Read more

Windblown is an action roguelite much like Dead Cells, the previous game from developer Motion Twin, but it trades sidescrolling ‘vania vibes for a 3D and more colourful world, and adds co-op for up to three pals. That sounds plenty appealing, and it now has a release date: October 24th.

Better still, on October 14th, it’s getting a singleplayer demo as part of the Steam Next Fest.

Read more

I’m on a one-man mission to destroy your productivity. Yesterday I offered you Scrambled Maps, which is good for fifteen minutes of not working.

Today I offer Alphaguess, a once-a-day browser puzzle game in which you must guess a word. With every incorrect guess you make, the game tells you whether the correct answer comes before or after it alphabetically.

Read more

Avatar: The Last Airbender hasn’t had much luck when it comes to adaptations, whether to film or to video games. Now Paramount Game Studios and Saber Interactive are going to take a new swing at it. The pair have announced an action RPG set in the “Avatar Legends universe”, the broader world and timeline that The Last Airbender and Legend Of Korra take place within.

Read more

I’m usually a little suspicious of anything that winkingly describes itself as “very normal”. It’s got Mental Baz energy to me. You’ve met mental Baz, right? He’s mental, he is! Has half a lemonade shandy with lunch sometimes, and wears one of those t-shirts that look like a tuxedo. Absolute mentalist! Anyway, after reviewing Grunn last week it’s thankfully far more interesting and creative than poor old Baz, who’s honestly just a bit shy and actually really nice when you get past the facade. Grunn just released today, and my high level tempter is that it’s a little bit like Outer Wilds, just with all the touching wonder replaced by spooky whimsy. Here’s a trailer:

Read more

Ubisoft have released a big new Star Wars Outlaws patch which, amongst other things, tries to fix and improve the open world game’s stealth. I’ve seen, read, heard, intuited and telepathically detected a lot of complaints about Outlaws stealth, ranging from “it doesn’t look realistic when she punches out stormtroopers through their blaster-resistant hats” to “please remove the hide-and-seek entirely, I wishly merely to pew-pew”. Seems likely that the patch won’t lay all these grievances to rest, to say nothing of the other problems people have with Outlaws. But I’m always interested in how developers Find The Fun in stealth mechanics, given that they are very easily unfun.

Read more

I miss the height of Wordle mania not because of the game itself, which I still play on occasion, but because of the torrent of delightful, experimental browser-based puzzle games that followed in its wake. Worldle, Octordle, Moviedle, Waffle, Who Are Ya?, Cloudle and many, many more were a gold rush of bandwagon jumpers I was fully onboard with.

Scrambled Maps takes me back to those good old days. It bears little relation to Wordle, but it is a browser-based puzzle game that offers one new challenge each day, and it is just as delightful a distraction.

Read more

“Turn-based” games are, as we know, all derived from Turn, the strategy game about a dog digging for coins released for the BBC Micro in 1987. Prior to this, all actions in games simply took place simultaenously, as fast as the player or players could make them.

Fast forward to today and many games are now “turn-based”, from Tactics Ogre Reborn to Age Of Wonders 4 to chess. In celebration of their orderliness, Steam is currently running a turn-based RPG fest featuring discounts and demos for “turn-based games where you grow stronger with every battle”.

Read more

Yesterday, Valve dropped a Steam client beta update focused largely on Game Recording – the beta version’s recently added clip-capturing utility. It’s a pretty wide-spanning array of improvements, adding support for ultrawide monitor resolutions up to 32:9, the high-quality H.265 (HEVC) video codec – on Windows only for now, apologies to the Steam Deck – and the option to “record a specified game indefinitely with no specified time limit.”

Read more