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In what is only the third ever piece of videogame-related media to make me weep at my keyboard, Volgar the Viking devs and retro specialists Digital Eclipse have announced a Power Ranger videogame – Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: Rita’s Rewind. It’s a 90s-ass side-scrolling arcade brawler for up to five players, involves “time twisting”, and has mode-7-style arcade shooter bits together with the original TV show’s climactic mecha transformation sequences.
Stare into an abyss for long enough and, as Nietzsche wrote, a mostly naked man will wobble out of the abyss and try to murder you with a mattock. Inasmuch as can be told in the absence of dialogue or a text preamble, the naked man wants to murder you because you, and not he, are in possession of a hat. The hat makes you look like an eraser pencil from Forbidden Planet. It’s the kind of headgear worn by the kind of criminal Batman’s too grown-up to fight anymore. But it has, nonetheless, roused in this under-dressed stranger a sense of Dionysian frenzy. He will do anything for that hat – hewing your arms off, ripping your intestines out, tearing the skin from your ribcage. And you, in turn, will do anything to rob him of that mattock, because by the gods, it looks a lot more dangerous than the candlestick you’re trying to fend him off with.
There are many such lost souls in the bleak, midnight world of the Half Sword demo – all lurking near candle-lit piles of randomly spawned hammers, stools, barrels, axes and lengths of wood, all subject to unforgivably authentic physics and cursor-based attacks that conspire to transform every scuffle into a Monty Python blooper reel.
Sonar Shock is a reminder that some of the best game concepts or settings seem so obvious as soon as you play them.
System Shock on an unreasonably huge submarine on an equally ludicrous trip around the Northeast Passage via Cape Agulhas? With a satirical Soviet setting that isn’t just “lol russia” or “I think Stalker was about machismo and gun attachments”? And a third thing that I’ll get to in a minute because this intro is getting out of control? God yes.
Whether or not they actually amount to anything, rumours of a new Doom have had me diving back into Doom Eternal recently. There’s at least one level in it that feels like essay-bait, so I’m obliging. The centerpiece of Mars Core – the FPS’ best level – is a comically massive superweapon called the BFG-10000. Oh, Chekov. If only you could see what we’ve done with your wisdom. The literary subtlety to gun-big-enough-to-scar-planets pipeline will eventually subsume all of pop culture, and those of us who chose to specialise writing about headshots will alternate between grins and tears from the wreckage.
In my eternal quest to describe games concisely enough that you don’t feel robbed of time you could have just watched a trailer with, I am compelled to use many of the same words and word combinations ad nauseam. So, when a game like horror tower defence Bella Wants Blood comes along and uses some odd nouns, I get all excited. Here, that’s because I get to recklessly spaff out terms like ‘Blood Gutters’, ‘The Rattler’, and your friend and mine, ‘The Stabber’. Barely an atom quivers in Bella Wants Blood that hasn’t been stylised or made odd and alluring in some way.
Back in 2020, fresh out of high school and feeling unstoppable, Charles Maddock and a few friends “decided to code a game about Fish Wizards.” The result was Fishards, Magicka-inspired PVP arena action that has you out-squirt, out-splash, and out-spellcast your mates. It’s a charmer, but after two years of dev, release saw it suffer the same sad fate as many multiplayer-only indies. People would play for half hour, says Maddock, then refund the game because they couldn’t find others to play with.
A new report in Bloomberg describes the development of Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League and the issues which may have led to Rocksteady’s expensive live service game flopping at launch. Staff, talking under condition of anonymity, described corporate owners who pushed for a multiplayer game from the studio known for singleplayer experiences, as well as indecisive leadership and a culture of “toxic positivity”.
Dragon Age: Dreadwolf is no more. No, EA haven’t once again taken Dragon Age 4 back to the drawing board; instead, they’ve just changed its name. The next entry in their trad-fantasy RPG series is now called Dragon Age: The Veilguard, and we’ll get a “first look at gameplay” next week.
I’ve been scouring Steam Next Fest demos specifically for something laid back, and Spilled! – despite sounding like the title of a musical about upturned milk – has delivered nicely. It’s a light and breezy ocean cleanup game that has you sailing a cute lil’ boat around polluted seas, cleansing oil patches and scooping up plastic bottles. Even if it doesn’t have the every-last-speck detailing of PowerWash Simulator or Viscera Cleanup Detail, it satisfies in very similar ways, and I would very much like to get back out on the water whenever the full game is complete.
Maybe you can relate, but I tend to find I crave twee and colorful things proportionally inverse to my melancholy. If I’m having a good week, give me Fear and Hunger and horrible films like Speak No Evil. If, like this week for some reason, I feel like bursting into tears at inopportune moments, I need silly little guys doing whimsical activities. Enter Dungeon Clawler. It’s a vaguely Slay The Spire-ish roguelite where you grab weapons from a claw machine while you fight. It’s got lazy Steam Deck depression nap written all over it. The main theme reminds me of Zombies Ate My Neighbors, and the character I picked is named Sir Bunalot.
