Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I love a game that features some kind of cooking element, so I was quite pleased yesterday when Humble Games revealed they’re publishing Town Of Zoz, a new action RPG that’s all about fighting off rats from eating your crops, taking down baddies to gather up ingredients, and using said ingredients and crops to make some tasty meals. It’s got wonderfully vibrant art and animation. The announcement trailer quickly won me over with the choppy, almost stop-motion-like quality of certain character models.

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Assassin’s Creed Shadows will in fact be compatible with the Steam Deck, Ubisoft say, despite a previous tech Q&A on the sneaky-stabby ninja sim declaring point-blank that it won’t. Announced on whatever the fuck Twitter is these days, the confirmation that Shadows will play nice with the Deck comes as a pleasant surprise – even without that prior naysaying, games with a GTX 1070 listed among the minimum specs typically don’t cope too well on the handheld’s frugal hardware.

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One thing this review can’t tell you is how exactly the MSI Claw 8 AI+ improves on the original Claw, for the simple reason that MSI themselves binned off the latter before I had a chance to try it. Three months, it lasted, before this do-over got announced. Three months! And people say the Steam Deck OLED came too soon.

The good news is that the Claw 8 AI+’s mostly-internal revamping – new CPU, new GPU, fatter battery etc. – has produced a handheld that not only thrashes Valve’s upgraded Steam Deck on games performance, but is up there with the best of its Windows-based brethren-portables on longevity. You know what, it probably is better than the Claw. Yeah.

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Avowed‘s game director Carrie Patel has been on the blower to Eurogamer about why Avowed doesn’t have any romance in it, which is to say it does, actually, if you’re paying attention, and also, affairs of the heart aren’t supposed to feel like min-maxing your Wizard, Kevin. To put that another way, she has gently suggested that relationships are more relatable when they aren’t some kind of mechanic or system.

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“While GTA lets players experience a fictional underworld of lawless enterprise, the entities behind PlayerAuctions own and operate a real one”. So claims a lawyer for GTA 6 and Borderlands publisher Take-Two Interactive in a complaint filed on Tuesday against third-party asset marketplace PlayerAuctions. They accuse PlayerAuctions – who have already faced similar accusations from Roblox – of selling modified player accounts obtained by hacking, via Polygon.

(I have no choice but to respect the hustle of trying to make GTA’s “fictional underworld of lawless enterprise” sound as cool as possible during a lawsuit. “While GTA lets players do cool and fun fake crimes…”)

“The website PlayerAuctions.com offers a vast online marketplace containing thousands of listings for unauthorized, infringing GTA V content – including heavily modified player accounts, in-game assets, and virtual currency – all gained by using hacking software, cheats, and technical exploits,” continues the complaint.

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Verity Amersham’s pockets are overflowing. Her school uniform hides a paperclip, a safety pin, two school badges, two books, a bottle of wine, a bottle of chloroform, a handwritten note, and more. None of it will do any good, as I have failed once again. Verity will be expelled from school.

I have saved Verity from her fate previously. Expelled! is Inkle working in their Overboard! mode, which Alice B so enjoyed upon its surprise release in 2021. Here, again, you play and replay a short 45-60 minute story, trying new ideas and learning more each time. It also returns to the interwar years for a different kind of pastiche of golden age mystery fiction: the school story.

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It’s not even been two months since the release of Ender Magnolia: Bloom In The Mist, and co-developers Adglobe and Live Wire are already back with a pretty solid update. The major addition is a New Game+ mode, which allows you to start the “evil-purging adventure anew, this time armed with gear and relics from previous playthroughs”, and face “harrowing hordes of smarter, stronger enemies with new attack patterns.”

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I’m not all that big on ranking games, truth be told – why would I want to catalogue a piece of art that way? But seeing as you have me at gunpoint (just pretend for me), I’ll admit I’d probably put Celeste in my top five. The platforming is tighter than any Mario entry, the art and soundtrack are stellar, and the story really hits home for me too.

You can imagine how excited I was when Earthblade, the follow-up from developer Extremely OK Games, was announced, and how upset I was when it was cancelled a couple months back. Still, we’ve been treated to a small taste of what the game might have been like in the form of a mini-album with a select set of tracks from composer Lena Raine.

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Grand yet furtive robot action-adventure Steel Seed will launch on April 10th, developers Storm in a Teacup and publishers ESDigital Games have announced. Not heard of Steel Seed before? You would’ve if I’d ever written up that demo build I played at last year’s Game Developer Conference. I don’t know why it’s taken me this long to mention the game, given that it contains one of my favourite things in fiction: a machine the size of a world.

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With several Disco Elysium spiritual successors in the works from former staff, controversy regarding the exits of key team members behind the beloved RPG, and an in-development expansion cancelled, you might have been wondering what Studio ZA/UM will do next. Well, that answer is here. In a recent presentation held for the press, ZA/UM revealed a first look at their next game. It’s called C4 and it’s about espionage.

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