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I have played many a creepy throwback game that takes inspiration from the ever inadequately named “Golden” (Grimy and Diseased? Cadaverous, perhaps) Age of survival horror on PS1, but it’s rare you play one that invokes the N64, and even less often that you stumble on something horror-adjacent that riffs on Star Fox 64. Ah, Star Fox! The natural companion piece for, say, Eternal Darkness or The Suffering. In fairness, I did always find those Pez dispenser dialogue animations pretty eerie.
To kick off with some extremely half-arsed mytho-geometry, the original Frostpunk was a testament to both the design utility and the inexhaustible political symbolism of circles. When people wish to found a community of equals they commonly form a circle, with each participant visible and audible to the rest. A circle is also the best shape for defending against an engulfing ambient threat such as a global ice age, because it has no weak points, and it makes a great centrepiece for a videogame interface, a symmetrical motif that can be tuned and adorned to either suck your attention into the screen or distribute it evenly in all directions.
Created by Polish developers 11 bit, Frostpunk takes place in the middle of a circle, an Arctic crater with a huge coal generator at its heart. Your city rises in rings around that generator, each additional layer of dwellings corresponding intuitively to decreasing temperature, and the result is one of the most focused and thematically consistent specimens of its genre – a building game that feels as intimate and urgent as tending a campfire. Frostpunk 2‘s new campaign mode breaks the circle open. It starts where you (hopefully) ended, with the crater now fully colonised and evolved into a glaring, blue-orange geode of high-density housing and clustered chimneys. But the view has been pulled back, and construction now unfolds along the plains and canyons beyond the crater, which consist not of circles but of hexagons – another UI designer’s favourite – on which you’ll plot out upgradeable districts rather than assembling individual buildings.
The first scene in RPS Game Club pick Deathbulge: Battle Of The Bands – a genuinely funny and innovative riff on turn-based RPGs – sees candyfloss n’ superglue-haired guitarist Faye frantically search for her missing guitar as the crowd for the titular battle grow impatient. You’ll quickly realise this a school-with-no-trousers-esque dream sequence, but the matted mess of thick black cables that carpet this dingy side-stage is painfully accurate. Pissing around with gear is roughly 70% of the band experience, in my limited experience of being in bands. This probably changes when you’ve got roadies or dedicated tech people, but we did not, because we were skint. And also terrible. Several hours of Deathbulge has brought me more joy than several years of being in actual bands. I had some isolated good times in some of those bands, but I’m having a very good time with Deathbulge.
A whopping 1000 corpses have been found in our ongoing investigation into Anthology of the Killer, Rock Paper Shotgun can reveal. The bodies were discovered in the aforementioned murder mystery “video game”, which is out now on itch.io. Following our previous reports we can confirm that exposure to the game’s crime-infested city can cause severe disorientation, confusion, uncontrolled fits of laughter, and moderate enlightenment. The streets here are so dense with crime that entire apartment blocks must shutter at night. When Rock Paper Shotgun reported the 1000 corpses to detectives, we were told this was “normal” and “appropriate”.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 will be the first Call Of Duty to launch on Microsoft Game Pass, according to a notification that went out this morning via the Xbox Game Pass app for iPhone and Android. “Just announced: Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is coming to Game Pass on day one later this year!” it reads. Sounds like a solid confirmation from me, though Microsoft and Activision have yet to start bellowing the news from any of Call of Duty’s official pulpits.
Resident Evils Code Veronica and 0 will be the next entries in the survival horror series to get the remake treatment, according to rumours. “A remake of Resident Evil Zero & Code Veronica in development right now,” claimed user Dusk Golem on Le Epic Musk Zone. The claim was casually corroborated by trustworthy sort Andy Robinson of VGC. Note the wording here, which suggests a bundle package of sorts, similar to the rumoured original plan for the remakes of Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 3.
At intervals in our relentless battles with the Maw, we lose people. Sometimes, it’s because those people have succeeded in levelling up out of games journalism, or found their way into another echelon of the craft. Other times, the losses are more abrupt and arbitrary. In each case, one short term response is intensification. Those of us who remain must be rockier, paperier and more shotgun than ever before. With that in mind, here are this (four-day) week’s new PC games of note.
It’s been three years to the day since we learned that Square Enix planned to remake Dragon Quest 3, unveiling a revamping of the seminal 1988 JRPG in Octopath Traveler’s HD-2D engine. Three years have passed since then, but we’ve finally had an update on the remake – and it’s raised a few questions, to say the least.
The next Doom game – the first new instalment in over four years, after Doom Eternal – is reportedly taking a leaf out of Evil Dead: Army of Darkness’ necronomicon by transporting the Doom Slayer back to a medieval world to presumably battle hellspawn. According to a new report, it’s subtitled The Dark Ages and we’ll get an official reveal next week.
The director of Baldur’s Gate 3 and CEO of developers Larian has revealed that the studio experienced crunch in order to get the sprawling Dungeons & Dragons CRPG finished. While Swen Vincke admitted that “it would be a lie to say that we didn’t [crunch]”, he insisted that it was less than on past Larian games such as Divinity, staff were paid for the overtime and it seemingly didn’t go as far as working late nights or weekends (for the most part, anyway).
