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I may have winced a bit, initially, at Alice Bee’s choice of RPS Game Club game for this month. Deathbulge: Battle of the Bands looked funny and all, but it’s a turn-based RPG, a subgenre that usually elicits the same amount of enthusiasm from me as the phrase “by Ernest Cline” does from Alice. Deathbulge, however, is a clever little sod of a game, managing to devise not only a turn-based combat system that avoids the usual waiting-around tedium but one that’s outright good fun in itself.
There are management games and there are micro-management games. Prison Architect 2 is the latter. I don’t mean this as an annoying thing, like when Harold from corporate starts commenting all over your document at 4.30pm on a Friday. I mean it as a distinction between those games that let you plop down a house, and others that need you to stack the bricks, install the plumbing, fit the lights, and select the wallpaper. The first Prison Architect allowed you to finesse every detail of a secure correctional facility, down to each cell and dog kennel. Unsurprisingly for a sim about prison, it encouraged obsessive control. The 3D-ified sequel isn’t finished yet, but it’s taking a similar approach. Maybe a little too similar.
You remember the ending of 2011’s first-person bullethoser Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, right? Everyone does! A big man kills another big man with a gun but then – then! – a third big man kills that first big man with a rope. It’s dramatic stuff. Well, a data-diving enthusiast of the CoDwars has discovered a cut ending from the original trilogy’s closing chapter. It’s a more downbeat and mysterious finale, featuring a shadowy figure whose identity is never revealed. Also, Captain Price, the hero of the franchise and aforementioned big man number three, drops his cigar with possibly mortal implications.
Baldur’s Gate 3 and Divinity Original Sin developers Larian today announced the opening of a new studio in Warsaw, Poland. This is RPG outfit Larian’s seventh studio worldwide, and the latest to contribute to their “24-hour development cycle” model. That’s even more hands on deck to a) keep Swen Vincke’s armour polished to a fine sheen and b) ensure smooth sailing for the two new games that Larian currently have in the works.
20 years after leaving Elder Scrolls, Starfield, and Fallout 76 makers Bethesda Game Studios, veteran writer and quest designer Douglas Goodall has returned to classic RPG Morrowind with an expansive new quest mod.
This week on RPS: secret plans and clever tricks. Also, a bunch of new videogames, none of them particularly Enormous or Crocodilian. We open on Monday 20th May with the extremely Alice B-friendly combo of Little-Known Galaxy, aka Stardew Valley meets Star Trek, and A Tower Full Of Cats, a hidden object puzzler featuring a tower full of dogs, I mean cats. All very upbeat. Well, hold that thought, because on the 21st, it’s time for Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2, another slice of Celtic sort-of-psychosis from Ninja Theory, which is as grim as the accompanying Paper Trail is *checks Nic’s review* incredibly annoying?
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! Did you know that the word ‘book’ is actually an ancient Sumerian greeting, short for: ‘can I have that book back I lent you eight months ago you said you’d have finished in like, two? This is going to be another one of those, isn’t it?.’ Truly, language’s many permutations are a font of limitless wonder. This week, it’s Pony Island, The Hex, and Inscryption maker Daniel Mullins! Cheers Daniel! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?
I’m just not sure where I’m going wrong, readers. I keep choosing great guests with great answers, and yet, they keep missing the subtext in my emails requesting that they name every book in existence. Another round next week it is, then! As a bonus this week, it turns out Edders and I are reading the same book, completely accidentally. That being Jake Adelstein’s The Last Yakuza. Edders got it is as a gift, and I moved on to it after finishing Adelstein’s first book, Tokyo Vice. I think I prefer the scrappiness of Tokyo Vice so far, but they’re both fascinating.
Also, Alice Bee done a second novel! I’m sure she won’t plug herself, so I’m doing it here. She writes novels after work! I can barely microwave pasta post 5pm! Let me know what you’ve been reading below, and remember: a rushed sign off will be forever bad, but a delayed sign off will just needlessly drag out the length of this sentence to disguise the fact I still haven’t come up with a good sign off.
Seablip is a pixel art pirate ’em up, which promises an open world to sail around, islands to visit, crews to hire, bounties to hunt, and minigames through which to uncover treasure and fish. It looks adorable and it’s out in Early Access now.
Dead Cells was blessed with several excellent animated trailers, each one produced by French animation studio Bobbypills. Now the slick metroidvania is getting a full animated television series from the same folks, and the first trailer is below.
The next Call Of Duty will arrive on Game Pass on day one, according to anonymous sources. Microsoft’s strategy has long involved releasing all their first-party games on Game Pass, but there had been doubt over whether the same would be true of the first Call Of Duty to be released since Microsoft’s $69 billion acquisition of publishers Activision.
