Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

In V Rising, you’re a fledgling vampire on a mission to become absolute bossferatu of a Gothic open world. You get a Diablo-ish combat system, the ability to shapeshift into a spider, and a whole castle to prance around in, crooning at the moon. I like this premise almost as much as I dislike the fact that V Rising is also a survival game, in which you must fell trees and master a crafting system like a common turnip farmer.

What do we hope for when our interest in a game is almost perfectly balanced by our disinterest? We hope that the developers will treat us to a free-to-play weekend, in which our perhaps-unfounded reservations might be strategically offset by the endorphin rush of not having paid any goddamn money. This, V Rising creators Stunlock have now done. The game is free to download and play on Steam from right now until Monday, 16th September at 5pm UK or 10am PST.

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After PowerWash Simulator’s jet to success, it was inevitable, really. Whitethorn Games and North Star Video Games have only come out with a rival: Spray Paint Simulator. In it, you get out your spray painter and “shshshshshs” different colours of paint onto various surfaces. For whatever reason, the universe this takes place in doesn’t seem to value brushes or those rolly mops. “No”, it says, kicking your brush into the sun. “Spray or nay”.

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I could have described the multiplayer racing game Faaast Penguin a lot of ways. It is Fall Guys meets Snowboard Kids. It is Diddy Kong Racing but all the courses are water slides. It’s Cool Runnings but there are 40 penguins instead of four Jamaicans. Okay, that last one is a bit of a stretch. But basically, yes, this brightly coloured free-to-play knockout racer feels like that one Super Mario 64 level where you race the big penguin down a slide, only this time there are a ton of other players trying to beat you to the secret shortcut. It’s coming out next week.

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Haha. Hoho. Yes. Hehe. Yes. This rules. This rules so hard. Portal To The Cosmobeat is a rhythm dance battler where you copy the moves of your opponents by controlling each of your limbs, and your head, with a separate key. If you look down at your keyboard right now, you’ll notice your W, A, D, Z and X form a five pointed star – with the W key a bit off, granted. That’s you, that is. You hold down the limbs you want to wiggle, then control them with your mouse. It’s simple, silly, and very fun. Here’s a tray-tray:

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Annapurna Interactive – the publisher behind games such as Cocoon, Stray, and Neon White – have seen their entire staff resign after an internal dispute this month, via Bloomberg.

The resignations came in the wake of a dispute between Annapurna Interactive president Nathan Gary and Annapurna studio head Megan Ellison. As Bloomberg report, negotiations were taking place to “spin off the video-game division as an independent entity.” After failing to reach an agreement, Ellison pulled out of the negotiations, resulting in the resignation of Gary and “other executives.” Further resignations followed, with a reported two dozen other staff leaving the company.

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There’s no greater tool in video games than a grappling hook. 2022’s Grapple Dog knew that, making it the core ability of its platforming. The ability returns in sequel Grapple Dogs: Cosmic Canines, out today, although there’s now a second character to play as for those fools who favour shooting over hooking.

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There seem to be an infinite number of video game showcase streams these days, each one promising to be full of exciting indie games. Whatever my feelings about the entertainment value of these streams, I can’t deny I watch all of them, or that they introduce me to games I might have otherwise missed.

Next on the calendar is the Convegence games showcase on September 26th, which is a new event that – hey, what a twist – promises to feature exciting indie games. It does have some recognisable publishers onboard, including Secret Mode, Thunderful, and Kepler, among others.

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Earlier today, Nic covered the full release of Steam Families, a feature which makes it easier for families to share a game library and for parents to manage kids’ purchases and playtime on the digital storefront. It’s a neat improvement over the old system.

Unfortunately I can’t think about anything other than the Steam Families logo, which is pictured above and is clearly a shocked, possibly aghast face. Or so I thought at first. The more I stare at it, the more it seems to reveal.

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There are many reasons to play and write about Arco. The Mesoamerican pixelart landscapes, for example – radiant, cloud-hung platters of land with people and buildings reduced to daubs of paint in the foreground. The fact that it’s about witnessing and surviving colonial invasion, rather than the more familiar European or North American video game fantasy of searching a New World for plunder.

The ensemble storytelling, with four, successively playable characters setting their own lenses to thickly entangled themes of sorrow, vengeance and growing understanding. The sparse, expressive dialogue, each phrase carefully tucked inside its speech bubble. The music. And the little things at the level of how you move, what you do. When you pick a faraway destination on your map, your character makes the journey screen by screen, which gives you a second to lean back and be a passenger, watching the horizon, at least until you’re ambushed by a giant beetle.

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Oh, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl. Mere weeks from release after years of delays, plopped in front of me at a cramped, lightly vibrating Gamescom booth, and you still won’t reveal your secrets. I did get to play a brief whizz through GSC Game World’s eerie FPS – enough to feel encouraged, even – but be it time constraints or the darkness of my nighttime raid into the radioactive Zone, I would have liked to have quite literally seen more.

Then again, keeping the mystery intact may have been the point all along. “As a game director, I want to hide everything from the player”, GSC’s CEO Ievgen Grygorovych had told me minutes earlier. “I’m fighting with the marketing team because they want to show as much as possible!”

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