MachineGames have made a decent living as the creators of satirical alternate histories in which you messily murder Nazis using mighty double-handfuls of shotgun. There are Nazis to fight in Indiana Jones And The Great Circle - a globe-trotting, tomb-robbing adventure featuring a Lost Ark-era Harrison Ford - but as you'd expect from a Lucasfilm adaptation, there's rather less of the bloodshed.

Read more

Peter Molyneux is once again back from the beyond, and he's making a new god sim. The game in question is Masters Of Albion, which now has a page on Steam. In development at Molyneux's 2012-founded studio 22cans, it looks like a mix of Populous and Black & White with knocked-together, toylike visuals, and a loose tower-defence format whereby monsters attack your villages at night. Here's the first trailer.

Read more

Firaxis and 2K Games have slapped a release date on Civilization 7, the latest in the obscenely venerable empire management series. It's out 11th February 2025. Find a new trailer with a quick-and-dirty montage of units, buildings and posturing historical celebs below. Don't worry, it still has hexagons.

Read more

There's a new instalment of Supermassive's Dark Pictures anthology series on the way, and it's set in Outer Space, wherein you'll find the Darkest Pictures of all. Out in 2025, Directive 8020 is the story of the good ship Cassiopeia, a human colony vessel that is infiltrated by Something Icky. The Something Icky is capable of mimicking humans. So that'd be a bit like Alien and a bit like The Thing, then. Sorry, human colonists!

Directive 8020 was teased at the end of the last Dark Pictures instalment, 2022's The Devil in Me. A trailer also leaked back in November 2022. Now, we have an official announcement video.

Read more

Activision have just screened an abbreviated video of Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6 campaign level “Most Wanted”, in which you and a buddy infiltrate a US fundraiser to save returning character Adler from Bad Dudes. Good news, people who like Call Of Duty: this looks like Call Of Duty. It’s got a homing knife, an exploding remote-controlled car and a big chap in full face armour with an overcompensatory minigun. Catch the full video below.

Read more

Our Black Myth: Wukong review hails the game as "a generous Soulsy adventure hybrid that works within its limitations and delivers a beautiful challenge to be unpicked with a magical toolbox". Reviewer Edders went so far as to find the world more engaging than that of Elden Ring - proper defying-the-gods level rhetoric. Players seem to agree. The game launched last night, and has already accrued a concurrent player peak of 1.44 million - Steam's fourth highest ever, exceeded only by Counter-Strike, Palworld and PUBG. By that metric, it's the platform's most popular strictly single player game of all the time.

All that goodwill has been spoiled, however, by a Steam code handout message to streamers and other "content creators" before launch which includes some reactionary, non-binding requests - no mention of "trigger words" like "Covid-19", no talk of "politics" or "feminist propaganda", and no mention of "China's game industry policies, opinions, news, etc".

Read more

Please lock your Chocobos to attack position and set your Phoenix Downs to stun: Square Enix have released fresh details of Final Fantasy 16's PC port, which has now been dated for launch on 17th September. They've also shared a little about why it's taken so long to arrive - the (generally decent) action-RPG hit PS5 over a year ago, back when I was still some filthy console-playing freelancer.

According to director Hiroshi Takai, it was "impossible" to create the PC and PS5 versions at the same time, even if Square Enix hadn't been restrained by a timed exclusivity clause. He also thinks that the Final Fantasy series faces no "existential risk" right now, despite lower-than-hoped returns from both Final Fantasy 16 and, going by Square Enix's latest financial reports, the more recent and currently PS5-only Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth.

Read more

Silent Hill has a messy, up-is-down relationship with time and history, so let's go about this hands-on with the Silent Hill 2 Remake in a messy, up-is-down way. Developed well over two decades ago, the original Silent Hill 2 is the magnum opus of Polish horror stalwarts Bloober Team. Running on then-innovative "Unreal Engine 5" technology created by Jazz Jackrabbit publishers Epic MegaGames, it's a wonderful abyss of a game that remains perfectly playable today, given a certain amount of tolerance for the quirks of the era.

It begins with your character, James Sunderland, descending from the road towards the eponymous Midwestern nowhere-town. Like many games of the period, Silent Hill 2 uses a third-person, over-the-shoulder manual camera, which allows you to glance fearfully up at the monstrous pine trees that fringe the path - each rising from a bulging tide of fog that menaces with the suggestion of approaching figures. There is moisture everywhere, gushing from drain pipes and dribbling down concrete barriers. As you amble into the murk, deathly chords and groaning, unmechanical motifs reverberate from somewhere deep underground.

Read more

New week, same old terror of that cyclopean glutton known as the Maw emerging from its cosmic bolthole and swallowing the entirety of Devon. As ever, we have a way of thwarting the Maw's advance, and it's... pasta sauce? Graham, why is there pasta sauce in the Trello? Have Ziff Davis subfranchised us to Dolmio? Oh, I'm sorry! That's just my shopping list. What I meant to say was: new video games! Video games (PC games, specifically) are the only thing that can preoccupy the Maw, the only thing newsworthy enough to distract it from the tempting clifftop maisonettes of Torquay. Let's see what the week has in store for us, eh.

Read more

When Bloober and Konami announced that they were remaking Silent Hill 2 as part of a comprehensive series reboot, it made immediate if slightly deflating sense to me. Silent Hill 2 is the more feted of the Hills - if I were a calculating franchise custodian tasked with 'bringing back' one of the acclaimed original trilogy, that's probably the instalment I and my spreadsheets would fix upon. I mean, it's the game with Pyramid Head in it - the nearest thing Silent Hill has to a mascot, and it's not like there's an issue of cutting out plot material: each game in the Silent Hill series is, on some level, a distinct story with a distinct protagonist.

Still, the decision to 'skip' the first game in the series, whose world, narrative themes, music and art direction set the parameters for all the rest, made my brain itch a bit, and when I ran into Bloober's creative director Mateusz Lenart and lead producer Maciej Głomb at a Konami event, I had to ask about it.

Read more

Baroque wilderness-builder Nightingale has not been doing brilliantly since Ed Thorn described the launch early access version as "a numbers grind disguised as a gaslamp survival game". We had moderately high hopes for it before the early access release - I personally enjoy the fairytale setting, with its pop-up Pucks and magic umbrellas, but I also think I've raised enough hovels on procedurally generated maps for one lifetime. Still, I'd quite like it to come good, if only so I can justify op-eds about Lewis Carroll, and I'm somewhat encouraged by what I've heard of the game's forthcoming Realms Rebuilt update.

Read more

There you are, rambling through the woods of Interactive Entertainment with an empty pack and a spring in your step. Here I am, lying in wait behind a tree. Wham! Bam! You reel back in consternation as I bounce into the path and clobber you with a sack containing no less than eight venerable RPGs, from Baldur's Gate to Warhammer 40,000: Rogue's Trader - well over a thousand hours worth of dungeons, dragons, dicerolls, dwarven shopkeepers and many other things I refuse to spend time alliterating, all of which will (currently) set you back just £32.07.

Were you planning to spend this weekend playing some cute two-hour artgame sideshow, without any levelling at all? Shut up, you DOLT. You will play what the nice journalist tells you to play! Best lay in extra caffeine tablets, because it's going to take you till Monday just to get through the character creators alone.

Read more

Crytek's sweaty and superlative survival boss-rush shooter Hunt: Showdown has been relaunched as Hunt: Showdown 1896, introducing a comprehensive technological update alongside a chronological leap forward to a new map in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. As is tradition for big 2.0-style updates, some players absolutely loathe it, with recent Steam user reviews dragging the consensus underwater.

Read more

For years, our PC storage has wobbled and buckled beneath the tyranny of gigantic Call Of Duty installs. Like 13th century peasants straining to convey huge, teetering loads of freshly quarried LMGs, our SSDs cry out for justice. Perhaps scenting imminent rebellion and a mass audience desertion to low-poly shooters with more civilised file sizes, Activision have relented. Future installations of the much-padded FPS will be "smaller and more customised", though in a last cruel stroke of villainy, they want you to download a large update to prepare the ground.

Read more

Space 4X strategy game Stellaris launched in 2016, but Paradox can't stop adding to the universe. Last time I checked in, it was school trips to other dimensions. Now, it's Cosmic Storms. Due for release alongside the Stellaris 3.13 Vela update on September 10th, these are a paid "mechanical expansion" (priced at a rather chunky £11, $13 or €13, and available as part of the current season pass) that builds upon the game's existing Space Storms, "providing a deeper experience with strategically meaningful gameplay and beautiful upgraded visuals". Wash that down with new civics, precursor narratives, anomalies, archaeology sites, techs, edicts, a new Ascension perk, and new galactic community resolutions.

Read more

If you relished the splashier gunfights of Cyberpunk 2077, like the sound of Doom meets Blade Runner, or wish you could jam your nose right into the neon trenches of Ruiner, you will likely enjoy the announcement trailer for Defect. It's a new "cyberpunk, squad-based, Immersive Objective Shooter" from emptyvessel, a team of erstwhile id Software, Call Of Duty and Naughty Dog folks.

Read more

Earlier this week there was some minor Discourse about the removal of the Erotica photography tag from the Dead Rising remaster. Some readers characterised this as a familiar species of cultural hypocrisy regarding video games - emphasising violence is A-OK, but for the love of god, don't mention sex. Good news, those people: Dread XP's latest horror signing The Lacerator has both. It casts you as hirsute 1980s porn star Max - surname not given in press release, but presumably something like Jackin' or Girth - who has been abducted by a large scary individual called the Lacerator.

Read more

I was all set to plunge into Blackbird and Gearbox's Homeworld 3 this spring when I received a slightly underwhelmed intergalactic transmission from Nic, praising the game's atmosphere and story while ruminating over fussy controls and a want of tactical depth. Like a herd of frigates scenting a pride of destroyers lurking behind a nearby asteroid, I rerouted hastily and took up a holding position approximately one astronomical unit from the Buy button, hoping that the developers might iron out a few of the wrinkles.

Read more

The Bullfroggy connected universe that is Two Point County continues to expand with the announcement of Two Point Museum, another irreverent management sim from developers Two Point Studios. This one’s about museums, would you believe, with exhibition themes including the world of prehistory. Find a trailer propped below this paragraph like a freshly brushed-down Tugowaurus skeleton.

Read more

The next advance in video game graphics technology is not ray-tracing or tray-racing or any variation thereof - it's janky stop motion and rubbish plastic dolls, and it actually began about 30 years ago, when I watched the Adam and Joe show for the first time. If you never watched the Adam and Joe show, they used to do home movie recreations of famous films like Titanic and Saving Private Ryan using stuffed animals and action figures. I found these "Toymovies" hysterical as a kid - I suspect they are less so now. Probably, they are full of jokes we might tentatively class as "of their time". The point is, Reptilian Rising is sort of Toymovie: The Game.

Read more

Satirical space RPG sequel The Outer Worlds 2 was announced back in 2021. Since then, we've heard nary a peep about it, with developers Obsidian focusing on Pillars Of Eternity successor Avowed and their ace survival game Grounded, which left early access in September 2022. According to Obsidian's studio head Feargus Urquhart, the project is rubbing along nicely. But it was not ever thus: during the opening years of the Covid pandemic, there was apparently "talk of 'do we stop Outer Worlds 2 and just throw the whole team on Avowed'."

Read more

Finding and sharing Free Stuff is one of the time-honoured duties of the video game journalist or SEO-monger. Back when I was OXM's online editor, "free Xbox games" was one of our golden Google pillars, the other two being "Minecraft Xbox 360 update" and "Skyrim something something". Well, uncle Valve has just rudely torpedoed that ancient investigative initiative by adding a Trending Free tab to the Steam frontpage, encompassing prologues, demos, free-to-play games and that most treasured of jewels, a full free game with no monetisation elements, such as Grimhook.

Do not cry for us pitiful electronic scribblers, crowded on our melting internet icebergs. Play free games instead! Thanks to that new tab, I've just discovered a demo for neato wide-format tower defender Frontline Crisis. Hah, that'll keep the awareness of steady livelihood erosion at bay.

Read more

Aside from being a game where you run around a shopping mall murdering the living dead, the original Dead Rising from 2006 is a clownish satire of sleazy tabloid photojournalism. It expresses this by way of its scoring system, where you earn "Prestige points" for snapping pictures that fit one of five categories: "Brutal" scenes of characters being slain; moments of "Horror", such as the spectacle of an approaching horde; comical "Outtakes", like characters caught in bizarre poses; moments of "Drama", such as people reacting to discoveries; and "Erotic" photos of women alive or undead, which range from snaps of exposed underwear to close-ups of cleavage.

The Erotica tag has, however, been chopped from the Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster, in what Capcom gingerly suggest isn't "a response to a changing cultural climate", but expressive of the view that earning points from such photos is not "an appropriate reward for survival and not a skill required of a journalist trying to stay alive".

Read more

I'm no shoot 'em up nutter - or "shmutter", as I understand they prefer to be called - but some of the first games I remember playing are shmups. Games like Maelstrom, Ambrosia's Macintosh clone of Asteroids, and the proto-shmup Crystal Quest from Patrick Buckland, who would go on to make Carmageddon. Little did I know that the humble premise of a small 2D spacecraft shooting baddies on a wrap-around screen would reach the glittering heights of Nova Drift. Had you shown me this game back in 1995, I dare say I'd have shmupped myself.

Read more

Among the many, Gigery beauties of 2014's Alien: Isolation is that you save using an in-game, wall-mounted Emergency Phone - a maddeningly analog process of slotting a keycard into the machine and waiting for three beeps. Doing this requires you to stand upright in full view, with your back turned upon an entire space station's worth of shiny domed technology and guttural industrial noises. Delightful!

Amongst the players harrowed and compelled by this fixture is Fede Álvarez, director of the 2013 Evil Dead remake, 2016's Don't Breathe and, most recently Alien: Romulus - the seventh and avowedly "back to basics" Alien movie. Isolation is the Alien experience that convinced Álvarez the Alien could still be scary, after decades of milking the creature's dugs for spin-off movies and making it share a screen with the Predator, the Pepsi Max to Alien's Dom Pérignon 1921. In possibly self-defeating homage to Creative Assembly's work, he's filled the movie with Emergency Telephones, turning them into a straightforward-sounding form of foreshadowing.

Read more

Valve's third-person hero shooter Deadlock hasn't been officially revealed yet, but thousands of you unscrupulous devils have been playing it thanks to stolen development builds. Speculation abounds that these "leaks", coupled with Valve's obstinate silence about it, are a calculated publisher psyop. Are they deliberately letting people play the game early so as to temper the marketing rollout in some way? Perhaps handle any initial player criticism under cover of non-announcement? It seems unlikely, but as other writers have pointed out, this is Valve, unaccountable elder god of PC gaming. I guess we should be thankful it isn't another Half-Life tease.

Read more

There are times when I think each week's most intriguing new PC releases are being organised behind the scenes by a fiendishly plotting, Left 4 Dead-style "AI Director". Mostly, the games approach in small groups distributed evenly among the weekdays - a steady assault. But every now and then, they treacherously mass and pounce on one particular day. This week, it's the latter.

Read more

Sometimes I want to play a video game, and sometimes I just want to assemble a quiet little Dutch town with iron bridges, fountains and dinky trams bustling about like bumble bees. The project in question is Tramstertram. Aside from being a terrifying feat of punmanship, it's a browser-based building toy from Matt Stark, creator of the really rather lovely Viewfinder.

Read more

The weekend bears down on us like a host of hissing, barrel-throwing psychics, but there is yet time for some brief updates on Remedy's Control 2, which Remedy say is coming along nicely. The same is apparently true of the multiplayer Control spin-off Project Condor and the Max Payne 1 & 2 remakes, on which Remedy are collaborating with GTA and Max Payne 3 developers Rockstar.

Read more

MachineGames have made a decent living as the creators of satirical alternate histories in which you messily murder Nazis using mighty double-handfuls of shotgun. There are Nazis to fight in Indiana Jones And The Great Circle - a globe-trotting, tomb-robbing adventure featuring a Lost Ark-era Harrison Ford - but as you'd expect from a Lucasfilm adaptation, rather less of the bloodshed.

Read more

Peter Molyneux is once again back from the beyond, and he's making a new god sim. The game in question is Masters Of Albion, which now has a page on Steam. In development at Molyneux's 2012-founded studio 22cans, it looks like a mix of Populous and Black & White with knocked-together, toylike visuals, and a loose tower-defence format whereby monsters attack your villages at night. Here's the first trailer.

Read more

Firaxis and 2K Games have slapped a release date on Civilization 7, the latest in the obscenely venerable empire management series. It's out 11th February 2025. Find a new trailer with a quick-and-dirty montage of units, buildings and posturing historical celebs below. Don't worry, it still has hexagons.

Read more

There's a new instalment of Supermassive's Dark Pictures anthology series on the way, and it's set in Outer Space, wherein you'll find the Darkest Pictures of all. Out in 2025, Directive 8020 is the story of the good ship Cassiopeia, a human colony vessel that is infiltrated by Something Icky. The Something Icky is capable of mimicking humans. So that'd be a bit like Alien and a bit like The Thing, then. Sorry, human colonists!

Directive 8020 was teased at the end of the last Dark Pictures instalment, 2022's The Devil in Me. A trailer also leaked back in November 2022. Now, we have an official announcement video.

Read more

Activision have just screened an abbreviated video of Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6 campaign level “Most Wanted”, in which you and a buddy infiltrate a US fundraiser to save returning character Adler from Bad Dudes. Good news, people who like Call Of Duty: this looks like Call Of Duty. It’s got a homing knife, an exploding remote-controlled car and a big chap in full face armour with an overcompensatory minigun. Catch the full video below.

Read more

Our Black Myth: Wukong review hails the game as "a generous Soulsy adventure hybrid that works within its limitations and delivers a beautiful challenge to be unpicked with a magical toolbox". Reviewer Edders went so far as to find the world more engaging than that of Elden Ring - proper defying-the-gods level rhetoric. Players seem to agree. The game launched last night, and has already accrued a concurrent player peak of 1.44 million - Steam's fourth highest ever, exceeded only by Counter-Strike, Palworld and PUBG. By that metric, it's the platform's most popular strictly single player game of all the time.

All that goodwill has been spoiled, however, by a Steam code handout message to streamers and other "content creators" before launch which includes some reactionary, non-binding requests - no mention of "trigger words" like "Covid-19", no talk of "politics" or "feminist propaganda", and no mention of "China's game industry policies, opinions, news, etc".

Read more

Please lock your Chocobos to attack position and set your Phoenix Downs to stun: Square Enix have released fresh details of Final Fantasy 16's PC port, which has now been dated for launch on 17th September. They've also shared a little about why it's taken so long to arrive - the (generally decent) action-RPG hit PS5 over a year ago, back when I was still some filthy console-playing freelancer.

According to director Hiroshi Takai, it was "impossible" to create the PC and PS5 versions at the same time, even if Square Enix hadn't been restrained by a timed exclusivity clause. He also thinks that the Final Fantasy series faces no "existential risk" right now, despite lower-than-hoped returns from both Final Fantasy 16 and, going by Square Enix's latest financial reports, the more recent and currently PS5-only Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth.

Read more

Silent Hill has a messy, up-is-down relationship with time and history, so let's go about this hands-on with the Silent Hill 2 Remake in a messy, up-is-down way. Developed well over two decades ago, the original Silent Hill 2 is the magnum opus of Polish horror stalwarts Bloober Team. Running on then-innovative "Unreal Engine 5" technology created by Jazz Jackrabbit publishers Epic MegaGames, it's a wonderful abyss of a game that remains perfectly playable today, given a certain amount of tolerance for the quirks of the era.

It begins with your character, James Sunderland, descending from the road towards the eponymous Midwestern nowhere-town. Like many games of the period, Silent Hill 2 uses a third-person, over-the-shoulder manual camera, which allows you to glance fearfully up at the monstrous pine trees that fringe the path - each rising from a bulging tide of fog that menaces with the suggestion of approaching figures. There is moisture everywhere, gushing from drain pipes and dribbling down concrete barriers. As you amble into the murk, deathly chords and groaning, unmechanical motifs reverberate from somewhere deep underground.

Read more

New week, same old terror of that cyclopean glutton known as the Maw emerging from its cosmic bolthole and swallowing the entirety of Devon. As ever, we have a way of thwarting the Maw's advance, and it's... pasta sauce? Graham, why is there pasta sauce in the Trello? Have Ziff Davis subfranchised us to Dolmio? Oh, I'm sorry! That's just my shopping list. What I meant to say was: new video games! Video games (PC games, specifically) are the only thing that can preoccupy the Maw, the only thing newsworthy enough to distract it from the tempting clifftop maisonettes of Torquay. Let's see what the week has in store for us, eh.

Read more

When Bloober and Konami announced that they were remaking Silent Hill 2 as part of a comprehensive series reboot, it made immediate if slightly deflating sense to me. Silent Hill 2 is the more feted of the Hills - if I were a calculating franchise custodian tasked with 'bringing back' one of the acclaimed original trilogy, that's probably the instalment I and my spreadsheets would fix upon. I mean, it's the game with Pyramid Head in it - the nearest thing Silent Hill has to a mascot, and it's not like there's an issue of cutting out plot material: each game in the Silent Hill series is, on some level, a distinct story with a distinct protagonist.

Still, the decision to 'skip' the first game in the series, whose world, narrative themes, music and art direction set the parameters for all the rest, made my brain itch a bit, and when I ran into Bloober's creative director Mateusz Lenart and lead producer Maciej Głomb at a Konami event, I had to ask about it.

Read more

Baroque wilderness-builder Nightingale has not been doing brilliantly since Ed Thorn described the launch early access version as "a numbers grind disguised as a gaslamp survival game". We had moderately high hopes for it before the early access release - I personally enjoy the fairytale setting, with its pop-up Pucks and magic umbrellas, but I also think I've raised enough hovels on procedurally generated maps for one lifetime. Still, I'd quite like it to come good, if only so I can justify op-eds about Lewis Carroll, and I'm somewhat encouraged by what I've heard of the game's forthcoming Realms Rebuilt update.

Read more

There you are, rambling through the woods of Interactive Entertainment with an empty pack and a spring in your step. Here I am, lying in wait behind a tree. Wham! Bam! You reel back in consternation as I bounce into the path and clobber you with a sack containing no less than eight venerable RPGs, from Baldur's Gate to Warhammer 40,000: Rogue's Trader - well over a thousand hours worth of dungeons, dragons, dicerolls, dwarven shopkeepers and many other things I refuse to spend time alliterating, all of which will (currently) set you back just £32.07.

Were you planning to spend this weekend playing some cute two-hour artgame sideshow, without any levelling at all? Shut up, you DOLT. You will play what the nice journalist tells you to play! Best lay in extra caffeine tablets, because it's going to take you till Monday just to get through the character creators alone.

Read more

Crytek's sweaty and superlative survival boss-rush shooter Hunt: Showdown has been relaunched as Hunt: Showdown 1896, introducing a comprehensive technological update alongside a chronological leap forward to a new map in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. As is tradition for big 2.0-style updates, some players absolutely loathe it, with recent Steam user reviews dragging the consensus underwater.

Read more

For years, our PC storage has wobbled and buckled beneath the tyranny of gigantic Call Of Duty installs. Like 13th century peasants straining to convey huge, teetering loads of freshly quarried LMGs, our SSDs cry out for justice. Perhaps scenting imminent rebellion and a mass audience desertion to low-poly shooters with more civilised file sizes, Activision have relented. Future installations of the much-padded FPS will be "smaller and more customised", though in a last cruel stroke of villainy, they want you to download a large update to prepare the ground.

Read more

Space 4X strategy game Stellaris launched in 2016, but Paradox can't stop adding to the universe. Last time I checked in, it was school trips to other dimensions. Now, it's Cosmic Storms. Due for release alongside the Stellaris 3.13 Vela update on September 10th, these are a paid "mechanical expansion" (priced at a rather chunky £11, $13 or €13, and available as part of the current season pass) that builds upon the game's existing Space Storms, "providing a deeper experience with strategically meaningful gameplay and beautiful upgraded visuals". Wash that down with new civics, precursor narratives, anomalies, archaeology sites, techs, edicts, a new Ascension perk, and new galactic community resolutions.

Read more

If you relished the splashier gunfights of Cyberpunk 2077, like the sound of Doom meets Blade Runner, or wish you could jam your nose right into the neon trenches of Ruiner, you will likely enjoy the announcement trailer for Defect. It's a new "cyberpunk, squad-based, Immersive Objective Shooter" from emptyvessel, a team of erstwhile id Software, Call Of Duty and Naughty Dog folks.

Read more

Earlier this week there was some minor Discourse about the removal of the Erotica photography tag from the Dead Rising remaster. Some readers characterised this as a familiar species of cultural hypocrisy regarding video games - emphasising violence is A-OK, but for the love of god, don't mention sex. Good news, those people: Dread XP's latest horror signing The Lacerator has both. It casts you as hirsute 1980s porn star Max - surname not given in press release, but presumably something like Jackin' or Girth - who has been abducted by a large scary individual called the Lacerator.

Read more

I was all set to plunge into Blackbird and Gearbox's Homeworld 3 this spring when I received a slightly underwhelmed intergalactic transmission from Nic, praising the game's atmosphere and story while ruminating over fussy controls and a want of tactical depth. Like a herd of frigates scenting a pride of destroyers lurking behind a nearby asteroid, I rerouted hastily and took up a holding position approximately one astronomical unit from the Buy button, hoping that the developers might iron out a few of the wrinkles.

Read more

The Bullfroggy connected universe that is Two Point County continues to expand with the announcement of Two Point Museum, another irreverent management sim from developers Two Point Studios. This one’s about museums, would you believe, with exhibition themes including the world of prehistory. Find a trailer propped below this paragraph like a freshly brushed-down Tugowaurus skeleton.

Read more

The next advance in video game graphics technology is not ray-tracing or tray-racing or any variation thereof - it's janky stop motion and rubbish plastic dolls, and it actually began about 30 years ago, when I watched the Adam and Joe show for the first time. If you never watched the Adam and Joe show, they used to do home movie recreations of famous films like Titanic and Saving Private Ryan using stuffed animals and action figures. I found these "Toymovies" hysterical as a kid - I suspect they are less so now. Probably, they are full of jokes we might tentatively class as "of their time". The point is, Reptilian Rising is sort of Toymovie: The Game.

Read more

Satirical space RPG sequel The Outer Worlds 2 was announced back in 2021. Since then, we've heard nary a peep about it, with developers Obsidian focusing on Pillars Of Eternity successor Avowed and their ace survival game Grounded, which left early access in September 2022. According to Obsidian's studio head Feargus Urquhart, the project is rubbing along nicely. But it was not ever thus: during the opening years of the Covid pandemic, there was apparently "talk of 'do we stop Outer Worlds 2 and just throw the whole team on Avowed'."

Read more