No Rest for the Wicked has introduced their new Together coop update, offering a new level of play for fans of this budding early access title.
Moon Studios GmbH has just released the coop update for their early access darling, No Rest for the Wicked. Titled No Rest for the Wicked Together, this latest update marks the first since the long-awaited The Breach Update, that release the end of April last year. Promising loads of new features, including the long-awaited coop play, Moon Studios isn’t simply allowing players to join in on a friend’s game; they are redefining how coop play can work.
While there are many aspects to the update to be impressed by, which you can find on the official Steam page, some stand-out features include shared realms that can be accessed by any invited player, even if the host isn’t present. This allows players to collaborate even when party members are offline, continuing to build the world of Sanctuary.
Additionally, this latest update allows for difficulty scaling based on active player count, ensuring that No Rest for the Wicked’s signature, challenging combat, remains consistent with the single-player experience. With full access to every aspect of the game experience, coop players can explore the world of No Rest for the Wicked together, sharing resources, housing, loot and experience while playfully trolling one another if they so desire.
Perhaps the most impressive aspect of Moon Studio’s approach to the coop experience is that all of this will be available as part of the base game, no subscriptions, passes, or microtransactions required. Following their recent successful bid to gain independence as a studio, this latest update is a testament to the developer’s commitment to creating the game they envisioned, unhindered by external pressure.
Even in its Early Access release, we noted in our preview that this title feels like a labour of love for Moon Studios. From its unique blending of Souls-like combat and ARPG design structure, No Rest for the Wicked is one of the most unique takes on these genres we’ve seen in recent years.
For the latest news on No Rest for the Wicked and all things gaming, keep those bookmarks saved to CGMagazine.
I know I say this a lot, but I’m genuinely surprised that Tides of Tomorrow flew completely under my radar. You’d think with a career covering the games industry, I would be aware of almost every video game that’s on the horizon, but sometimes you can end up missing the trees for the forest.
However, I knew this would be something interesting when CGM’s Dayna Elieen messaged me, “K CAN WE PLEASE TALK ABOUT TIDES OF TOMORROW,” since she doesn’t often message me in all caps unless something is genuinely good. I’ve repeatedly said that the Indie scene is infinitely more interesting than the “AAA” one because of the bold choices developers make to advance the medium. Tides of Tomorrow is one such example of this.
Developed by DigixArt, the studio behind Road 96 and Lost in Harmony, Tides of Tomorrow is a narrative adventure set in a vast, flooded world that has been all but destroyed by plastic pollution in the oceans. Players take on the role of a Tidewalker—unique humans who are able to connect with each other and harness visions of past events—suffering from the disease known as “Plastemia,” which is slowly killing them.
Players must navigate the world, fighting for not only their own survival, but the fate of the remaining mankind. Their choices will shape the world and potentially build a new one, or possibly destroy what little is left. It may sound simple, or like so many games that have come before it, but Tides of Tomorrow differentiates itself with its main gameplay mechanic: asynchronous multiplayer.
When players begin their game, they can choose to follow another player. As you play, you’ll be able to see what choices your followed player made both in dialogue and in action, how it affected the story and allow you to make decisions accordingly. You can either follow in their wake or attempt to diverge and see what new waters await you.
It’s an incredibly interesting idea that works on a lot of unique levels. In the moment-to-moment gameplay, it functions like a positive version of Dark Souls’Messages system, where players are actually trying to guide each other instead of sending them into bottomless pits. But in the macro-design, it connects in a meta way to the game’s overall narrative by allowing players to learn from each other’s mistakes and try to forge a better path forward.
“Even though my time with Tides of Tomorrow was relatively brief, I’m genuinely impressed with what it’s doing. “
In the early moments of the game, I needed to collect some scrap in order to help one of the characters who was trying to guide me. There was a bunch littered around, but one of them was placed on a memorial to those who had died from Plastemia. By using my Tide-O-Vision, I was able to see that the player I was following had been reprimanded for taking some scrap that was on the monument.
In that moment, it gave me some pause to consider how else I could approach my current situation that wouldn’t put me in bad standing with the local population. Going forward, I tried to be extra considerate with my decisions, all while trying to navigate a whole that was being shaped by another player. It made the experience so incredibly interesting, as you can tangibly see how events were shaped by the person who came before you, and how I now had to move through newly opened doors as others were closed by another player.
And what’s even more interesting is that players are not bound to another player for the entirety of their journey. At certain critical moments, players can choose to follow others, giving them the freedom to explore other perspectives and follow different threads of fate. Digixart clearly wants Tides of Tomorrow to be a deeply social game as players can share game seeds with one another, and there’s a big push for players to follow their favourite streamers—expanding the experience to a much broader platform.
Even though my time with Tides of Tomorrow was relatively brief, I’m genuinely impressed with what it’s doing. Not only is it creating an interesting world and telling an engaging story with truly resonant themes, but it’s doing so with such an interesting and dynamic gameplay hook that it genuinely keeps you involved. It’s going to be really exciting to see how Tides of Tomorrow connects and challenges players.
Developer Lion Shield that its Roman themed city builder Nova Roma will no longer be releasing into early access on January 22nd. Following feedback from those who have played the Nova Roma demo, the developer has made the decision to delay the game by two months to put in some extra polish. That means Nova Roma early access will now launch on March 26th.
In a joint statement Pete, Michael, & Sam of Lion Shield said, “First off, thanks for all your feedback on the Nova Roma demo! It’s been great to see the cities everyone’s creating, and we’ve definitely been impressed and surprised with the things you’re all doing with the dams and aqueducts! Given the response to the demo, we are going to push our launch date back a couple more months. The new date will be March 26th, 2026. Using your feedback we’ve updated the demo with lots of tuning, fixes, and recently we added rain, flooding, and droughts. We’ll continue to update the demo – we’re sort of thinking of it as a ‘proto-early access’. It’s disappointing to have to wait even longer and we’re sorry about that! We want to make sure everything is polished and we want to get in as much of your feedback as possible before release. Until then we hope you enjoy the demo and keep the feedback coming!”
In Nova Roma, the Roman Empire is falling into decay so you have to lead a small group of citizens to build a new version of the city in new lands. To build successfully you will need to meet the needs of the citizens, and gain the favour of the gods through building temples. Nova Roma is not just a builder where you throw up some buildings a be done with it. You will need to plan where to place dams and aqueducts to get water flowing to the city, without causing floods, and set up supply routes to get raw materials to the city without spreading too quickly. Advisors and senators will be there to help guide you build Nova Roma, and deal with the different issues that come up which will need balancing. You will need to make sure there is enough variety of entertainment to keep citizens happy after days of working, otherwise they may become unhappy too leading Nova Roma to ruin.
Flotsam – much better than the actual Waterworld games (Stray Fawn Publishing)
Surviving the apocalypse has never been so relaxing as in this excellent mix of survival game and city builder, set on a waterlogged future Earth.
The post-apocalypse is a famously popular setting for video games. From Fallout’s survivalist role-players to the harrowing events of The Last Of Us, game makers have long been drawn to the idea of a world reset, primed for reimagining. And, naturally, such games tend to be rather gloomy affairs.
Not so Flotsam, which might be gaming’s most cheerful take on life after the end of everything. Finally released as a full game, following years in early access, Flotsam is set in a world almost entirely flooded, where a handful of small islands and building tops make up the remaining landscape. The population appears reduced to almost nothing, and there is next to nowhere left to grow food.
And yet developer Pajama Llama Games’ creation welcomes you to a place of glorious weather, rolling blue seas, oceanic beauty, and an optimistic effort to build a community and thrive.
The heart of the game is your new home: a plucky, pootling boat that you constantly expand with walkways, pontoons, and floating structures, until you find yourself piloting a vast, self-sufficient floating village. Everything you use to build that undersized empire will have to be pulled from the waves or constructed onboard. Which brings us to Flotsam’s other half, where you explore a vast map, scavenging for supplies and welcoming new survivors to your community.
When it comes to the fundamentals of building out a prosperous settlement with a functioning and balanced ecosystem, things are broadly comparable to the likes of classics such as SimCity; although in the case of Flotsam the focus is on the finer details of producing food, building housing, and workshops, purifying water, and keeping your residents happy and healthy.
So, where SimCity might have asked you to place an entire industrial region in a single click, in Flotsam the level of detail demands you have the correct ingredients for meals, enough wood dried and shaped to build your next extension, and all manner of other considerations.
That might make things sound like rather too much of a mundane chore list, but so brilliantly balanced are Flotsam’s systems that the game is deeply captivating and rewarding. Constantly working to keep going has never felt quite so wonderful. There’s an intimacy to the detail that really connects you with your floating home, making you really care about its survival.
Flotsam is a very hard game to put down, because there’s always a few more things you can do to improve your settlement. And with those tasks completed you’ll open up yet more ways to make your home a little more efficient, beautiful, or capable.
The game’s core loop sees you hopping back and forth between the map screen – where you’ll direct your boat to points of interest – and the zoomed in world screen where you scoop up resources, scavenge islands for everything from food to metal scraps, set your inhabitants to work, and maintain and expand your boat.
Some of the old world is still left to scavenge from (Stray Fawn Publishing)
After that, you can hop back to the map and let everyone carry on as you navigate. Early on, you’ll focus on gathering plastic and wood from the sea, to build the likes of storage areas and your first homes and workshops. Initially the workshops let you dry salt water-drenched driftwood, cut planks to shape, and form plastic into simple building materials. In the opening hour you might also craft a water purifying tower or expand a network of jetty-like pathways that let your residents – known as drifters – get about their work.
In time, you’ll even construct your own humming power network, schools, areas for rest and recreation, seaweed farms, smaller fishing and scavenging boats, and specialised workshops that create food, rope, firewood, and much else besides – all of which will have to work in balanced harmony.
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That harmony is yours to orchestrate. The Pajama Llama team’s greatest achievement, in the case of Flotsam, is making that effort a wonderfully relaxing, gentle, interesting experience, without watering down the wider genre’s complexity and nuance.
Nevertheless, Flotsam could do with having its tutorial integrated into the game’s opening, rather than existing as a separate entity. The opening chapter of the Flotsam experience does give you nudges in the right direction, but you might find yourself momentarily bewildered by an inability to source a certain material or reaching for your phone to search how a system works (and fortunately, there is plenty of information online, thanks to the game’s years in early access).
You’ll soon feel entirely in control though, a master of your floating future. Because the systems in Flotsam make such plain sense, and because of that close-up level of detail where you can see seaweed fluttering in the wind on racks and dried wood being carried to the sawmill. Despite its imperfect onboarding, Flotsam is the ideal game if you’ve always wanted to crack the city building genre, but never really found your gateway.
If you’re a genre obsessive, things might feel a little familiar in terms of the process of building out that bustling ecosystem. And yet the addition of the exploration and survival element should give you a taste of something distinct. And whatever kind of player you are, you may well long for more elaborate quests and missions, or maybe in-narrative events that drastically shift the dynamic of strategies you deploy. Still, even without those things, there are many, many hours of pleasure to be found in the waters of Flotsam.
The process of scooping up new survivors and integrating them into your community is always delightful, too. Rather than fuss over the fate of a city of millions, in Flotsam new recruits never arrive in crowds. Many hours in, you might still be able to count your populace on two hands – or maybe three. Again, Flotsam has a marvellous sense of knowing the world you build at an individual level, right down to the names of each resident.
The overall result is one of the most rewarding and charming city builders of recent times. The emphasis is almost always on progress, success, and community, and while you do have to knuckle down to the serious business of keeping Drifters fed, watered, and content, rarely is Flotsam a game about struggle or failure.
It wants you to do well, and that is a pleasure to experience. Even if you do squeeze yourself into a resource bottleneck, where your stores are full and you don’t have what you need to build a way forward, the solutions are always straightforward and typically immediate. Flotsam doesn’t patronise or keep things too easy; rather, it makes facing its challenges a joy.
And when that joy plays out over a blue and pleasant land, where people are collaborative and kind, it makes Flotsam a very nice place to escape to, even if a global disaster has struck. It is still a post-apocalyptic world, where survival dominates your every thought, but saving the future of humanity has rarely been so playful. And play is what video games are meant to do well.
Flotsam review summary
In Short: A relaxing and nuanced survival city builder, that has plenty of depth and variety but also an unusually laidback and optimistic tone.
Pros: An excellent city builder, that uses the established foundations of the genre in new and unusual ways, with a smaller and more intimate scale. Upbeat atmosphere is cheery without being saccharine.
Cons: The game could be clearer in introducing its concepts and the core gameplay may feel too familiar to genre veterans after the opening hours. More elaborate missions and quests would be welcome.
Score: 8/10
Format: PC Price: £19.99 Publisher: Stray Fawn Publishing Developer: Pajama Llama Games Release Date: 4th December 2025 Age Rating: N/A
You can’t save the world but you can rebuild it (Stray Fawn Publishing)
Steam is without a doubt one of the best places to discover new open-world survival-crafting titles, with games like Palworld, RuneScape: Dragonwilds, Enshrouded, Sons of the Forest, and Once Human being some of the platform's more recent hits. The genre has seen a steady flow of new entries over the last couple of years, and when a genre grows because players keep showing up for it, adding more games to the lineup is rarely cause for an eye roll. On that note, Revelation Games' As One We Survive is coming to Steam Early Access very soon, and its combination of elements from games like Valheim, State of Decay, and Project Zomboid makes it look like it could be the next best thing for fans of those titles and the open-world survival-crafting genre in general.
Developed by Wishes Ultd., Greg Lobanov, Alexis Dean-Jones, Lena Raine, Madeline Berger, and A Shell in the Pit, Chicory: A Colorful Tale is a top-down adventure game in a coloring book world full of vibrant, animal-like characters. In the world of Picnic Province, Chicory, superstar artist and wielder of the Brush, is missing, and all the color in the land vanished with her. As Chicory's biggest fan, players are tasked with picking up the Brush and filling in for her, using their newfound painting powers to explore, solve puzzles, make friends, and draw on anything. It's the perfect blend of The Legend of Zelda's iconic puzzle-solving progression and Animal Crossing's cozy charm, and yet it is still somehow one of the gaming industry's best-kept secrets.
Developer Lion Shield that its Roman themed city builder Nova Roma will no longer be releasing into early access on January 22nd. Following feedback from those who have played the Nova Roma demo, the developer has made the decision to delay the game by two months to put in some extra polish. That means Nova Roma early access will now launch on March 26th.
In a joint statement Pete, Michael, & Sam of Lion Shield said, “First off, thanks for all your feedback on the Nova Roma demo! It’s been great to see the cities everyone’s creating, and we’ve definitely been impressed and surprised with the things you’re all doing with the dams and aqueducts! Given the response to the demo, we are going to push our launch date back a couple more months. The new date will be March 26th, 2026. Using your feedback we’ve updated the demo with lots of tuning, fixes, and recently we added rain, flooding, and droughts. We’ll continue to update the demo – we’re sort of thinking of it as a ‘proto-early access’. It’s disappointing to have to wait even longer and we’re sorry about that! We want to make sure everything is polished and we want to get in as much of your feedback as possible before release. Until then we hope you enjoy the demo and keep the feedback coming!”
In Nova Roma, the Roman Empire is falling into decay so you have to lead a small group of citizens to build a new version of the city in new lands. To build successfully you will need to meet the needs of the citizens, and gain the favour of the gods through building temples. Nova Roma is not just a builder where you throw up some buildings a be done with it. You will need to plan where to place dams and aqueducts to get water flowing to the city, without causing floods, and set up supply routes to get raw materials to the city without spreading too quickly. Advisors and senators will be there to help guide you build Nova Roma, and deal with the different issues that come up which will need balancing. You will need to make sure there is enough variety of entertainment to keep citizens happy after days of working, otherwise they may become unhappy too leading Nova Roma to ruin.
I Can Only Speak Doner is a rhythm-based cooking game where you slice, grill, and serve doner in a foreign land without being able to speak a word of the local language.
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In DEATHMOON you carve through layers of the moon with an arsenal of powerful weapons, using tight, fine-tuned movement to escape tough situations – or just punch your way out. Heavily inspired by The Binding of Isaac, synergies drive the fun … Read More
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In Void Pachinko you rotate the barrier to guide balls toward the void, chasing the highest possible score before the timer runs out. Precision matters – balls can break if they collide with the barrier too often. … Read More
Tides of Tomorrow is an ocean survival game from the makers of Road 96, where you survive the troubled planet Elynd while being impacted by choices made by friends and favorite streamers.
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In Straying Rules you won’t be told where to go or what to do – all information lies within the rules. But not every rule tells the truth, and blind obedience may lead to deception. … Read More
Medieval Frontiers is a first-person village builder set in a wild and untamed medieval world where you establish a frontier settlement, manage resources, and guide your people through harsh conditions.
In Medieval Frontiers you scavenge resources, cook food, craft goods, and prepare medicines to help your growing community thrive. Every resource matters and can be depleted so you need to manage your environment wisely. You … Read More
Knights of Frontier Valley is a challenging roguelike RPG inspired by classic titles where you go from humble beginnings to glory in a procedurally generated open world filled with tactical combat and impactful choices.
In Knights of Frontier Valley you guide an adventurer through years of life in a dynamic world with realistic day/night cycles, seasons, and weather. You fight in gridless turn-based tactical combat … Read More
Sova is a narrative-driven action roguelite set in a surreal sci-fantasy world where every run reshapes your story through expressive combat and deeply branching dialogue.
In Sova you navigate the ever-shifting Conjecture – fighting, exploring, and piecing together a story that bends with your decisions. Walk away from conversations, interrupt characters, or punch them mid-sentence. Choices leave lasting marks on quests, environments, and combat as … Read More
