Lo, a ripple in the release date sands. Stand still a moment while we study this phenomenon. Yes, yes, it is the unmistakable rumble of a large survival MMO pondering its release date. Dune: Awakening is having a think and has decided "early 2025" is a good non-specific time period to come out in early access. That could mean January or February. Or March, I guess. April? Now don't be silly, that's spring. Not April, surely. This beast seems hungry. It will eat before then. I have foreseen it. Mostly by watching the trailer that dropped at Gamescom.

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Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 has been delayed yet again, pushing the troubled RPG into the first half of 2025. Publishers Paradox Interactive and developers The Chinese Room say the delay will allow them to continue to polish the game, respond to feedback, and expand on its story.

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Arc Raiders was announced back in 2021 as a free-to-play co-op third-person shooter, and has been delayed several times since. That's partly because Embark Studios' other in-development game, The Finals, progressed faster than planned and stole its momentum. It's also because it was re-tooled at some point as a PvPvE extraction shooter.

Now it's back again, aiming for release next year, and it's been re-tooled a little more: it's no longer free-to-play.

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Here's the news: there's a new Mafia game, it's called Mafia: The Old Country, and it's set in 20th century Sicily rather than in America as per the previous three games in the series.

That's about all we know, but hop below and you'll find a trailer.

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Oh, and new Indiana Jones And The Great Circle trailer! Great. I’ve been looking forward to a nice, juicy chunk of extended gameplay. You know, something to really convey the flow of the game, rather than the admittedly impressive but nonetheless very fragmented snippets we’ve gotten so far. Now to sit back and…oh, wait. Hang on. It’s just actor Troy Baker telling me about all the great acting he’ll be doing. It is great, by the way. He’s doing a fantastic job. Maybe just, you know, a crumb of acknowledgement or elucidation over the whole ‘interactivity’ part?

Anyway, don’t mind me. I’m just an old fool who likes to press buttons. And, to be fair, it's not like Machinegames don't have a great track record. Anyway, here’s some good news: The game releases December 9th this year. Have a release date trailer.

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Little Nightmares DNA runs strong in Tarsier Studios’ new game. So much so, in fact, that I’d assumed the trailer I watched during an online preview event last week was for a new entry in the horror cinematic-platformer series, right up until the name Reanimal appeared on the screen - shortly followed by a snippet of voiced dialogue.

It’s not just the horror setting, but the Grimm’s fairytale threat, the distorted adults-made-monsters through the trauma-tinged lens of a child’s imagination. A long-limbed man riding a bicycle in a threadbare suit chases children down an alley. A gangly, bowler-hatted pursuer scuttles down a long table like a spider. It's familiar enough territory, at least at first glance. But when Tarsier have a body of work subconsciously scarred by phantasms this vivid, recurring nightmares are just as potent.

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There are unexpected things in life, like when one of the recipes in my Gousto box (basically Hello Fresh) didn't come packed with a key ingredient: a single red pepper. Devastating, especially since it's only ever happened to me once. Anyway, this is a long but no less meaningful segue to a game from the Far: Changing Tides and Lone Sails devs Okomotive that's just been announced at this year's Geoffcom show. It's called Herdling and it's nothing to do with sailing across a decaying universe, but very much to do with alpine expeditions and friendly beasts. Very unexpected.

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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.

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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.

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Fine, that was slightly mean of me. There’s clearly at least fifteen people still playing Starfield, and Bethesda are today rewarding their commitment with a free buggy named the Rev-8. Today! It actually looks pretty nifty. With it, you’ll be able to hop, jump, and skip the tedious ballache that was hoofing it across the RPG’s needlessly large planets. Here’s a looksie:

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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.

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ARPG (not to be confused with action RPG, the comments inform me) Path Of Exile 2 will release in early access November 15th, 2024.

Grinding Gear Games have been set on a November window for a while now, but this is the first time they’ve nailed down a date, and possibly clicked on it a bunch of times to show how serious they are. Do a game related verb I can’t accurately name because I never played past that beach at the beginning of the first game, and do it in the general direction of the trailer below. Watch it. Just watch it.

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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.

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This seems like an odd one. I’m only tangentially familiar with the Dying Light games, but I was under the impression that the model here was releasing a single game, then updating and expanding it for years. Whether standalone adventure Dying Light: The Beast represents an attempt to course correct after Dying Light 2’s mixed reception, then, I’m not entirely sure. But if nothing else, it does share something in common with all the other adverts at Gamescom tonight: it is a game that exists, and will presumably be playable at some point.

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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.

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The trailers of Gamescom 2024 want to be here with you, explained Keighley in his opening monologue. They are not directed at you. They are with you. That's lovely. Thanks videogames. And if - as we surely must - we judge the eagerness of these adverts to spend time with us by how quickly they appear on our screens, then FPS sequel Borderlands 4 surely loves us the most.

Do we love it back? Who knows. But it does exist, and it isn’t using a subtitle. That’s got to count for something, right?

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Announced at this year's Geoffcom, RoadCraft is a new game courtesy of the vehicular bods behind MudRunner and SnowRunner. This means it's very much a simulation game where you're fighting terrain with tyres, except this time you aren't just driving about, but managing a fleet of machines to carry out heavy construction work. Think a mixture of logistics, cars, cranes, and paving some lovely new roads from a once dilapidated junk heap.

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As much as I’m a sucker for the grimmest and darkest of grimdark fantasy settings, the try-hardness of it all can get a bit grating at times. You could make the same argument at the opposite end of spectrum, of course. Cosy games seem locked in a perpetual arms-race to twee each other into the dirt, chopping their rival’s dog-petting hands off and taking a sparkly tinkle on their pastel corpses. But hand-drawn RPG Heroes Of The Seven Islands feels more authentic than all that. It’s bedroom antifolk by way of chill dungeon synth, by way of an antelope sorcerer named Jean-Pierre.

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Oh, hey, would you look at that? Total War: Warhammer 3's patch 5.2.0 (arriving later today) has some new orcs and goblins in it.

Look at 'em! They've got swords and shields now!

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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".

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Our unlucky planet in Wasteland Waste Disposal has suffered not just one apocalypse but all of them. Turns out the "megapocalypse" was an unhealthy combination of "every worst-case apocalyptic scenario imaginable". Luckily, in this upcoming sandbox adventure, you have a giant metal fortress that walks above the pools of toxic sludge on huge spidery legs and chomps up all the trash you bring it. If you are not intrigued by that, perhaps the little janitor with a sci-fi vacuum cleaner (or the feel-good music reminiscent of Adventure Time songs) will convince you.

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Tactical Breach Wizards is a tactics game for people that don’t like tactics games. Magically, it’s also a tactics game for people who love them like nothing else. It’s permissive and demanding; playful and tense. Its globe-spanning plot covers conspiracies, PMCs, and brutal theocratic dictatorships. It also features a traffic-summoning warlock named Steve wearing a hi-vis robe. It’s finding that one absolutely, perfectly ridiculous XCOM turn, every turn…and at the same time knowing it’s absolutely, perfectly fine if you don’t. In short: it’s one of the most enjoyable tactics games I’ve ever played, and the only tactics game with a pyromancer so rubbish he relies on making his enemies pass out from heatstroke.

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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.

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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.

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I’ve likely mentioned hitting Lovecraft fatigue so often that it’s now evolved into a second phase of Lovecraft-fatigue fatigue. This is not the same as Lovecraft refreshment, no matter how much I might want to return to the days before old one plushies and Cthulhu children’s books terrorised the internet en masse. There’s not quite enough information about “story generator” sim Marry a Deep One: Innsmouth Simulator for me to confidently say it’ll cut through my exhaustion with all things tentacular and horrifically be-gilled. But it is beguiling, isn’t it? There’s all sorts of little widgets and details shown off that remind me of everything from Sid Meier’s Pirates to classic adventure games, and maybe even a little Rimworld? It’s a heady soup, although one I’d recommend against quaffing, given where the water comes from.

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One of the best roguelikes on PC is getting a farewell of sorts this week. Twitchy slashfest Dead Cells received its final major update, introducing new enemies, fresh weapons, and a few mutations. Unfortunately, all this new stuff is very cursed. In other words, it all toys with the game's "curse" status effect, a hex that causes you to be killed if you take even a single hit. You'll probably die a few times as a result of this update, which in some ways is a fitting finalé for this fast-paced jar smasher of a game. You can see the new features in the trailer below.

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Last week, the Xitter account for H2M - a mod aiming to recreate the heyday of classic Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer inside Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered - announced that they had received a cease and desist from Activision Blizzard, and would shut down the project. The 2022 version of Modern Warfare 2 lacked the original’s multiplayer, and H2M was so highly-anticipated that Steam sales of the 2016 FPS balooned in the lead-up to the mod’s planned release date. It didn't hurt that Activision had it on sale, of course, but the timing lined up so well that some fans speculated the discount was a deliberate bait-and-switch on the publisher’s part to profit from excitement over a mod they were already planning to shut down.

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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.

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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.

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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! You know books, right? They’re like RPS articles, but slightly better for piling under a flock mat to make little hills for your plastic spacemen. Fitting, then, that this week it’s plastic spaceman enthusiast, writer on Absolver, Nightingale, Gladius, and Total War: Warhammer 3, and Ten Things Video Games Can Teach Us author, Dan Griliopoulos! Cheers Dan! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

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Sundays are for cat. I’m currently in the process of acquiring a gorgeous white and ginger kitten for the local shelter. I have seen four seconds of footage and I’m already smitten, kitten. Before I spend the weekend getting very excited about big stretches, let’s read this week’s best writing about games (and game related things!)

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JDM: Rise Of The Scorpion is a free prologue for JDM: Japanese Drift Master, a racing game about - who could guess - drift racing in Japan. It's got an open world set in rural towns to burn rubber around as well as several story missions to play. You can download it from Steam now.

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I've got a real soft spot for Trombone Champ, a rhythm game about tooting along to music that works perfectly with the mouse. I'm also a huge fan of Beat Saber, a rhythm game in which you slice at blocks that whizz towards you in VR.

You can see where this is going. Trombone Champ: Unflattened transports that 2022 tooting into 2024 virtual reality.

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Minecraft's Realms servers have been down for most of the past four days. Mojang's official account for reporting service status updates noted that "intermittent failures or slowdowns" began on August 13th, and despite similarly intermittent reports of uptime in the days since, the servers remain inaccessible to most players today.

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Good job, everyone! The cat talk in the comments has never been stronger. I miss my cats back in England very much. Though I did visit a cat cafe recently, and I got to boop some sphinx kittens on the nose. Life pretty much peaked then, so I'm in a bit of a slump right now. So do me a favour and sound off even more than usual about what your fur babies have been up to lately! And also, if you feel like it, let us know what you're playing this weekend too. Here's what we're clicking on!

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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.

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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.

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Black Myth: Wukong is an action RPG that leans a bit into the Souls camp and a bit into the adventure camp. And either way, it's a spectacular journey that works for mostly everyone: those after challenging fights against Chinese mythological creatures, and those after the same thing, but with a little less challenge than your typical Soulslikes. What separates Black Myth from the crowd, though, is its slick presentation and a sense of generosity. You're to witness the most lavish, cinematic worlds and its creatures. And you're to enjoy battering everything with your staff as a highly athletic monkey with copious spells at his furry follicles and fingertips. It's been a while since I've played anything quite as impressive as this.

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Unlike Ed, I wasn’t deemed important or youthfully handsome enough to get Black Myth: Wukong review code, leaving my only hopes of conducting some hardwarey performance investigation with the recently released benchmarking tool. The one that, by the admission of developers Game Science themselves, "may not fully represent the actual gaming experience and final performance at the time of the game's release". Monkey nuts.

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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.

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Any gags I could make about an update that lets Total War: Warhammer 3’s dawi play tall are far too obvious for the discerning comedic palette that brought you such bangers as that time I just wrote “(penis)” a bunch so the Overkill’s Walking Dead page wouldn’t quote me out of context, so let’s just dive right in to the details. The strategy game’s 5.2 update is on the horizon, and tagging along with it are the first of the “extra bits” the team teased in June. I’m very excited about them. They sit somewhere between the usual patch fare of stat tweaks and errata, and the weightier faction facelifts that come alongside paid DLC. They’re also focused right where Immortal Empires needs them the most: depth, rather than width. In the dawi’s case, quite literally.

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The mountain biking of Lonely Mountains: Downhill was sometimes a relaxing ride down gentle slopes, and at other times a hairy hurtle down declivitous cliffs. Alongside the likes of the Descenders and Riders Republic, it offered a more laid-back game, open to furious time trialling but always remembering to let you stop and appreciate the view. Both the stakes and the poly count were low. Happy news then, that it is getting a snowy sequel. In Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders you'll be swapping your bike for a pair of skis, and you'll be able to barrel down the mountainside with friends in co-op.

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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.

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Life sim contender Inzoi is hoping to knock The Sims from its perch when it launches (supposedly) later this year. There will soon be an opportunity to judge whether that feat is likely. Krafton have announced that they're releasing a time-limited trial of Inzoi's character creator next week on August 20th.

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I am forever looking for a game to replace Transport Tycoon (or OpenTTD) in my affections. I know there are several railway management sims kicking around Steam, but I haven't found the one that does it for me yet. Could it be Railroad Corporation 2? It's a train tycoon game in which you lay tracks through the early 20th century, and it's launching in Early Access on September 9th.

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The Plucky Squire stars a 2D sword-slashing protagonist so plucky he busts out of his storybook confines and into the fully 3D world of a kid's bedroom. You'll then spend your time hopping between these various planes on a grand, cartoon adventure.

It now has a release date: September 17th.

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The management game progression chart is supposed to go: zoo, then theme park, then hospital, then school. Apparently no one told Springloaded Software, who are following up their 2021 tycoon 'em up Let's Build A Zoo with a game about building an MMO.

Let's Build A Dungeon marries the business aspects of Game Dev Tycoon with a more hands-on approach to constructing your company's game, and there's a first trailer below.

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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.

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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.

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Tiny Glade is a relaxing, wholly escapist building sim where you can kick back and summon villages, cottages and castles whilst listening to whimsical tunes without the worry of combat or busywork. This cosy game has received a lot of attention, becoming the fourth most-played demo during Steam Next Fest and earning a place within our own list of favourite demos. It now has a release date - 23rd September 2024.

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