Let us discover a new world
With insight from the developers of Mina The Hollower, Spelunky 2, Citizen Sleeper, and Tales From Off-Peak City
I have discovered a crab that cuts off its own eyes. It was a small moment in the warm waters of Subnautica 2, but it reminded me why I loved the first game so much. This crab has regenerating eyestalks that mimic the anemones of the seabed. "If the stalks grow too long," says a lore blurb about the critter, "the clowncrab will trim them to avoid drawing attention." Every animal has a note like this, earned when you scan them - a growing encyclopedia the player is encouraged to build to help discover the world around them.
In a fluffy way, every game is about discovery - you are finding out the rules of a world as you go along. In a non-fluffy way, some games are shit at this, and others are masterful. Inspired by a single crab, I've spoken to a handful of devs on this topic. How do the makers of Spelunky, Mina The Hollower, Citizen Sleeper, and Moves Of The Diamond Hand make sure their worlds are worth discovering? And do I reckon Subnautica 2 has hit the mark?
"The best thing a game can do to create a
12 upcoming games that give me hope for the future
Triple-A showcases are the thief of joy, but luckily we secured joy to your belt with a wallet chain
Not-E3 and its exhausting cavalcade of marketing showcases has drawn to a close, leaving behind the hangover of disdain and regret I feel every year. Do I even like videogames anymore? Did I ever? How could anyone possibly appreciate this dour medium? Let me summarise the blockbuster games thus: Coca-Cola announced new Coke flavours for the Coke drinkers, Pepsi announced new Pepsi flavours for the Pepsi drinkers, and those of us in desperate need of a sip of water rasped for it all to end.
Do not, as I almost did, give up hope. The rains will come. In the meantime, I have harvested the morning dew and dug under the dry riverbeds. I have found water in the desert. Here are the only games from Not-E3 that were actually worth your time.
Carcass Clad
I love clunking machinery and a diegetic interface, and I love steering tanks through desolate landscapes. Carcass Clad is about both, as you and your co-op partners operate the cranks and levers of the Yksiö, your Soviet (or Soviet-inspired) tank which has the husks of (mutated?) livestock messily nailed to its armour. That this is also from Wrong Organ, the
It costs £7 to boot orcs off a cliff
It's all kicking off
Fatekeeper is deeply unfinished. Ladders warp you from the bottom to the top, menu items are plastered with "WIP", and there's an NPC smithy who hammers on steel without emitting a single "klang" sound effect. There is an big lizard with a saddle, but you cannot ride it (it says "Press E to Pet" the megalizard but there's no petting animation). In so many ways, this sword-swinging first-person RPG is a perfect example of eurojank released in a state of panic. I cannot honestly recommend it, notwithstanding the following counterpoints:
It has a kick button; it is seven pounds.
Well, nine pounds if the launch deal has run out by the time you've read this. This is basically Dark Messiah of Might and Magic dragged kicking and screaming and on fire into the light of 2026. It is made by a small team that have somehow maintained a blockbuster studio's backbreaking passion for placing thousands of tiny, hyperrealistic pebbles. I am not joking, it is obsessed with perfectly rendering tiny rocks. Also, you have a talking rat as a best friend.
It is not a polished game, except in the way that
The Lie-In
Links worth reading
Good morning, videogames. I am hosting a sleepover for three ten-year-olds and so there will be no lie-in for me today. As I write this now, on Saturday, it's not yet even clear whether there will be sleep for me. That doesn't mean we can't heroically gather some fine writing about videogames (and much more), though.
For PC Gamer, Rick Lane tells the story of the making of Unreal 2. I remember that it was initially enormously ambitious, but I did not know (or did not remember) that it effectively wanted to be Mass Effect.
Verdu wanted to create an all-new Unreal experience, one that leant harder into the cinematic sci-fi of the original. "I hatched a vision for a game that, rather than you just being constrained to one world, it would have this story device that allowed you to move between worlds, and that became a spaceship," he explains. "We were going to create a little simulation of a world on a ship, and it would have these characters that move around, that you have these interesting conversations with, and those characters were going to develop along with the story,
Total Playtime: A Majestic Herd of Max Paynes
Premium episode for the premium god
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What you could play this weekend
Tell us what you're playing below
We have once again dragged our nets along the sea floor of videogames to trawl for new releases worth bringing back to port, but for once our catch is bordering on paltry. Perhaps the videogames were simply too small to be caught in our nets, or perhaps the industry's videogame farmers thought it unwise to release alongside the marketing bonanza of Summer Game Fest, which continues over the weekend.
In any case, there are still some interesting new games you could play. Tell us what you are playing in the comments.
Crashout Crew
The latest game from Aggro Crab, fresh from their success as the co-developers of Peak. Crashout Crew has a similar art style and focus on co-op slapstick, but here your and your buddies are fulfilling orders in a warehouse that's really just an escalating series of physics arenas. A little bit Peak, a little bit Overcooked.
The 7th Guest Remake
I never played The 7th Guest, but it was practically a permanent fixture for about a decade of PC gaming magazines. This remake uses volumetric filming techniques to produce
Thumper beetle vs SkiFree Yeti
Let endless battle persevere
Welcome to season one of Character Select. How many seasons will there be? Only one person knows the answer, and he is on paternity leave.
This week's hyperfictional showdown is as much thought experiment as battle for survival. Step this way, unstoppable force, let me introduce you to my good friend, immovable object. It's the Beetle from Thumper versus the Yeti from SkiFree. One of them will never stop hunting you and always kills its quarry. The other is a rhythmically violent intradimensional insect capable of passing through realms of consciousness at the speed of thought. This is the Large Hadron Collider of "who'd win" scenarios. The laws of physics hang in the balance. It's now or it is never now. Select your character!
The case for the Beetle from Thumper
Have you seen somebody perform a perfect run in Thumper? It is like watching a migraine achieve sentience and launch into space. There is no species on this planet that can compete with this... thing. I briefly thought about putting Sonic the Hedgehog into this fight against the Yeti, but the blue bozo is always stopping to refuel on chilli dogs or talk to a
The adventures of hat guy and tutorial gal
The Adventures Of Elliot: The Millennium Tales seems initially bland, but its demo won me over
Some people's names can hold up to being put in the title of a videogame or movie, but I'm not sure "Elliot" is one of them. The protagonist of Square Enix's next HD-2D game is introduced by one NPC as a man of good character, although they "will admit he has his quirks." I assume that's a reference to Elliot's red hat, which seems to be the the only notable part of his personality.
The Adventures Of Elliot: The Millennium Tales might be as bland as its main character, but I think I'm fully onboard anyway after playing its demo.
Elliot is an adventurer in a fantasy world overrun by beastmen. The remaining human population are safe inside a medieval city's walls thanks to a magical shield maintained by the princess. Adventurers are those few who travel beyond the walls to explore and find supplies, and in Elliot's case to earn money he can use to care for the children in the orphanage in which he was raised. His name could have been called Hero McDogooder and the game name would have been better.
This has the same art style
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