It’s the RPS/Gamer Network annual day of chest-thumping/excessive consumption/enforced PowerPoint-watching, so we’ll all be offline when Capy’s much-anticipated rando-dungeon-runner Below launches this evening.

Hence, let’s say this now: Below’s out today! Somehow! After half a decade! Is that even a long time in games development any more? I don’t know I’ve been here 11 years so it feels like Below only got announced like, last summer! Anyway! It’s really happening! Happy days!

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Very pretty/entirely menacing rand-o-dungeon-o game Below has been tantalising us from a distance for half a decade. “It’ll never happen!”, bellowed Derek Misery from a Twitter account with 12 followers, sometime in 2016.

Well, suck it up, Derek – all of a sudden, the closest thing there is to a follow-up to peerless adventure/musical odyssey/exploratory crisis Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP is out in seven short days.

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Dr. Richter Harris is a bastard. Not because he’s the mass murdering bad father of survival horror classic D [wikipedia page], but because he truly scared the life out of me when I was 11 years old. Released originally for the 3DO in 1995, D made its way onto European and North American consoles (and MS-DOS) in 1996. I played it the following year and, having missed the original Resident Evil the first time round, D was my first proper taste of the horror genre – one that’s stayed with me ever since.

Now, some 21 years on, the late Kenji Eno’s seminal works has appeared on GOG and I think you should give it a bash.

… [visit site to read more]

I’m going to mention a name soon, and I want you to resist your gut reaction to pull a dirty face and scroll past this post. This series is good and interesting and you might well like to play it but, well, the game’s named Space Pirates And Zombies 2 [official site] and- no no, come back, come on now. I know, I do. It’s a space shooter where players build their own motherships by snapping together modules then roam across a living galaxy, scavenging, fighting, building bases, and forming factions – against two hundred AI-controlled spaceship captains each doing exactly the same. And it’ll hit Steam Early Access this month.

… [visit site to read more]

I was certain I’d never have any time for roguelites. To clear up confusion about this most ambiguous of genres, by this I mean games that have permanent or mostly permanent death states, where losing means starting again from the beginning, with finite resources, and not necessarily any end goal. In fact, if you’d asked me a few years back, I’d have said this was the antithesis of why I play games.

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Have You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.>

We had no idea what a roguelike resurgence there was going to be back when brutal yet light-hearted dungeon-running RPG Dredmor was released in 2011. Sure, a few were doing the rounds, but they were rare enough that this tongue-in-cheek take on perma-death adventuring seemed ever so special. It still is, even if what it’s doing seems rather more commonplace today. It’s got wit and strangeness as well as a mean streak a mile wide. … [visit site to read more]

Ignore the acronym if you possibly can because we shouldn’t dwell on an irritating title when there’s so much else to discuss. Space Pirates and Zombies 2 looks like it might be an absolute corker, an heir to the sensational Space Rangers 2, built around a living galaxy that exists and develops no matter what the player might be doing elsewhere. Read this and salivate:

Two hundred persistent Captains that are able to do everything the player can, including forming dynamic factions, building structures, controlling territory, and going to War.

If Minmax pull that off, Space Pirates and Zombies 2 might be an unexpected and unlikely true single player alternative to Elite: Dangerous. Space wars! There’s much more, including a trailer and details about randomised ship parts below.

… [visit site to read more]

We’re seven years old! (Actually, we were seven years old last month, but we’ve never been much for punctuality.) And so by way of celebration we’ve curated the latest weekly Humble Bundle, and that means we’ve chosen some of our most beloved indie games from the past seven years for the Pay What You Want sale. An esoteric bunch, but so very beautiful, all. If only there were room for all the delights of those many wonderful years. As ever, some of the money goes to charity, too: we chose EFF and Medecins Sans Frontieres. Find out more, below, or simply click over the the bundle itself.

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Clockwork Empires is a citybuilding/Lovecraftian survival sim from Gaslamp Games, they of the splendid Dungeons of Dredmor, in which you manage and protect Imperial colonists attempting to build a life on a new frontier. A new frontier which just so happens to contain Other Creatures. While it might be a dramatic departure from the successful roguelike that went before it, it does retain the horror-comedy tone. It arrives on Steam Early Access tomorrow, but I’ve been playing it for the last few days.> … [visit site to read more]

Imagine if so much of the bullshit Peter Molyneux has talked over the years was actually in a game. A simulation game where each tiny human lived their own lives, had their own thoughts and feelings and memories, and behaved accordingly. It’s a claim we’ve heard so often that it’s hard not to dismiss it out of hand. So much so that when Dungeons Of Dredmor developers Gaslamp Games were claiming it, I demanded they stop and prove it to me… They did. Clockwork Empires, a colonial village building sim (of sorts) pulls you in with the cult monster worship, but you stay for the extraordinary AI.>

… [visit site to read more]