Those darn Whistleblowers. Always huffing and puffing until they (whistle) blow entire houses down. Edward Snowden did it to the NSA, which now… remains frighteningly functional, and the main character of prequel DLC Outlast: Whistleblower will do the same to the game’s Asylum, leaving it… frighteningly functional for the main game’s plot. But that’s whistleblowing for you. The only thing it immediately> grinds to a halt is recess. Sometimes. Everything else is a process. Sink into the depths of this post’s madness for a trailer.

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There is stealth. In Wolfenstein: The New Order, which is, as you might have already guessed, a Wolfenstein game. That might strike you as strange, but a) the first games to bear the Wolfenstein name were actually stealth-focused>, and b) I dunno, I mean this doesn’t look terrible. Just functional. Stealth is an option, if it’s up your gentle whisper of an alley. Blast-kowiczing your way through all that draws breath, however, looks a lot more fun.

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If at first you don’t succeed, pause and have a good think. Do you really want to make a video game about knights with dirty diesel-powered armour and jetpacks fighting orcs and goblins? You may very well! In that case, put your head down and work, rethink your crowdfunding campaign, then come back with something people can play first. Bish bash bosh, here’s DieselSt rmers again.

Having cancelled its first Kickstarter at less than 15% of the $500,000 goal ( 300 grand-ish) last August, Black Forest Games have now launched a second campaign for the game formerly known as Project Ravensdale. This time it’s far more sensible, looking for $50,000 ( 30 grand) and offering a playable prototype so potential backers can have a bash.

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Diablo 3′s originally planned runestone system seemed like one of the game’s most exciting features: for any skill, you’d be able to socket in a rune which would dramatically change that skill’s purpose. Plugging a particular rune into your plague of toads skill, for example, might have instead spawned a single giant toad who would eat your enemies, or cause toads to fall from the sky like it’s a Paul Thomas Anderson movie. It seemed like a tinkerer’s delight, and when that system was streamlined pre-release, I’m not sure my excitement for the game ever really recovered.

LifeIron is an indie action-RPG which, according to this email here, promises to fix what its designers “perceive as genre-wide mistakes in game mechanic design.” Which mechanics? “Character building and tweaking,” of course. Trailer and ambition below.

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Hello youse!

It’s the big reveal video of numbers 40-31 on my TOP 50 Boardgames of ALL the TIMES list. I do hope you enjoy it. Next week I’ll dig into the games in a wee bit more detail. For now go see what’s made the list!

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How many posts have I written about Prison Architect alphas since joining RPS last October? Checking the tag page for the game suggests seven thousand. It’s not my fault, it’s just that each one adds a feature or set of features I find irresistible. The latest, alpha 20, introduces a set of failure states to the game, including the ability to be convicted of criminal negligence. You will then “spend time within your own jail as a prisoner.”

The regular developer video showing the new features is below.

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Part first-person puzzler, part synthesiser, FRACT OSC has evolved from the mysterious musical toy that won the IGF s Best Student Game in 2011. It s now a paid Steam release with a more formal puzzle-game structure in which you explore a vast cave system of disconcerting geometries, full of exotic polyhedral shapes and pulsing neon tubes. Work out how to revive this world and its strange machines, and it throbs with sound and rhythm, unlocking components for a full-fledged music sequencer that you lets you compose and export your tunes. Alec found the whole experience a little austere. Here s wot I think.>

Puzzles are about epiphany, about the joy of understanding something new and achieving mastery of it. It s what makes a puzzle different from a problem: a problem doesn t want you to solve it. The best puzzle games need either escalation or variety to carry that sense of epiphany onwards and upwards. They prevent wonder subsiding into routine. And in that sense, FRACT falls short – the more you explore its puzzles, the less interesting they become – but the first few hours in FRACT s alarmingly alien world may hold wonder enough to buoy you through.

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Can any of us honestly say we have never dreamed of creating a beautiful garden from flesh and bone, bile and spit? I thought not. That’s the problem with these ‘Craft’ games: they tend to use everyday building materials like stone and metal. Give me great citadels of bone draped in banners of skin, the absurd excesses of heavy metal album covers come to virtual life. Or, failing that, GorgeCraft will do.

The mod turns Natural Selection 2 into a building sandbox, letting us cough up biological lumps and structures wherever we please as architects of oozing monstrosities. It left beta and launched over the weekend, and you can snag it from the Steam Workshop.

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‘Hero brawler’. That’s what Blizzard would like you to call their all-star lane pushing videogame, Heroes of the Storm. In marketing terms it’s better than referencing your competitors by saying Dota-like or LoL-a-like (sidenote: no-one says LoL-a-like and this is a crying shame). More importantly, it’s better than the emotionally dead and uselessly expansive MOBA. It gives you the flavour of the game you’re about to play. The phrase ‘hero brawler’ contains something of the rambunctiousness you’ll find infecting lanes, infiltrating the weird scrubland that the genre’s traditional vocabulary dubs ‘jungle’ and venturing into haunted mineshafts.

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As I watched early but surprisingly polished footage of The Old City, I was stricken by a few standout qualities: 1) it’s a very handsomely atmospheric game, wreathed in glittering flecks of Dishonored and Half-Life, 2) there are dying whales and I feel very bad for them, and 3) the narrator delivers his lines with the stop-go car crash thunderstorm cadence of William Shatner. The narrator in question is very clearly not> good ol’ Captain Kirk, but still. Phrasing much of what you say such! That it reads like this! Evokes the famed starship captain/lawyer/Priceline mascot! Whether you intend it to or not! The whole package really does seem quite lavishly produced, though. It’s a story-focused exploration game about… well, an old city, presumably. Also philosophy. Developer PostMod Softworks is being pretty vague beyond that, but there’s plenty to watch, if nothing else.

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