Hellraid is the next violence-mare due from the e’er unpredictable Techland stable, and it is some manner of first-person sword-stabbing game. Whether it would join the ranks of the vanishingly few effective first-person melee games was something we were due to find out in the few remaining weeks of 2013. No longer! Techland have pushed it back to next year, in the wake of mixed tester feedback. In other words, they want to make the knob bits not-knob.

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We haven’t mentioned before now, but the current Humble Weekly Sale is a clutch of Cliffski’s Positech games, which have already netted over $100k, with a day and a half to go. Beers are on Cliffski! (Just don’t mention piracy.) And now a new fortnight-long Humble Bundle proper has launched, this time showcasing the products of the decidedly not indie Deep Silver. Four of their games (including Saints Row 3!) for pay what you want, two more for over the average, and the rather average Dead Island Riptide if you throw in $25.

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ZOMBIES ARE EVERYWHERE. In the schools, under your refrigerator, buried deep within the collective cultural conscience. Especially that last one, which is probably why a new zombie game gets announced every 0.4674 seconds. That brings us to the current undead re-deadifier du seconde: Dying Light. It comes from Techland and takes place in a balmy, bloody tropical setting, but it’s not part of the Dead Island series. The main differences? Fleet-footed, Mirror’s-Edge-esque parkour and a Minecraft-like survival element. Don’t worry, though: you can still make an electrified machete.

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Dead Island: Riptide isn’t just one of the most tastefully marketed games of 2013, it’s also the semi-sequel to one of the best-selling games of the last couple of years. Yes, Dead Island was an absolute smash hit, because everyone wants an open-world zombie survival game. Or wanted, at least. Hmm.

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Techland have announced that they are currently working on a new game, currently named “Project Hell“. The game is a spin off from Dead Island, as revealed on their recent blog-post about the game, it comes out of “an internal weapon mod” for Dead Island, made by one of their own. It’s a first-person “hack and slash game in a dark fantasy setting”. Techland said that the mod “was a proof that chopping monsters frozen by magic spells using two-handed swords is brutally fun and addictive.” We had always suspected, of course, but now we have proof. Horrible proof. It’s going to be just as dark as their tropical zombie-hurter: “Our main goal is to make a game we can all enjoy playing so don’t expect unicorns and fairies – we prefer breaking through hordes of undead minions only to slaughter their devilish and loathsome masters in a bloody boss-fight.”

No other details on release or owt, but they say a small team is currently working full-time on the game.

Among The Sleep‘s main character is two-years-old. In every culture except dog, that means he’s woefully under-prepared to do anything except crawl, cry, and make everything smell horrific by proxy. So then, when the game’s Internet-famous trailer threw the teetering tot into a nightmarish gauntlet of hallucinatory horrors, it provoked many a raised eyebrow. And why not? It may sound crass, but recent horror-themed games have made a rather disturbing discovery: if you want attention, put a child in a high-risk (or even fatal) situation. Just ask Dead Island’s infamous trailer and Limbo. Both games ultimately received mixed reactions, but they certainly didn’t go unnoticed. For Among The Sleep developer Krillbite, though, it’s not a matter of drawing gasps or coaxing a single tear from your eye or potentially doing both at the same time and causing you to choke hilariously. There’s a reason, after all, that this one’s first-person. We’re stepping into a child’s feet pajamas and seeing a child’s world as colored in by a child’s hyper-imaginative mind>. Without its main character, Among The Sleep probably wouldn’t even exist.

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Techland’s zombie game Dead Island sold especially well, so it’s hardly surprising that a sequel should have appeared on the RPS long-distance radar so quickly. There’s no information aside from the name and confirmation that it exists, (thanks VG247) but I sense this will please those of you who enjoyed the original tropical island undeath. Full details will appear in the summer, and I’m hoping to see more surfing zombies, perhaps some zombie scuba action?

It’s a frequent lament that we rarely get to play bad guys in an interesting way. There’s another hope on the horizon, with the rather good Dead Island announcing some new major DLC. Ryder White is a whole new angle on the game’s story, where you play as the titular character – the game’s main baddie. Which is a splendid idea, if it’s done right. It’s a new single-player campaign, where you’ll apparently get to understand White’s motivations for his actions, as well as see him as a loving husband and military man. Techland say it’ll be “several hours” long, and add in a couple more weapons. We’ve some screenshots of it below.

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RPS is probably the most visited website on the internet, knocking Google and YouTube into an embarrassing runner-up position. I don’t have accurate data, but it was.

Meanwhile, we’ve just received an email letting us know that Techland’s Tomasz Gawlikowski says, “Dead Island is probably the best selling new IP in this year”.

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This year has been unusually rich in the kind of game that I most enjoy: those that are open-ended, or provide a sandbox world for me to mess about in. We usually get a couple of these every year, but in 2011 we seem to have run into a minor bounty of the open stuff, which is good news for explorers and meanderers alike. I’ve gone into a bit more detail about why this pleases me below. >

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