Cosmic horrors never die, they just sleep, and immersive sim roguelike Eldritch from Minor Key Games has stirred from its slumber. Over the weekend, the game received a major free patch, renaming it to Eldritch Reanimated. It’s an across-the-board upgrade, adding new chambers, weapons, tools and monsters, as well as giving the game’s code a bit of a spring-clean. As well as being a great reason for a return to the game (Think Dishonored meets Minecraft in Cthulhu-world) this also provides me an excuse to embed Eldritch’s incredibly jaunty launch trailer below.

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

Overtly Lovecraftian, subtly Thiefesque, Eldritch [official site] is a glorious experiment in lo-fi stealth-horror.

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So often the bleeding edge of games tech, yet so often fundamentally the same underneath: there’s a reason we can’t get enough of pretend shooting pretend people in their pretend faces. It is a pure test of skill and reflex, a game about movement at least as much as it is about violence, and done right it is absolutely delightful>. And hey, sometimes you get a decent gimmick or story thrown into the mix.

These are our favourite 50 first-person shooters on PC, from 1993-2017. Your favourite is at number 51.

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There was a Buffy The Vampire Slayer game on the first Xbox, for our sins. I can remember playing it, hating it, then hating myself for having been suckered. It was hack and slash and jump and collect, of course: all license and no trousers. Slayer Shock [official site] too is hack and slash and jump and collect, but more than a decade later it’s got the hindsight to appreciate why we loved the Scoobies. … [visit site to read more]

Slayer Shock [official site] is the recently announced first-person Buffy-like vampire-killing game from David Pittman, creator of Eldritch and Neon Struct. The game has now landed on Steam Greenlight, with a ten minute walkthrough video showing a couple of missions as well as the coffee shop hub where mission planning and research takes place. It looks more in-depth than I’d expected, with team mates to recruit/rescue, equipment to buy or flog, and a TV series structure that procedurally generates missions and ‘Big Bads’ to hunt and slay.

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Somehow we’ve not mentioned before that Eldritch and Neon Struct studio Minor Key Games are making a role-playing first-person shooter about youngfolk hunting vampires in Nebraska. Silly us. Slayer Shock [official site] is due to come out later this year and comes to my attention today through a new dev blog post with the catchy name Everything I Need to Know About Writing Video Games I Learned From Pro Wrestling. Sounds fair enough.

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NEON STRUCT is a first-person stealth game from the makers of the excellent Eldritch. You play as a federal agent who falls foul of high-level conspiracy when an apparently routine mission goes wrong. It’s out now.>

It might have lacked much of what made later stages of Ion Storm’s game so beloved, but first level Liberty Island was also the freeform Deus Ex promise writ largest: a wide-open playground for action and most especially evasion. While what followed introduced more ways to kill, people to talk to, secrets to find and decisions to agonise over, it downscaled the sandbox, live by your wits promise. What if Deus Ex had been like Liberty Island throughout?

NEON STRUCT. … [visit site to read more]

Gathering together the best shooters is no easy task, but if you’re looking for a new PC FPS to play, look no further.

Your favourite game is at number 51.

… [visit site to read more]

First-person, Lovecraft-themed explorey-death game Eldritch is so good>. Somehow I didn’t think that the first time I played it. I thought it was Quite Good, and then I forgot about it. Recently, I’ve been going back to it, in the way I used to go back to The Binding Of Isaac or Spelunky. A year later, it has its hooks in my mind. … [visit site to read more]

It’s sometimes hard to gauge from the outside exactly how successful an indie game has been, so I’m always interested when developers release figures. David Pittman, creator of Lovecraftian first-person roguelike Eldritch, has done just that. In a post-mortem posted on his blog, the former 2K Marin developer outlined the steps he took in leaving his old job, building the game, and was even kind enough to include some graphs. (more…)