It’s that time again already – 2018’s Independent Games Festival hands out its best-in-indie gongs on March 21 (as part of the Game Developers Conference), and these are the games in line for a prize. And, more importantly, a big shot at success thanks to the profile, although it should be noted that a fair few of these have done rather well for themselves already.

Scooping the most nods at 4 is veritable brain-frying, rule-rewriting puzzler Baba Is You, while the singular, surreal climbing game Getting Over It… With Bennett Foddy and charming, cups-on-ears narrative adventure Night In The Woods both boast a respectable three, followed by FTL follow-up Into The Breach with 2. There are many more lovely, lovely things on the full list of finalists below.

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With apologies about continued teasing you with something you can’t have quite yet, I wanted to follow-up our recent chat about the stressful wonders of FTL follow-up Into The Breach with an after-action report. This takes you through how the game actually works, and demonstrates the kinds of decisions, sacrifices and face-palming involved in every moment of it.

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Any studio with a debut as strong as FTL might well be wary of that Difficult Second Album syndrome. How do you follow up a game so idiosyncratic and widely adored without risking disappointment? The answer, it turns out, is with a kaiju vs giant mech tactical masterclass.

We ve been playing Into the Breach.

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Cowardice is a virtue. So says the team on this week’s RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show. That’s because our theme is “running away” – games that encourage you to flee from danger, or that give you a choice between fight and> flight. Adam will run from the soldiers of Arma or the post-apocalyptic antagonists of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Brendan will scarper from poor odds in For Honor or Overwatch, while Alice only pretends> to run away in Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds, tricking her foes into giving chase before ambushing them like some kind of velociraptor. (more…)

Within a couple of minutes of sitting down with Justin Ma and a build of his new game, Into the Breach [official site], preconceptions are torn to shreds. Ma is one half of the team behind FTL and when Into the Breach was announced, I wasn t alone in thinking it looked like tactical skirmisher Advance Wars, with added monsters. It is that game, to an extent, but its most notable feature isn t tied to the setting at all – it s that this is a tactical combat game in which the enemy is entirely predictable. Everything is explained below, but in short, this might be the smartest turn-based design I’ve seen since Invisible, Inc.

… [visit site to read more]

The creators of FTL have announced their next game, Into the Breach [official site], and it looks a bit like the isometric, tactical version of EDF I’ve always wanted. Tasked with defending the last remnants of humanity from giant monsters, you’ll protect cities and fight monsters in randomly generated turn-based scenarios. It looks gorgeous, as you can see in the trailer below, and will have a new soundtrack by Ben Prunty, FTL’s composer, as well as writing and world-building from the keyboard of Chris Avellone.

… [visit site to read more]

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

FTL is a Star Trek episode generator. You are in control of the crew of a spaceship and forced to race across the galaxy. Each new system visited brings with it drama, tough choices, high comedy, and the very high possibility of death. It’s thrilling.

… [visit site to read more]

An entirely objective ranking of the 50 best PC RPGs ever released. Covering the entire history of computer role-playing games is a daunting task and attempting to place the best games in such a broad genre in any kind of order is even more daunting. Thankfully, we are equal to all tasks and below, you will find the best fifty PC RPGs of all time.

… [visit site to read more]

Hello there, best keep your distance, for I am ill. Not just ‘bit of a sniffle/put a bigger pullover on, you great ninny’ ill, but ‘noxious substances violently erupting from everywhere’ ill. My daughter started going to nursery about three months ago, and has been bringing back a delightful cocktail of viruses and bacteria ever since – it’s been a relentless assault on my immune system, and while I’m oddly proud of how long it stood against this microbial siege, it has now collapsed in gruesome style.

It’s OK, I don’t want your pity. Unless it’s a special magical form of pity that renders me instantly able to eat again. I want to talk about games.

… [visit site to read more]

I’m a broken man today, having been up til nearly 2am playing the freebie ‘Advanced Edition’ expansion for impeccably clever/brutal space survival sim/strategy/RPG FTL: Faster Than Light last night, so I guess it’s safe to say the new features haven’t broken the old spell. I had worried the various new weapons, rooms and encounters would upset FTL’s simultaneously delicate and chaotic balancing act, but in four run-throughs (three failed, once successful #humblebrag) I haven’t felt its famed cruelty ever collapsed into either messy excess or over-complication. In one game, I lost because the enemy kept teleporting over a stream of invading clones. Another I won thanks to an excellent new weapon. All’s fair in love and murderous rebel space fleets.

Thoughts and a video (with commentary, or something approximating it) below. … [visit site to read more]