A fan-made enhanced edition of Daisuke “Pixel” Amaya’s seminal indie platformer Cave Story has been slapped with a DMCA takedown. Publishers Nicalis have accused Cave Story Engine 2 of using code stolen from the original game’s source – code that they, as developers of Cave Story +, own. But while fears that the publisher planned to wipe all free versions of the game off the internet for good seem to have been misplaced, contention remains over whether Nicalis actually owns the rights to code used by the now-shutted fan game.

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It’s no longer the most urgent gold rush in PC games, but survival games continue to be regularly released, and older games continue to be regularly updated. It’s only natural then that we’ve taken some time out from foraging for edible berries to update our list of the best survival games for 2020.

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The year is 1937, and you’ve just woken up in a crashed plane in the middle of a desert. You’re not some sort of Indiana Jones-esque film though, I’m afraid, you’re in a horror game – Amnesia: Rebirth, to be exact. It’s the new survival horror from Frictional Games, the team behind Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Soma, and it’s out today.

How can the horror of a traditionally dark and dingy series hold up under the bright desert sun? I talked with game director Thomas Grip and creative lead Fredrik Olsson to find out. We also discussed monsters and things they’ve learned from their old games, as well as how player choice can make horror that much more horrifying.

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Who says you don’t get more than one chance at a happy ending? Not the Terraria developers Re-Logic, that’s for sure. Today, they’re releasing their, uh, second final update for the 2D mining and crafting game. Named Journey’s Actual End, after Journey’s [fake] End that released back in May, the update adds a final NPC, new achievements, balance changes and “the long requested game credits (done Terraria style)!”.

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In the run-up to the release of Amnesia: Rebirth, Frictional Games are continuing to show love to their first Amnesia game for its tenth anniversary. Paying tribute to the modding community that’s played no small part in Amnesia’s longevity, Frictional have now released the source code for Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs freely online.

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In all of horror, the true terror often lies in threats of things that might have been more than what really is. A jump scare that’s just a gust of wind or a monster that’s actually a hallucination, you know the kind. Here’s a truly frightening prospect then: a version of Amnesia: The Dark Descent with some very different details. Frictional Games celebrated the game’s 10th anniversary by sharing some lesser-known ideas for the game as it might have been. Some of them are a real trip.

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Terraria

astounds me. It astounds me because it is bottomless. I mine materials for hours, finally smelt some armour, then the developer saunters over and refills my glass. Just when I think I’m done for the evening, another one slides across the table. Oh, go on then.

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An ominous shadow falls across the Earth, cast by a tentacled beast that reaches out to grasp the planet. Impostor Factory, the final game in the To The Moon series, is not effing around. Whatever journey the game will take you on, it involves the apocalypse, a time-travelling bathroom, and reliving lives. It is a “wholesome celebration of the bloody end of the world”, as the new trailer shows.

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At the end of this year, most Flash games will be unplayable in their original form. Adobe are going to stop distributing Flash, and so most browsers plan on dropping Flash support. While this may be an internet security victory – Flash has a history of being vulnerable to certain kinds of malware – it does make it harder to experience the thousands of online Flash games. There are ways to download and run Flash games offline, but many of those games have processes that are meant to lock the game to its original site.

Thankfully there are preservation projects working to keep Flash games playable in their original form. The only question remaining is which you should play. We’ll answer that question, and explain the best ways to play them, below.

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Terraria’s

final update, Journey’s End, is just the beginning. Developers Re-Logic have pulled off one final trick for their huge fanbase, making popular community mod manager tModloader officially supported. It’s a lovely gesture that means the players will have easy access to the bewildering amount of fan-made items, monsters, total conversions, and more, even if development has ceased.

I had to editorialise a lot when looking around for mods for Terraria: there’s a bewildering amount. I didn’t want to overwhelm things with content mods, because there’s an issue of balance with some of the larger mods. As much as I love OTT boss battles, I generally prefer Terraria’s mods to feel like part of the original game. The rest are QoL addons, because there’s nothing better than wrangling the vasy, unwieldy systems of Terraria into something just a tad more manageable. That’s what we’ll be working with, so let’s get to it.

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