Tower defence games are tricky things, I reckon. At their worst - and their worst is generally still pretty entertaining - they can feel a bit like clicker games. You buy stuff and place stuff and the enemies obligingly shuffle on through your maze, but the challenge has been eaten away by the sheer overwhelming force on your side and so you're left just watching the numbers change - one side's health being whittled down, another side's loot slowly pooling. You get a hint of the hidden life of maths, sure - the way that one enemy, placed in the middle of a line of troops, will make it much further on their health than those in front or behind do - but it's an empty, sugary sort of game when the designer's attention starts to slide.

In PixelJunk Monsters the designer's attention never did, however, and in PixelJunk Monsters 2 it still doesn't. This is an odd sequel - many things are completely unchanged, while a handful of the tweaks can initially feel a little arbitrary - but there is beauty in it nonetheless. Some of the beauty lies with the original design, but there's one big addition that, for my money, makes things surprisingly fresh.

Superficially, it is business as usual. You're Tikiman, running around in a series of cheery environments, protecting your village and its inhabitants from wave after wave of invaders. The art style has moved on, from flat cartoons in the first game to something claylike and chunky here - an old children's animation perhaps, not quite as weird and Soviet as the aesthetic employed in Q-Games' glorious oddity The Tomorrow Children, perhaps, but still something that invokes stop-motion handicraft with its harshly-lit sets and plasticine models with pipe-cleaner skeletons tucked inside.

Read more…

Every spring, when the cherry blossoms are in full bloom, people in Japan gather to celebrate in an ages-old tradition known as hanami. It's a celebration of nature's beauty, and a chance for friends and family to get together in the first blushes of spring. This year, Q-Games has assembled alongside its Kyoto compatriots on the banks of the Kamo River, laying a blue tarpaulin down beneath the tree that boasts the most impressive blooms for miles (a spot that a junior member of the team was sent down to secure some hours before the event started) before piling into a supply of beer, wine and other assorted booze.

Galak-Z creators 17-Bit are in attendance, as are Vitei, the studio headed up by former Nintendo EAD man Giles Goddard. And watching over it all is Goddard's one-time colleague back in the days of Star Fox and Argonaut Software, Dylan Cuthbert, cutting a fatherly figure as he slices into an improbably large leg of ib rico ham. The party goes into the night, the drinking until sometime the following morning. A couple of days later, I catch up with Cuthbert at his Kyoto office - a neat, warm little studio that looks out over the neat, tidy little streets of the city - at what feels like a fitting time. After a couple of years of relative quiet, it feels like Q-Games is about to break into bloom once again.

The studio's last high-profile release, The Tomorrow Children, was perhaps the developer's most ambitious project to date. It was certainly its hardest to parse; a strange, nebulous and arrestingly beautiful waking dream of a game, it struggled to define itself upon launch in 2016 and ended up being shuttered just over 12 months later.

Read more…

Update, 26/3/18: If last week's announcement screens weren't enough to convince you of PixelJunk Monsters 2's sheer gorgeousness, then you'd do well to feast your eyes on its debut trailer below. It looks splendid.

Original story, 23/3/18: Q-Games has announced that a sequel to its beloved tower defence classic PixelJunk Monsters will arrive on PC, PS4, and Switch on May 25th, over a decade after the original's release.

The first PixelJunk Monsters launched in 2007, and the PixelJunk series has gone from strength to strength since then, tackling all sorts of genres in games like PixelJunk Shooter and PixelJunk SideScroller. Q-Games even made a music visualiser with the recent PixelJunk 4am.

Read more…