Looks like we’ll be waiting a little longer to roam the new trippy corridors of Stanley’s office building, because The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe has been delayed again. It was originally expected in 2019, then this year, and now we won’t be seeing it until at least 2021. The co-developers at Crows Crows Crows revealed the bad news on Twitter by, uh, borrowing some corporate ‘our game has been delayed’ images and slapping their own info over the top.

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We’ve missed the Thursday mark, but there’s still time to snag some free games over on Epic’s shelves. This week, the house of Sweeney are giving away The Stanley Parable and Watch Dogs. One is a sprawling, meta-textual comedy narrative about control and the nature of stories themselves. The other has a bloke with a neat cap. You’ve got until next Thursday to grab ’em for free, at which time they’ll be replaced by Figment and Tormentor X Punisher.

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It s Friday the 13th, the day of Saint Badluck, patron saint of ladders and casinos. And it is a fabulous holiday. Out there, parades are getting ready to be rained on, and children are looking forward to tonight s shenanigans, when they will dress up as mirrors and knock on doors, declaring: sweets or I ll smash myself . I love Friday the 13th. So many cherished memories. So many splinters of reflective glass.

So, Happy Bad Luck Day. Here s a list of the 9 unluckiest characters in videogames. Spoilers for pretty much every game mentioned. So, watch out.

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Is that a tingling in my ears? Has Kevan Brighting’s soothing voice returned to comfort my lobes? The Stanley Parable‘s narrator is back in a new trailer, and he’s got some concerning news regarding the development of the upcoming Ultra Deluxe edition. Reluctantly, regrettably, and due to popular demand, it appears the labyrinthine adventure’s second remake won’t be launching as planned this year.

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Indie developer Crows Crows Crows, whose founder William Pugh is one of the developers behind The Stanley Parable, has released a free browser-based MMO. It is described as “a mix between Journey, RuneScape and that time U2 s new album got auto-installed on everybody s iPhones.” The Club – a blocky 90s-Internet styled multi-player discothon whose name is surrounded by the animated GIF flames of a Geocities fan page, and whose club tracks sound like a DJ set by David Lynch – is a mission-less, non-competitive, online music listening game. It is hell. It is perfect.

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Davey Wreden isn’t done making you sad. He co-designed The Stanley Parable and directed The Beginner’s Guide, and now he’s heading up a new team with the aim of producing games “that are beautiful, meditative, thoughtful, and sad”. So like the games he’s already worked on, but with fewer jokes.

Details about the next game are thin on the metaphorical, ‘probably a big allegory for something’ ground, but let’s have a rummage through these two job ads. Look, it’s gonna be third-person. That’s a start.

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If you ve choosed-and-adventured through Bandersnatch, the recent Black Mirror thing on Netflix, and aren t already a fan of experimental interactive fiction: I envy you. It means you re able to play actually good examples of interactive fiction for the first time.

Sure, Bandersnatch has funny lines, surprises and scene stealing performances from Will Poulter doing a pretty much exactly how I, the writer, talk in real life voice. But as a whole, video games have been iterating deeper on the main themes of control, authenticity, forced choice, meta-recursion and non-linearity for years, without also including an unhelpful portrayal of paranoid schizophrenia. When you love enough people who hear voices and suffer from castigatory delusions, maybe you become less enthused about media which depicts sufferers committing murders or throwing themselves off buildings. Fix it, Brooker. The same plotpoint was in White Christmas and it was shit back then.

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Splendid walk-o-laffer The Stanley Parable is being revisited and expanded again in an Ultra Deluxe edition. This will bring new endings, new choices, and I’m sure so very many new secrets. The main goal of Ultra Deluxe is to bring the game to consoles but hey, it’ll come our way too so we all win. Have a peek at Stanley’s anguish in the announcement trailer.

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We’ve already seen which games sold best on Steam last year, but a perhaps more meaningful insight into movin’ and a-shakin’ in PC-land is the games that people feel warmest and snuggliest about. To that end, Valve have announced the winners of the 2017 Steam Awards, a fully community-voted affair which names the most-loved games across categories including best post-launch support, most player agency, exceeding pre-release expectations and most head-messing-with. Vintage cartoon-themed reflex-tester Cuphead leads the charge with two gongs, but ol’ Plunkbat and The Witcher series also do rather well – as do a host of other games from 2017’s great and good.

Full winners and runners-up below, with links to our previous coverage of each game if you’re so-minded. Plus: I reveal which game I’d have gone for in each category. (more…)

Hey everyone, look. The creators of The Beginner s Guide have made a new game. I wonder what emotional masterpiece they ve made this time? Let s go take a lo– oh. It s an RPGMaker game about Keanu Reeves indiscriminately stabbing people. Well, you know, maybe there s a hidden message. A deep satire on the state of the videogames industry. A worthy soliloquy hidden in the dialogue. Perhaps there s some understanding of the human condition to be gleaned from

No. No, it s just a rando JRPG about Keanu Reeves dealing drugs to children. (more…)