A measure of how quickly my year is passing by is how often a new fortnightly Humble Bundle rolls around. While not every single deal is worth raving about, the latest another Staff Pick, where Humble employees choose both the games and the charitable organisation a portion of the proceeds go to is pretty good.

The standard Humble format applies the pay what you want tier (wherein you must fork over at least $1 to obtain Steam keys) includes stealth puzzler Volume, open-ended programming game TIS-100, and retro-inspired first person dungeon crawler The Legend of Grimrock 2.

If you're feeling a little more generous, spending over the average total which, at the time of writing, stands at $3.93 (about 3.16) also nets you assembly line puzzle game Infinifactory, MMO role player The Secret World, and strategy 'em up Dungeons 2.

As always, paying a set fee grants you all of the above and an extra game which in this occasion is $14 (about 11.26) and gets you Crate Entertainment's dark fantasy action RPG Grim Dawn. Humble engineer Nick has chosen this lot and suggests you split your money this time round between the devs, Humble and the Multiple Sclerosis Society of Northern California and Able Gamers following his own MS diagnosis.

Nick's Staff Picks Humble Bundle is live right now until December 7.

If you're after even more savings this week, be sure to check out our best Black Friday PC gaming deals hub.

Some online stores give us a small cut if you buy something through one of our links. Read our affiliate policy for more info.

Mike Bithell, the brain behind Thomas Was Alone and Volume, says he's working on two new titles but they might mark the end of an era. That's according to a new interview over at MCV, where Bithell surveys his career up until now, roughly six months after the launch of the aforementioned Volume.

Asked what he's working on at present, Bithell mentioned both a small and large project, but didn't offer much in the way of details.  I have a smaller project which I think will surprise people by how quickly it comes out, he said.  It s something I ve been fiddling with since the end of Volume, so about six months. A little idea a few ideas I ve bashed together, actually.

On the topic of the larger project, Bithell had this to say:  there s definitely seismic, massive stuff as well which is super exciting and completely secret, he said.  Volume opened some very cool doors. We were already talking to various people about various things but once Volume came out and sold well and reviewed well, a lot of people became interested in working with us.

Still, Bithell said the smaller project might mark the end of his coding career.  It s probably the last thing I ll code if everything goes to plan, and that s a horrible thing to say. That s a quote that some smart ass will throw at me in ten years time when I m sat in my shed. You can count on it, Mike.

Of course, not coding doesn't mean "not making games" those "cool doors" Bithell mentions in relation to the larger project could indicate anything. Indeed, it could mean he'll take a more directorial, less hands-on approach on the next major title. Who knows.

Volume was a beautiful, polished stealth-action game, but according to our Tyler it had a few problems. "[Volume has] fun, not-too-hard stealth puzzles that look great, wrapped up in a humdrum story with a boring protagonist."

Volume is a pretty good stealth puzzle game. It could be called 'Pretty Good Stealth Puzzle Game' and I would agree with it. "Hey, that's what you are," I'd say. As a futuristic Robin Hood tale with a mysterious name like 'Volume,' however, Volume is not as good. 

It's often amusing, but Volume's comments on wealth distribution and moral responsibility are ultimately pretty mundane, no matter how hard the theatrical score tries to elevate it all. (There's even a choir doing ominous 'oooohs.') Meanwhile, its protagonist, Rob Locksley, sounds so bored I expected him to give up on saving the world halfway through to watch YouTube videos. Maybe seeing a goat cuddling with a duckling would get him to feel something.

But as 100 stealth levels, Volume is pretty good! It s played from an overhead perspective, with WASD to move Rob through small puzzles, avoiding guards and collecting gems on the way to the exit. It s very similar to  The Marvellous Miss Take, only better—better looking, better level design, better gadgets—and without the randomized guard behavior. Volume s levels are puzzles, plain and simple. Guards do one thing over and over, and there s almost always a clear solution.

Say there s a guard looking through a doorway, for instance. At the most basic level, I might crouch behind a half-wall near him, whistle to get him to move off his post, and then creep around the wall as he comes looking for me. In a more advanced puzzle, I might have to shoot a noisemaker gadget I found earlier in the level, lure one guard away from a group of marching guards, and then let him rejoin out of formation—right behind another guard instead of evenly spaced—to create a gap I can squeeze through. It s about identifying and disrupting patterns.

Sneak king

The complexity rises every few levels, when new, extremely Stealth Game ideas are introduced. You can hide in closets. There are forcefields blocking paths that need to be deactivated. Dogs have better peripheral vision. Archers have long, narrow vision triangles, but are slow to shoot. There s a gadget that distracts guards with a curious object, one that disguises you as a guard, one that makes you invisible, and so on. A lot of ideas are introduced at an even pace.

I especially liked puzzles designed around jumping over short walls. As guards can t do the same, you can force them to run little mazes while you take shortcuts, off to the next section of the level before they have any clue what s happened. It s fun, if sometimes too obvious and simple, to game the guards AI.

There were two levels that infuriated me (screw lasers), but for the most part, Volume is pretty tame. There's some tricky maneuvering—such as avoiding pressure plates that emit guard-alerting sounds while also keeping out of sight—but I rarely got stuck on anything for long. Many of the puzzles are satisfying to solve, but few are difficult to figure out. I never had a big 'aha' moment, and that was disappointing. 

The difficulty is heavily mitigated by checkpoints, which are placed throughout the levels and not only act as respawn points, but also save any gems or items you ve picked up so far. I appreciate that I m not asked to redo an entire level because of one mistake, but checkpoints can be abused. I discovered early on that if I grabbed some gems and was spotted by a guard, I d be fine as long as I made it to a checkpoint before being killed. Hell, even if I fell through the checkpoint while in my I ve been shot and am dying animation, I still respawned there and kept my progress. It feels like cheating, which isn t a good feeling, but I wasn t going to forego a simple solution on principle. Heck, I often abused checkpoints by accident, running through one while just trying to escape a pursuing guard.

Rob the planet

It s funny that mid-death checkpointing is allowed, given Volume s premise. The idea is that you, as Rob Locksley, have hijacked an evil corporation s old AI and are livestreaming simulated burglaries of real places. You re showing the public how to take back the wealth that s been hoarded by the elite, and they re going out and doing it. Except I figure they die whether or not Rob made it to a checkpoint.

The danger of Rob s suggestion is addressed, to be fair. The story is mainly told as Rob s hijacked AI (Alan) talks to him every few levels. Alan is voiced by Danny Wallace, who is funny, emotional, and delivers the best AI voice performance in a game since GLaDOS. The cartoonishly evil corporation owner also chimes in now and then, and is voiced by Andy Serkis. Andy Serkis is great. He is the great Andy Serkis, so that s assumed.

Rob himself, however, is voiced by musician and YouTube star Charlie McDonnell, and it doesn't work. I understand the choice—Rob is a kid livestreaming a game, essentially, so a YouTuber makes some amount of sense—but it doesn't work. McDonnell seems like an affable fellow, but he s painfully outclassed. While Danny Wallace is discovering what the world s become, struggling with his lack of free will, and cracking jokes, McDonnell is reading words. He sounds like he s been woken up at 4 am, handed a script with only his lines, and told he can go back to bed when he s done. By the end, I did not like Rob at all.

Had I liked him, there would ve been some enjoyable moments. The best bits are when Alan shares comments from the outside world: Jim Sterling (as Tuck) gives Rob s stream a scathing review, another viewer raps about it. Had Rob s response to his fame not been total apathy, I might have had fun seeing his character progress.

And I was disappointed that aside from those moments, and a couple others like them, I felt disconnected from the premise. There s no way to interface with the world outside of the simulation, where presumably there s a Twitch chat screaming at me for every mistake, and forum threads about my identity, and news reports, and fan art. I only get to glimpse that world through messages Alan scatters around for me, and Rob rarely addresses the viewers. I left the final, weirdly artifacted cutscene feeling like none of it happened at all. There was no AI, no simulation, no story about a corporation taking over England—just a sleepy kid yammering while I played 100 pretty good stealth levels puzzles.

But I enjoyed most of those 100 levels, so it's not so bad. Plus, there are more levels after the main 100, because Volume includes a built-in level editor, as well as a sharing and rating system. The level editor is OK. It s got all the functionality you need to make a level like any of the 100 core levels, but bafflingly doesn t have mouse support. You have to select one tile at a time with WASD and hit Space to place an object. You can t select a big area and fill it with floor, or right click on something to get its properties. It was a designed for a controller, which is the last way I want to interact with an editor.

Still, I m sure players will make some cool stuff with it, however tedious it is to use right now. I think 100 levels was enough for me, though. There s some interesting stuff to play with near the end of Volume—including some unique teleporter puzzles—but for the most part I ve done it all already. I ve thrown noisemakers, avoided vision cones, and dodged lasers—plenty of them, in plenty of other games. Volume is beautiful (and the triangle explosions are very neat), but I didn't fall in love with its world, so I don't feel any strong desire to crouch-walk around any more of its corners.

Originally released in 2012, Thomas Was Alone is, at its core, a puzzle-platformer built around rectangles. It was also quite a good game, "entirely too touching for a platform game about bouncy squares," as we said in our review (via Metacritic), and it actually built up quite a fan base, evidenced by the nearly 5500 positive user reviews (compared to 229 negative) on Steam. And so now, to mark the upcoming three-year anniversary of its release, there are action figures.

No, seriously. Thomas Was Alone action figures: Officially sanctioned, and, as you can see, almost exactly as they appear in the game, except in three dimensions instead of two. "Lovingly handcrafted from the finest materials [plastic], these figures offer the full articulation possible for toys based on the reasonably popular indie game, Thomas Was Alone," the product description states. "The Claire figure even floats. Seriously. That's not a joke. That took time to make work."

Further evidence that this is not a joke (and it's not!) came from Thomas Was Alone creator Mike Bithell himself, who sent us an email saying that it's actually something he's been asked about quite a bit. He also noted that it's a "very limited run" of figures, and while he didn't say how many of the sets have been made, the counter on the Kerry Dyer website indicates that more than a third of them have already sold.

The Thomas Was Alone action figures come together in a set of four that sells for 20/$31. They're not very big—Claire, the blue block, is 3.2 cm tall—and thus should not be given to children to play with because, as the site notes, "they are small cubes of plastic."

Bithell's next project, the stealth-action game Volume that features voice acting by Andy Serkis, will be out on August 18.

At this point, we should all be used to Steam's auto-updating. Even so, it can be a little unsettling when it happens to a game about emerging autonomous AI. Quadrilateral platformer Thomas Was Alone has received just such an update, supposedly adding Benjamin's Flight a free chapter of levels originally exclusive to the game's Playstation release. At least, that's what creator Mike Bithell claims it adds. My advice? Keep an eye out for rogue squares.

"Benjamin's Flight takes place before the events of Thomas Was Alone," Bithell writes in a press release, "and tells the story of the first AI to discover something very dangerous: Hope. Armed with a new jetpack ability, he'll go hunting for the strange glowing light he's long admired from afar."

With the update, Steam owners get a new set of jetpack-designed levels, new songs, and a new narration about Benjamin and his high-flying dreams. It's a nice bonus for owners of the game assuming it doesn't unleash sentient and somewhat charming artificial intelligence.

Mike Bithell is currently working on stealth game Volume. For more on that, check out Chris's preview.

A recent trailer for Volume has revealed that author, actor, and Thomas Was Alone narrator Danny Wallace will lend his voice to the game’s companion AI. YouTuber Charlie McDonnell will play the role of Robin Hood. Yes, that Robin Hood.

Volume will be a retelling of Robin Hood set in the near future. According to Eurogamer, Robert Locksley (better known as Robin Hood) finds a volume, a simulation tool that’s used to train a military coup’s forces. Locksley then uses the volume’s AI to “broadcast simulations of robbery against England's wealthiest, becoming the world's first crime let's player.”

I encourage anyone who hasn’t heard of Volume to check out designer Mike Bithell’s video demonstration, which should give you a better idea of what Volume actually is.

Volume’s set to come out sometime in 2014 on the PlayStation 4 with PC and Mac versions a month later.

The freshly announced Volume is being made by Mike Bithell, creator of the quadrilateral platformer Thomas Was Alone. Which means I'm fighting the urge point at one of the abstract red cuboids emerging from the ground and going "lol, Thomas in 3D!" I'll continue to struggle against that base temptation, because Volume looks to be an intriguing stealth distract-'em-up with an emphasis on making noise.

To the Youtubatrons!



Some brief story info has been posted to the Volume website.

" Does not kill. That would be far too easy. Instead, he commits his crimes through stealth. He sneaks, he distracts, he avoids. He is never seen, and seldom heard. As he grows in popularity and notoriety, so will his inventory. Blackjacks, bugles, thunderclaps and veils are just some of the tools at 's disposal."

The game's site notes that Volume will release with "hundreds of challenging and exciting environments," but goes on to promise that every area can be remixed and expanded. "The community are free to take the game in any direction they want, even releasing their own takes on the core levels. This is a game which will evolve, warp and grow as players make their mark on 's legend."

A livestream of the game is planned tonight at 9pm BST, over on Bithell's Twitch channel. Alternatively, you can see a ten minute demonstration below.



Volume is set to release in 2014. No platforms have been announced.

Summer has always been a bit of a lull when it comes to video game releases. It’s the time of year where we hear more about the upcoming fall releases rather than actually, you know, playing games. Luckily, we have the Humble Indie Bundle 8 to keep boredom, UV rays, and those treacherous, shark-filled oceans at bay.

The Humble Indie Bundle traditionally features recent indie darlings for the low, low price of “whatever the hell you want”, and this year is no exception. No matter what you pay, you’ll get access to Little Inferno, Awesomenauts, Capsized, Thomas Was Alone, Dear Esther and their soundtracks (and Steam keys if throw in a dollar or more). Linux users should be happy to know that the Linux versions of these games are also debuting with the bundle.

Forking over more than the average purchase price (a modest $5.72 as of this writing) will net you Hotline Miami and Proteus plus its soundtrack. Yes, you might be saving up for the pricey GTX 780 that your annoying friend already has, but maybe you could skip eating today?

Like always, you can choose where your money goes, rationing out which developers and charities get your hard-earned bitcoins. You have a full two weeks to decide who gets what while stocking up on harpoons for the inevitable shark invasion.

By now you may've heard the ruckus emanating from the console community. Zack Scott, prominent YouTube personality and uploader of Let's Play videos, revealed that Nintendo had "claimed ownership" of his Nintendo gameplay demonstrations—meaning, basically, that ad revenue from the videos would go to Nintendo rather than Scott himself. It wasn't an isolated incident; numerous other YouTubers found their videos had also been claimed by the heavyweight publisher.

Nintendo's started a possible movement among publishers; Markus "Notch" Persson of Minecraft fame has revealed that he, too, was approached by YouTube and offered a cut of all Minecraft videos' revenue.

"It was tempting," said Persson on Twitter. "We almost did it."

Had the Minecraft team gone through with the deal, what then? Well, not only would the income of Let's Play YouTubers be threatened, but there's an argument for the exposure that indie developers would lose as well if major YouTubers closed up shop.

Mike Bithell, developer of Thomas Was Alone, says that it was a Total Biscuit video that propelled his game to success.

" Thomas sold eight times more units than on launch day," he recounts frankly in a piece for Develop Online. "I was outselling Assassin's Creed 3 on Steam."

"Thomas Was Alone would not have been a hit without YouTube. Without the frequent infringement of my copyright, the astonishingly aggressive use of my intellectual property and oftentimes presumptuous use of work comprising years of my life, I wouldn't be sat right now, at home, taking a break from my work as a full time indie developer."

So it's not just about massive publishers who can probably live without the money earned by YouTubers—in the end, widespread adoption of YouTube claiming could hurt smaller developers as well. Let's Play videos often help us decide whether to buy a game or not, and they can introduce us to wonderful smaller projects and mods as well.

Zack Scott's suspended his playthroughs of Nintendo games, and many other YouTubers are following suit. In the meantime, indie developers continue to lobby for the positive effects that Let's Plays have on their success. One thing's for sure: game publishers can try as they like to take away our gameplay videos, but they'll never take away our enjoyment of cats with pineapples.

Chris, Marsh and very special guest Mike Bithell, creator of the BAFTA award-winning Thomas Was Alone, discuss Sim City, Sniper Elite: Nazi Zombie Army, Tomb Raider, the Arma 3 alpha, the morality of Kickstarter and why triangles should just go home.

Also featuring the industrial nightmare of Novathurstengrad, vague caveat-laden descriptions of Mike's next game and an analogy that we might not simply be advanced enough as a species to successfully assemble.

You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, or download the MP3 directly. Follow PC Gamer UK on Twitter to be informed when we're putting the call out for questions. Alternatively, follow us as individuals:

Mike - @mikebithell
Marsh - @marshdavies
Chris - @cthursten

Show notes

Our review of Sim City.
Our review of Tomb Raider.
Somewhere you can buy Thomas Was Alone.
Our Let's Reboot series about classic games reimagined for today.
Just because we can build something doesn't mean we should use it in an extended metaphor.