I return to Amnesia: The Dark Descent with one question alone: will it still scare me?

Amnesia scared the bejesus out of me in 2010 when it first came out. But we all know how games age, and the magic can wear off. At the time the graphics and physics on offer were really astonishing work for a tiny indie team, but what about almost a decade later? Can it still make me do that bum-clenched mad panic thing where I lean in forward in my chair in an effort to get away from the monsters faster? Or will it seem a little quaint now?

(more…)

The biggest names in platforming used to live only on console, but it’s on PC now that the genre is thriving. Indies have taken the simple ingredients and spun them off in umpteen directions (but still normally from left to right). Below you’ll find a collection of the very best platform games on PC – including puzzle platformers, physics platformers, platformers with roguelike elements, and platformers about absolutely nothing but pixel-perfect jumping.

(more…)

When Tommy Refenes first sat down to prototype a new, auto-running one-button Super Meat Boy game in his GDC hotel room back in 2011, it was meant to be a tiny spin-off for mobiles that stopped after nine levels. The scope of it was going to be very small, the programmer of Team Meat told me at PAX East 2019 last weekend. The idea was just to be like a palette cleanser in between our bigger projects because we were working on Mew-Genics. It was supposed to be, Let s just do this, put it out and charge like a dollar for it and then move on .

Fast forward to today and Super Meat Boy Forever will shortly be out on every platform with somewhere in the region of 7200 levels (or chunks as Refenes calls them). It s still an auto-runner, but if you re worried about Forever being dumbed down after beginning life on mobile, rest assured that it looks and feels just like the 2010 mega hit right down to the speed of Meat Boy s stubby red legs.

(more…)

>

Nobody has to die, Justine told me. There’s a way to save them all.

Reader, I did not save them all.

(more…)

Splendidly deadly platformer Super Meat Boy is free to keep on the Epic Games Store if you grab it now. This is the second of the freebies luring people onto Epic’s new store since its launch in December 2018, following Subnautica (and if the carrot doesn’t work, there’s always the stick of exclusive games). For now, hey, if you install Epic’s client and register an account, you can get Team Meat’s ace platformer free.

(more…)

As we rapidly approach the end of the year, it s time for everyone to look back over the past twelve months of stuff and turn it into neat little lists of what was best. Like games, yes, but also telly and photos and, as we shall see, music. After all, is there a better way of celebrating the end of the year than to take 10 of the finest tunes of 2018 and run them through the finest rhythm game of 2008? I certainly can t think of anything. Let s Audiosurf.

(more…)

With the season of spooky celebrations kicking off, Amnesia: The Dark Descent has added a Hard Mode for people who wish to suffer terrible cruelty as they explore the horrible ghost house of meat monsters. The new mode, added to 2010’s first-person spooker in a patch today, makes the meatmen more murderous and starves us of comforting light so we lose our mind (and then die as we lose our loose grip on reality). So a real good time. It’s a stark contrast to the bonus mode developers Frictional Games added to their later Soma – an easy option for explorers and sightseers. This time, they want you dead.

(more…)

I was jolly pleased when Frictional Games patched a ‘Safe Mode’ into Soma, letting fraidypants like me freely explore the undersea horror. Conversely, I said “Ha ha ha NOPE” aloud after Frictional announced today that they will next add a new difficulty level to Amnesia: The Dark Descent – a ‘Hard Mode’ to freak your nut out and murder you hard. No thank you! But I know some Amnesia players had wanted their minds more fragile and its ghoulies deadlier, so good for them? Agh.

(more…)

The inspiration for Alien: Isolation came from a simple thought experiment: what if somebody let a lion loose in developer Creative Assembly s office? I d get behind my desk and make sure it wouldn t see me, says the game s creative director Alistair Hope. Then, you d need to get to the fire escape. Maybe I d move desk to desk and distract it. If you are confronted by it, what do you do? What do you know about it? What do you know about what it knows about you? That felt pretty cool, and it wasn t relying on scripted events.

Most of us know the feelings of dread that accompany playing a horror game. But how do developers create those feelings from scratch? What are the tricks that developers use to scare us, and create a sense of atmosphere? How do they go from imagining a lion in a studio, or an empty bathroom, to moments that will scare the pants off us? I spoke to four of the top minds in the industry to find out. (more…)

If you have not bought the Amnesia first-person spookers intentionally, inadvertently acquired them in an old bundle you don’t really remember buying, nor grabbed them when they were free in January good news: both Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs are free for keepsies right now on Steam. What’s changed since the last giveaway? I still have not finished either of them, I’ll tell you that much. You go lock yourselves into dungeons with terrible monsters, I’ll be just fine where I am, thanks. (more…)