E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy is a name so crap I can’t even be bothered to mock it. And yet unlike 95% of crap names, I never forget it.

EYE is one of my favourite games. It’s a mess. There’s so much wrong with it that I could probably slag it off for two full reviews, but I still like it too much.

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Space Hulk: Deathwing must have been a dream project for little French indie studio Streum On, creators of the endearingly janky E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy. As a team they’d started their careers with making Warhammer 40,000-themed mods, so having the official key to the kingdom must have felt like a miracle, but with a famous license and a higher budget comes higher expectations.

While undoubtedly more polished than E.Y.E, Deathwing still felt like a low-budget game with a high-budget facade. After an additional year and a half of development and launching alongside the PS4 version of the game, an Enhanced Edition rolled out today, addressing many of the flaws of the original launch and for those with the original version, it’s a free upgrade.

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Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.>

Some days you just want to watch the world burn. Sometimes you want to spin the world of its axis and watch as its mass is consumed by the sun, which has just suddenly expanded to ten times its original size. Some days you just need to play Universe Sandbox.

… [visit site to read more]

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.>

With Samorost 3 out last month, hopefully interest in creators Amanita Design is high. Perhaps you missed their utterly lovely Botanicula [official site]?

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From the team most famous for Machinarium, Aminita Design, comes the third game in the Samorost series. Don’t worry if you’ve never heard of the first two – they were both tiny Flash games. Samorost 3 [official site] is a full-length, full-screen adventure that requires no prior knowledge. How does the adventure/puzzle game hold up at this scale? Here’s wot I think:>

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I like to think I’d be a respectful god. I wouldn’t go poking around inside your head or turn you into a heifer. I might, however, be tempted to dick about with cosmic powers and portents. What will you think when I plop another Moon into the night sky, drop a supernova behind Pluto, or extinguish the Sun? Y’all had better hope that, if I ever achieve godhood, I’m too distracted by Universe Sandbox [official site] to notice.

Rebuilt and expanded in a new engine, the cosmic simulator sequel last night launched on Steam Early Access. Come check out these cosmic calamities:

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Just as night follows day, just as dog follows rabbit, just as Shia LeBeouf follows Daniel Clowes from a safe distance, a nomination for the latest game from Amanita will, it seems, always follow the announcement of another Independent Games Festival. This year, the makers of Botanicula and Machinarium are taking their charmingly odd, experimental puzzle-adventure Samorost3 to the show, where it’s nominated for Excellence In Visual Art and Excellence in Audio. This is their fourth game to bag a nomination – will it join its three predecessors in winning a prize?

We shall see. In the meantime, let’s have a chat with Amanita’s lead Jakub Dvorsk about how Samorost 3 is and isn’t like its much-loved forerunners, the role sound plays in their games, and their status as veterans of the much-changed indie landscape.>

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2015! That’s an insane release date for a videogame! There won’t even be PCs by then. We’ll all have Google Glass injected into our eyeballs and iPhones surgically implanted up our bums and Microsoft Surfaces built into our toilet seats. That’s definitely the future. Everyone will want closed, locked, tyrannical software ecosytems by then. Why, PC gaming has died 42 times this year alone, so God only knows how bad it’ll be in 18 months’ time.

Hopefully Machinarium and Botanicula developer Amanita Design will be able to port their long-awaited second sequel to lovely, gently psychedelic pointer-clicker Samorost to Smartwatches and curved televisions BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE. Meantime, I’m going to watch Samorost 3′s first-ever trailer just before I take my PC to the dump. (more…)

It’s no secret that I enjoy drifting around the moon in a tiny lander module. You’ll rarely find me doing anything of scientific importance as I crunch into craters and rotate wildly and out of control – I’m there for the (lack of) atmosphere and the gentle calm of being so very alone in the dark. The spiffy Lunar Flight is no longer content with its cargo carrying and data discovery missions, however, as a multiplayer mode is currently in beta. It has rockets and violence. Lunacy.

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There might be a robot roving around on Mars but Lunar Flight has done what so many dream of and sent men to the nowhere-near-as-red-as-I-was-led-to-believe planet. They are men who pilot lander modules, collecting cargo and data, spinning gracefully through the sky and plunging into the planet’s surface. I found the odd mixture of tranquility and panic rather splendid when dallying on The Moon, and the free Mars update adds a decent chunk of content. New physics, a dynamic dust storm system, crosswind forces and new routes and locations to drift around. The game is also a mere £1.75 on Steam for the next ten hours or so. Less than two pounds for both Moon and> Mars! Trailer and dust storms below.

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