The devs behind Moonlighter are already back with something new. While they're still tinkering away with the early access release of Moonlighter 2, at the Future Games Show Spring Showcase they revealed another roguelike entirely: ReVamp, a tower defence spin on the genre that pits you as Dracula himself protecting his castle.

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Video games are such funny things, because I think if you were to tell someone unfamiliar with them that there is genuine enjoyment to be had in pushing some blocks around in a virtual space they'd look at you as if you'd told them there's genuine enjoyment to be hand in pushing some blocks around in a virtual space. And yet it's true! It's one of the classic puzzle game genres, going way back to 1982 with Sokoban. And here we are now, many years later, with a new entry to the genre in the form of Hazard Pay, a dystopian take that sees you cleaning up mysterious messes in secret labs.

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Subnautica probably wouldn't be the beloved ocean exploration/survival crafting game that it is without its underwater base building, so of course it's no surprise that it's returning for the impending sequel. But being a sequel, it of course can't just be the same thing with a new coat of paint slapped on, and in a dev log some of the improvements of base building in Subnautica 2 were put on display.

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What's the best video game guide you've ever used? There's an art to it, knowing what information is imperative to include, how to include it, is it a written guide, or a video? Well, how about a 21 track long rap album? I only ask because, I am so delighted to say, someone has done just that for indie classic Metroidvania Cave Story.

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A man with a gun stands above the crowd at GDC, the barrel levelled at the words "Next Gen Raytracing Performance & Capabilities." Alas, he is not here to shoot the technojargon out of existence, nor to ballistically punish the unforgivably inappropriate use of title case. He himself is a ray-traced gamething, here to illustrate at least three of the many hardware-based tricks and tools that Microsoft are hyping up for Project Helix: the next, apparently PC game-running Xbox console.

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That's cool, but can I whip out a six-shooter while my private parts dangle in the breeze and cause a rootin' tootin' ruckus that leaves my enemies with chills going up their spine whenever they see bare buttocks? This is the question I've found myself asking of The Legend of California, a multiplayer survival shooter that the studio currently led by former Overwatch director Jeff Kaplan are releasing in early access this year.

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I think that genres, particularly in the realm of games, are often more used as marketing tools than signifiers of the contents therewithin. Still! Genre labels are a useful thing to quickly ascertain the thing you're doing in a game. Take, for example, Arc Raiders and its specific genre of extraction shooter. You know you'll be shooting, and extracting something, even if it technically isn't that simple in practice, but you get the gist. However, at one point in time, the genre of the game completely depended on who you asked.

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Well, a week out from the gargantuan merging of MMO and RPG bits' release, we finally know what Crimson Desert is. It's a game that's just slurped down some Denuvo DRM (. Yep, the shonky enormity of exploding slippage whose devs reckon they announced it too early has been fed some anti-tamper software at the last minute.

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The folks behind PEGI - the age rating system used for games in Europe outside of Germany - have announced plans to update their criteria so that games which feature likes of loot boxes, harbour NFTs or blockchain-related bollocks, or pressurise players into returning via daily quests will automatically be given specific age reccomendations to match.

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Former Overwatch director Jeff Kaplan has said his 2021 departure from Blizzard followed an ultimatum about redundancies which "ultimately broke" his resolve and led him towards the exit door. The developer frames that moment as the culmination of a number of tough years working on the hero shooter, which included a 2018 push into esports with the Overwatch League serving as a drain on resources for a team who were also trying to get Overwatch 2 off the ground.

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