Just the other day I was talking about another action-RPG from Japanese developers Nihon Falcom coming our way (Ys VI, there), when lawks a lummy look! Another one’s already here, as an English translation of Gurumin: A Monstrous Adventure [official site] launched yesterday.

It’s a cutesy adventure about a girl, her monster friends (who are invisible to adults, obvs), and her magical drill. Together, they fight evil spirits and save the village. Adventure! It looks all cutey-cute, but I have heard some fairly good things about the old PSP port.

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All good and freeware things must eventually come to an end and the very same applies to my dear Freeware Garden and its all singing, all dancing games. This, wonderful readers, is the final post in the series and my chance to admit how much I enjoyed writing it and to thank team RPS for giving me the chance to take this huge freeware burden off my chest. Oh, and to let you know which five games I covered I loved the most. These:

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Selina Scott and Jeff Banks were right all along: dress wrong and you’re nothing. This is the lesson of Pillars of Eternity, a howler of a newly-disclosed bug in which will permanently strip your characters of buffs if you happen to use the inventory a certain way.

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Last time we had a gander at Sword Coast Legends [official site], it was ten minutes of singleplayer questing, monster-slaying, loot-grabbing, and tavern-frequenting. The latest trailer for the Dungeons & Dragons action-RPG follows on from that, but carries the quest over to multiplayer so another player can be Dungeon Master.

It’s a curious mode which sees one player deploying monsters, laying traps, setting ambushes, locking doors, and controlling monsters while the heroes romp through it. Come see how it works.

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Each week Marsh Davies scuttles nervously over the creaking, makeshift architecture of Early Access and comes back with any stories he can find and/or plunges to his doom amid a shower of twisting metal. This week, he dons his hardhat and unfolds the blueprint for 3d Bridges, a physics-based construction puzzler in which you construct – yes! – bridges and then run a truck over them to test both their mettle and their metal. It also turns out to be standalone level pack otherwise included in the more sandboxy 3D Bridge Engineer toolkit – which is also on Early Access. They are not entirely as terrible as they might first look. Not entirely.>

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Tch, why conquer space for anyone else? Why march under the banner of the Krynn Syndicate when you could be The Confederacy of Ian? Who could stand up to the economic power of The Michael Empire? And imagine the terror enemies would feel lining up against the Aliciance fleet.

You can now make that happen in Galactic Civilizations III, as the latest update on its way through Early Access added custom factions, not to mention mod support.

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I admire how much Dead or Alive embraces its silliness. The fighting game series might be known for its terrifying unreal simulation of breasts, but that’s unfair to the many other oddities in Dead or Alive 5 Last Round [official site]: geishas fighting roughnecks, huge amounts of zany clothing and costumes, tiger maulings, a colossal Buddha statue coming alive to deck pugilists, and so on.

DoA5LR came out on PC today, though bafflingly it’s launching without online multiplayer. That’s due to be patched in after about 3 months. That’s a bit too silly, even for me.

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Excepting further delays, Grand Theft Auto V [official site] is due to finally arrive on PC on April 18th. In anticipation, Nathan Ditum sent us this piece about how the series’ increased fidelity has created problems, and why that same “miraculous detail” is why his love for it endures.>

Recently I was reminded by Helen Lewis of the New Statesmen of the current predominance of a certain kind of opinion writing, which can be summarised as As a blank, I feel x about y. This formulation can be limiting, to the writer as well as the pursuit of the ideas at hand, but probably also reflects something laudable about at least trying to diversify from a monolithic consensus. As a white middle-class male approaching middle age I am of course precisely the pale demographic flob from which this archetypal pitch is trying to escape, so it is with a sense of irony which apparently no longer exists in GTA itself that I present this: a list of reasons why, as a representative of the default morass of accumulated privileged perspective>, I feel culturally and morally compromised by some of the bad bits in GTA V>.

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It seemed initially like the Source Filmmaker community might be content to make only short and silly videos, but there’s now a growing selection of long> and silly videos starring Team Fortress 2 [official site] characters. The one that’s making the rounds today is The Winglet’s Live and Let Spy, a 20-minute epic that starts out with sneaking but escalates until chaos erupts. Watch it below.

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The Vive overwhelmed me when I first tried it at GDC, but after playing through Valve’s hand-picked demos for a general sense of the VR headset, I went back for a second time to play more of Job Simulator [official site]. Of the game-like experiences I’ve had with the device, it was the best – better even than Valve’s own Portal 2 vignette.

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