I keep seeing those adverts for that Ray-Ban and Meta collaboration, where like, they're smart glasses that let you browse the web with your eyes? Anyway, yeah, they don't appeal to me at all. Not as much as "Dateviator" glasses, which come courtesy of Sassy Chap Games and their upcoming dating sim Date Everything! As the title suggests: you date everything, from kitchen sponges to lampshades, as they morph into absolute fitties once you've donned the special specs. It looks incredibly dumb but in the best possible way.
The immersive sim has seen a revival in recent years. Not only from larger studios like Arkane, keeping the faith alive with their time loops and space stations, but also from a bunch of smaller developers bravely exploring a typically ambitious genre. RPS has always had an affinity for these systemically luxuriant simulations, historically lauding the likes of the original Deus Ex as the best game ever made. But given everything that has come since, is that still the case? Only one way to find out: make a big list.
Animal caretaking sim Zoochosis is about being an ordinary zookeeper working in an ordinary zoo. What's that? There are no ordinary zoos? My mistake. Let me start again. Animal caretaking horror game Zoochosis is about being a stressed-out zookeeper in a hideous zoo where the giraffes have tendrils coming out of their chests and the kangaroos have rows of chattering teeth in their marsupial pouch. There, got it right in the end. We've known about the development of this terror-heavy tourist attraction since its announcement early this year. But now the upcoming horror sim has been given an autumn release date in a new trailer.
Between Against The Storms’ critters, Manor Lords’s perfect oxen, and now Cataclismo, Hooded Horse’s roster of strategy games share a common thread that many guard-the-village-em-ups can fatally overlook: they present a civilisation that’s worth protecting. Even if the fallen culture you’ll defend against waves of gribblies offers fascinatingly few concrete details on its origins, there’s a lithe and impressionistic otherworldliness and use of colour in Cataclismo’s art that evokes unearthed layers of history. Also, everyone is just so gosh darn likeable, with their foppish hats plopped atop stretched bodies, and dialogue that remains resolute, chirpy, and eager, even when you’re click-marching these poor folk straight to their deaths.
Still, none of this will stop me will sacrificing every last man, woman, and child of these beleaguered warriors if it means preserving a single one of my immaculately crafted staircases.
Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week - our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! Something extra magical has happened! And by magical, I mean that I’ve bollocksed it up, yet again! I foresaw this coming, honestly, and should have addressed it last week. Alas, I dared to dream that I’d have sorted things out by now. Well, this is what I get for mild optimism!
Sundays are for getting dangerously into No Man’s Sky again. Before I go floating in a tin can, let’s read this week’s best writing about games (and game related things!)
The skies roil. The forests burn. The oceans drink themselves, then throw themselves back up, then drink themselves again. That’s gross, oceans. Don’t do that. Wait. Wait. Sorry. I misread the memo. It’s not the end times, it is simply the end of the week. That’s much nicer. Weekends bring with them solid videogame hours, and perhaps even video game hours? We shall have to see. Here’s what we’re clicking on.
Ho, wayfarer! Beware slight spoilers for Alan Wake 2 in the passages ahead.>
Deep in the Dark Place of Alan Wake 2 there is a forest that is not a forest - a zig-zag tunnel adorned with murals of a grisly woodland scene. Entering that tunnel, you find yourself sealed in at either end. But the mural suggests a way out: it changes when you turn around, following an unspoken narrative. It's a device as delicate as the graffiti elsewhere in the Dark Place is obnoxious. In hindsight, it feels like an example of "metsänpeitto", a concept from Finnish folklore about forests which, as writer Sinikka Annala explains, saturates the design of Alan Wake 2. It's a fascinating idea I'd love certain much larger, less intriguing video game worlds to learn from.
I am burning the Bishop while he sleeps. I'd say it's nothing personal, but quite a lot in medieval management sim Norland is personal. He shouldn't have slept with the Queen's sister, for example. He shouldn't have insisted his lover subsequently pay him for a confession to absolve herself of the guilt accrued from sleeping with him. He shouldn't have felt safe in a room next to the Queen, a woman described as "reckless" in her character traits, and who is perilously close to having a nervous breakdown. This, my holy friend, is how your bed chamber becomes a raging inferno.
By the end of my first game of Norland, the village of Nandos (you can name your own settlements) is covered in more blood than the back end of the bard's best work. In storytelling terms, it is a tragedy. In terms of fantasy management games? It is great fun. The failure cascade as waterslide.