The immersive sim supergroup at Question, the studio behind The Magic Circle, have announced their next game. The Blackout Club is a cooperative multiplayer game starring teens who discover a secret nighttime society of sleepwalking adults meeting in tunnels beneath their small town, then set about spying on them, recording evidence, and trying to find their missing friend. It sounds like some sort of surveillance-focused multiplayer immersive sim, which is wild. Here, watch the announcement trailer: (more…)

Vagante has left early access after four years, so who better to take a look than someone who can barely get off the first level of this ultra-hard rogue-lite platformer? Everyone else, that’s who! (more…)

You have to hand it to MSI for cramming so many keys onto its new Vigor GK80 mechanical keyboard. Glance down at its streamlined aluminium base and you’ll see at least sixteen keys with extra function symbols peeking out of the tiny crevasses between each row.

That’s in addition to four dedicated media keys in the top right corner and a further eight function buttons along the usual string of Fn keys. For a keyboard measuring just 445x141x42mm, that’s pretty impressive. Whether you’ll end up using all of those is another matter of course, but (lack of volume slider aside) the main thing here is that you’re not having to compromise on style over substance. (more…)

Rhino Stew Productions’ delightful free game David Lynch Teaches Typing doesn’t necessarily require a working knowledge of the ways and tropes of America’s favourite avant-garde film-maker or of Mavis Beacon’s iron rule over 90s typing tuition programs, but it’s a doozy if you do. I will say that the impersonation of FBI Deputy Director Gordon Cole’s distinctive barked but super-positive speech patterns is riotously on-point, however.

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In Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, stories are currency. You walk the backroads and fields of the United States during the Great Depression, occasionally freighthopping or hitching a ride from one town to the next. Along the way, you meet many people and witness many events, most of them insignificant in the grand scheme of history and the land, but all contributing to a complex tapestry of a certain time and place.

Everything that you witness and every conversation you have becomes a tale in your repertoire, and in retelling these tales you learn about the characters you share them with, around campfires that are dotted around the map. It’s at the campfires that stories become currency, and also where the game’s combination of folktale and interactive systems becomes muddled.

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

When people ask me about the first game I ever played, I tell them it was Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. That’s not accurate, but it was the first one I played that made me realise the unique power games had to transport me to other worlds, and into the shoes of another person. (more…)

The Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB), the North American industry body which assigns games age ratings, will expand its labelling on physical boxed games to include warnings of “In-Game Purchases”. This will cover everything that can be bought digitally for real money, from season passes and skins to microtransaction currencies and random loot boxes. They’re only a decade late to noticing all this, then.

Some industry commentators are disappointed that the ESRB don’t take a tougher stance against loot boxes, specifically pointing them out, but it’s no surprise. The ESRB exist to protect big publishers, and recently responded to a US senator’s concerns about loot boxes by calling them “a fun way to acquire virtual items.” (more…)

H1Z1 has rolled out a major new update today, officially bringing the survive-y Battle Royale out of early access. Along with it, developers Daybreak have added a surprising new variant playmode, called Auto Royale. Auto Royale is a blend of regular Battle Royale systems and perennial PlayStation favorite Twisted Metal. (more…)

This is perhaps a slightly perverse offer, seeing as so many folks who have been jonesing for Into The Breach have the jitters and the sweats specifically because it’s the follow-up to the revered FTL.

However, if you’ve managed to come to this backwards, i.e. got all hot’n’bothered about Into The Breach’s ultra-deft, ultra-lean apocalyptic turn-based strategy without ever having played its brutal star-trekking predecessor FTL, good news! If you buy Into The Breach via Humble or GOG (and the former delivers you a Steam key, FYI), you’ll get a free copy of FTL.

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It’s not just me, right? A brawler (also known a beat-em-up) is a game in the vein of Final Fight or Streets Of Rage, no? A duo or trio of co-op heroes against waves of expendable mooks? Well, the Humble Brawler Bundle doesn’t contain any of those.

What it does contain is a great selection of fighting games to start off the collection of someone looking to get into the genre, mostly focused around the back-catalogue of Arc System Works, who recently shook up the scene with Dragon Ball FighterZ.

It also contains a lot of Anime, with a capital A. You have been warned.

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