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…)

The eighth Humble Bundle boasts an extraordinary line-up of recent indie royalty. Proteus, Thomas Was Alone, Hotline Miami, Capsized, Awesomenauts, Dear Esther and Little Inferno, plus their soundtracks. It seemed like the best one yet. So naturally they’ve added another four games.

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