You will be more interested to read about Gone Home after you’ve played it. And it will be more interesting to write about after everyone has played it. Gone Home is a wonderful game, and one that is fundamentally reliant on its being approached with a clean slate. If this is enough to convince you to give it a go, then perfect. If not, read on and I’ll do my best to say as little as possible while relaying why it’s so compelling. Here’s wot I think:>

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Craig sent me a link to Astrobase Command earlier today, wisely recognising it as the sort of thing that would cheer me on a dank and earthbound Thursday (I spend Wednesdays on the moon). Unfortunately, the link appeared in a tiny chat window, running over two lines, and momentarily creating the thrilling promise of a game called Astrobastard Commander. I want to play that game. Thankfully, Astrobase> Commander looks great as well and should present plenty of chances to behave like a terrible space-bastard. It’s “a sci-fi sandbox space station-building game with roguelike elements and AI-generated stories”. I’m thinking Redshirt, Space Station 13 and more conventional base-building all mixed into a potent brew, or perhaps compacted into a nutritious pill.

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Deep breath. Take it right in. Expand those lungs, fill them with air until you feel like you’re going to burst. Now exhale. Feel your body contract as your breath heaves out of it. Remember that feeling of clean air, because it was taken in a pre-Space Hulk world. In about an hour the game unlocks on Steam (6pm UK time), and from then on each breath will be tainted with the smell of oil, death, burning Genestealer flesh, and if you live anywhere near a Lush shop, the lingering aroma of boutique soap. Not even death and war can cover that smell up. (more…)

I have a jar of ball bearings on my desk. For each kill in CS: GO, I drop a ball into a hole in desk. The bearing rolls into a rat’s cage. The rat squeaks in terror, and a noise-activated switch turns on a fan. The fan blows a toy boat across a bucket of water, and the boat’s mast tips a small bucket of sand into another bucket. That bucket is on a string that’s tied to a switch, and it gently tugs at it, releasing another ball bearing from a small cage on a shelf above me. That other ball bearing drops into another jar. If I want to know how many kills I have, I count the balls in the jar. How do you track your kills in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive? You just use one of the StatTrak modules from the now live Arms Deal update? Show off. (more…)

Dragon Age: Inquisition won’t be out until Autumn 2014 at the earliest, but that doesn’t mean we can’t poke through the nuggets of information emerging from within the extended development cyclone. In the last week, two significant gobbets of information have emerged from Bioware’s lair. The first, as alluded to in the headline, is the news that Morrigan won’t be a party member, although that’s not to say her witchy ways won’t have a place in the game. The second piece of news wasn’t really news at all to me – Inquisition will contain multiple playable races. I didn’t realise that was a thing that might not be happening but confirmation came in a Game Informer interview.

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Betrayer, which I’m sure only came into existence about nine minutes ago, is already available to play on Steam. Albeit an alpha version, with plans to change based on feedback. Sorry, what’s Betrayer? It’s only a new FPS from the people behind No One Lives Forever and FEAR.

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The future is looking very bright for Wasteland 2 and Torment: Tides of Numenera developer inXile. Very bright indeed. Two wildly successful Kickstarters and one nearly complete, maddeningly exciting game later, Brian Fargo and co have finally found their niche. Or rather, they’ve settled back into the comforting clockwork of an old wheelhouse, an old home. But the road to this point was hardly an easy one. The developer-publisher relationship has always been rather skewed, and inXile’s taken its fair share of licks. Some times have been good (see: The Bard’s Tale), and others, well, others have been Hunted: The Demon’s Forge. The latter, especially, is a sore spot for Fargo, but he’s been burned by various publishing arrangements far more than once. He and I discussed that subject, whether Kickstarter is inXile’s permanent solution to that problem, and tons more after I saw Wasteland 2. It’s all below.>

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I hadn’t entirely forgotten that Rayman Legends is coming out on PC, but I had put it to the back of my mind as something to be enjoyed in the distant future. It’s a mark of how quickly this year has slipped through my fingers that the once distant future is now the end of this very month. While I’m slightly horrified that several months seem to have passed without notice, I’m pleased that a return to Michel Ancel’s world of glorious jazzy nonsense is just around the temporal corner. The video below shows a musical level, which looks as precise and demanding as the chest-chases in last year’s Rayman: Oranges. Prepare to hum.

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I love that the PC covers so much ground. It can match and outdo the very highest-end console gaming, while just as easily provide a home to phone-based concepts. Mice: the secret to success. So it is that forthcoming turn-based strategy Combat Monsters for mobile is also seeing a simultaneous PC release, later this year. Inspired by Magic: The Gathering, but played on a 3D board, this is the latest from the Great Big War Game creators.

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Contrast does trailers really well, and really badly. The previous teaser trailer was a fine thing, but left it a bit obscure what was game and what was cutscene. The new trailer is another absolutely gorgeous thing – a real pleasure to watch – but I still don’t feel any wiser about the game.

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