Last night Ice-Pick Lodge revealed a new collection of screenshots for their HD remake of the wonderful, bizarre and previously very broken Pathologic [official site]. Looking at them, I found I was bursting with questions, so I asked them. Ice-Pick’s Alexandra Golubeva replied, in splendid detail. Below you can find out how there came to be two remakes at once – a complete rebuild and reimagining of the game and an updated-but-preserved version of the original – plus what new directions this reimagining will take, and how they’re inventing brand new ways to tell those old stories. (Click on the pics to see the new screens all bigger.)

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Those boisterous Beastmen are now stomping around in Total Warhammer [official site], thanks to today’s release of the ‘Call of the Beastmen’ expansion. It’ll cost you 14 to play as that horny rabble yourself but, even if not, they can now appear as opponents in the Grand Campaign. A fairly big free update has launched alongside the expansion, also bringing oodles of fixes and tweaks, drafting the Amber Wizard hero unit for the Empire, adding new multiplayer maps, and more. But back to the Beastmen: here, you can watch a bit of them in action.

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

Supercars International, the DOS version of Amiga hit Super Cars II, was and is worth playing for one reason: there’s a train rushing across one of the tracks and it will crush the crap out of any car that gets in its way.

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2010’s Apocalyptic (that’s with a capital A) hack ‘n’ slash Darksiders [official site] is being revamped for a prettied-up re-release, like its sequel already has. And like the sequel with its ‘Deathinitive Edition’ subtitle, Darksiders is picking up a dreadful title: the Warmastered Edition. Like ‘remastered’, yeah? But War because the game’s about that surly fella out the Four Horseman? The preponderance of puns is the surest sign of the impending end times, if you ask me. But this surely brings us closer to a Darksiders III?

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The biggest event on the Dota 2 [official site] calendar is almost upon us, The International. Valve’s huge tournament starts on August 3rd, hosted in Seattle as ever, but folks at home can now join in the fun too. The International Compendium update is now live, with packs of virtua Dota Top Trumps cards to collect, swap, and put into fantasy challenge sorts of… look, it’s all complicated. I’ll explain. But most exciting is the launch of the Dota 2 VR Hub, a way to watch matches in cyberspace which I assume lets you nestle between Tidehunter’s legs like he’s a big salty armchair.

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Remember how angry I got while building a chair in Ikea-esque furniture build-em-up Home Improvisation [official site] while it was in Early Access? Well, the game is launching its Full Normal Regular Access version (technical term) and has been reworked in ways that will ALLEGEDLY make me far less angry and obsessed with building and rebuilding the same hell chair for a week.

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Don’t take my slight sadness at No Man’s Sky being released as a sign I’ve made up my mind about it. I haven’t played the procedural space-‘em-up and so my mind is still wide open. I keep watching these trailers for a hint at whether it could be great and the latest and last, titled “Survive”, is below.

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I’m going to admit something to you. It’s that I initially skipped over the press emails for Okhlos [official site] because from the name I thought it might be a new low fat yoghurt*.

BUT! It’s a videogame! About an Ancient Greek mob trying to overthrow the awful gods of yore! And which now has a release date of 18 August! And is definitely not a yoghurt!

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The first piece of interactive fiction I ever played was Infocom’s locked-room murder mystery Deadline. With a plot that turned on embezzlement and unfaithfulness, not to mention a fiendishly unforgiving set of scheduling puzzles, this is not the game I myself would recommend for a six-year-old. But I suppose my parents figured it wouldn’t do me any harm, and it left me with a long-term affection for interactive mysteries.

The mystery is a natural fit for interactive fiction. The player has a clear goal. The focus of the story is usually firmly on past rather than present events. Locks, ciphers, and other standard puzzles feel at home in the genre. So many classic mysteries are essentially logic problems in fancy dress, so it’s not a great stretch to do the same thing in game form. (In fact, here’s Mattie Brice on why murder mystery writing can teach us about narrative game design in general.)

So if you have a taste for classic whodunnit genres rendered interactive, here are some highlights dating from 1995 to 2016.

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The fab time-travelling teen drama Life Is Strange [official site] is to become a live-action television series, Square Enix announced today. Or whatever it is we’re supposed to call television shows made for cybernet screens. A “digital series”, they say. Netflix or something, perhaps? We don’t know who what where when – or why, really – but we do know Squeenix have partnered with Legendary’s Digital Studios arm for it.

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