I m delighted to say that Virginia [official site] was not at all about what I thought it would be, what it seemed to be. Pretty early on, its narrative took a surprising sideways step, a sudden and yet fluid motion that made it feel fresh, exciting and unpredictable. It was the first of a series of such steps the game would take, crabbing its way into increasingly unusual territory until, at the end of its two hour story, I wasn t quite sure where either of us were left standing. Many of its surprises were pleasant, but others were perplexing.

Ostensibly, Virginia is about two women working for the FBI in the early 1990s, tasked to find a boy who has gone missing in the titular state. However, this missing person case isn t quite what it seems. Nor is your own objective. Nor even is your character or, it seems, much of what s going on around you. By its conclusion, I wasn t entirely sure what Virginia was about and I m not sure how much of this I could attribute to imperfect storytelling, to elements of very deliberate obfuscation or to my own ignorance. Virginia is strange and fascinating. It definitely isn t for everyone, but it certainly is remarkable.

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Ubisoft are trying to make The Division [official site] “feel more like a shooter” again, they say, similar to how it feels while you’re still levelling up. They’ve been talking more about Update 1.4, the patch so important that Ubi delayed two upcoming expansions to focus on improving the base game. A public test server will launch on Monday but, for now, here’s more on their plans.

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With Part 4, Inkle s triumphant Sorcery! series [official site] reaches its conclusion. It’s still sourcing its core tale from the Steve Jackson classics, but having taken wonderful leaps away to include its own far more elaborate possibilities. And the trajectory of each game being better than the last is not broken in this fourth release, the best yet, and indeed one I now feel comfortable calling one of the finest RPGs ever made. This is spectacular. Here’s wot I think:>

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Looking for a fun competitive game to take home to the family at Christmas? Mate, DEVIL DAGGERS. Test grandma’s twitch reflexes, give your nephew new nightmares, and see how competitive everyone gets once your cousin breaks out the brandy. Or, y’know, I suppose Jump Stars [official site] might work too.

The platforming party game will launch in December, publishers Curve Digital announced today. It’s a TV game show-style doodad with competitive and cooperative local multiplayer minigames based around jumping and punching, and it looks like it might be a lark. See:

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We have been cooing at Astroneer [official site] on and off for the past year, its colourful planets, bouncing astronauts and clicky base-building. And although we enjoyed footage of little men bounding across low-poly worlds together and carving out tunnels in the rock with some sort of futuristic matter displacer, we didn t know exactly when it would come out. Well, we still don t know. Not exactly>. But it will be in December this year, say the developers, hitting Steam and Windows 10 as an early access game. Here s another trailer they released along with the news.

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There are a handful of IF authors whose work is consistent and satisfying, who repeatedly and frequently release things their fans rush to play. Andrew Schultz turns out a wordplay puzzle game or two a year. Caelyn Sandel wrote a serialized Twine story called Bloom, with a steady supply of new installments. And then there’s Ryan Veeder, a master of short parser games who produces several a year, often outside of any competition setting.

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After twenty years, Blizzard plan to step away from the name Battle.net for their online platform and services. The Diablords and Warcrafteers today announced that they’ll be “transitioning away” from the name Battle.net, which they’ve been using since the first Diablo way back in 1996. No, Blizzard now want to name elements boring things like Blizzard Streaming and Blizzard Voice. Ah, the end of an era. Another icon falls.

Look, let’s be honest: names which are also domain names had become daggy by ooh we’ll generously say 1999. But don’t you see, Blizzard? A ’90s revival is going on – for the first time in yonks, the name Battle.net currently sounds cool.

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That there Firewatch [official site] is already a chatty one but what if you want more? What if you want more people talking about more things? What if you want to know secrets? What if you want to know the horrors of Henry’s hands? Then you’ll want to return for the free new Audio Tour mode coming in an update today. Any minute now?

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We dispatched Brendan back into sci-fi disaster simulator RimWorld [official site], where he quickly established a failing hotel in the middle of a scorching desert. Last week, the hotel staff were in the grip of drugs and cancer. In part two of this three-part diary, a tragedy brings the hotel to its knees.>

Wide-eyes Pete was on another one of his binges. He d gotten his hands on some Wake-up thanks to a passing group of merchants and after spending the previous week in withdrawl he was now sucking it down like sugar. In terms of work rate, this is bad because you can t control RimWorld s cartoon men and women when they enter a state like this – they just refuse to do their jobs. But in terms of happiness, I would rather Pete get high every day and stay chipper than descend into a spiral of withdrawl. That s why I bought him the drugs. He s better like this.

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Dark Souls III [official site] will be the end of Dark Souls, as far as director Hidetaka Miyazaki is concerned, but we’ve still got two DLC story add-ons to come before it wraps up. The first of these will be Ashes of Ariandel, which is due on October 25th, and… do you want to know more about it or enjoy a surprise? If you fancy going in fresh, probably don’t watch the new trailer released today. Its four minutes of gameplay show not much, really, until they show exciting spoiler-ish things that honestly I’d rather have seen fresh while playing. Be warned. For the bold, onwards:

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