More of a straight news post than a pondery look at a thing, EGX also introduced me to Foramina [official site] which seems to be a point and click game that’s a monochrome, creepy point and click sort of like Botanicula meets The Nightmare Before Christmas via gothic horror story illustrations.
The Iain Banks novel Complicity> dedicates a fair few words to the system requirements of Despot, a fictional game which is basically Civilization (Banks had a bit of a Civ problem). If even Iain Banks didn’t shy away from such responsibility, I hardly can.
With Civilization VI [official site] now less than a month away from launch, the system requirements are now finalised. As you’d expect, they’re not too strict, running on most PCs from the past four years or so.
Continuing to drip-feed thoughts about games I played at EGX, let’s talk about Far From Noise [official site]. It’s a gorgeous, ruminative game I found in the Leftfield Collection. It’s also one of those games that I thought I might not write about because of how I felt at the end of the demo, but I keep coming back to it so clearly it has stuck with me.
Fancy a new PvP arena brawler? Battlerite [official site] may be your cup of tea. Made by Bloodline Champions developers Stunlock Studios and billed as that game’s “spiritual successor”, it’s got colorful heroes, things to shoot, and whatever “battlerites” are. That sounds like it might be fun!
It’s been a long time coming, but Spaces of Play’s top-down nature explorer, Future Unfolding [official site], is expected to arrive some time in 2017. We last took some time to bask in Future Unfolding’s boundless beauty way back in 2014, and judging from this new Greenlight trailer, not muh has changed in that regard. Come take a look!
Have you ever wanted to be a cockroach? Not someone who’s a burdensome nuisance, but the bugs that hang out in condemned properties and dingy apartment complexes? You might want to pick up Cockroach Simulator [official site].
You’re probably familiar with games like Who’s Your Daddy, where it’s one player’s job to keep another player (or a team, in some cases) from completing goals like suicide or self-preservation. Cockroach Simulator is a lot like that, but instead of crawling around on the floor as an infant or a worried father you’re a ruddy-looking human or a nasty little roach.
Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.>
Silly question. Of course you haven’t. Michael Wright’s texty ‘haulage bashing’ sim is so niche you could place an ormolu vase in it. It recreates a rarefied form of trainspotting in which sighting locos isn’t enough. To scratch a particular diesel or electric from your Ian Allan motive power pocketbook you must travel behind it. … [visit site to read more]
The ultra-cute Beglitched [official site] is out October 7, as evidenced by a new trailer which you can watch below. Bedecked in bright pastel hues, Beglitched is a game about hacking, a magical programming art very few people understand. You are not one of those people, however, as you find yourself the pupil of the Glitch Witch, a notorious hacker who bends the fabric of the interwebs to her every whim. It’s kind of like Hogwarts Online except not at all.
Sundays are for having a long lie, which used to mean staying in bed for as long as you wanted but now means staying into maybe 9am. It is genuinely a much greater luxury now, where there is greater contrast. But I suppose Sundays are also for catching up with the week’s writing about videogames.
We gave this its own post earlier in the week, but maybe you missed Julian Benson’s deep dive into the troubled development of Star Citizen. It’s maybe not as juicy as you’re expecting, but still an interesting (if long) read:
Panic at Multiverse High! [official site] has been out for over a month already, but now you can try before you buy in a new demo. It’s Dead State developer DoubleBear’s take on a dating sim set in a high school where things are a bit… off.
Things start out normally enough. Canned music straight out of a ’90s job training video check. A school bully named Chad check. Said school bully is pink and has six arms well, hold on.