The Behemoth, the gang best known for cheery beat ’em up Castle Crashers, have announced that their new game Pit People [official site] will hit Steam Early Access on January 13th, 2017. Pit People is an adventure across a weird apocalyptic wasteland, recruiting troops, finding loot, and fighting in hexy turn-based tactical battles. And yes, as The Behemoth are angels for always supporting, it will have co-op. Why early access? They want to be sure Pit People is balanced and polished when it properly launches, and hope players can help with that. … [visit site to read more]

We Happy Few [official site] is much less of a downer following a major update. The game, which is a fusion of crafting, survival and first-person narrative action adventure, was released into Early Access in July and my first experiences with it were disheartening. A short introduction has you control lead character Arthur Hastings at work, redacting history, and then escaping into the underground when the true nature of his colleagues and environment is revealed. He sees the truth when he stops taking his Joy, which is a more potent form of Huxley’s Soma, and swiftly ends up in the blitzed rubble at his home village’s outskirts with all the other downers.

On its initial release, I found the game as drab as Hasting’s surroundings.

… [visit site to read more]

Orcs Must Die! Unchained [official site] has launched a huge update taking the tower defense closer to its roots. The unpopular PvP mode is gone, for starters, which devs Robot Entertainment say is so they can “fully focus on bringing back the classic Orcs Must Die gameplay that players thought was missing in OMD!U”. Smashing! I enjoyed the earlier games, with their mix of building wacky traps and roaming around on foot fighting monsters myself, but didn’t dig what Unchained was up to. … [visit site to read more]

I’ve added Downward [official site] to my list of things to investigate this month as they come to Early Access. It’s billed as a “first-person open-world parkour adventure set in the medieval ruins of a post-apocalyptic Planet Earth.” The trailer caught my eye, but with any movement game it’s really hard to tell anything about how pleasant it actually is to interact with the systems until I can get my hands on it. … [visit site to read more]

Yooka-Laylee [official site], the crowdfunded Banjo-Kazooie-y 3D platformer, now has a release date. Come April 11th, 2017, we’ll get to do all those late-nineties jumping things with two new cute animal friends. Our Pip played a few minutes earlier this year and reported back, “the impression I currently have is that rather than this being a new game it’s very much like finding an alternate universe’s version of Banjo-Kazooie and playing that.” I’ve no love lost for 3D collect-o-platformers myself but hey, that is exactly what some want from Yooka-Laylee. Here, have a peek in this new gameplay trailer: … [visit site to read more]

Alec is away this week, following the Vengaboys around on tour. Or, if they’re not currently touring, just visiting places they’ve been, taking photos and placing them inside his scrapbook alongside some brief reflections. That means it falls to me to tell you which ten games were the best selling on Steam in the past week, and there are some pleasant games inside.

… [visit site to read more]

Oooh! What a lovely mind scrambler to start a morning with – Jonathan Whiting’s Ludum Dare 37 entry is delightfully simple in terms of the controls and the idea, but good lord it becomes deliciously awkward and so complicated (for humans) early on! Nest [official site] is a recursive single-room movement puzzle which gradually layers control systems in such a way that even moving one square forward becomes a significant challenge, while turning ninety degrees is a challenge worthy of the next RPS sports day! Here – I made a video to explain: … [visit site to read more]

Perhaps you, like me, had forgotten that Tekken 7 [official site] will see the fighting game series finally arrive on PC. Perhaps you, like me, had forgotten that Tekken is so cuckoo kooky bonkers that its lineup of pugilists includes not one but two bears – one grizzly, one panda. Also the bears can talk. And at least one of them evidently likes a good natter on his pocket telephone. Amazing scenes. Tekken 7 isn’t due until next year but, to remind us of that, Bandai Namco have released a new trailer to remind us of that and of its wacky bears. … [visit site to read more]

Every Monday we find Brendan sulking in a tavern and recruit him into our brigade of early access mercenaries. This week, the tough, turn-based strategy of Battle Brothers [official site].

The life of a sellsword is not a forgiving one. But don t take my word for it – ask Jos the Dog Whisperer, who has just been pushed into a narrow hole by a gang of heavily armoured Orcs and savagely sliced to bits from all sides. Oh, I suppose you can t. Well, you could ask Fibs O Hanlon, but no, now that I think about it, he was also stabbed until death. Let s see, what about Dietrich With No Surname? Yes, he’s the one without the head. Oh, oh I see what you mean. … [visit site to read more]

Another multimillion-dollar Dota 2 Major tournament has come to a close this weekend as top teams from all over the world battled for the Boston Major‘s Eaglesong trophy and a share of the $3m prize pool. Would OG be able to defend their title with a remixed lineup or would some feisty newcomers be able to snaffle it away? In case you’re still avoiding spoilers all of this will be revealed after the jump, as well as the must-watch matches so you can condense your viewing into a single action-packed evening! … [visit site to read more]