Grim Dawn’s Ashes of Malmouth expansion launched yesterday, introducing new classes like the Necromancer and the Inquisitor, and continuing the action-RPG’s gloomy story with two new chapters. It’s pretty meaty, and also throws in a cosmetic system that lets you change the appearance of your items, like Diablo’s transmogrification system.

Accompanying these additions is an increased level and Devotion cap, 100 and 55 respectively, four extra factions who can become allies or enemies, several new environments, and new super bosses who drop some unique loot. 

Speaking of loot, expect to discover hundreds of new items as you fight your way towards the titular fallen city of Malmouth. But first you’ll need to slaughter your way past hordes of enemies hiding in the Gloomwald forest and the swampy Ugdenbog. 

A free update will also introduce a new roguelike dungeon, featuring “the corrupting presence of the Aetherials and the Chthonians upon the beasts of Cairn”. Sounds like a nice place. Expect it to appear soon. 

Ashes of Malmouth is out now on Steam and the Humble Store for £14.49/$17.99. Grim Dawn itself is also 70% off on Steam.

While games as a service doesn’t have the best of reputations, contributing to countless debates over DLC, season passes and, most recently, loot boxes, a recent study reveals that a lot of us have eagerly bought into the model, and as a result, the value of the industry has tripled. 

Monetisation services company Digital River recently published a report titled ‘Defend Your Kingdom: What Game Publishers Need to Know About Monetization & Fraud’ which found that even premium games—as in not free-to-play—benefited significantly from DLC and microtransactions. 

“In 2016, a quarter of all digital revenue from PC games with an upfront cost came from additional content,” the report reads. Though it also notes that consumers now expect more for less, and the model has been a reaction to that. 

"Consumers are less willing to pay $60 for a boxed game and instead choose titles with a steady stream of new content," the report said. "Publishers seek to meet these expectations and have adopted a 'games as a service' model, releasing fewer titles over time while keeping players engaged longer with regular updates and add-ons."

As players are turned into long-term customers, buying loot crates and expansions instead of splashing out on the occasional expensive game, revenue per user is expected to grow twice as fast as the rest of the market, explains the report.

You can read the full report, which also explores the impact of fraud and key resellers, here.

Cheers, GamesIndustry.biz 

Overgrowth, a game about murderous kung-fu bunnies, has been in development for eight years. At the tail end of 2008, it appeared on Steam and people could start pre-ordering it. Today, finally, developer David Rosen announced its release date on Twitter. 

It will leave Early Access next Monday, October 16. 

The final beta update went live last week, introducing a story mode, more animal diversity and the ability to be impaled on spikes. Lovely!

Here’s what it looked like during alpha, back in 2012. 

And here’s the latest video from beta 6.

It’s certainly been a long time coming. Overgrowth is currently £22.99/$29.99 on Steam and the Humble Store.

In the slightly directionless world of GTA Online, where needy NPCs ring you with requests every five minutes and the map is strewn with task icons that mostly seem like busywork, the best thing you can do is own a piece of Los Santos that feels like yours. Aside from buying apartments or cars, there are now many ways to do this—the most appealing (and cheapest) of which is running your own biker gang. I spent just over $500,000 earlier this year to get a decent hangout in the middle of Los Santos, money I had from doing heists with the PCG team. I christen this new gang ‘Biker Grove’. Ha. I’m a cool guy. I’m also the only one here. 

Here’s my dilemma: I don’t want to just invite anyone into my biker gang, and the PC Gamer boys are all offline. So I’m a one-man biker gang—which isn’t really a gang at all. I have a two-storey clubhouse, and a foul-mouthed lady behind the bar who comes free with all the biker hideouts. I also have a bong, and a dart board. But these things aren’t fun by yourself. The point of a biker gang is you’re supposed to ride in formation with buddies. When it’s just yourself and a big empty clubhouse, you sort of feel like a dad having a midlife crisis.

In my head, I picture the scenario exactly like this. The kids have moved out, and your partner’s joined a silent religious sect because they’ve had enough of your near-constant bullshit (yes, I've been watching HBO's The Leftovers). So you sell the house then buy a run-down garage, park your bike there, and hire someone to work there who won’t even play darts with you. I paid half a million hard-earned GTA dollars to experience this virtually. I could just live this in real life in 20 years’ time. 

The good news is I can still take on jobs that earn okay money. I go and steal a prison bus from a gas station, and drive the convicts across town away from the cops. It’s deliberately reminiscent of a brilliant singleplayer mission in GTA: The Lost and Damned, where protagonist Johnny Klebitz does the same thing. It’s a pretty exciting mission, which ends with you dropping off the cons at a couple of helicopters.

The biker update to GTA Online in general felt like a homage to that expansion—although the lack of narrative direction to owning a biker bar makes it feel a bit uneventful (which is also how I feel about the game's other recent expansions). With friends, though, the co-op missions and driving in formation are fun. It’s not meant to be played solo, really. Having other friends join, then assigning them roles that give them extra abilities in combat, like calling in AI gang members for support, is the real reason you do it. You’re not meant to be a lone ranger, simply because it’s embarrassing. 

I get drunk and have a game of darts rather than run another mission. Next time PCG's Phil Savage comes online, I’ll force him to join my club. Since I'm his line manager, I can probably make him do that.

Middle-earth: Shadow of War’s fortresses might have strong defences, but the game doesn’t. Monolith’s Orc-slaying open-world game uses Denuvo anti-tamper software, and once again it’s been cracked in a single day, letting pirates get access to it almost straight away. 

Denuvo’s appeal, for publishers looking to protect their game, was that the Austrian developer originally boasted that it made games extremely hard to crack, and at first it was tougher nut, taking a month for the first game to be cracked. Since it appeared a few years ago, however, the time between a game’s launch and it being cracked has shrunk considerably. 

Several high profile releases, including Total War: Warhammer 2, have been cracked in a day as well, so the case for using it has become increasingly flimsy. With it no longer being guaranteed to stop piracy, even temporarily, it’s looking more and more like a waste of money, and player goodwill, since it also imposes several restrictions on legitimate users, like limiting activations on different PCs. 

Last year, Denuvo Software Solutions boasted that some publishers were only considering PC versions of console titles because of the DRMs previous success, when it was still stopping pirates, though the link between piracy and sales is questionable. Indeed, a recently published EU Commission report couldn’t find robust evidence of a link at all. 

If publishers want to keep using DRM, they may have to start looking elsewhere. 

Cheers, DSOG.

The Singer is an orc musician that will hunt you down and sing to you in Middle-earth: Shadow of War. I mean, he'll also try to kill you—but he'll do it with a surprisingly durable lute, grappling with your sword as he delivers this rhyming couplet right in your face:

You may have heard of one like meThat prances, dances and sings with gleeWherever the strife, the Singer is thereHe slaughters and slays with such merry flairI sing this song with all my breathTake heed, for this interlude ends with your death

I know we're all concerned about loot boxes, but Shadow of War players should also be worried about being lute-boxed.

Credit to Gamesradar.com senior news editor Rachel Weber, who tipped me off to the existence of this singing orc this morning in the office. Rachel encountered him in Minas Tirith early in her campaign ("He seems fun, but he is THE WORST," says Ms. Weber). I found the above video footage of 'Shaká' (he seems to draw from Shadow of War's normal pool of orc names) on the Serious Gaming channel, who also ran into him inside the opening area of Shadow of War.

Like other orc captains, The Singer will (or has a chance to) 'cheat death' and make a second appearance at a higher level. When he appears again, he sings this quick encore:

You tried and failed to kill the SingerYou did not get a caragor dinner

(...Is that a PUBG reference? "A character bursting into song is the most lore-accurate thing about Shadow of War," remarks PCG indie channel editor Jody Macgregor.) 

Other than The Singer, PC Gamer associate editor James Davenport says he's encountered at least one more unusual orc captain in Pûg the Friendly, who shows up and wants to chat instead of fight. When you defeat him, he reappears with bandages and even more fearful apologies.

I don't care what Celebrimbor is whispering in my ear throughout Shadow of War—my new goal for my campaign is to recruit one of these weirdos into my personal orc army.

When Wolfenstein: The New Order released in 2014, it was just another shooting game. A bloody excellent shooting game, yes, but in terms of its reception in the greater, non-gaming world: a non-event. 

Fast forward to 2017, and Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus is attracting a fair bit more attention than its predecessor did pre-release—especially off the back of last week's "Make America Nazi-Free Again" trailer. It's doing so because, at a time when racist intolerance and bigotry is alarmingly foregrounded in American life, "embracing an anti-Nazi stance" can, in some quarters—unaccountably, scarily—appear quite brave.

Bethesda's Pete Hines made his company's vehemently anti-Nazi stance explicit last week, while also adding that Wolfenstein 2's depiction of a United States ruled by a fascist regime is a "pure coincidence". But it's still a timely game, disturbingly enough, and I sat down with its creative director Jens Matthies to talk about this stuff, as well as a bunch more.

PC Gamer: You might not have the figures on hand, but a lot of Nazis die in this game. How many roughly? Can you give us a figure?

Jens Matthies: I can probably give you a figure but I have to think about that.[Jens picks up his phone and, after a minute of complete silence, continues.] 

I would say, close to a thousand. That’s what I think. That’s a little bit speculative, but in the neighbourhood of one thousand. Let me revise that: I mean about a thousand personal kills, but then there are a few thousand impersonal kills as well. 

I’m happy with that figure. When The New Order came out it wasn’t such a big deal that you were mowing down Nazis in a video game en masse. But in 2017 it is. Pete Hines even addressed it directly last week. What’s your personal response to Wolfenstein suddenly being a cathartic and timely game, given the current political environment?

JM: Well, it is quite a coincidence because that’s actually the theme of the game: catharsis, in terms of the narrative. While I don’t think it’s ever a good thing to have Nazis marching anywhere in the real world, if a feeling of catharsis is what you’re after, then this game is for you.

Nazis have come to be a kind of generic comic evil in games, in the same vein as zombies. Until recently we’ve felt so remote from that history that we can just mindlessly kill them. But I was wondering, speculatively, if you were to make a third instalment, would you address the depiction of Nazis or go about the narrative any differently?

JM: No. We feel very strongly about the stories that we’re telling. This game is painted on a very grand canvas: it’s over the top and it’s bombastic and it’s pulpy. But it’s also...  we never wanted to undermine or make light of what Nazi ideology is actually about. So even though we’re sort of representing it in this larger-than-life canvas, it’s not a cartoon in that sense. 

We feel like that’s something we established with the first game and continue in this game. If we get the privilege of making the third entry in the trilogy, that’s what we’d continue to do. If you’re all the time worrying about the world and what other people are thinking and saying, then you stop being a good creative.

The tone is pulpy, but one of the things that elevated The New Order, and made it easier to engage with, is the fact that the characters had humanity about them—particularly, surprisingly, BJ. Are there any film makers that inspire MachineGames?

JM: Oh yeah. That’s always what we’re going for, that juxtaposition of things that are very over the top with things that are incredibly intimate and domestic and normal. And we love those authentic feeling relationships—that’s what we want the game to be about. Examples of that are the original RoboCop, which has that vibe. More than anything else, I think that’s an inspiration to me personally because seeing that as a kid was a formative experience. There are other examples: District 9 straddles that line as well, maybe Guardians of the Galaxy, though that’s extremely humorous in a way that we’re not really. Our humor is a lot darker, but it’s still on that spectrum. And of course some Tarantino movies are like that too. 

One of the interesting things about Wolfenstein is that it’s marketed as this heavy duty cathartic shooting game, but it’s actually quite tough. It’s a really challenging game.

JM: Of course it is, depending on your difficulty settings. I mean, if you just want to experience the story you can just dial down the difficulty and more or less walk through it. But it’s always more fun, we feel, especially in a game with real old school merits, if it’s a real challenge. It also leads to players needing to think creatively, in ways that many games don’t allow you to do nowadays. If you run into a challenge that’s tricky to overcome, that means you need to re-examine the situation. Maybe if I try it in this order, and use these weapons, and maybe even sneak for a bit and then do this… this is the kind of game where you have a lot of those tools and options, and the combat areas are open to a lot of exploration and approaches. You can observe and figure them out, and most have a certain logic to them. So in order to encourage that kind of gameplay it has to be a little hard, and you have to die a few times just to probe the problem and figure it out.

I’m put in mind of Hotline Miami—you have to figure out a wise sequence, it has a puzzle dynamic.

JM: Yeah, and if that’s not for you you can turn down the difficulty and be more straightforward in your approach. But for the standard experience, you want that cerebral dimension of it, where it’s not just about going through the paces but actually figuring the problem out.

You’re using a new engine, and it seems to me it’d take a lot of effort to basically create the game afresh. 

JM: Oh yeah. Oooh yeah. 

But you’ve still retained the feel of the weaponry. There’s a certain quality that has carried over.

JM: We were extremely happy with what we accomplished in The New Order. We felt that was a good, really strong feeling of Wolfenstein. So for sure we wanted to preserve that, but also kick it up to the next level. We really wanted to get back to having a full body model, because in New Order you were basically a disembodied arm / gun / first-person model. So if you look down you have no legs. But in this game it’s a full body model, which in itself is incredibly much more work, but we have a dedicated team who is super passionate about the first-person experience.

Were there any overarching philosophies regarding the shooting approach? Obviously it feels different to anything else, but in subtle ways. What were the guiding values?

JM: It’s interesting because I don’t think I’ve ever put words to it before, but we always wanted to be just, I guess, meatier, and just fucking… more heavy metal than anything else. So our stated goal was that we wanted to reach the level where this was the best first-person experience you can have in terms of combat and movement. I’m very happy with how it came out because it’s very noticeable that if you play The New Colossus for a few hours and then you start playing something else, everything feels a lot different. So yeah, I think we’re evolving with what we did with The New Order to a new level.

Do you think it helps your gunplay that multiplayer isn’t a factor? Could it work in multiplayer?

JM: I’m sure it could, but I’m sure there would be problems as well. But for sure, having everyone focused on the same problem is what historically has always resulted in our best work. So that’s always what we’ve tried to do and that’s why we don’t do multiplayer. But I think if we did do multiplayer, I’m sure we could get to something of that same level.

I like that The New Colossus feels like a filmic sequel—it’s not about just adding stuff, like so many game sequels are, it’s a new story. Has there been any desire to do stuff like that, add an open world, add more stuff?

JM: I don’t know, we constantly think about stuff that we want to do and I wouldn’t at all be opposed to doing different formats. But of course, we have this… I wouldn’t say that we have this story that we want to tell—we do of course—but it’s more than that. We have an experience that we want to create. We always envisioned it as a trilogy, and so if we get to do one more, if the game does well enough to motivate that, then I can guarantee that it will be a worthy sequel. How that shapes out and what its form is, we’d have to see.

What’s your relationship with the first Wolfenstein 3D? Do you resort to it as a primary, kind of bibilcal text? Or have things moved on so much that it barely factors in?

JM: No way, to us that’s the foundation with our approach to Wolfenstein. It’s not biblical in the sense that we’re being literalist about it, but the ethos that propelled and created Wolfenstein 3D is what we’re literal about. Analysing what went on there, this was id Software coming into their own, having broken away from wherever they were before and barely in their teens, sitting in some apartment somewhere making these things that no one else is making. That people don’t even think is possible. That’s what they’re doing and they’re just forcing their totally unrestricted creativity into that project, and that’s what we wanted to go for: if we think it’s a cool idea and it belongs in the game, it goes into the game. We don’t try to censor ourselves and say “would that really fit with blah blah”. That doesn’t mean we don’t want to make it credible in the game world, we care about that stuff, but we don’t put any boundaries on ourselves. So that’s what we’re trying to carry on.

RPG Maker has been used to make games as diverse as weird sidescroller LISA, heartbreaker To the Moon, and plenty of other games worth recommending. It gives users a basic scripting language, a map editor, and a combat editor with which they can create whatever they want. And yet, if you look into using it, you're bound to find people saying RPG Maker is a bad engine.

The truth is more complicated, and can only be understood by knowing the full history of RPG Maker. It's a 17-year odyssey, featuring dopey teenagers, mangled translations, cease-and-desist letters, and every known form of piracy. None of this was ever supposed to happen.

RPG Maker 95, 2000, and 2003

The RPG Maker series was created by Enterbrain, a division of Japanese company ASCII Corporation that initially had no interest in translating its product for a Western audience. But in 2000 a Russian student nicknamed 'Don Miguel' released a completely illegal and somewhat wonky English translation of RPG Maker 95/2000. It spread like wildfire.

RPG Maker was easy to use, and promised the opportunity to recreate, without coding, something akin to the glorious JRPGs of the SNES era. Flocks of teenagers downloaded the engine, dreaming of making the next Final Fantasy.

Being teenagers, many of those first users weren't skilled artists. They resorted to "ripping," taking graphical assets from commercial games and assembling them into spritesheets the engine could digest. They mixed and matched art from games like Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, and Suikoden to create their own fantasy worlds.

It was completely illegal, of course, but the Internet at the time was still a wild, wild place, and at first nobody cared. Enterbrain eventually issued a cease-and-desist letter to Don Miguel, but it was too late: his creation was out of control. As he closed his own website dozens of others popped up. Further legal actions never managed to eradicate the problem. RPG Maker in English was here to stay.  

RPG Maker XP

In 2004 a new version of RPG Maker was released in Japan—and promptly cracked, translated, and released to the Western market by Don Miguel’s successor, 'RPG Advocate.'

RPG Maker XP featured a higher screen resolution, a shiny new map system, and most importantly, a scripting system. By tinkering with the base library, all written in Ruby, it was possible to change core functions or add new features to the games. If the library had documentation, though, it was never translated. 

The community faced a schism. Those who already had programming experience grasped the system; most others were left in the dark. But the good part of having an engine with so many pre-scripted features is that the code you write for your own game will probably work on someone else’s project.

"Scripters" began to release their work to the public: adding a fancy new menu to your game became only a matter of copy-pasting a few lines of code. New users joined forums looking for those assets and scripts, but remained for the company. Communities grew.

In 2005, the impossible happened: RPG Maker found an English publisher in Protexis. However, the people who already owned a pirated copy were unwilling to support the official version. After waiting for so long for an English release, many ignored Protexis's work. 

RPG Maker VX and VX Ace

Two years later, Protexis localized the newest version of the engine, RPG Maker VX. Unfortunately, it wasn’t very good. With a reduced resolution and a simplified map system it was seen by many as a step back. A newer version called RPG Maker VX Ace addressed those complaints, and Degica stepped in as the new publisher. 

Degica not only translated the engine, but made an effort to build a community around their product. RPG Maker finally had official forums, a support network, and someone willing to listen to the community and relay their feedback to the Japanese developers. Most importantly, Degica put the entire RPG Maker series on Steam, greatly increasing the engine’s popularity. But with new perks also came new rules.

No piracy, no ripping, no more fan games that used copyrighted material. The days of glory and plunder were over. It was time for the community to grow up—but a large part of the community was still not great at creating original art.

Degica published more art packs in the same style as their standard assets (also called Run Time Packages, or RTPs), and encouraged the community to make new assets using the same art style. The idea was to encourage the use of RTPs, building a free large library of tiles and characters available to everyone. It was a noble intent, but also produced an unfortunate side-effect.

Steam Greenlight and experimental games

The release of RPG Maker VX Ace coincided with the birth of Steam Greenlight. RPG Maker users started to consider themselves real game developers, and realized they could actually try to sell their games. The result? An explosion of RPG Maker games on Steam Greenlight, often made by teenagers with big dreams but limited skills. And all those games looked the same.

Players began to associate RPG Maker's RTPs with mediocre, "lazy" games. The engine got a bad reputation. In a 2016 Reddit thread about why people had begun to hate games made with RPG Maker a community manager who worked for Degica said, "I really wish people who weren't ready for the big time would stop submitting to greenlight. It would make my job easier. Because the perception of RM is already bad enough without people trying to throw their 10 minute effort game on greenlight."

On forums and in Steam user reviews the same comments about RPG Maker games recur over and over. They're "low effort and low quality," "look more or less identical," use the same "stock resources." It's enough to put you off using the engine entirely.

But outside of Steam, experimental RPG Maker games thrived. Artists with cool ideas but basic programming skills had found the perfect tool for them. Not interested in selling their products, they used RPG Maker to make weird games that reached cult status even outside the community. Japanese horror games like Yume Nikki and Corpse Party kickstarted an entire "horror RPG Maker games starring cute girls" movement. Other notable games include Space Funeral, Gingiva, Ib, Ao Oni, Oneshot, and OFF.

RPG Maker MV

In 2015 Degica published RPG Maker MV. The engine looked similar to the older versions, but had been completely rewritten in Javascript. New features included proper porting options, a debug console, and touch and mouse support.

After 20 years, RPG Maker was finally starting to resemble a proper game engine. It was a huge step forward. Though troubled by some serious bugs at release and a lack of documentation, it works well nowadays. In some corners of the internet that's never enough to repair a damaged reputation, however. 

 Comparing their Steam forums, the older engine has more discussion threads in every category except one—Tech Support, where the newer version has overtaken it handily. Two years after its release opinions are still divided. Some say the choice between MV and VX Ace comes down to which programming language you prefer, Ruby or Javascript, while for others it's about MV's ability to port to mobile versus the older engine's wealth of available assets. It's not a conversation that's likely to end any time soon. 

The future of RPG Maker

While RPG Maker’s community is pushing for more professional features, the developers themselves seem to consider the engine more of a toy than a proper engine, as the various console incarnations prove. We have to remember that RPG Maker is a Japanese engine at heart, and indie development is seen differently there.

Strangely enough, RPG Maker 2003 remains extremely popular, especially among Japanese developers. The limitations mimic those of a retro console, and help solo devs prevent overscoping their projects. The engine is still well supported, and even received some Steam updates this year. Vgperson’s translations website is the best resource about those new games made with this 14-year-old engine. 

Should you use RPG Maker? 

At this point you may be asking yourself, "Should I try RPG Maker after all? Should I give this much-maligned engine a chance?" If you're looking to make a professional game and actually sell it, probably not. It's still not a terribly good engine, and lacks many features its more professional counterparts like Unity and even GameMaker have. However, I think RPG Maker could be the perfect choice in some very particular cases.

• Returning devs: Maybe you fiddled with RPG Maker when you were a teen. Maybe you want to make games again, but don’t really know where to start. Rejoice! The engine works exactly like you remember, and the community is incredibly active and helpful. A small RPG Maker project can help you flex your muscles before tackling a more complex engine like Unity. 
• Artisans: By "artisans" I mean a very particular kind of game developers who like to focus on art and writing, and are making a game just because it’s the best medium to express the particular story they have in mind. They usually don’t have strong programming skills, nor do they care to—they just want to have characters walking around, some dialogue, and maybe some minigames or a battle here and there. If you fit this description, RPG Maker can take care of all your needs. 
• Children: Historically RPG Maker has done surprisingly well with the young. Give it to some bright kids, and they might well love it. RPG Maker's eventing system is much more complex than Game Maker’s drag-and-drop commands, and can teach them a great deal about programming logic while they have fun. 

And always remember: an engine is just an instrument. Sometimes a 'bad' engine can be exactly the right one for you.

Special thanks to community manager Archeia for advice and additional information.

"For better or worse," we said last week, "Assassin's Creed: Origins is an RPG now." That shifting aspect of the game is reflected in a number of different ways, not least of them the addition of a difficulty setting, a first for the series. The idea, game director Ashraf Ismail told GamesRadar, is to ensure that while Origins' gameplay is "deeper" than previous games in the series, it still remains accessible to everyone. 

"We wanted more gameplay depth, and that means more challenging aspects of the game—bosses, and so on," he said. "What we felt was, by going deeper into the gameplay challenge of the game, we're feeding one part of the audience but not others. So it was a natural step for us to think well, let's give difficulty settings so that if you're really more into the narrative or the historical element, you can set the game to an easier setting."

"If you're the opposite, if you really want that very difficult challenge, you can set the game to a harder setting."

The difficulty level won't be locked, so you'll be able to dial it up or down to deal with any bumps in the road as you go—keeping your day-to-day encounters tough so you can feel like Bad-ass Bayek, for instance, while toning it down to deal with bosses you don't want to waste time on.

Assassin's Creed: Origins comes out on October 27. Get your system requirements here, your season pass information here, and listen to three guys from the UK talking about it (along with some other things) here. 

Horror sequel The Evil Within 2 comes out on October 13, which is just a couple of days away, and by now you probably have a pretty good idea of what grim delights it has in store. For those of you who don't, the launch trailer is here to help. 

The game sees the return of Sebastian Castellanos, who is once again forced to descend into the nightmare world of STEM, the bizarre system that enables individuals to connect their minds and share thoughts, experiences, and perceptions. But this time, it's personal. "He’s searching for his daughter Lily, who he thought he had lost many years ago, and it’s now a race against time as the world crumbles around him," Bethesda said. "Sebastian must rescue Lily before everything falls apart and they are both lost in STEM." 

The video doesn't do much to help nail things down story-wise (the story trailer is probably a better source of info on that) but it does have some interesting highlights: The little girl with the face, the sewer tunnel filled with rushing vomit, mutants that look like they were thrown together over a Tzimisce weekend workshop, and snippets of dialog like "Enough art school bullshit!" and "Keep shooting until they're dead or we run out of ammo" are all highlights in my book. 

It's perhaps not the cleverest bit of scripting ever, but you get the idea: The situation is bad, and the only things that are going to make it better are bullets and hard noses. 

In case you missed it, Nvidia released new Game Ready drivers for The Evil Within 2 yesterday, and you can check out the system requirements right here.