Welcome back to Unknown Pleasures, our weekly* search for five splendid but under-reported new games released on Steam over the past seven days.
This week: firelight survival, bootleg Podracing, Mario vs Super Crate Box, monkey-free Monkey Ball and lava lamp simulation. (more…)
Representation matters but the inclusion of more diverse casts of characters is the starting point, not the goal. Too often, characters with identities other than straight, white male are written as caricatures. They no longer represent an individual but instead represent the sum total of their gender, their sexuality, their race. They become tokenistic stand-ins for the complexities of real people.
Inclusion and representation alone can be ineffective or actively unhelpful if not backed up with strong writing and a level of care about characters that goes beyond the basic facts of their identity. It can be a tricky line to walk but Butterfly Soup, by Brianna Lei, is here to show how to do it right.
Your monitor is one of the most important parts of your PC, so finding the best monitor to suit your needs and budget is vital. Take a look at the display section of any electronics retailer, though, and you’ll find hundreds of screens costing anything from 70 right up to 1500. The range of models and prices can be overwhelming, but this guide is here to help.
We’ll take you through everything you need to know about screen sizes, resolutions, refresh rates, panel types, inputs and adjustable stands, as well as provide a few recommendations of our own based on our own testing. By the time you’re done here, you’ll be fully equipped to find the best monitor for you. Let’s begin!
Terrible, terrible name aside, 10 Chambers 4-player horror FPS GTFO looks like a good time for fans of running terrified down a claustrophobic sci-fi corridor. You can see its flashlights and monsters in the trailer below.
The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is a beautiful, quiet game — a thoughtful and sedate walking simulator. Bulletstorm and Painkiller are not. They re both balls-to-the-wall action and dripping with over-the-top machismo and violence. On the surface, the only similarity is the people who made them. Witchfire, The Astronaut s latest project, looks a lot like the former at first. But there’s more to it than meets the eye. Devour the teaser below.
At The Game Awards last night, Geoff Keighley introduced the new trailer for his best pal s bold new take on Arnold Schwarzenegger s 1994 comedy, Junior. That s about the best explanation I could come up with after watching the eight minute trailer for Kojima s Death Stranding. Enjoy the mishmash of science fiction and horror ideas below. (more…)
Last night, Ubisoft Montpellier hosted a livestream for Beyond Good and Evil 2, spilling more details about the space-pirate romp s story, characters and wide variety of flashy spaceships. The livestream is an hour long and is mostly the devs chatting away on a sofa, so if you want a more condensed version, you can also watch a dev diary that touches on the same things below.
Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time.>
I always feel a bit sad when I think about Deadly Shadows. Ion Storm Austin’s spin on Looking Glass’ landmark stealth series is an embodiment of frustrated ambitions. The developers had basically planned for Deadly Shadows to be an open-world stealth game, a sort of medieval Grand Theft Carriage. But the prioritising of the original Xbox combined with lofty technological ambitions meant that, like a man trying to fit an elephant into a fridge, Ion Storm had to mercilessly cut down the scope of its project. Even then, they could only include the important bits, like the trunk and a couple of the feet. (more…)
After a few delays, SpellForce 3, Grimlore Games RTS/RPG hybrid, is finally a thing that you can play in its entirety. I ve been traipsing around the fantasy land of Eo myself, though you ll need to wait until Monday for my review. In the meantime, chow on the launch trailer below, and then read on for some quick impressions.
