Stationeers

Dean Hall's ambitious "hardcore" spaceship construction and management sim Stationeers is out now on Steam Early Access.

Stationeers was first announced back in March and draws inspiration from cult classic spaceship management game Space Station 13. It's being created by Hall's RocketWerkz studio (which just announced open-world "neo-noir" game Living Dark), and has been in development for over a year now. If you're interested in its journey so far, Hall and co. have been charting Stationeers progress through many, many hours of informative dev streams.

Despite its cartoon-y looks, Stationeers is focussed on delivering a sophisticated simulation experience, requiring the management and maintenance of complex atmospheric, electrical, manufacturing, medical, agriculture, and gravitational systems. "This is not a casual game," says RocketWerkz, "Stationeers is designed for hardcore players who want a game that is systems oriented. Full utilization and optimization of these complex systems will only come from great knowledge and practice."

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Eurogamer

Ni no Kuni 2: Revenant Kingdom has officially received its second delay, and will now release on PC and PS4 on March 23rd 2018, according to publisher Bandai Namco.

Developer Level-5's highly anticipated follow-up to the wonderful DS (and later PS3) J-RPG was initially due to release on November 10th this year. However, its first delay came this summer, pushing the game's launch back to January 19th 2018.

At the time, Ni no Kuni's director (and Level-5 president) Akihiro Hino simply stated that the delay was a result of the studio deciding "that more development time is required in order to deliver the full Ni no Kuni 2 experience to our fans".

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Eurogamer


A note from the editor: Jelly Deals is a deals site launched by our parent company, Gamer Network, with a mission to find the best bargains out there. Look out for the Jelly Deals roundup of reduced-price games and kit every Saturday on Eurogamer.

GOG has decided that mid-December was a pretty good time to launch a Winter sale. Funny that.

This range of discounts is live right now and set to end on 26th December. There will also be a new and different set of offers each day, kicking things off with what might be my favourite freebie of the year - a copy of Grim Fandango Remastered on PC. To get your free copy of the game, you'll only need a GOG account - other than that, just click 'Get for Free' and you're done. That free game is available for the next couple of days.

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Eurogamer

UPDATE 14TH DECEMBER: A second teaser for Living Dark has been released, focusing on a character called Algo Azul who can telekinetically move objects. Is this a hint at the types of abilities we'll be able to use in the game?

ORIGINAL STORY 13TH DECEMBER: RocketWerkz has unveiled a new open-world, procedural, "neo-noir" game called Living Dark. There's no mention of it being multiplayer and, judging by a developer's post on Facebook, the team is 15 people big, so temper expectations accordingly - this will be no Grand Theft Auto.

RocketWerkz, incidentally, is the New Zealand studio set up by former DayZ frontman Dean Hall, though it's former Bethesda artist Rashad Redic directing Living Dark.

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ARK: Survival Evolved

A second expansion pack for Ark: Survival Evolved has launched on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. It's called Aberration and it is, as the title suggests, unusual.

Aberration is the name of a malfunctioning Ark with an underground biome. There's radioactive sunlight, earthquakes, ziplines, wingsuits, climbing gear and weird creatures. There are spooky humanoids called Nameless, and Reapers who impregnate enemies to spawn offspring. Apparently if you let the Reaper Queen impregnate you, you spawn a Reaper you can tame and control.

It won't be the only new beast you can tame. You can climb and fly on the back of a camouflaged Rock Drake chamaeleon thing; you can stamp around with a giant Cave Crustacean, which is probably an overgrown crab; and you can light the way with a Lantern Pet.

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Dec 12, 2017
Eurogamer

At one point, the sun becomes a gear with tooth-like rays that might slot neatly into the crenellations of a nearby castle. A man walks to the right in the foreground, and the castle retreats to the left in the background. The teeth of the sun have meshed with the castle now, so as a man walks, his very act of walking turns the sun in the sky - and the sun itself turns...?

This is Gorogoa, and look at what this simple puzzle - the only one I will really spoil - is doing right here. Look at the way it makes you poke at this game's world, imagining a sun that works as a gear, a man who works as a motor. Look at the playful shifts in scale, in perspective, the sheer dance of flatness as distant giants meet nearby minnows in the knowledge that the eye can be trusted to slot it all together. A sun becomes a gear and as a man walks across the earth he turns that sun in the sky!

Gorogoa is drawn by hand and created by - um, I actually have no idea at all how someone could have put this together. The game's quest seems simple, if I have it right: a boy spies a divine beast in the distance and heads off to gather the fruit that will sate it. The quest is just the friendly shove, of course, the first bit of forward momentum you need for a game that feels like a book, a papercraft puzzle, a sticker album, a crazed unspooling schematic (or even a Mad Magazine fold-in, a peculiar art form in which a crimped creasing of the page allows an image to contain its own parody). But in fact Gorogoa would only work as a game, where geometry becomes pliable and prone to whimsy, where vectors can be judged and then acted upon, where progress is the only force of nature that cannot be meddled with.

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BATTALION: Legacy

Battalion 1944 will cost just 11.99 when it launches next year in Early Access - less than the price of the crowdfunded game's lowest Kickstarter pledge.

In Europe that's €14.99, or in the US that's $14.99.

Those who have already paid more for the game via Kickstarter will get unique skins and cosmetic-focused loot crates.

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Eurogamer

After a weekend of Destiny 2 where its PVP Crucible mode looked like a laser light show, Bungie is calling time on the game's overpowered Prometheus Lens gun.

As Wesley wrote yesterday, the ridiculous nature of Prometheus Lens has lit up Destiny 2 - literally - over the past couple of days.

Alas, Bungie will now reing in its all-conquering reign and now nerf the weapon - hard. Instead over being hugely powerful, it will now be hugely weak.

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Assassin's Creed® Origins


Assassin's Creed Oranges owners will notice a 3GB update being piped to their consoles and/or PC today. It contains a selection of handy updates and changes.

First up, for folk who've noticed the game has struggled loading textures at a distance (we're looking at you, 2D trees), there are various fixes on the way to hopefully make things prettier.

Among the detailed patch notes are points including "Improved texture streaming selection to allow for more high-resolution texture", "Fixed loading grid setups for tall palm tree fields to improve their view distance" and various improvements specific to certain in-game locations (Siwa, Alexandria, and more).

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Eurogamer


Bungie has posted a frank blog post admitting it "made some mistakes" regarding Destiny 2 content access - in short, the fact it last week locked various base-game activities behind a Curse of Osiris DLC paywall.

Destiny 2 players could no longer access the Prestige raid or Nightfall activities, and therefore no longer complete the base game's achievement/trophy lists or acquire the Legend of Acrius exotic shotgun.

This morning, Bungie has laid out why it made those decisions, admitted it was wrong to do so and explained how it will fix them.

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