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.

Never let it be said that video games are lacking in branded merchandise. We've got a guide to Christmas gifts for gamers elsewhere on the site but right now, there's one game that seems to be generating more merchandise than most others. That would be Destiny.

While the release of Destiny 2 may not have set the world on fire the way that I'm sure Bungie wanted, there's no denying the fanbase is there and the game has already solidified itself as an internationally recognised franchise. If you're one of those fans or you know someone who is, they may just be interested in one (or all) of the following things. Here is a look at the weird and wonderful world of Destiny 2 merchandise.

Read more…

I suspect that if you grew up with Indiana Jones and the Goonies, with Tintin and Fighting Fantasy paperbacks, the merest combination of words like "Dungeon Run" is likely to trigger a Pavlovian response. Luckily, Blizzard's take on Dungeon Run, employed as the wriggly, twitching spine of Hearthstone's recent Kobolds and Catacombs expansion, has much more going for it than the simple pulp poetry of its name.

Dungeon Run is a roguelike. It's a roguelike, right, that lives inside Hearthstone, which last time I checked was a collectible card battler. God, it is ingenious: a boss-rush composed of eight horrible jerks to tackle, each of them drawn randomly from a pool of 48. Defeat a boss and you win treasure, in the form of groups of themed cards to add to your hand. Die, and the whole thing wipes: you begin your next run back at the very start, facing off against a giant rat and with the most basic and unadorned of decks once again.

It's not hard to see why this works. Hearthstone is brilliant at building themed decks that have a sense of character to them. To put it another way, Blizzard knows how to slap the right physical presence - maddening, fire-handed - on Lyris, The Wild Mage, whose Hero Power sees her adding Arcane Missile to a deck that is otherwise pretty much composed of Flamewalkers. And Blizzard also knows that in a game about collecting cards, there's no better reward for vanquishing a nightmare like Lyris than, well, collecting a bunch of extra cards, cards you can then use as you try to take on whoever comes next.

Read more…

Earlier this week, Take-Two's brand new label Private Division was named publisher of Obsidian's big and secret, in-development role-playing game.

Take-Two, the parent company of 2K and Rockstar, is a big name, and what big names have been doing recently - Activision Blizzard, EA and Warner - is pushing loot boxes in their games. The question naturally followed: will Private Division push Obsidian to do the same?

It prompted an official response from the studio as well as a very short video featuring the leaders of the new Obsidian game project, Leonard Boyarsky and Tim Cain.

Read more…

This piece contains spoilers for Assassin's Creed Origins.

Assassin's Creed has always had fun with nested narratives. The modern-day sequences get a lot of stick, and fairly: they often feel like awkward and unnecessary interruptions to the historical adventuring which draws many of us to the series. But they do make explicit the series' ongoing fascination with themes of historical memory - how we think about and remember our collective past. It's baked into the idea of the Animus: where other series might have gone for time-travel or done without the contemporary frame-stories altogether, Assassin's Creed bases its nonsense McGuffin on the idea that historical experiences are encoded in our DNA. For much of the series, the historical portions were explicitly labelled not as areas or time-periods, but as memories.

These themes have always been part of the series but the most recent entry, Origins, takes them and runs. There's the modern-day frame-story and the mainly historical adventure, as usual, but within the ancient Egyptian setting the game is particularly interested in the still more distant past. Ancient Egypt isn't equal in its ancientness. Its greatest icons and the central image of the box art - the pyramids - were more ancient in the game's Ptolemaic setting than that period is to us. The game's fascinated by this. Ruins are everywhere, ancient tombs punctuate the landscape and the game itself, casting hero Bayek as a Croft- or Drake-style tomb raider. Your reward for clearing a tomb: a stele inscribed with hieroglyphs. 'Ancient writing,' says Bayek, a note of awe as well as satisfaction in his voice, 'from the Old Kingdom.' The idea of ancientness-beyond-ancientness is there for everyone to hear.

Read more…

Earlier this week, a YouTube video sparked reports that Battlefield Bad Company 3 would launch in 2018.

Details of the purported project were uploaded by YouTuber AlmightyDaq - who previously laid out a host of leaked details on Battlefield 1. Off the back of that track record, AlmightyDaq's video was picked up by numerous other sites and forums.

The video had plenty of details in it - a "mid and post-Vietnam conflict" setting, game modes including Conquest, Rush, Operations, Domination and Team Deathmatch, "tighter" maps and era-appropriate guns.

Read more…

There's a folder on my PlayStation 4 that's reserved for the really good stuff. It's where Towerfall Ascension sits alongside Nidhogg and the brilliant compilation that is Sportsfriends. It's where I head when friends are around, when I want a guaranteed good time, and ever since creating it there's been a little slot reserved for Gang Beasts, that party game par excellence. I've been waiting on it a fairly long time.

You've already played Gang Beasts, I'm sure. Whether that's at one of the many game events where it's been a fixture since 2014, where you'd follow the sound of laughter until you found four people huddled around a monitor knocking merry hell out of one another. Maybe you've already got it on PC where it's been out in Early Access for a good few years. You likely know the deal already; pissed-up jelly babies go at each other across a series of stages until only one stands as the winner.

Now it's finally out on PlayStation 4, familiarity hasn't really dimmed its brilliance. Played with friends, Gang Beasts is a drunken hug of a game in which you're fighting the controls as much as you are each other. You're never really in charge of a fight in Gang Beasts - don't expect this particular fighting game to turn up at EVO, or to be the subject of in-depth YouTube tutorials - and instead my only advice is that you give yourself over to its chaos.

Read more…

Destiny 2's first seasonal event, The Dawning, arrives next week on Tuesday, 19th December.

Three weeks long, it'll conclude on Tuesday, 9th January.

Included in the update are new snowball fight activities in social areas, snowball weapons in Strikes, the supercharged Mayhem mode in Crucible and the ability to collect and receive gifts for your favourite vendors and agents.

Read more…

Elite Dangerous' legendary Thargoid menace has embarked on the next stage of its apparent plan for galactic domination, attacking space stations and causing utter devastation.

This escalation of events in the Thargoid storyline is one of the most exciting in-game developments since Elite Dangerous' narrative-focussed 2.4 update launched earlier this year. Indeed, it's notable enough to warrant its own trailer.

One of the earliest reports of Thargoid attacks on human facilities came from community member Commander GluttonyFang, who posted a video exploring the aftermath of an alien strike on The Oracle Orbis Starport in the Pleiades Sector IR-W d1-55 system. Up until now, Thargoid encounters have largely been limited to random interdictions from hyperspace, and aggressive engagement with players only when provoked.

Read more…

Night School Studio, the developer of 2016's brilliant narrative adventure Oxenfree, has revealed its next game, Afterparty.

"In Afterparty, you are Milo and Lola," says Night School, "recently deceased best buds who suddenly find themselves staring down an eternity in Hell.

"But there's a loophole: outdrink Satan and he'll grant you re-entry to Earth [...] Time to go on the best bender ever, uncover the mystery of why you've been damned, and drink the big guy under the table".

Read more…

Tracks, the wonderful toy train set builder from developer Whoop Group is getting a big free Christmassy update tomorrow.

Tracks is one of the unheralded gems of 2017 as far as I'm concerned; it's a simple-to-use, but gloriously engaging construction game based on the classic wooden Brio train sets.

Truthfully, it doesn't get much more complex that simply plopping down tracks, decorating them with intricately designed scenery, then watching your train go about its unhurried business, but it's a wonderfully relaxing way to tinker away some time.

Read more…