Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time.>

Puddle is a simple but inventive puzzler about fluid dynamics. You play as a small pool of liquid which you must navigate through an environment by tilting the screen from side-to-side. Between you and your ultimate goal is a variety of hazards that can trap, evaporate or otherwise disperse your loosely connected cluster of atoms, and if you lose too much of your puddle en-route to your destination, you’ll have to re-start the level. (more…)

The Tomb Kings are not a crust punk gang who meet in the vaults of Greyfriars Kirkyard. No, they’re a Warhammer rabble riffing on Ancient Egyptian beliefs, a faction of ancients pharaohs and their servants, risen to rebuild their empire. We’ve known for a while that these sandy sorts are headed to Total War: Warhammer II in paid DLC, and now we know when: January 23rd. Alongside this news, the developers today released a cinematic trailer giving a peek at the Tomb Kings, them with their skeletal warriors, animal-headed giants, scorpions of stone and bone, serpentine sentinels, bonebirds, Necrosphinxes, and oh my god is that a giant statue shooting zapbeams out its eyes? (more…)

What do you call a storefront dummy wearing a Star Wars costume? Mannequin Skywalker. Hello, this post has nothing to do with Star Wars and only a little to do with mannequins. Painterly horror game Layers of Fear is free on Humble today. It s a short game, about three or four hours long, and contains ghosts. In many ways, the perfect stocking filler. (more…)

To play Viscera Cleanup Detail is to be an enemy of environmental storytelling. It’s a spacejanitor simulator where we sweep into levels and sweep away all the bodies, burns, blood, bullet holes, detritus, and alien goo that paints a clear picture of a terrible sci-fi incident. Once we’re done, no one will ever know what will happened. (Well, unless we end up accidentally making even more mess.) Perhaps we’re an agent of exposition, creating a blank slate so our dark masters can snare the next schmo with lengthy cutscenes. Whoever our spacejanitors are, thanks to another free update we can now enjoy a new level introducing something new to clear away: expository graffiti. (more…)

Fans of bodices and inheritance might remember card game Regency Solitaire. Pip and Adam enjoyed looking for tea sets underneath piles of cards in that tale of gambling and gossiping. But I m in charge of the card games now. So I get to review highway robbery follow-up Shadowhand. If I were a member of the polite, ball-attending society of the game I might say it was frightfully untaxing>. But I m not, thank fuck. So I can just say it s boring. (more…)

It s the 30th birthday of Final Fantasy, says Square Enix. The first in the series was released in Japan on this day in 1987 and an old story goes that the name was chosen because Square was in financial trouble at the time almost bankrupt and it was likely to be their last game. But that s rubbish, the creator later said in an interview. It turns out any old F-word would have done.

It s nevertheless a series worth celebrating. A tropey, dopey JRPG series that somehow manages to be comforting and friendly. At least, some of the time. Here s the highs and lows of the series. (more…)

Chocks/bombs away! The mildly FTL-ish game Bomber Crew unleashed its first payload of DLC last Friday, sending a new mini-campaign, bomber upgrades and experimental enemy fighter craft plummeting down to the earth below.

That new campaign takes place in the winter of 1944, during the “Big Week” that paved the way for the land invasion of continental Europe. The real-life series of missions is also known as “Operation Argument”, which I much prefer – apparently Operation Passive Aggression and Operation Quibble just couldn’t get the job done.

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Sitting at the intersection of several of my interests is Ghosts I-IV for Quake, a new mod which turns id Software’s gibtastic first-person shooter into a quiet walking simulator and couples it with a calmer soundtrack. While Quake’s original 1996 soundtrack is an industrial dirge by the popular beat combo Trent Reznor & The Nine Inchnails, this mod replaces it with tunes from their chilled-out 2008 album Ghosts I-IV – which is legally fine to include, thanks to its Creative Commons licensing. The mod is organised by JP LeBreton, a designer and level designer who worked on the first two BioShock games and has developed quite an interest in peacefully exploring seminal FPSs. (more…)

It’s easy to mock Capcom’s seemingly endless stream of reboots and re-releases, but if there’s one game in the publisher’s back catalogue that truly deserves to be reincarnated for the modern age, it’s Clover Studio’s Okami. While Clover itself has since faded into the mists of time (the remnants going on to form Bayonetta studio PlatinumGames), its ink-washed tale of Japanese sun gods and monstrous demons remains as bright and vibrant as ever, the last ten-odd years bouncing off wolf heroine Amaterasu’s gleaming fur almost as if they never happened. Sure, there are still a few wrinkles and matted tufts here and there, but whatever anti-aging stuff Capcom and Hexa-drive used here, I want it, and I want it now.

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Are the presents already laid out under the tree? How many are there? Count them. Now, count them again. They seem to be…multiplying.

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