Despite the mountain of incredible 2017 games I still need to play, I am once again back on my Skyrim nonsense. I reinstalled it over the weekend and I’m still in the process of adding all 10,000 mods that I simply cannot live without, including many featured in our best Skyrim mods list. I might need to add another, however, at least when the gargantuan Lordbound mod launches later this year. 

The Lordbound team is aiming to make an expansion-sized mod with around 30 hours of new adventures, including fancy dungeons, three non-linear faction storylines and an entirely new region of Skyrim, Druadach Valley, located near High Rock, which is also where Daggerfall took place. 

When it launches this year, the mod will throw players into a conflict between Orcs and the Imperial Legion as they fight over who gets to stick their flag in the area. The latest trailer showcases some of the mod’s environments, including some striking magical ruins and weird Dwemer caverns. 

I used to avoid the massive mods that added whole new areas to the game because it can be a bit of a hassle trying to figure out what mods they’re going to conflict with, but after playing Beyond Skyrim’s surprisingly polished Bruma mod, which introduces the northern Cyrodiil town to the game, I’ve been won over. Thank goodness for kind souls making compatibility patches. 

Cheers, Kotaku. 

I'm attempting a non-lethal playthrough of Fallout 4 with the Knockout Framework mod, which lets me punch NPCs unconscious and carry them around in a sack on my back. Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

Using mods can get messy, especially when a mod changes a major aspect of a game system, like the knockout mod does. There can come a point where the game simply doesn't know how to respond to the alterations the mod is making. A lot of quests in Fallout 4 can only be marked as complete if you kill certain NPCs or monsters, and considering that I'm trying to avoid doing that, it's no simple matter to progress.

Last time, I tackled Preston Garvey's Museum of Freedom quest, which resulted in me leaving Concord with an unconscious deathclaw stuffed in my backpack. Since Garvey will only be satisfied if the deathclaw is dead, the quest remains incomplete.

I want to keep my pet deathclaw, though: it could come in handy. I figure that if I just remove it from Concord for a period of time, Preston might decide I've killed it and let me progress through the story. So, I head to Red Rocket Truck Stop, where I'd previously built a prison for some mole rats, and I drop the deathclaw inside. Sort of. It kind of flops half-in and half-out.

I'm not sure what'll happen if I leave it dangling like this, so I wake it up with a stimpack. Thankfully, after regaining consciousness on the edge of the pen, it sort of hops inside. My pet! My lovely pet!

Naturally, it's not really my pet, it completely hates me. It starts roaring and stomping around and swiping at me with its tail and claws, so I quickly close the door (as if it could fit through that doorway, and even if it could, like a closed wooden door would stop it) and spend some time trying to admire it from the staircase. It manages to hit me, only once, which breaks my leg and sends me limping away with only a shred of health remaining.

I tell ya, playing non-lethally is bad for your health.

After crafting a water pump back in Sanctuary to heal myself (the game won't let me using the crafting bench at Red Rocket since there's a furious deathclaw a few feet away), I head to Concord, and sure enough, the quest still isn't complete. Preston wants that D-claw dead and there seems to be no fooling him.

The only other quest I currently have available is one from Tenpines Bluff, where a couple of farmers want me to take care of the raiders at the Corvega Assembly Plant. Since I've had no trouble knocking out raiders with my cane and my non-lethal shotgun, I figure I can handle that.

I can't handle that.

This isn't some little band of shaggy, stinky raiders like the ones I've encountered so far: there are over a dozen of them outside, including on the roof, and almost twice as many inside. While I do pretty well clonking them unconscious around the perimeter, I'm being constantly sniped from the ones on the roof of the plant, who are too far away for me to hit with my non-lethal shotgun. Inside, I'm immediately and repeatedly scorched by molotovs and grenades. I'm not going to be able to manage this alone.

Well, I do have my own deathclaw. After several deaths and reloads, I return to Red Rocket, zip my deathclaw up in my backpack, and return. With my pocket monster, I figure, I can handle the factory.

I can't handle the factory.

Really, there are three problems. The deathclaw, when awakened, only has one stimpack's worth of health, and though it's still fearsome it's not exactly an irresistible force in its weakened state. The assembly plant, meanwhile, consists of a lot of stairways and catwalks and narrow areas, not ideal for a monster the size of a car. And finally, I'm a weakling in fight with a dozen enemies armed with guns and lobbing grenades. Even if my deathclaw can survive long enough to take out the raiders, I can't. And if the raiders kill the deathclaw, thus completing my Concord mission for me, I can't survive long enough to enjoy it. I die again and again.

Finally, I give up. After some deliberation, I decide to simply take the deathclaw back to Concord, drop it in front of the Minutemen, and let them finish it off.

They don't finish it off.

It's definitely enjoyable watching the deathclaw rampage around the office, but it's too much for the Minutemen and Mama Murphy, quickly knocking them all out (the mod allows NPCs to bash each other unconscious as well). Now the deathclaw I don't want to kill but need to kill refuses to be killed. You suck, Minutemen.

I manage to slip out onto the balcony to see if Preston can be persuaded to come inside and finish the job, but I discover Garvey is, well, a bit broken:

He's alive and conscious, but lying face-down on the balcony. Preston wriggles around, he speaks, he occasionally teleports a bit, but he won't get up. The guy with a fetish for settlements appears to have permanently settled here.

After hitting him, shooting him, and otherwise trying and failing to get him to stand up, I decide to enlist the help of the unconscious raiders in the street below. Maybe if I haul them into the office, they'll kill the deathclaw and I can finally complete this mission.

Nope.

When I return with the first raider, I find the deathclaw finally, mercifully dead. A few of the Minutemen are awake and acting as if everything is normal, like there isn't a giant dead monster on the ground and their boss isn't outside dry-humping the balcony. What's worse, when I dump the raiders (who now also need to die to complete the mission), their bodies vanish. I drag in all of them, one by one, and they all disappear. You can see above that the hovering red squares on my HUD indicate their positions in the office, but they can't be seen, revived, killed, or hauled back outside.

And so, with Preston doing the eternal worm outside and a pile of unconscious invisible raiders no one can kill, I think it may be time to put a pin in my non-lethal knockout adventures in Fallout 4. I didn't get far, but at least my personal body count is zero. A few raiders died due to my actions and I blew up a few turrets, but the only thing I wound up killing was the game itself.

If you've played Rainbow Six Siege in the past few weeks then you've probably come across Jäger players exploiting a glitch with his deployable shield. The glitch makes him nearly impossible to kill, and Ubisoft has been rushing to fix it. That fix is nearly complete, the developer said on Reddit on Friday, and a patch should be live in the next few days, which is good news.

Usually Jäger plonks his shield on the ground so that other defenders can use it as cover, but by following a series of steps players can get it to sit on top of their gun so that they can run around with the shield covering the upper half of their body. Their view is not obstructed by the shield, so they can still shoot as normal, but nobody else can shoot through it.

Basically, it breaks the game. If the Jäger player crouches behind cover then they are virtually impossible to tag, but they can still kill any attackers that come into view. As you'd expect, it's become pretty popular with a certain group of players. 

Ubisoft has not set an exact date for the patch, but says it should happen "earlier in the week". For people that have had rounds ruined by the exploit, it can't come soon enough. 

If you've ever wanted to play Civlization 6 but found yourself put off by the $60/£50 price tag, then you're in luck. The game, plus two DLC packs, are the early unlocks available to anyone that purchases the next Humble Monthly bundle, which you can pick up for just $12.

The brilliant turn-based strategy game has had the odd 50%-off sale, but its price has never been anywhere near this low. It really is an incredible deal, offering the base game alongside its Viking-inspired DLC and its Australian scenario pack, which normally cost £3.99/$4.99 each. 

The bundle is a subscription service, but you can just pay $12 for one and then cancel before the next one arrives. You'll immediately get Civilization 6, and then the other eight or so games in the bundle will unlock next month. You don't know what those other games will be, but usually you'll get a few decent ones. And besides, it's worth it for Civilization 6 alone.

I don't normally dabble with the monthly bundles, but I think I'll bite on this one and put some time into the game before the huge Rise and Fall expansion comes out next month. That expansion faced criticism this week for its portrayal of the Cree.

Pick the bundle up here.

The team behind the bizarre, creepy Rusty Lake games has announced that a new addition to the series, Rusty Lake Paradise, will be released next week. The game will follow the story of a young man named Jakob, who returns to his home of Paradise Island after the death of his mother leaves it cursed by the ten Plagues of Egypt. 

The Steam listing doesn't say much about the game beyond describing it as a "premium point-and-click adventure," in which Jakob must discover his mother's hidden memories and take part in strange family rituals in order to bring the plagues to a halt. "Each plague brings its own atmosphere, suspense and a variety of Rusty Lake brain teasers," and features its own theme song, with backdrops by Dutch painter Johan Scherft. 

The description is a little strange but it's got nothing on the trailer, which is flat-out weird, and not in the happy-trippy way of something like Samorost 3: There was a deeply sinister edge to Rusty Lake Hotel (not to mention violence), and Rusty Lake Paradise quite clearly promises more of the same.   

Mystery and secrets are a big part of what makes Rusty Lake work so you won't find much about the new game, but more information about the studio that makes it and its other games are up at rustylake.com. 

The first-person supernatural mystery The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is good stuff. We called it a "intriguing, mostly satisfying, and most importantly, wonderfully restrained" story in our 82/100 review, and the biggest complaint—lack of a manual save option—was addressed in a "Redux" update that dropped in 2015. And now it looks like another update adding a peaceful, puzzle-free "free roam" mode, could be on the way too. 

The mode is on the way, in the Xbox One version of the game that's coming out later this month. "Many people agree this is one of the most beautiful games on the market, and some expressed a desire to explore the environment without any darkness in it, and by darkness we mean bloodies [sic] corpses and locked doors. They wanted to just have a nice relaxing walk down the Red Creek Valley," The Astronauts co-founder Adrian Chmielarz explained. "That option now exists, and it’s called the Free Roam mode. Everything that was gameplay and everything that was evil is removed from the game in that mode." 

Chmielarz also posted a few images demonstrating what the game looks like in the new mode. "Turn down the music, leaving only sound effects on, and it’s like you’re really there," he wrote. 

Unfortunately, there's no guarantee that the free roam mode will be released for the PC version of the game. For one thing, it's apparently a timed exclusive feature for the Xbox One, but more importantly the job will require more effort that you might expect. Updating the PS4 version sounds like the biggest sticking point, but the PC version gets caught up in that too.   

"It’s not like the Free Roam-enhanced PS4 (plus 4K on Pro) and PC versions (well, 4K is already there) are locked behind a key, just waiting to be released one day. Some serious work needs to be put in first in order to make them happen," Chmielarz said. 

"For now, we’ll just wait and see if there’s any demand for the feature to come to PS4 and PC one day. It does seem like it, since this section of the post exists exactly because you are already asking. So we will probably do it, but the 'probably' is a key word here. We cannot guarantee the feature happening 100%, because, again, it’s not as easy as we are sure some people believe it is." 

The Astronauts announced in December that it is working on a new project called Witchfire, which looks to me like The Vanishing of Daniel Garner Killed My Dick. We can only hope.

Thanks, RPS.

Akarsa-184's job is to make people happy. Akarsa-184 is a genderless android who crafts cybernetic upgrades that make humans fitter, happier, and more popular on the internet. Donovan's job is also to make people happy, because he's a bartender and that's how alcohol works. He's an information broker on the side, manipulating customers by mixing drinks that accentuate personality traits he exploits to keep them talking. Brandeis wants to make people happy too, in his case by bringing down the corporations. He's a freelance hacker in a cyberpunk dystopia and that's what they're supposed to do.

The Red Strings Club is the new game from Deconstructeam, the indie studio responsible for Gods Will Be Watching and various other small projects. It's based on a couple of those smaller game jam projects, and the variety that gives The Red Strings Club is one of its biggest strengths. You play as each of those three main characters in turn, and as you do it's like three different games.

When you're playing a transhumanist implant robot it's about matching upgrades to clients, figuring out whether enhancing someone's sex appeal or rendering them immune to the effect of internet comments will fix their problems. Once you've chosen an upgrade you spin up the lathe, put on a tune, and use the mouse to carve it out of biomatter. 

It's an unusual way of representing the process and honestly a bit fiddly, but trying to second guess which modification will actually solve humans' ridiculous problems is darkly funny. I could give this person everything they desire, or I could just block the part of their brain that makes them desire things. Tough choice.

Bartending is a more spiritual act. Emotional hotspots appear over customers and you steer toward the one you want to activate, perhaps sympathy or paranoia or pride or regret, by mixing spirits. Each bottle has an arrow worked into its logo in case you forget bourbon goes up and vodka down, and ice cubes alter the size of your target until it's perfect. 

Dragging the physics-enabled bottles around is again a bit fiddly (there will be spills), but navigating dialogue trees to draw out secrets makes me feel like a mastermind. It's the same basic concept as VA-11 Hall-A: Cyberpunk Bartender Action but you make dialogue choices as well as serving drinks, and that makes all the difference. There's a sense of subtle control as you steer executives, scientists, and renegades through their stories.

Finally, there's social engineering. Since hacking minigames are hard to get right and so very easy to get wrong, The Red Strings Club doesn't have one. Its climax, an epic run on a corporate high-rise, is conducted entirely over the phone with a voice modulator that lets you impersonate other people. You work your way through a database of employees until you've pretended to be everyone from Karen in HR to the top brass. The dialogue and decision-making that are the best elements of The Red Strings Club are cut free from its other systems, showing a game that's best when it's about manipulating people, rather than manipulating the mouse.

But it has something else going for it, too. When I wrote that cyberpunk games should remember how to be punk, I wasn't asking for them to add more mohawks. I wanted them to remember the genre's roots in stories of underdogs and outsiders, not just badass cyborgs and investigators. The Red Strings Club does exactly that.

Its characters are schleppy and weird, philosophical rather than decisive, and frequently out of their depth. Nothing comes easy for them and they all work hard for what they've got. Those sometimes-frustrating minigames are just their jobs, the things they'd be doing to survive if they weren't taking down a corporate conspiracy.

That conspiracy (I'm being vague to avoid any more spoilers than you'll get from reading the About This Game section on Steam) involves a plan to mind control people and do away with negative emotions. Just like the main characters, the antagonists want to make people happy, they just have a different way of going about it. The Red Strings Club exploits this theme for all it's worth, asking questions about when it's OK to mess with people's emotions and how in our own small ways we probably do that every day. It feels a lot more relevant than another rehashing of "it's bad to be mean to cyborgs" or "robot feelings are real feelings."

Now about that implant to increase my follower count...

The Red Strings Club doesn't have an official release date yet but I got in touch, pretended to be Karen from HR, and now I can inform you it's probably January 22. Just don't tell anyone I let you know that.

The Messenger is a self-described love letter to 8-bit and 16-bit platformers and action games, and it just so happens to star a young ninja fighting to defend his clan from demons. 

As you may have guessed, The Messenger was heavily inspired by the old Ninja Gaiden games—so much so that, speaking with Polygon, lead designer Thierry Boulanger said much of his development history can be traced back to Ninja Gaiden 2 on the NES. 

Boulanger and developer Sabotage boast of "challenging gameplay and tight controls" on Steam, but The Messenger's most interesting tidbit is its generation-hopping aesthetic. When I said it's a love letter to both 8-bit and 16-bit games, I wasn't kidding: partway through, the whole game upgrades from an 8-bit action game to a 16-bit Metroidvania game with improved music and visuals. You can also swap between the two styles mid-level to solve puzzles. 

The Messenger was designed to be speedrun-friendly. Boulanger says there are multiple paths to each level: the normal, obvious path, and then paths with huge shortcuts hidden behind skill-based techniques like the "cloud-step," a situational double jump which can only be used when you hit something (like an enemy or an enemy projectile) mid-air but can also be chained infinitely. 

The Messenger looks like one to keep an eye on as it cloud-steps toward its 2018 release. 

Without context, Wolfenstäche: The New Censorship might make you extremely uncomfortable. You, a faceless G.I., glide down burgundy, Quake Engine corridors until you come face to face with a Reich-era portrait of Adolf Hitler. The supremely on-the-nose "Ride of the Valkyries" starts kicking up dirt, and his infamous toothbrush moustache detaches from his face and propels towards you with evil intent. Your soldier picks up an MP5, with a Star of David mounted on the iron sights, and shoots it down. Suddenly, the chamber is full of Hitler moustaches, angrily fluttering around your field of view like a disoriented swarm of bees. World War II ended a long time ago, but the international wounds in its wake are relevant enough that generally, the world's satirists reserve a certain threshold of tact when targeting Nazi racial policy. Weaponized Fuhrer whiskers seem a little beyond the pale.

Fortunately, there is context.

Wolfenstäche, which you can play for free right now on itch.io, was programmed by Shalev Moran, Alon Karmi, and Nadav Hekselman, three indie developers based in Tel Aviv. Mechanically, the game works as a stripped-down Serious Sam lead-pumper—gleefully inane like other browser-based Unity classics such as The Room of 1,000 Snakes. But politically, it aims to lampoon Bethesda, who refused to sell Machine Game's excellent Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus in Israel—an action that this trio of developers call both "lazy" and "cowardly." Bethesda did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

To be clear, Nazi iconography and artistic immunity has always made for an uncomfortable marriage. German bowdlerization laws famously threaten any use of the Swastika—even for mordant purposes—with criminal punishment. However, Bethesda still released The New Colossus in the country after applying an airbrush to the red armbands and Reichskriegsflagge, and waxing the mustache off of their deranged Venusian Hitler. 

Israel, on the other hand, did not get the same treatment. In late October, shortly after the game's release, Israeli gamers ventured to Steam to find that the The New Colossus' prodigal re-conquest of North America was missing from the marketplace. Confused, they petitioned Zenimax for an answer, who responded with a curt announcement clarifying that Wolfenstein 2 wouldn't be available in the region. Zenimax apologized for the inconvenience, but offered no specific reason why. 

This is an especially strange call for Bethesda. Israel doesn't have the same municipal censorship laws you find in Germany, and Karmi tells me it's completely legal to display swastikas and make references to the Third Reich in the media, "so long as you're not genuinely supporting Nazi ideology." (He points to a primetime Israeli TV series called The Jews Are Coming, which routinely sends-up Nazism with no edits or concessions.)

"When Inglourious Basterds was first screened, the audience cheered whenever Nazis were killed. We’ve come to an era where teenagers, whose grandfathers breathlessly escaped from Auschwitz, have poetic, digital, cathartic revenge on the ones who annihilated their people," he says. "And to most people here, it’s a wonderful catharsis. Film distributors see no issue with uncensored Nazis here. Neither does the court. Neither does the public. Only game publishers, it seems, are afraid of a 'PR disaster.'"

Heckselman agrees, noting that the depiction of Nazism in Israel is a fading, decrepit taboo, which was only especially prominent during the post-war founding of the state. Furthermore, Nadav tells me that if you follow local politics closely, you'll find the occasional parliament member trying to drum up support for an administrative prohibition of anti-Semitic iconography, but a tangible law never make it across the finish line. "[It's] only done for show," he says.

Wolfenstein itself doesn't hold any specific anathema either. Before Bethesda took over the rights from id Software, every game in the series was published in Israel, including that (entirely forgotten) 2009 reboot. Karmi highlights this post by Israeli blogger Ido Keinan, where he remembers playing Wolfenstein 3D with his grandfather who served in the Red Army, both of them reveling in the death of Hitler 2000. So the decision to suspend Wolfenstein 2's proliferation in a Jewish state appears to be handed down by a corporate boardroom rather than a closed government channel. "[Bethesda] has decided to pull the game of their own volition," says Karmi. "Should they release the game here, as far as I know, they could just do it, and very few would bat an eye."

In that sense, gunning down the bristles on Hitler's upper lip might be the perfect parody for Bethesda's tentativeness. There are plenty of somber, respectfully pointed moments in The New Colossus, but this is still a pulpy action game where you venture to Nazi space bases and confront a bedwetting Fuhrer. It’s a mashup of silly American pastiche and tyrannous Reich-era politics meant to to portray the Nazis as the soulless flunkees they always were. Censoring it in Israel makes The New Colossus' message ring hollow. If you fear the ramifications of your satire—if you fear that you may be going too far in the face of the population you're supposedly advocating for—is it still satire? 

"They could have written a forum thread asking Israelis what the public thinks about Nazis and whether it’s safe. It would have taken them, at most, 30 minutes," says Karmi. "But the industry has gotten complacent and sheltered; so much so that us Israelis have to develop our own Wolfenstein game and say: “Here’s all the things you plugged out of your game. We’re cool with it. The Germans are cool with it. Why aren’t you?"

In a couple years, when Bethesda concludes this Wolfenstein trilogy, perhaps the company will reconsider their censorship policy and let the global Jewish population participate in the ultimate toppling of The New Order. Until then, Israelis will happily demonstrate just how happy they are to laugh at Nazis, and force the rest of us to reckon with our hypocrisy.

"We made Wolfenstäche to remind Bethesda that what they’re doing is wrong and hurtful and ignorant, and to encourage gamers and journalists to keep pestering them because we really do want this to change," says Moran. "I really do want to buy Wolfenstein on PSN and play it. I really do want publishers to stand behind the politics of their games, not half-heartedly, and not just in American culture."

Ted Martens was lead artist and animator on Crypt of the Necrodancer, a rhythm-powered roguelike built around a killer soundtrack. Martens is now the fiance of developer Liselore Goedhart, who pulled off a one-of-a-kind engagement using the very game Martens worked on. 

Goedhart outlined her master plan in a recent tweet. With the help of lead designer Ryan Clark and composer Danny Baranowsky, she had Martens play a custom build of Crypt of the Necrodancer with a few special touches, namely "Ted zombies," a wedding remix of the first level's music, heart-shaped stages and, finally, a ring. Ted said yes. 

Thanks, ShackNews.