You’re climbing a mountain. It’s hard, especially when the wind is cutting through you like a knife and angry spikes are pulsing from the walls. Sometimes you’re not even sure if the mountain is actually a metaphor for every difficult thing you’ve ever done in your life. That’s how much trouble you’re having getting to the peak.

That is my brief summary of Celeste, a game that has flung me into the abyss hundreds of times, battered me into submission, and placed me in predicaments that are as unnerving as they are challenging. It’s a tricky platform game, with a beautifully melancholy story, and enough creativity on show to give me strength even when the going got so tough I almost lost hope.

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‘Suspicious Developments’ remains my favourite name for a games studio*, but ‘Sokpop’ might be my favourite name for a video games collective. That’s because a) it captures some of the playfulness that they bring to their work, and b) it’s fun to say. Sokpop!

I can look forward to exclaiming it more often, because Sokpop Collective have announced that they’ll be releasing a new game every 2 weeks using crowdfuning from their recently launched Patreon. You might know them for sci-fi city stroller Bernband, pleasant meadow puzzler Lisa, multiplayer park mess-about sim Digital Bird Playrground, or any of their many, many other games. Click on through for details about that Patreon, as well as the bigger projects they’ve got planned for this year.

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What happens when iron meets steam? In the real world, clothes get smooth. In the games industry, however, they react and create another entity altogether. Image & Form, the studio behind the SteamWorld games, have amalgamated with the creators of upcoming forest adventure Fe (it actually has nothing to do with the elemental notation for Iron, soz) to create Thunderful. It s a new company altogether, co-owned by the two head honchos of its constituent studios. The two studios won t disappear. This new, bigger one will just own them both. (more…)

Though the galaxy of Stellaris is filled with traces of strange and terrible events, we don’t really leave our own mark in extravagant ways. That will change a little with the launch of the sci-fi 4X strategy game’s planet-destroying Apocalypse expansion, which Paradox today announced they will release on February 22nd. T-minus 28 days later until I demolish your planets to build a hyperspace bypass, or to mine it for resources, or simply because it was spoiling my view. Or maybe I’ll trap you in a bubble to study you. Or robotise you. Options. Anyway. 28 days. Make your peace. Later taters. (more…)

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

My Summer Car has excellent patch notes. Here are some examples:

• Player can now drown when too drunk>
• Adjusted targeting of piss>
• Sleeping with cigarette can start a fire>
• You can now drink from jail cell WC bowl>
• Added moped (do not try to drive moped inside another vehicle, YOU WILL DIE)>

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We’ve not peeked at The Banner Saga 3 since Stoic’s Norse fantasy strategy RPG soared through Kickstarter in 2017, but now here’s a new trailer and oh! word that the game will launch earlier than expected. The Kickstarter tentatively said December 2018, and I’d even speculated that adding stretch goals features might push it back further, but publishers Versus Evil have now announced it’ll launch this summer. Whether it’s through coy planning or extra-speedy work, hey, once the sun comes out (all three days of summer) we’ll get to cool ourselves by tromping through the ice and snow murdering mythmen. (more…)

While BioWare’s new sci-fi persistent open-world multiplayer shooter doodad Anthem is officially due to launch this autumn, several secret sources tell Kotaku that the game is now likely delayed into early 2019. Speaking anonymously (the industry is not remotely fond of leakers, after all), they say that BioWare are shifting almost everyone to focus on Anthem, and… there are more whispers about the game’s progress, but they get vaguer. Let’s simply say: it seems quite possible we won’t get to rocket around an alien planet in BioWare’s Iron Man armour this year. (more…)

Hurrah! Mark Darrah has gone so far as to confirm that BioWare is working on a new Dragon Age game. He’s the executive producer for both Anthem and Dragon Age, and he’s tweeted to say that while Anthem is next in line, “there are people hard at work on both franchises”. We’ve heard roundabout confirmation before but this is solid and direct.

And yet, as the Coen brothers would say, would that it were so simple. According to Kotaku’s sources, BioWare only have a small team working on Dragon Age – with the bulk of their staff focused on Anthem. That’s not too surprising considering the new Dragon Age game hasn’t even been announced, but it does mean it’ll be a loooong time before we see Dragon Age 4. As far off as it may be, I’m still gonna stop me using this as an opportunity to tell you about what I want to see from BioWare’s next fantasy RPG.

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Update Night is a fortnightly column in which Rich McCormick revisits games to find out whether they’ve been changed for better or worse.>

The tanks of World of Tanks are an evolutionary success story. Not only did they manage to build a functional society on their planet despite the lack of opposable thumbs or appendages in general but out in the reaches of space, far from Earth, they were also able to split their organised conflicts up into two forms: the bigger battles represented by the original World of Tanks, and smaller seven-on-seven conflicts seen in the simplified and mobile-friendly World of Tanks: Blitz. (more…)

The robots are coming, and they’re coming for YOUR JOB – so proclaims the trailer for Tomorrow Corporation’s new game 7 Billion Humans. You might know Tomorrow Corporation as the studio behind Little Inferno or World of Goo, but they’ve just announced a follow-up to their 2015 programming game Human Resource Machine.

HRM was all about automating a single office worker’s tasks using simple(ish) programming commands, but 7 Billion Humans kicks things up a notch and enters the wonderful and intimidating world of parallel computing. Not sure what that means? Me neither! Let’s try and figure it out together.

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