After a year of waiting, 80 Days developer Inkle has shown off a proper look at its in-development sci-fi adventure Heaven's Vault - and confirmed it will arrive on PlayStation 4 this year.
(PC and Mac versions have previously been confirmed, with a smartphone launch set to follow later on.)
Heaven's Vault looks like a mix of Assassin's Creed's weirder modern day moments and the multi-choice narrative storytelling of a Telltale game.
It was Superhot that first made me think about the old writer's adage, that you do the slow stuff fast and the fast stuff slow. This is the thinking that powers Jack Reacher novels, for example - Lee Child talks about this trick often and with great clarity. If Reacher's doing a bunch of research, you whip through it in a couple of lines. Literary montage! If Reacher's outside a bar, though, and a horseshoe of bad'uns is forming around him, time slows until it forms a thick mineral goop that traps everyone within it. The next few seconds are going to involve the shattering of kneecaps and the bruising of aortas (if aortas are a thing that can be bruised - having typed it, I am unconvinced). The next few seconds are going to be violent and memorable. Crucially, the next few seconds are going to take eight or nine pages to play out, because every move will be examined in great forensic detail. We will count the separate sparks in the air, and be deafened by the clatter of a spent cartridge case rattling on the tarmac. We will be fully present and fully conscious in these terrible, glorious moments.
Is Superhot turn-based? Not really, but it's a unique kind of meter, certainly - the work of a ludic Dave Brubeck. It is strange, given the unprecedented control over the variables that make up the universe they afford, that many games are so uninterested in time. Sure, they shatter it into loops with the death and save systems. They may also slow it, Reacher-like, when the guns come out. But genuine inventions, such as Superhot's world in which time only moves when you do? These genuine inventions are quite rare.
I've been thinking of all this these past few weeks as I've been playing, by sheer coincidence, through a range of rather brilliant turn-based tactic games, some of which have come out and some of which are yet to be released. Turn-based tactic games are hardly inventive by this point, but they definitely force you to think about time, about how it is broken up, and about what happens when you can pause it and step outside of it and really ponder your actions. Specifically, the games I've been playing have made me think about the way that time affects storytelling, and I think I'm ready to present my findings. Turn-based games, I suspect, are uniquely suited to generating incredible stories. They are more cinematic in the narrative sense than the games that we lazily refer to as being cinematic. And I think this is because of time.
Epic appears to be teasing the imminent arrival of jetpacks in Fortnite Battle Royale, judging by the game's latest welcome screen.
On firing up the game last night, players were treated to an update screen which, as well as showing the already announced Fortnite Season 3 Battle Pass and Royale Dragon Glider, gave a sneaky glimpse of an entirely new item: the Jetpack. "Take the fight to all new heights", read the blurb, beneath a message indicating that jetpacks would be "coming soon".
That flavour text certainly implies that jetpacks won't merely be cosmetic in nature when they arrive, but it's unclear whether the item might offer full-on flight, or - as some users are speculating on the Fortnite subreddit - more of a portable jump-pad-style height burst. Obviously though, jetpacks will remain a mystery until Epic decides to reveal more.
Square Enix has surprise-released beloved Super Nintendo RPG classic Chrono Trigger on Steam. But before you go rushing off to make a purchase...
The new PC version includes the full time-hopping, dimension-spanning original adventure - widely regarding as one of the finest J-RPGs ever made - plus the Dimensional Vortex dungeon and the forgotten Lost Sanctum dungeon that first appeared in the excellent DS port. Elsewhere, there's mouse and controller support, and a handy autosave feature.
Chrono Trigger is available now on Steam, priced at 11.99. However, there's something of a major caveat here that fans of the SNES and DS versions might want to be aware of before parting with their money. This PC release is a direct port of the mobile version, which means that it features some of the more unpopular elements of the iOS and Android games - including an unsightly, amateurish interface, and questionable visual "enhancements".
Games containing microtransactions will now feature a warning label in America.
The move is part of fresh push by the ESRB - the board which gives age ratings to games in the US, Canada and Mexico - to better educate parents on the ways children can spend money within games.
All games which offer some way of spending further money will be branded with the label - from those which offer blind loot boxes and flog in-game currency, to those which simply offer the ability to buy a season pass or DLC pack. In other words: this will affect most games.
Yoku's Island Express is a pinball-based platformer which stars a cute little dung beetle postman - and if you're not sold by that, well there's some new footage below.
I first played Yoku back at EGX last year - on Switch, I think - and was instantly sold on the concept. I didn't realise at first that Yoku was a dung beetle - but the fact you push a ball around, which can then be propelled through the game's various paths... well, it then made sense.
Today's trailer shows off Yoku's underwater gameplay for the first time, something which is unlocked when you upgrade your dung ball with other abilities. Another upgrade, the Slug Vacuum, lets you suck up explosive slugs and turn them into jump boosts, because why not.
Fallout 3, which will be 10 years old this year (good grief!), is being remade using the Fallout 4 engine for the Capital Wasteland project.
It's making good progress judging by a new video, which shows the player meeting the Brotherhood of Steel paladins at Tenleytown Station and going on to take down a Super Mutant Behemoth. It doesn't quite have the crumbly atmosphere of the original game but it looks undeniably more up to date.
Here's the Capital Wasteland footage next to relevant sections from the original Fallout 3 game.
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.
Switch owners will already no doubt be aware of the perils of buying digitally when the onboard memory of Nintendo's newest system is a mere 32GB. Fortunately, Micro SD cards can be used in order to expand the storage space available, allowing you to get up to 2TB of storage.
The thing about that, however, is that 2TB Micro SD cards don't actually exist at this point. What does exist, though, is a Micro SD card with a whopping 400GB of storage. As luck would have it, MyMemory is offering up the chance to save 40 off the price of one of these 400GB beasts by entering the code SAN20MM during checkout. Comparatively, Amazon is still listing this for 200.
Five years later, the gorgeous crowdfunded mouse adventure Ghost of a Tale, made by Lorax and Despicable Me animation director Lionel Gallat, is ready. An update on the game's website yesterday revealed a startlingly imminent release date of 13th March.
That's on PC, where a small portion of the game has been in early access for a year-and-a-half (it's also currently in the Xbox One Game Preview programme). It's 15/$20 and will stay that way for the next couple of weeks, after which it will go up to $25(/ 20, perhaps).
There are console versions (Xbox One X and PlayStation 4) planned for later this year but their timing depends on rectifying any issues there may be with the PC version first. A Switch version is a much trickier proposition and would require "a complete re-tooling of the visual features and a fundamental re-authoring of most of the 3D assets", Gallat said. If Ghost of a Tale sells well and Gallat can hire a studio for a Switch conversion then it would be possible, but otherwise probably not.
Warframe developer Digital Extremes has announced that this year's TennoCon - the company's annual Warframe-themed convention - will take place on July 7th, at the London Convention Center in London, Ontario.
Digital Extremes says that TennoCon 2018 will feature a variety of developer-led panels and workshops, plus numerous Warframe-themed activities - including a cosplay contest with a $10,000 CAD (about 5600) prize. It will also host a live Twitch stream with the developers, known as TennoLive, which promises "huge reveals". Last year, this included the announcement of Warframe's open-world Plains of Eidolon update.
Tickets for this year's TennoCon will go on sale this Wednesday, February 28th, and will range from $30 CAD to $1000. More specifically, there are four available price tiers - $30 CAD, $75 CAD, $250 CAD, and $1000 CAD - and each subsequent tier includes an increasingly elaborate array of digital and physical goodies.