Nearly every night, I do the ‘should I play more Slay The Spire‘ dance. The cons: I wind up feeling guilty about not spending my free time trying something new, such as any of the half-dozen games I bought in the Steam Sale. The pros: it’s always satisfying, and there’s nearly always something that makes each run uniquely interesting.

That’s largely thanks to the devs adding something new to their roguelike deckbuilder nearly every Friday. Today’s early access update is a little beefier than usual, chucking in ten new relics and a special event where a six-armed entity offers you a new face. (more…)

The ‘Playground’ sandbox mode that’s currently seeing players cover Fortnite Battle Royale in everything from Mario Kart-esque trolley-racing tracks to elaborate pranks is only temporary, but Epic are already planning to bring it back and dreaming bigger. They’re talking about having a “full creative mode” eventually, taking it weirdly full circle to the days when Fortnite was more of a Minecraftbut than a battle royale megastar. This is a long-term plan, mind, but in the more immediate future Epic plan to add support for teams in a future Playground. (more…)

There’s a frightening invisible monster at large in my corner of Wiltshire at the moment. It can kill you with a single touch and is completely indiscriminate when it comes to selecting victims. Should I pick up and bin that rubber glove that someone has discarded next to my front gate, or incinerate it with a gout of flame from my butane-fuelled weed burner? I just don’t know. Lionising pillars of the Flight Simulator community and writing about Tiger-stuffed tank games feels like a walk in the park totally safe in comparison. (more…)

To fully defox the following enlargeable geofoxer, identify all twelve locations plus the theme that links them. (more…)

Kotaro Uchikoshi, the director of the first and third Zero Escape games, has revealed his next murderous mystery during Spike Chunsoft’s panel at Anime Expo 2018. AI: The Somnium Files is a visual novel adventure doodad about a detective with a roboeye who will travel into people’s memories as he hunts a serial killer. The game is still largely under wraps, but apparently a core theme is “different types and expressions of love”. And a teenaged YouTuber is involved somehow. No word yet on when AI will launch, so for now check out the announcement trailer below. (more…)

You have no idea how nice it is to finally be able to write about Shenmue again. While my nostalgia for both games will undoubtedly be shattered entirely when the Shenmue I & II collection releases on PC next month, I’m savouring every bit of it I can in the meantime. The aforementioned collection is one of the best PC gaming deals of the week, conveniently enough, though there’s a whole lot more to look through, so let’s do that right now.

As usual, we ve got deals that ll work in the UK, deals that ll work in the US and some deals that will work in both the UK and US, as well as presumably many other places. Let s get started.

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Four queer misfits living in a small desert town, making ends meet and trying to keep ahead of the half-witted fascist gangs that roam the streets. It’s a simple enough and very contemporary story… Right up until you get to the sun disappearing, the town being somewhere in the ‘Hellzone’ and the fist-fights using giant biomechanical meat-mecha. Welcome to Extreme Meatpunks Forever, an upcoming visual novel (with some realtime, low-fi robo brawling). The trailer is below.

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Google’s DeepMind research division have made a pretty solid argument that the future of game AI is in self-teaching neural networks. Not content with destroying chess forever (credit to the BBC), their most recent project was to have a team of AI agents learn how to play a Quake 3-derived game of Capture The Flag from scratch. Not only did they master it, but after nearly half a million simulated games, these bots aren’t just better than human players, but more cooperative than a human if paired with one as a teammate.

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What Works And Why is a monthly column where Gunpoint and Heat Signature designer Tom Francis digs into the design of a game or mechanic and analyses what makes it good.>

When games offer you abilities and perks that boost your stats, they often do it in a meager, fiddly way:

5% chance to deal 10% extra damage for 5 seconds. Does not stack.>

This is dry, fussy and boring to me. A 5% chance is so low I can never bank on it happening, 10% extra damage is so small I won’t notice it, and lasting 5 seconds means there’s this extra state I now need to know about and track. And ‘does not stack’ might be the saddest phrase in game design.

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I always knew the Vocaloids were just trying to lull us into a false sense of security. Persona-ish JRPG The Caligula Effect: Overdose is less about saving the world, and more about saving yourself as you lead a teen rebellion against a rogue AI singer’s dystopian virtual reality city-state.

Originally released on Vita to wildly mixed reviews, the Overdose edition promises major overhauls, including doubling the amount of story content and adding the option to pick the protagonist’s gender. It’s headed to PC early next year via publisher NIS America.

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