There’s not much of a need to add to this news hit. Today, on the ole Itch.io site, I stumbled upon yet another great Ludum Dare 41 entry. If you remember, 41’s theme is two game genres that should not be compatible. Jon Remedios took this to one of its most bizarre conclusions: that the walking simulator genre requires a good driving simulator that is not, itself, a driving simulator but rather a walking simulator where you are a car. If you think it sounds like that might not work, well, you’d be right. Especially if that car if forced to experience life trapped within the walls of the rural Oregon home of the Greenbriar family. That’s right. It’s Gone Home but you’re a car. You’re a car in the Gone Home house. Welcome to Gone Vroom.

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Joseph DeLappe is no stranger to using games to make big political points, and his newest art project is just as upsetting as its description sounds: using real gun violence data, a self-playing version of GTA V will run for one year (between 4th of Julys) and will visually display the accurate number of homicides involving guns each day. This is all streamed on Twitch for your enjoyment (?) education (?) anger. Hopefully, it can serve as a call to arms, or whatever exactly the opposite of that is called.

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Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 is not a political game. We’ve heard this from Ubisoft, who insists that their title about an uprising set in Washington D.C. will avoid being political. No politics… in Washington D.C. and that’s final. Sorry, I guess all of my coverage of the game needs to start with me shaking this scaldingly mild take off, like a wet dog covered in bad takes. Like Tom Clancy’s The Division Origins Part The First, there is a big giant city out there to conquer and the emphasis is on group play and cooperation. For those of you who have two or more friends. For the rest of us, there’s good news in the form of a recent announcement that the game is absolutely beatable as a single player experience, including Division endgame missions with notorious difficulty spikes.

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The Forgotten City, true to the spirit of its theme, is both a game that has yet to be released and is a game that has been available for years. While I’ve always been one of the few hold-outs that’s been annoyingly “meh” about Skyrim, I fired up my copy this week to play through the The Forgotten City, which began as an extensive mod for Elder Scrolls V. In 2019, it is getting a stand-alone version that reinvents and expands its lore, but keeps the intriguing mechanics intact. Now that I’ve played it once, I’m ready to play it a dozen more times in its next reincarnation.

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Sundays are for moaning about hot it is.

I’ve got something a little different to open with this week. Dia Lacina has launched Capsule Crit, a “a monthly online journal dedicated to games criticism, personal essays, reviews, and fan fiction in micro genres”. Any of the articles in the first issue would feel at home here, but I’ve picked out a couple of my favourites. First up is Jackson Tyler’s piece about the hidden earnestness of Metal Gear, which offers a smart and funny deconstruction of storytelling I’d written off as inane. (more…)

Warframe, the cooperative shoot-and-loot space ninja game, is about to get more of all of the above. Developer Digital Extremes announced an all-new open-world zone – purportedly five times bigger than the Plains of Eidolon – at the third annual TennoCon. But the most exciting announcement came at the end of the Warframe-centric convention. Code named “Railjack,” the free expansion will let 1-4 players pile into a spaceship and seamlessly take their battle to the stars. (more…)

Uh. Okay. Where to start here? So, last weekend, you might remember that within the world of Fortnite (a video game) a one-time event occurred when a rocket was launched from a secret underground bunker and tore a hole in the sky (of a video game). What does that giant rip in the fabric of space-time mean for the game? No one knows. What we do know is that, around the same time, an in-game burger mascot disappeared and just turned up in the middle of the desert (not in a video game). So. Uh. What does this mean? I guess Durr Burger is opening franchises.

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By digging into the darkness of Taiwan’s past, Red Candle Games’ 2017 sleeper indie horror hit Detention managed to push some buttons that I didn’t know I had. If you haven’t given it a spin, go grab the deluxe edition on Steam, because you’re going to want that soundtrack. You know, for when you need terror to inspire you at the gym, or when you really need to speed-up your nightly jog. Building on the static-obsessed foundations of Detention, the follow-up title Devotion now has a trailer and a plot summary. It looks like Red Candle Games is going to stick to what they do best: teeth-grindingly upsetting history lessons.

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If you’re like me, a recent playthrough (or two) of Vampyr has left with you a taste for something unholy… a taste for more complicated vampire stories that Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines can’t seem to quench. Well, for my children of the night, excellent news has just arrived via a cloud of mist that transitioned into a press release and then back into a bat: Netflix’s Castlevania has a season two and it is set to arrive just before Halloween on October 26th. What a terrible night to have… already made plans with some friends… that I need to cancel now. (Is cancelling on friends diabolical?) Bwahahahah!

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Dead Island 2 is one of my favorite trailers of all time for a game I’d all but given up on seeing. Back in 2014, the studio Yager was developing the then announced title for Deep Silver, and in 2016 the production was moved to Sumo Digital. As a reminder, it is now 2018, so Dead Island 2 and its Santa Monica-ish muder-setting seem like they have been abandoned. That is, until, Deep Silver dropped a free-to-play tower defense game called Dead Island: Survivors. The Internet has some questions about whether this mobile tie-in was taking the place of the long gestating title, and Deep Silver responded.

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