The fighter is too slow and clunky. The mage brittle and lacking. But the rogue feels just right. Rocketcat Games’ pixelated roguelike dungeon crawler Wayward Souls didn’t click with me until I stepped into the shoes of Renee the Rogue. 

Renee has only a single ability aside from her basic dagger attack: the all-important dash. With a reliable way to avoid attacks I finally reached some level of success as I plunged deeper into the randomly generated dungeons... until I was devoured by a horde of angry boars.

Wayward Souls, out now via Steam Early Access, is styled as a close relative to classic SNES 16-bit RPGs like Chrono Trigger and Secret of Mana. The pixel art looks fantastic, with a rich variety of randomly generated dungeon tilesets and plenty of monster variety. Developer Rocketcat Games' has experience with pixel art and procedural generation, combining both in the wonderfully absurd roguelike Death Road to Canada. Despite the random generation, the RPG inspiration here means there's more focus on a cast of named characters and their adventure through the dungeons.

I can select my class at the beginning, but only after first completing a prologue with the Paladin. During this sequence Wayward Souls already makes good on its story-heavy focus with numerous dramatic cutscenes as I play through an invasion of a castle. Alas my newbie paladin falls to the boss, and I’m greeted with his tombstone. Death is permanent. Like Rogue Legacy, gold carries over, and can be spent to upgrade each character. Skill upgrades are more Path of Exile than Diablo, raising my HP, crit chance, and mana reduction by a small percentage with each purchase.

It’s not terribly thrilling for an entire run to come down to increasing my crit chance by 3% for the next one. The lack of detailed information is also irritating. There’s no telling how much “+2 Bonus Life” actually means, as my HP is always represented by a bar, never a number. 

I quickly realize that one of the best skills for any character is a small heal at the end of each floor, since healing is otherwise almost nonexistent. Wayward Souls wants me focused squarely on speed and offense, yet movement and combat is a bit slower than I like. Eventually my skill upgrades and enemy knowledge add up, allowing me to reach the end of the first dungeon with my beloved rogue, where I learn a little more about the fall of the kingdom.

The tragic tale of a cursed tower

Each character class has its own storyline. I’m not used to watching cutscenes and reading lore in my dungeon crawlers, and I found it a welcome change of pace. The story is legitimately captivating, particularly the ghostly scenes that reveal the tragic history of the land. The game rarely wrests control away from me, so I’m free to either move on to the killing or stay awhile and listen. So far, I always choose to stay.

Unfortunately, the roguelike structure of Souls meant I saw the same scenes often repeat. I watched Renee get taunted by a rival master thief half a dozen times. Naturally, each floor of the dungeon is randomly generated, along with the random story scenes, but the character-specific cutscenes seemed to play out every time on certain floors. 

Most rooms slam shut when I walk inside, forcing me to kill everything within to proceed. Enemies follow patterns that reward knowledge, timing, and efficient use of limited resources. The rogue lacks the consumable abilities of the fighter or mage, but can find and carry several different one-use potions. Potions can dramatically alter a battle in my favor, including stunning and blinding rooms full of enemies. The UI is in desperate need of a quickbar or radial menu, however. I was never a fan of pausing the action to bring up my inventory to swig a potion.

Regardless of my skills, my dungeoneering successes were mostly tied to how many Emberforges I could find. These rooms let me upgrade my basic abilities with powerful branching skills. Abbie the mage could upgrade her ranged staff attack into either a longer range snipe, or a shorter flame-thrower. These essential upgrades are lost on death, and starting over after enjoying an upgraded with rogue with stealth-inducing blades and poison-retaliation boots was always painful.

Beating all five floors of the first dungeon unlocks the fourth of seven character classes. Cyril the Adventurer is an interesting amalgamation of fighter, mage, and thief, and I’m digging his tale as a young man haunted by literal shadows. I’ve enjoyed experimenting with him as I attempt the second dungeon, Amaranth Keep. It features more floors and tougher and more numerous enemies, including pesky gargoyles who spout flame and turn to stone, only to explode in my dying face.

Despite its relatively simplistic controls, Wayward Souls is pleasantly engaging, challenging, and rewarding, especially for a game that started life on iOS and Android four years ago. It lacks the faster pace, vibrant art, and fine-tuned controls of genre behemoths like Rogue’s Legacy or Spelunky, but the story bits help set it apart in a very crowded genre. The variety of classes help ensure there's at least one playstyle you can work with, and it nails the 16-bit SNES aesthetic. Just mind that room full of boars.

Tyranny, the isometric RPG about being bad that's actually very good, is the latest addition to the lineup of free games being offered to Twitch Prime members. But you've only got until tomorrow to pick it up. 

Twitch Prime provides ad-free viewing, exclusive emotes and a chat badge, free channel subscription, and—as of March—free games every month. It's included with subscriptions to Amazon Prime, which offers free delivery on a huge range of products, access to Prime Video and Prime Music, and free ebooks via Prime Reading. Subscriptions recently went up from $100 to $120 a month (or $13 per month if you don't want to commit to a full year, but that'll end up costing you more in the long run), but it's still a pretty sweet deal if you're a regular Amazon user. 

Tyranny isn't the only free game on the table this month: Twitch is giving away a free game every day this month, and The Red Strings Club, Brutal Legend, The Bridge, Tacoma, Observer, Deponia Doomsday, and the SNK Bundle are all currently up for grabs, as are the Warframe: Prime Day and Trinity Prime bundles, a Call of Duty: WWII Ultimate Supply Drop pack, a Neverwinter: Purple Owlbear pack, and 500 bonus Bits. 

And in case you missed it, today is Prime Day, that most magical day of the year where we celebrate how wonderful Amazon is by giving it our money, and we've got an ongoing roundup of the best PC gaming deals right here. 

Eight years since release, a host of neat player-made mods have kept Fallout: New Vegas players flocking back to the Mojave Wasteland. To this end, Fallout: Atlanta is a work-in-progress project that brings The Big Peach, the Hollywood of the South, or, as Usher calls it, A-Town to the post-apocalypse. It's been in the works since 2016, and has now launched its Alpha Update 0.25—marking the end of a short hiatus. 

At present, Fallout: Atlanta comes with new NPCs, new dialogue, new quests, new vendors, new building interiors—some of which have been custom-built, says creator lolpop109, such as supermarkets and a subway system—new textures, new weapons, new items and a new casino. 

Accessible via a trap door behind the Goodsprings gas station, lolpop109 plans to eventually create a more lore-friendly way/believable/physically possible way of transporting players to ATL—"probably a caravan from the Mojave Outpost."

A blurb on the project's Nexus Mods page reads: "Welcome to Atlanta The trading hub of the south and one of the 'must visit cites' in post-apocalyptic america 2280… There's plenty to see and there plenty to do in one of America's most culturally rich cities. 

"Explore the likes of The World of Nuka Cola and the Super Duper theme park. Take a trip to the memorial park or even take a boat ride down the Chattahoochee River. You won't struggle for a place to stay either, with rooms available at Peachtree Towers and The Marquis Hotel."

In this dev blog, posted today, creator lolpop109 says they're working on a new showcase trailer. In the meantime, here's an early pre-alpha short that was published a couple of years back:

And here are some screens:

Fallout: Atlanta is without a hard release date, but more information can be found on its Nexus Mods page. 

My generation is currently having its nostalgia moment. I can listen to podcasts that analyse every Simpsons or Lost episode in granular detail, Twin Peaks came back from the dead because college students my age watched it on Netflix, and developers are remaking games that were released when I was a kid. And if it's not a remake, it's a spiritual successor—the likes of Phoenix Point, Pillars of Eternity and many more revive the types of games we played 20 or so years ago.

We've reached the next stage of that with Capcom's Resident Evil 2 remake. It's one of the first times this decade that a big publisher is embarking on a major re-imagining of a classic, and it's far from a remaster, swapping fixed camera angles for a third-person shooter view. The tone, though, seems compellingly grim based on this footage, in a way I think series fans will appreciate even if no longer looks like the same game. If it's a success, I can see it starting a trend of remakes that go way beyond a graphical overhaul.  

Below, I've collected my thoughts on the factors that face developers in remaking games now, touching upon projects like Pathologic 2, the System Shock remake and Resident Evil 2. 

Being faithful to the source material is important, but ideally a remake excites new players too

Resident Evil 2 did scare me back in the day, partly because I was 11 and easily spooked by the police station's low-lit pre-rendered backgrounds and ambient sounds. I probably wouldn't recommend it to anyone younger than me now for several reasons. The voice-acting is terrible, deliberately or not. The combat has the struggle you want from a horror game, but it's fiddly to control by modern standards. You couldn't really do that style of game now—by Resident Evil 0 on GameCube in 2002, critics were burning out on this formula, and it's ultimately why Resident Evil 4's series revamp happened. 

I can't see that style of game getting anyone but Resi fans excited now, and obviously Capcom will want a new generation of players to discover Resident Evil 2. For the remake, it looks like they took the same setting, characters and features and asked what that would look like now if you were to build it from scratch, hewing closer to the tone of Resi 7 than previous entries. I can't wait to get lost in it, and I'd rather this kind of approach than a shiny-looking retread. 

Anything new should add something meaningful

In Resident Evil 1's GameCube remake (released on PC in 2015), I think about what they did with sharks to make them terrifying. The 1996 original presented them as some pretty basic-looking enemies that swam around hassling the player (footage here). The remake, on the other hand, made them terrifyingly real and Jaws-like, to fit the enhanced realism of the game's visual style. That's a good example of using better graphics technology and a (presumably) bigger budget to subvert player expectation. This thing you thought you knew was now scarier than you'd even imagined it could be. It wasn't exactly the same as it was, but the player's experience of the game was ultimately improved by the shock of such a bold change. 

It's not always that easy to figure out the right approach to remaking a game, though. I'm not a backer, so I can't say I've followed System Shock's remake much beyond playing the demo released after announcement, which showed promise. But Wes's interview with the team at Nightdive in March brought up some interesting decisions made behind the scenes on that project. 

"As we geared up and started moving forward with it, we began to run into feature creep," business development director Larry Kuperman said. "All of those things like 'you know what would really be cool, how we might reinterpret this.' Various people wanted to put their imprint on it. As this process evolved over a period of time, it grew in complexity, and it veered away from this original representation. That doesn't mean that interpretation would've been bad, but it wouldn't have been true to the System Shock vision."

It's a tricky balance, deciding what to add to a game people love, especially with a game as influential as System Shock. When so many of our favourite classics are available forever on Steam, GOG or wherever, though, I think surprising players is no bad thing as long as it feels like a sensible extension of the original game's vision.

Remaking games could fulfil unrealised potential in some cult classics

Pathologic 2, the confusingly-named remake of the original 2005 first-person horror game, is refining a bunch of elements like its reputation system, as explored here. I can't say it's a game I've played before, but everything Joe relayed about it during his demo back in 2016 makes me think this is the version to pick up, and I'm glad someone is giving that game a chance to reach more people. Joe described it as "smoothing the edges of its source material while retaining the despondent charm that elevated the original to cult status." 

I'd love to see a ton of influential PC games from 15-25 years ago get that kind of treatment, where it's a better fit for modern tastes but keeps the essential elements of the game people loved. Resident Evil 2 might be a more extreme example of a remake in terms of changes to the design, but not everything needs that level of reinvention. Better controls, UI, cutting content that doesn't work, revamping different systems or adding new difficulty settings might be enough to get a classic in front of a new audience.

Bayu Arafat loves Metal Gear Solid. Like, really loves it. So much in fact that he's turned part of his home in Jakarta, Indonesia into a shrine for the Japanese developer, his games, and his new development studio.

"When I was in junior high school, I fell in love with the first Metal Gear Solid," he tells me. "I still remember that boss fight with Psycho Mantis where he breaks the fourth wall. And for me, no game came close to it in terms of story, graphics, voice acting, music. It was all so memorable."

Bayu started his collection around 2005, but being a poor college student, he never had enough money to fund his obsession. "But then I got a proper job in 2014 and the hype of The Phantom Pain inspired me to start taking my collection more seriously," he says. "Then, in 2016, when Kojima created his own studio I decided to collect everything related to him."

I ask Bayu what the most important item in his vast collection is to him. "It has to be the life-sized, wearable Ludens suit," he says. "Kojima and Yoji Shinkawa both signed it, and Shinkawa even sketched Ludens on the shoulder armour. This is probably the only suit like this in the world!"

Bayu is also proud of his collection of every Metal Gear Solid game, all of which are signed by Kojima. "Kojima likes my collection," he says. "He retweeted it. And this year I even got to meet him face to face."

"Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater is my favourite Hideo Kojima game," he says. "But I think Death Stranding will surpass Metal Gear!"

Hurk Drubman fans take note: the lore and history of Hurk, already quite extensive from previous Far Cry games, is expanded upon greatly in Far Cry 5's add-on Lost on Mars (my review here). If you manage a fan page or wiki about Hurk Drubman Jr., your fingers are going to be sore from all the updating you're about to do.

In about four minutes of extremely spoilery footage in the video above (also here on YouTube) we quickly learn that Hurk:

• once made Nick promise to help if he was ever seduced by a sexy AI
• sometimes forgets to warn people about the existence of deadly space crabs
• thinks his large calves make him the ideal godfather
• got lost in a laser tag tunnel on his birthday and cried
• gets jealous when seeing others be badasses
• is just as tired of "climbing shit" in Far Cry games as we all are
• blames Total Recall for lying about 'three-titted women' on Mars
• isn't sure how long you can eat eggs after their sell-by date
• knows in his gut that Yetis like to party, but wants confirmation
• will hang out with nerds if he gets to ride on their rockets
• will occasionally offer to let close friends squeeze his man boobs
• likes to pet cows

What can I say? The man is an open book. Maybe it's not the fanciest book, but it's an extremely honest and forthcoming one. Long live Hurk.

In anticipation of its launch next month, Compulsion Games has released a lengthy new trailer for We Happy Few, which provides more details on its newly designed structure.

The video, which is difficult to follow thanks to its kooky narration and choppy editing, introduces the three playable characters who form the backbone of the game’s story. Players will start out as Arthur Hastings, who plans to escape the city of Wellington Wells into the slum-like “Garden district” in search of his missing brother.

Later on, you’ll assume the role of Sally Boyle, an “experimental chemist” who can use her concoctions against the city’s oppressive police force. Last up is Ollie Starkey, a Scottish former soldier reminiscent of Groundskeeper Willie having a particularly bad day. The three characters are clearly built around different play-styles, with Ollie favouring aggression and Sally emphasising stealth, while Arthur sits somewhere in between.

The second half of the video demonstrates the various systems at play, such as weapon-crafting, stealth, character upgrades, and side missions. There’s plentiful footage of the game’s pugilistic melee combat, and a neat clip where the player vomits butterflies.

All-told, the trailer suggests We Happy Few is now far more closely aligned with a game like BioShock than it was during its Early Access period, something which James Davenport discovered earlier this year. Although the striking style and subversive tone suggested a story-driven experience, the game originally played out as a procedural survival sim. In the last year or so, however, the developers have significantly changed the game’s direction, introducing a far stronger narrative thread revolving around the three characters shown off in the trailer.

Either way, there’s certainly plenty to be intrigued about, from how the world-state will change when players ingest “Joy”—the drug used to control the populace through a constant state of euphoria, to the rictus-grin doctors who remind me of Timothy Dalton as the shopkeeper in Hot Fuzz.

We happy Few launches on August 10. The trailer is below. Make sure to pay attention.

You wait ten years for a Left4Dead successor to come along, and then four swarm you from all sides within the space of a few months. We’ve already had the much-improved Vermintide II earlier this year, while Deep Rock Galactic’s Early Access adds a shade of space dwarf shenanigans to the structure defined by Valve’s co-op classic. There’s even GTFO lurking in the shadows of Q4, quietly hoping to be the Aliens game that Colonial Marines certainly wasn’t.

Right now though, there’s Earthfall, a high-intensity co-op shooter which switches out  shambling zombies for scuttling aliens. The game is set in the verdant forests of the Pacific Northwest, and sees players working together across ten missions of extraterrestrial-splattering action.

There’s a little more to Earthfall than a straightforward run-and-gun, however. Players can deploy barricades and gun-turrets to establish defensive positions on the fly, while new weapons can be created via the use of 3D printers. The latter smacks of being a little gimmicky, but the idea of custom fortifications seems like a smart way to get players to work together.

There’s a launch trailer below which, frankly, doesn’t do the best job of selling the game. But if you’re up for some more cooperative gunplay, you can pick up Earthfall right now on Steam for £24. Developers Holospark also have plans to support the game beyond launch, and those future updates won’t cost you nothing more than the time to play them.

An enterprising soul has designed a calculator from rollercoasters using Rollercoaster Tycoon 2’s creative toolset. YouTube user Marcel Vos posted the above video demonstrating the calculator in action, which uses a pair of trains running along a labyrinthine track setup to input two numbers and output the resulting calculation.

The video shows off three calculations performed by the gigantic coaster, multiplying 2 and 8, multiplying 7 and 7, and adding 1 to 1.

The track arrangement is mind-bogglingly complicated, including massive sections of it hidden underground. But the principles behind it are straightforward enough. The calculator is set up to perform both multiplication and addition calculations, with tracks running between each input integer and all 200 possible output results.

For each calculation, the track must be set up to send the two trains toward the correct input numbers. One train is sent on a mazy route underground, while the other is directed to a long sequence of hill-shaped tracks that it slowly rolls between. Eventually the first train collides with the second train, propelling over the correct hill to the appropriate output station. In effect, the whole system is a gigantic multiplication/addition table connected by tracks.

In a post on Imgur, Vos explained in detail how the calculator works when set up to multiply 3 and 6. “Since 3 and 6 are the fourth and seventh exit, the trains will collide on the fourth row of hills and the seventh hill from the left. The blue and purple tracks are for train 1 and the yellow and orange tracks are for train 2. Train 2 will smash into train 1 at high speed after which train 2 explodes, giving train 1 enough speed to make it over the hill.”

Speaking as someone who struggles with basic mathematics at the best of times, this seems like a fun (albeit incredibly inefficient) way to brush up on those multiplication tables. If you want to try it yourself, first you’ll need to grab OpenRCT2, then download the calculator here.

Here are a few more images of the calculator’s beautifully ridiculous design.

New information has emerged detailing Visceral Games’ aborted plans for what would have been Dead Space 4.

Speaking to Eurogamer, former Dead Space creative director Ben Wanat revealed Dead Space 4 would have placed greater emphasis on exploration and scavenging resources for survival, blending the previous games’ tightly scripted action with larger, more open areas that the player could explore freely.

"The notion was you were trying to survive day to day against infested ships, searching for a glimmer of life, scavenging supplies to keep your own little ship going, trying to find survivors," said Wanat, who is now creative director at Crystal Dynamics.

Dead Space 4 would have expanded upon the “Lost Flotilla” chapter of Dead Space 3, in which Isaac drifted through a graveyard of destroyed spaceships on the trail of an SOS signal. “The flotilla section in Dead Space 3 hinted at what non-linear gameplay could be, and I would have loved to go a lot deeper into that," Wanat said.

The concept was that the player would hop from ship to ship, seeking out equipment and battling the horde of Necromorphs that undoubtedly would have lurked inside. Wanat planned for these ships to be highly distinct from one another. “Imagine an entire roster of ship types, each with unique purposes, floor plans, and gameplay. Our original prototypes for the Dead Space 3 flotilla had some pretty wild setups that I wish we had been able to use.”

The article reveals a couple of other interesting details. Dead Space 4 likely wouldn’t have featured Isaac Clarke as the main character. There were no solid plans for who the player would have controlled, but Wanat’s preferred choice of protagonist was Ellie, a side-character featured in Dead Space 3.

In addition, Dead Space 4 would have introduced a new range of Necromorphs that were more dangerous in Zero-G environments, and reworked the controversial crafting element of the previous game, “I love that it gave players creativity in putting together their weapons, but it became very difficult to tune when you allowed players to break the primary and alt-fire pairings,” Wanat said.

Visceral of course never got the chance to put these ideas into action, having been added to EA’s own studio graveyard late last year. Nonetheless, the revelations form yet another chapter in the series’ fascinating history. Last year, Eurogamer also revealed that Visceral’s original vision for Dead Space 3 was very different from the final product, while PC Gamer contributor Mat Paget learned that the original Dead Space began life as System Shock 3.