Supernatural ghost-hunting romp HellSign launched on Steam early access on Friday, reminding us that haunted houses aren’t just for Halloween. It’s an investigative RPG where, as a paranormal expert, you take on jobs for cash, finding clues in abandoned crimes scenes and getting junk flung at you by angry poltergeists. Take a gander at the launch trailer.

I’m not a great paranormal investigator, it turns out. Actually, I’m OK with the investigation bit, it’s the not getting killed by giant bugs part that I’ve been struggling with. There are different types of jobs, but as a novice with no reputation, I was clearing out nasty spiders and centipedes (of the gargantuan variety) and scouting haunted houses for clues with my trusty EMF device and blacklights. 

The lighting, visual distortions and audio all work hard to fray the nerves. I love an isometric horror game, and HellSign uses the perspective really well. You get this broad view that makes it easy to investigate and explore, but the darkness means that your field of view is limited to what your torch illuminates. Opening a door to a new room is always fraught with danger. For this brief moment, you can only see a tiny sliver of the room, illuminated by the opened doorway. It’s not until you take the plunge and actually walk into it that you’ll know if it’s empty or if some skittering nightmare is waiting for you. 

What I wouldn’t do for a target lock when the action kicks off. I’m not the quickest draw in the west, but I’m normally better than this. I can barely hit a giant spider. I’m far from the only one, judging from the Steam user reviews. The creepy crawlies are incredibly fast and equally hard to hit, which can be a bit frustrating when you’re still trying to get into the swing of things. There are lots of different weapons, so I might have to start using something a bit more forgiving. I should probably hunt down a shotgun. Judging by the skill trees and long list of tools, there are going to be a lot of ways to clear a home of supernatural monsters. 

Developer Ballistic Interactive is hoping to reach 1.0 in about a year, but only if things go according to plan. They never do. Right now, you can play one of three planned chapters, featuring 13 different monsters, three bosses and lots of very, very sweary Australians. HellSign is definitely the fastest a game has ever gone from zero to the c-word. 

Finally, after years of waiting, you’ll soon be able to conquer Crusader Kings 2’s medieval world as a duck. This might be the Holy Fury expansion’s single greatest feature, but you probably wouldn’t find it unless you were looking. Not into fowl? You can play as a dynasty of hedgehogs, cats, elephants and even dragons. One of my neighbouring counts is an egg. 

‘Animal Kingdom’ is a hidden setting for Holy Fury’s random maps. Instead of playing on the historical map, you can play around with a list of settings and have the game generate something new. The geography stays the same, but entirely new kingdoms, religions and characters are summoned into existence. They’re all human, however. 

When you’re putting together your new world, you can pick between historical or random cultures, and it looks like that’s all. Keep clicking, however, even if it looks like you’re just seeing the same two options, and eventually you’ll find the easter egg. I say eventually, but really it’s just a few more clicks. Et voila! A world populated by aristocratic beasites, as well as humans living alongside them. 

As King Darkwing, I ruled a large—but not the largest—kingdom of waterfowl in what is, in our reality, Central Europe. Things were a little tense for a while since my neighbour was a Holy Roman Empire analogue that was ruled by dragons. I didn’t fancy my chances in a war, so I married off my daughter, also a duck, to a scaly duke. There was a bit of strife within the kingdom itself, too, because it turns out that not all ducks follow the same religion.

Most the ducks, myself included, logically worshipped The Sky and followed the rules from The Books of Blessed Virtues, but there were also some loons who worshipped The Moon, of all things, and had their own holy text, The Hallowed Manuscript. I’m in the process of explaining why they are wrong and we are right. Mostly with swords. All of these religions are randomly generated. 

So Crusader Kings 2 is Redwall now, I guess. I love it. 

Holy Fury is due out on November 13. 

This story was originally published in February of 2013.

I love my Skyrim wife, Mjoll the Lioness. She carries my spare gear with no complaint, she never runs out of arrows, and she doesn't mind accompanying me when I murder a bunch of farmers because I can't find a common axe. However, I've just informed her I don't want her following me any longer. I've been playing the Dragonborn expansion pack for Skyrim, and I want to try out (and write a column about) the new followers it offers.

Mjoll seems a bit crestfallen, but tells me she'll be in Riften should I need her again. As she walks away, however, a thought occurs to me. If we were currently in Skyrim, she could just walk to Riften, but we're not: we're on the island of Solstheim, a completely different continent where the new Dragonborn content takes place. How, exactly, is Mjoll going to get back to Riften? My original column idea is instantly forgotten as Braul the Easily Distracted Orc decides to investigate this incredibly important mystery.

The only way I can travel between Skyrim and Solstheim is by paying a ship captain to ferry me between the cities of Raven Rock (in Solstheim) and Windhelm. Is Mjoll capable of doing that? If she's not, how will she get off the continent? Also, what happens in general when you brush off a follower? Do they really remain persistent in the world for their entire journey back to their home city, or does the game just pluck them up and drop them off once they've walked out of sight? I decide I'll find out by simply not letting Mjoll walk out of sight. I'll follow her stealthily (or as stealthily as a giant orc clad in Daedric armor can) and see how she gets to Riften first-hand.

Technically, we're not even on the island of Solstheim at the moment. We're on another island off the coast of the island of Solstheim. I swam over to to this little island a minute ago because I wanted to see if anything lived on it. (Nothing does. Anymore.) Now, as I watch, Mjoll strides into the water, headed for Solstheim. I follow, swimming at a careful distance.

First observation: she is an incredibly slow swimmer. Second observation: she is doing her incredibly slow swimming along the very bottom of the channel, which is making her even slower. Like all gifted detectives, I start drowning almost immediately. After coming up for air and healing myself, I dive back down and realize I've completely lost her. A minute after deciding I won't let her out of my sight, I've let her out of my sight. Did the game already wink her out of existence already and plop her back in Riften, or is she still paddling around somewhere?

I swim across the channel and stand around on the main island for a bit to see if Mjoll will actually emerge from the water at some point. A few minutes later, to my surprise, I spot her to the east of me, still swimming. She eventually climbs onto land and begins walking in the direction of Raven Rock, far to the southeast. I take up a position about twenty yards behind her, and grimly prepare to spend the next couple days staring at her back.

As the sun slowly wheels across the sky, Mjoll slowly stalks across Solstheim, passing through a town, over a bridge, through a mountain pass, across a couple corpses, and along the steps of an ancient temple strewn with dragon skeletons, not showing much interest in any of it. It's dusk and we've crossed half the island before any danger presents itself.

If firing my loyal wife, making her walk home from a foreign country, and spying on her all day doesn't make me sound like a terrible husband, this probably will: I decide not to help her fight off the various threats that begin to appear. As anyone who has spent time in Skyrim knows, simply walking near an NPC will cause them to stop in their tracks and talk to you. If the NPC is walking somewhere, they will sometimes even walk off in a different direction than they were headed before they stopped to chat. I'm trying to avoid even casual interaction with Mjoll, because I don't want to muck up whatever travel plans she has. See, I'm doing this for science, and not because I'm a horrible uncaring jerk.

So, when she's attacked by some ash hoppers (giant crickets found in Solstheim), I watch her kill them. When a Burnt Spriggan sets her on fire, I watch as she hacks it into charred lumber. Further down the road, an angry wood elf conjures up a ghost wolf and some sort of elemental guardian, and I watch as she has considerable trouble dispatching the latter. An hour later, she comes across an Ice Wizard and a Fire Wizard, who are going toe-to-toe in an attempt to answer the eternal question: which is mightier, ice or fire? Mjoll answers the question for them, and Mjoll's answer is Mjoll .

It's the middle of the night when Mjoll finally reaches Raven Rock. She strolls to the docks and climbs aboard the ship I use when I need to travel between Skyrim and Solstheim. She doesn't speak to the captain, she simply walks across the deck, appears to reach out and touch a barrel... and then fades from sight.

Okay! I guess that's how NPCs handle cross-continental travel: magic barrel-poking. Question answered. Though... now I'm kind of curious if I can catch up to her in Skyrim. I pay the captain to take me to Windhelm, but when I arrive I don't see Mjoll anywhere. Maybe now the game has transported her to Riften? If not, where would she have gone? South, I guess. I jump into the icy river to see if she's paddling sluggishly around near the bottom, but I can't see much, so I run up the bank on the opposite side. There's a female NPC walking around near the bridge that's south of Riften, but it's not my wife.

I run around a bit more, and eventually spot a figure walking across another bridge, off in the distance, headed west. It's her! For some reason, she's taken off her ebony armor and cult mask and is instead clothed in her original duds. Weird. On the other hand, cool! I found her! Now to continue following her for days like a bizarre creep. I also can't help but notice she's not walking in the direction of Riften. She seems to be heading west and soon crosses a river to head north, aiming for Dawnstar. Why would she be going there?

I'm puzzling over this when a dragon rudely lands right in front of me and starts turning me into a popsicle. Come on, stupid dragon, I'm trying to keep a low profile while I stalk my wife. A couple hacks from my enchanted battleaxe and it's dead. Mjoll calmly strolls right through the middle of the disintegrating dragon, and then of course there's the usual pompous noisy business as I devour the dragon's soul, so I think a low profile might be out the window at this point. At least she didn't stop to talk to me.

As I clump after her through the night, periodically watching her get into pitched battles with marauders and murderers, it occurs to me that perhaps I should not be standing around, twiddling my gauntleted thumbs, while she has to repeatedly fight for her life. Maybe I can help, without being too obvious about it, by going out on point and handling anything threatening before it reaches her. Also, if she has to continuously stop to fight every man and monster that comes roaring out of the underbrush, this trip is going to take forever.

I skirt around her and sprint ahead along the route she's taking, looking for danger to de-dangerize. A snowy sabre cat leaps out at me, giving me a good chance to try out the new Bend Will shout I learned in the Dragonborn content, which lets you tame dragons but can also pacify other hostile creatures. When Mjoll finally catches up, all she sees is a random guy dressed exactly like her husband with a peaceful giant tiger monster sitting next to him. Once she's walked by, I kill the cat (the shout's effects don't last terribly long), and sprint ahead again, looking for more threats.

The morning comes, and Mjoll continues her uninterrupted stroll, perhaps curious about at all the fresh corpses now littering the road ahead of her. She walks past several dead sabre cats, a couple dead wolves, two dead frost trolls, a beheaded skooma dealer, and a living giant frost spider oddly indifferent to her presence, almost as if someone had shrieked magical will-bending dragon curses in its face.

There's an even more unusual sight as she reaches the top of a hill: someone dressed like her husband, lying on the ground, completely paralyzed. Seems he maybe got a little bored waiting for her, and maybe decided to pass the time by eating some of his alchemical ingredients to determine their effects, and one ingredient from Solstheim, Netch Jelly, maybe has paralyzation properties, and so he maybe keeled over onto his back like a big dumb statue. Maybe . As she passes his stiff body, he clambers to his feet, looks at her, and then races off into the trees. Whoever he is.

A little further ahead, I spot a wolf and a horse fighting to the death. Naturally, I side with the horse, and I'm surprised to discover that the horse turns out to be my actual, owned horse, who I haven't seen in months. I have no idea what he's doing out here, but it seems like the whole Braul family is back together for this dysfunctional roadtrip. Speaking of dysfunctional, every time I dismount to kill something, my horse starts walking away, so I have to spend twice as much time chasing him down. Eventually, I just let him leave to wherever he's going. I don't have time for horse-following, I'm busy wife-following.

Night is falling again as we approach Solitude, where I've remembered I own a home, which I assume is where Mjoll is actually headed instead of Riften or Dawnstar. It also appears she's going to be doing some swimming again, since she's approaching it from across the bay. She walks into the water and disappears, and I follow, though I almost immediately lose sight of her. Then, from behind me, I hear her angrily shouting "This ends now!" I swim back and pop out of the water, only to find her standing near the shore, aiming a bow at me. Jeez! What the heck did I do, besides creepily follow you around for days and almost let you die several times?

Turns out, she's actually attacking (and verbally threatening) some slaughterfish that swam too close for her liking. I begin bellowing at swinging my axe as well, before realizing the fish are a good twenty feet away and I'm just chopping air. Mjoll quickly kills all three fish at range, walks past me wordlessly, and starts paddling across the bay. I haven't felt that stupid since, well, yesterday, when I paralyzed myself in front of her.

Emerging on the far bank, I realize I'm not even sure how to walk into Solitude, since I generally opt to poke it on my map and materialize inside it. Mjoll knows, though. She climbs through a pass and finds a door built into the rock that I didn't know was there. A circular staircase leads to a tunnel, the tunnel leads to the streets of Solitude, and the streets lead to the back door of our home (I also had no idea we had a back door.)

I walk up to Mjoll in our dining room. "How nice to see you again," she says sweetly, as if it's been days since she's seen me. As if she didn't just see me swinging my axe impotently at fish that were nowhere near me. As if she didn't see me repeatedly chasing my stupid horse all over Skyrim. As if she didn't see me chow down on handful of jelly and keel over like a stroke victim. That's tact.

I know I originally set out to write about the new followers in Dragonborn, but with a wife like Mjoll, why would I ever need another?

Valve has condemned the "damaging" use of racist insults by Dota 2 pros and warned teams that they need to dish out "strong punishments" to any future offenders.

It follows two incidents of Dota 2 pros using racist taunts against Chinese teams. The first, as noted on ResetEra, involved Filipino player Andrei "skem" Ong. His team compLexity Gaming said they had issued skem with a "formal reprimand, as well as a maximum fine" for the "inappropriate comment", which was made earlier this month.

Following another pro using the same racial taunt a few days later—this time Carlo “Kuku” Palad of TNC Pro Team—Dota 2 was review bombed on Steam, with most of the negative reviews citing the lack of proper punishment for both skem and Kuku. On November 7 and 8 combined, the game received nearly 4,000 negative reviews.

On Friday, Chinese pro player and coach Xu "BurNIng" Zhilei shared an email about the incidents that appeared to be from Valve's Erik Johnson. In the email exchange, translated by Reddit user WhoIsEarthshaker, Johnson said the pro players' comments were "very offensive and inappropriate", and that Valve would step in if a pro player that made racist comments was not punished by their team. It would also be contacting TNC regarding Kuku's comments, he said.

He did not respond directly to BurNing's call for "clear rules" governing punishments for racist launguage. 

Valve did, however, write a post on the Dota 2 blog yesterday in which it said that racist language between pro players "is really damaging to the entire Dota community.

"It pits fans against each other, belittles and demeans entire groups and makes them feel like they are not as important. Going forward, we expect all teams who participate in our tournaments to hold its players accountable, and be prepared to follow up with strong punishments when players represent Dota and its community poorly."

Valve did not clarify what would happen if teams did not dish out "strong punishments" for racist abuse, or say what it thought constituted a strong punishment. It continued:

"We’ve always had an approach of letting the players be themselves, and to express themselves freely. That’s how it’s always been for a long time. However, we also expect pro players to understand that they represent the Dota community regardless of where they are. Words carry a lot of meaning. 

"Some people may not agree or understand why certain words are harmful, but it doesn’t make it any less so to those on the receiving end. The language used by multiple players over the last week has caused many of our fans a lot of pain and is not behavior that we condone."

You can read Valve's full statement here.

Thanks, Eurogamer.

A pre-release preview tournament for Valve's CCG Artifact is running on SteamTV this weekend, and no doubt anyone watching will be itching to get their hands on their own deck. Online deck builders, such as this one, have already started popping up, letting players tweak their card combinations—and now Valve has released tools that will make it easy for players to import any decks they've built online straight into the game.

The developer has released a CardSet WebAPI that will allow third-party Artifact sites to pull card images and text straight onto a web page, as well as deck code API, which will make it easier to share codes generated for customised decks. You'll be able to copy and paste those codes directly into Artifact to pull the cards into the game, or view your deck in Valve's online deck viewer, it said.

Valve said the tools will help players "theorycraft new ideas"—and I don't doubt some people will spend hours upon end agonising over card choices before they even launch the game.

Artifact is due on November 28. You can read Tim's impressions here, and Jody's deep dive into how it'll change the card game scene here.

The developer of Dead Cells, one of our highest reviewed games of 2018 so far, has added custom dungeon runs and a massive balancing update to its alpha branch. 

The changes—which include both weapon tweaks and overhauls of entire features, such as the way level scaling works—will remain in alpha "for quite some time" so that the team can make adjustments with community input, Motion Twin said.

Custom games, announced in September, are probably the biggest single addition. They let you change the loot table to ban certain weapons, choose your starting gear and apply gameplay modifiers or timer settings. 

In another major change, mobs will no longer auto-scale to your level: their difficulty is fixed, which means "you'll have to be really careful to be properly equipped before getting to late levels". It'll completely change the pace of play, and encourage proper planning and caution. 

Bosses no longer drop legendary items, and you'll instead get one weapon and one active skill. You can only get legendary items as random loot in the world, or if you poke your head in a challenge door that appears after you defeat a boss. Walking through these doors will trigger another boss fight, and if you kill them without taking damage they'll drop legendary gear.

Cooldown reduction has also been rethought—mutations that granted automatic reduction have been axed, and replaced with mutations that will reduce cooldown when you perform a specific action, such as killing enemies or parrying. 

If you're interested, you should really browse through the full patch notes, which contain around 90 tweaks to specific skills, weapons and items. It'll fix plenty of bugs that have been flagged since the full release in August, too, and you can expect lots of graphics and UI tweaks.

The frozen wasteland of Orb Vallis is a dramatic improvement over Warframe’s last open-world area. Not only is it bigger, but it's packed with far more interesting things to do, too. If I get bored of randomized missions, I can whittle away the hours catching robotic fish or exploring ancient cave systems looking for rare minerals. Better yet, I can grab my trusty tranq rifle and head out into the wilds to track the local (and adorable) wildlife that roam around this terraformed slice of Venus. Or I can just hop on my cool new hoverboard and practice grinding rails while avoiding local patrols of Corpus troops. There's a lot of great stuff in the Fortuna update, and I want nothing more than to just binge on it.

But Warframe doesn't want me to do that, and that's supremely frustrating.

Fortuna, which launched just yesterday, is structurally similar to Warframe's previous open-world expansion, The Plains of Eidolon. Intrepid players can venture to Venus and, after a lengthy introductory quest, are then set loose with nearly half a dozen activities they can invest time and resources into. The problem is that most of these activities tie into Warframe's Syndicate system, which doesn't function all that differently from the reputation grind you'd find in games like World of Warcraft or Destiny 2, except for one major restriction: You can only earn a certain amount of reputation points in a day. In World of Warcraft, that's not a big deal, but the way reputation works in Warframe ends up limiting what I can do each day in a very annoying way.

Come back tomorrow, Tenno 

Just about everything in Fortuna is centered around the Solaris United Syndicate. As I help various people around town, I earn 'standing' with this band of half-human rebels. Earn enough and I can rank up to unlock more valuable items from shops. But Solaris United standing isn't just points that fill up a meter to unlock new stuff. It's the currency that I spend to buy that stuff, too. It'd be like if, in a normal RPG, I could spend my experience points on a new set of armor. In Fortuna, though, just about every meaningful activity is locked behind Solaris United standing. Fishing, mining, animal conservation, gun crafting—all of these things require me to spend some amount of Solaris United standing to access them. 

What's so frustrating, though, is that I can only earn so much standing per day, and it's really not that much. Though Warframe doesn't have typical levels like a normal RPG, it does have a system called Mastery Rank that's a kind of rough approximation of your power as a player. Leveling up your Mastery Rank unlocks more powerful weapons and cooler quests, but it also has secondary effects like increasing how much standing you can earn with a given Syndicate each day. After a hundred hours or so, I'm only Mastery Rank 9. That means I can earn 10,000 standing with Solaris United each day. That might sound like a decent chunk, but I quickly blew through that in an hour or so buying a few items and upgrading my rank.

Because I'm a newer Warframe player, I'm arbitrarily restricted from enjoying more of Fortuna on a daily basis. I haven't even had a chance to craft my own gun or build my own robot dog companion because I spent all my standing elsewhere. Meanwhile, veteran players who have a much higher cap on standing can, effectively, enjoy Fortuna for much longer each day than I'm allowed to. It makes sense that more serious players would have an advantage, but something is wrong when that advantage is just being able to continue having fun.

What's just as annoying is that part of the appeal of these side activities is that they, in turn, reward standing with Solaris United. So even if I go out and hunt animals or fish just for the sake of it—the features that I already paid Solaris United standing to unlock—I won't get any Solaris United standing because I've already maxed out for the day. There are other rewards to doing these activities, but it doesn't feel good knowing that I won't benefit fully. The message is clear: Come back tomorrow.

I understand the necessary evils of time gating in certain circumstances. As big as Fortuna is, if Digital Extremes let players gorge themselves on it they'd be complaining in a week that there was nothing left to do. It makes sense to place soft barriers that slowly diminish the returns of playing for more than a few hours each day. World of Warcraft does this by only offering so many daily quests, so players who binge eventually have to find something else to do in-game. But those daily quests are also just a small part of an expansion like Battle for Azeroth and they don't actively prevent me from experiencing more of it.

Warframe needs a system that's more generous, because the current limit on how much standing I can earn feels too strict and too stingy. Being a newer player already means I don't have access to as many cool toys and activities as veterans, but why limit my ability to benefit from the ones I do have? It's a shame because, for a free-to-play game, Warframe places very few restrictions on players. The few that it does, like this one, are frustrating. While I have no shortage of things I can do in other parts of Warframe, what I want to do is experience all the cool new features in this massive, exciting update. Why won't Warframe let me do that? 

Above you can watch the announcement trailer for Volcanoids, a first-person steampunk survival game due to hit Steam Early Access in January. On a volcanic island you'll have to survive eruptions and battle a mechanical race of enemies while crafting a sweet-looking steampunk home called a drillship that serves as a factory and armored mobile base. There will be co-op play and PVP as well.

According to the FAQ, you don't actually drive your mobile base around freestyle (unfortunately), but give it a location, at which point it folds itself up and drives or burrows you there on autopilot. It still looks pretty darn cool, and while your base is in transit you're free to occupy yourself with other tasks like crafting.

Volcanoids is currently taking signups for an alpha if you want to get in early.

The Quiet Man made a hell of an impression back in June with "the worst trailer at E3," and it more than lived up to that potential when it finally came out last week. Tyler, who played it so that you don't have to, described it as "a spectacular disaster," not just a bad game but a full-scale catastrophic failure whose existence is even more remarkable when you consider that it comes from a major, reputable publisher. 

But hey, maybe that's your thing, and if so, the new "Answered" update could be right up your alley. It adds all the sounds and subtitles that were missing—intentionally, as an artistic choice (that, like pretty much everything else, doesn't pan out)—from the game in its original release.   

"[The 'Answered' update] allows players to re-experience Dane’s journey to rescue the singer Lala with sound, voices and full subtitle support for the first time," Square Enix said. "This new experience will provide the final answers to the lingering mysteries of The Quiet Man and let players know the truth within this unique interactive experience." 

Producer Kensei Fujinaga was considerably (and literally) more poetic about it in a "letter" posted to The Quiet Man website, where he said the game would be "reborn" with the update. 

The story will bring light to the truth, and maybe even uproot the mystery that was thought to have been solvedas if to say, “I knew nothing at all…” 

The first version, that threw words away.The second version, that brought words back in.A story dramatically transformed.This is the completed experience. 

And so, with everyone, I want to ask this. 

Can we really be strong to say we do not need words, even if we have them? 

In a world overflowing with words, can we really find something beyond them? 

I'm not convinced that subtitles can fix overlong and overwrought cinematics, bad animation, wonky controls, and craptastic fight mechanics, but hey, I'm willing to give it a shot. Which is to say, I'm willing to try talking Tyler into doing it. I'm sure you'll hear about it if he does.

Last week's Wild Hunter update to the online survival game Scum added bow and arrow skills, new animals to use them on, new musical instruments, and user-definable dongs. Amusingly, they weren't purely cosmetic: embiggening your wang requires the use of attribute points that could otherwise be put toward more useful characteristics, or you could shrink it up in exchange for a boost to your brain or biceps. 

As sometimes happens with such complex, interlocking systems, the rollout didn't go perfectly smoothly. Because of that, Gamepires released a hotfix today aimed at addressing some of the most pressing issues, including: 

• Bug fix where penis would get bigger with each login
• Fixed a bug where urinating would lock hands and penis if interrupted
• Fixed a bug where it was possible to increase penis size without it affecting other attributes

There are other, less phallus-focused (and phunny) changes, of course, including visual improvements and tweaks like decreased candle heat radius and increased sodium loss while urinating, and a wider frequency range for musical instruments. There's also a new "participation prize" of ten fame points for prisoners who stay in  game events until they're over, and new administrator commands that enable weather effects, visual bullet trajectories, and improved drone access.

The full rundown of Scum's dong nerf hotfix is available on Steam.