Who remembers the Marble Blast games? Brilliant little 3D physics platformers, a bit like Super Monkey Ball but with a jump button, some clever power-ups and often non-linear levels. Marble It Up is a spiritual sequel from many of the original developers, now operating under their own namesake – ‘Marble It Up LLC’. It’s out now on PC today after a well-received debut on Switch. Today’s new incarnation includes a PC-exclusive level editor and Steam Workshop support to share your creations with the world. Roll on the launch trailer below.

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Below is a list of 30 Things Wot You Might Find In A School ( things is used here in its broadest possible sense). Entries have been stripped of vowels and had any inter-word spaces repositioned. For example, if The Bash Street Kids were present they might appear as THB SHST RTK DS. (more…)

How vexing. I’d planned to devote the lion’s share of today’s column to that portion of Veitikka’s debut title last month’s overwhelmingly approbatory preview-cum-review didn’t cover. Like many I was expecting this friendly top-down conflation of Close Combat, Combat Mission, and Command Ops to ship with something the preview code lacked. A campaign>.

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Some of us find there’s an appeal to minimalism. This applies to creatives, too; there are some that seek out limitations, forcing themselves to think outside the box and reevaluate what they have. The most extreme example of this in gaming is the makeshift medium of address bar games — games that are played entirely within a website’s URL.

These experimental games began popping up online over the last decade or so. They appeared after web designers started to create custom URL animations, and to program games that took place entirely within a site’s favicon. Naturally, it didn’t take long for imaginative minds to take the next step by creating interactive games that take place in the address bar.

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Delightful deck-building dungeon-crawler Slay The Spire has added a semi-secret fourth and final act in this week’s early access update. At long last, we’ll get to give that dastardly dungeon heart a proper kicking. You’ll need to make an extra effort to face the final boss, let alone defeat it, but I believe in you.

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Further trivialising the use of nuclear weapons in Fallout 76, canny players have made tools to bruce force decrypting its nuke launch codes. Players will still need to gather partial codes by defeating high-level enemies, collect keycards, then fight to the silo control room, but the description tools save a lot of time guessing at ciphers. Nukes are mostly useful in the online survival sandbox for irradiating areas so real big nasty monsters spawn for your raiding pleasure, and this helps people get to that faster. Which could be good or bad depending on how you feel about end-game challenges?

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Is it… is it here yet? Has Black Friday finally arrived (and does that mean I’m finally free of my deals shackles)? Alas, there’s still another week> to go until Black Friday proper (not you’d know it from all the bloomin’ Black Friday deals currently happening left, right and centre because people apparently can’t read a calendar any more), so we’ve still got another WHOLE SEVEN DAYS of pre-deal mayhem to get through before we can give our wallets a rest once and for all. Well, until you’ve done all your Christmas shopping as well, that is. It never ends!

Still, that means plenty of cheapy cheap things for me, your appointed deals herald, to shout about today (perhaps with a few muffled weeps mixed in if you listen closely), including some tasty graphics card deals, RAM and even a couple of gaming laptops. And of course there’s plenty of games to sink your teeth into as well, including discounts on Pillars of Eternity, Stellaris, Owlboy and a whole lot more. To the deals!

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The Room, as I once very wisely said, is the game Myst should have been. Astoundingly pretty graphics, impossible mechanisms and peculiar levers, switches and buttons, and so very many puzzles to solve, all set within a story so mysterious as to be close to impossible to fathom. Except in The Room’s series of games there’s a coherence, a delicacy of touch, and a far finer degree of craft, justifying why the four games have been such astonishing hits on mobile. And as with the first two games of the series, after an extremely long time The Room Three has made its way to PC. Almost three years this time. But it’s a three years spent, they say, rebuilding the entire game from the ground up to be in a PC’s super-hi-def graphicy magic.

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The people who made Mysterium want you to play it wrong. That’s not a problem with the original board game, as long as you don’t play with people who insist on adhering to the designer’s vision (hot tip: just don’t tell people about the extra faff and keep the timer tucked away in the box). PC players can’t be so picky.

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Blimey, there’s lots of RPGs with turn-based tactical combat around lately, and Druidstone: The Secret Of The Menhir Forest (from Ctrl Alt Ninja, some of the folks behind Legend Of Grimrock) looks especially interesting. It’s a story driven, party-scale isometric RPG with a focus on grid based combat, minus the statistical bloat common in the genre. The game was first announced back in April last year, although its final scope wasn’t quite clear back then. Now it’s set to launch in spring 2019, only a few months off. Take a peek at it in action in the trailer below.

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