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Hidden role games are normally about looking deep into your friend’s eyeballs, then calling them on their bullshit. Town Of Salem is an online hidden role game with no friends or eyeballs, and a whole load of bullshit.
Here’s a double giveaway to snap up now before it disappears early tomorrow. Available until 2pm GMT on Wednesday are a pair of good games that couldn’t be more different – Sins Of A Solar Empire: Rebellion by Ironclad Games is – depending on how you look at it – a mega-scale space RTS or a small, real-time 4X strategy game. Geneshift by Nik Nak Studios is a multiplayer (with bots) bit of knockabout fun inspired by the rather cyberpunk Grand Theft Auto 2. Both are free and if you snag them on Steam here and here now, you can keep them forever.
Warhammer 40,000: Mechanicus was one of my more pleasant surprises this year. While held back by being a bit easy and buggy, it was still one of the most creative and charming 40k games released in ages, if not ever. Today’s ‘Tiresus patch’, out now and noted here, goes a long way to hammering out the kinks in Bulwark Studios’s game of tactical techno-monk versus alien terminator mummy combat. Bugs have been squished, and while still a bit easy (difficulty options are planned), steamrolling the Necron is harder now. Arguably more important, they’ve added another seven hidden missions and a new boss battle to the game.
Home Alone’s idiot burglars – or at least a pair of very similar bumbling thieves with legally distinct surnames – are on Santa’s naughty list, and they’re Agent 47’s target in Hitman 2‘s first Christmas update. While largely a repeat of the previous game’s Holiday Hoarders mission, set in a remixed Paris map, it’s been polished up and remastered to Hitman 2 spec along with a bundle of challenges to permanently unlock a Santa costume. Also included is a bundle of new profession-themed Featured Contracts, and a slew of bugfixes. There’s a trailer under the tree below.
Super-stylish platform hack n’ slasher Bladed Fury is out now. Heavily inspired by Muramasa: The Demon Blade on Wii and undoubtedly cribbing a bit of Vanillaware’s painterly art-style, it’s a gorgeous bit of Chinese mythological stabbery. A sword-swinging princess is accused of murdering her father, so goes on a quest to address this injustice by stabbing everything in her path instead, including all manner of demons, ghosts and skellingtons. I’ve really enjoyed what I’ve played of it so far and NEXT Studios have launched it at budget price. Check out the trailer below.
We all know the coming of Christmas means the goose is getting fat, but what about the chicken? She’s warm and cosy, as Counter-Strike: Global Offensive has kicked off its festivities by giving chickens wee Christmas jumpers. These jumpers are #2 on the definitive ranking of CS:GO chicken costumes so that’s certainly something to celebrate. Other Christmas festivities include piles of snowballs in spawn points to lob at folks, the return of Militia’s snowy variant, giftwrapped C4, and a new coin trinket for veterans who’ve been Counter-Striking for ten years. But mostly it’s about the chickens.
Nvidia’s performance-boosting DLSS tech arrived in Final Fantasy XV last week, allowing all three people who’ve actually bought themselves one of Nvidia’s new Turing RTX cards to finally start making use of what makes the GeForce RTX 2070, RTX 2080 and RTX 2080Ti so special. I’m still a bit miffed this fancy, AI-driven edge-smoothening magic only works at 4K at the moment, thereby making it even more niche and harder to use than FFVII’s Knights of the Round summon (a little joke for you there) but I do realise that this is the resolution that arguably needs it most. And after running some tests on the RTX 2080, the results are pretty encouraging.
Warframe‘s space-travel update might not be here until the new year, but Digital Extremes are ending 2018 with a bang and a very large boss to fight. Fleshing out the frozen Venusian landscape introduced in the Fortuna expansion, today’s update – The Profit-Taker – finally lets players take on the giant robot spider seen in Fortuna’s introductory missions. There’s also a new Warframe (reluctant warrior-monk Baruuk), some new weapons and the unlockable ability to call down heavy anti-spacecraft Archwing guns for use on foot. The patch notes are here, and a trailer below.
CardLife is an open world crafting game that, like many examples of the genre, has a hunger mechanic. That means your little cardboard avatar is cursed with the need to eat to survive, or suffer the relatively minor indignity of respawning nearby with none of their stuff.
We all know that robots eat nuts and bolts from cereal bowls, that s basic science. But if we re to accept that a creature made of corrugated cardboard (and therefore not burdened by a gastrointestinal tract) even has> an appetite, what do you suppose that little cardboard man would eat? My guess would be various bits of coloured crepe paper and packing peanuts (perhaps with those little silica gel sachets for dessert) but in CardLife that s not on the menu. No, instead you eat raw meat. To find a meal you must stalk through the woods like a papery Liam Neeson, punch a wolf to death with your bare, cardboard hands and then feast on the incongruous hot flesh within.
“And since we’ve no place to go, let it snow, let it snow, let it snow” is a tad more grim in a post-apocalyptic world where everything we knew is frozen over and everyone we know may well freeze to death, but Frostpunk has still made space for Christmas. A little festivity can bring hope, after all, and mercy knows we’ll need it. That’s the possibility offered by a Dickensian new quest in ‘A Christmas Carol’, the survival strategy game’s new update released today by developers 11 Bit Studios.