Do you remember those jelly-like toy octopuses you had when you were a kid, which you throw at a window or wall? They’d half-stick/half-walk their way down the surface, their legs glooping on and off as they rolled in a semi-controlled fall. That’s what the character in the ridiculously delightful Pikuniku most immediately reminds me of. It’s just the way he walks. It’s the most adorable thing there is. And he kicks too.

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Wednesday, January 23 2019 will be a day remembered in infamy. The day that the human race committed, inexorably, to self-destruction. The day that cardsy-roguey titan Slay The Spire left early access and got itself a full release. Such a lovely game, such a lovely game. You can check it out any time you like, but you can never Save & Quit.

And so I bring you these words as a dual warning: 1) BEWARE OF THE INCREDIBLE VIDEOGAME AND THE TERRIBLE THINGS IT WILL DO TO YOU 2) the price is due to be raised at any point between now and the 23rd, so get in quick. (Except don’t, because it will destroy you>).

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I’d missed that 2016’s first-person spooker Layers Of Fear was getting a sequel but: oh, it is. No, not Observer, the ace cyberspooky game that developers Bloober Team made next, an actual sequel with a number and everything. Layers Of Fear 2 is its name, and wandering a spooky boat telling the tale of a suffering actor is its game. They’ve even got a proper fancy actor to narrate this terrible tale, Tony Todd, who you might know as the Candyman or Worf’s brother off Star Trek. Here, hear his ace voice in this new trailer.

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You may have noticed I’ve written a fair few words about Nvidia’s new RTX 2060 this week. It’s a good graphics card and I like it a lot. If it had existed three years ago when I wanted to get Matthew a graphics card for Christmas that could play The Witcher III at 60fps at 1440p on max settings, I probably would have bought it instead of the GTX 1070 I ended up getting instead because it seemed like the best compromise at the time.

Of course, the only way to tell if a graphics card is any good is to play some games with it. Specifically, the same three-odd minutes of said games over and over and over again so you end up with a uniform set of data you can use to compare and contrast across a wide variety of cards, resolutions and graphics settings. And let me tell you, you start to notice some really odd things when you’ve played the same 90 seconds for the 1800th time in a row.

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Don’t be scared. It’s OK. I’ve got you. Hold my hand. Tighter. Come on. We can do this together. You and me. Lets… Steam Chart.

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“Make something that makes something”, goes the tagline for Procjam. It’s an annual game(ish) jam that invites designers to come up with a procedurally generated something> – but those projects aren’t the only wonders it spawns.

Every year also sees a new edition of Seeds, a companion zine where participants are invited to explain what they’ve done. It’s also open to essays on any AI-related topic, and 2018’s crop was strong.

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Last time on the BoC: Expedition leader Lorbam shepherded her dwarves to the Jungle of Hides, where they spent the spring digging out a home in a lush valley. Rakust the lumberjack got his leg bruted by a tree, and Imush the craftsdwarf got extremely excited about bins. >

Author s disclaimer: Once again, things get pretty weird here. Accordingly, I should remind you that I m not truly the writer of this column: the game Dwarf Fortress is. And I have limited control over said game. Essentially, my role is to report on its decisions, and attempt to recognise patterns amidst the electric madness.

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Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege Year 4 edges ever closer, though there are currently no details on the operators that will be arriving this year. It seems like now is a good time to go over the 44 operators that are currently in the game, each one with different weapon load outs, gadgets they can bring along for the fight. They also have unique abilities they offer, essentially being their own class. Knowing their limitations and strengths is key to getting the most out of them and we’ll be looking at the various operators to see how they stack up today in this guide hub. We’ll be making recommendations about who to use if you’re new, as well as detailing which operators they have advantages over. (more…)

Pirates have once again proven themselves incapable of civil behaviour, as salty early access survival sandbox Atlas has been hit by ne’er-do-wells dropping terrible whales and other oddities all over the world – for the second time in a week. While Thursday’s whale of a time was down to a “compromised” admin account, according to developers Grapeshot Games, Sunday’s cetacearama was down to “a technical exploit” they say they’ve now closed. Once again, Grapeshot took all the official servers temporarily offline and rolled back the North American PvP servers to an earlier backup. Naughty pirates.

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It’s been almost three years since we all braved one last trip into the crumbling Kickstarter mines to drag System Shock back into the daylight. Night Dive’s modernised do-over of the proto-immersive sim has clearly suffered a few trials and tribulations during the protracted Remakening process, but I’m struck by how similar the latest video is to the relatively spanky demo build I played back in 2016.

But though the game would seem to have stayed the same, the same cannot be said of the lighting. It’s so glowy>. And foggy>. And delightfully menacing.

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