>The first I ever saw of Eastshade was a single screenshot. In it, the sun stands high in the sky over a glittering river. Off in the distance, past the forest and its imposing trees, you can see what looks to be a city. Eastshade is full of such carefully designed landscapes: forests that invite you to saunter through them; buildings you just want to take a closer look at. Eastshade is a first person exploration game where every landscape looks like a potential work of art because that s the game. Whenever you feel like it you can pop down your easel and start painting. How does everything look this nice? How to explain that almost everyone you talk to is equally impressed by what they see?

Instead of busily overthinking what makes me react so strongly to what I see on screen in Eastshade, I decide to enlist a professional and pose my questions to Eastshade s lead developer Danny Weinbaum. He explains Eastshade s strong sense of place is deliberate, and the result of the difference between traditional game design, and his own point of view as someone with a background in environment design.

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Fans of To The Moon and Finding Paradise, rejoice: developers Freebird Games have announce-o-teased their new game. Though maybe don’t rejoice too much, because the new game is “a time-resetting thriller-mystery that involves a series of bloody murders”. That’s right, no more ethically questionable memory meddling until people believe they’ve fulfilled their dreams. Only murder now.

It’s called Imposter Factory, and a teaser trailer awaits below. “Teaser” being the operative word.

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Anthem’s best stuff comes in the form of both Masterwork and Legendary ranks. Each one gives a better output of damage and better inscriptions compared to the Epic gear, but they also come with an added bonus effect. These bonus effects can be quite hard to track, especially in-game, so we’ve compiled all of the Masterwork effects for the weapons, gear, and components in the game. We will also be ranking the Masterwork weapons in the game based on their effects.

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Nvidia plan to soon stop supporting 3D Vision, the 3D glasses system they introduced in 2009. The GeForce driver release in April will be the last to support 3D Vision, so folks who wish to keep using their goggs will need to stick to older drivers – which could suffer compatibility and performance problems in the future. 3D Vision created the appearance of physical depth in games by using special electrical spectacles in combination with certain monitors, working a bit like the stereoscopic 3D that was briefly popular in movies rather than yer modern face-enclosing VR goggles. I know no one who used it.

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Respawn Entertainment have vowed to improve the cheat-busting tech in Apex Legends, though it seems to be doing pretty well already considering they say they’ve banned over 355,000 accounts since launch five weeks ago. It’s good to see Titanfall’s free-to-play battle royale spin-off slam so many bans, as the low cost of entry on F2P games is like poo to a fly. In this powerful simile, cheaters are flies who eat poo. Also outside the metaphor they eat poo, irl. Respawn also plan to thwart ne’er-do-wells who join matches to spam ads during character selection then leave.

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Hahaha, I can’t believe you think the game you like is good! The game you like ISN’T good! Your liking the game you like makes you look just SO silly. Find out which games everyone else likes, and then start liking those games instead, with our handy Steam Charts guide.

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Anthem’s latest patch seems to have been dropped earlier than expected and makes some sweeping changes to the game, most notably addressing some more loot spawning issues, a few changes to respawn timers, and a few item balance changes to Masterwork/Legendary gear. To that end, we figured it would be good to have a summary of all the more relevant updates for Anthem, so in this guide we will be going over the most recent patch notes for Anthem, how they affect your builds, and other things to keep an eye out for.

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Remember when P.T. came out on the PS4 and everyone went wild for it, because Guillermo del Toro and Hideo Kojima had made the scariest thing ever? And then Konami cancelled Silent Hills and removed P.T. from the PlayStation store? Well, if you re hankering for a version of P.T. about an obsessive artist making a painting from bits of his dead wife, then boy, do I have a game for you! Yes, it s Layers Of Fear, the definitive ‘how-to’ for creatives who want to murder their loved ones and then rattle around their mansion for years, constantly haunted by their own memories.

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Sundays are for actually setting up those shelves I lied about a few weeks ago. And for reading the best writing about videogames from the past week.

On Kotaku, Gita Jackson wrote about writing about videogames and race. It’s an astonishingly calm, considerate reply to the commenters who crop up on any article that discuses anything to do with race. I’ve read so many words about hostile, bad faith commenters, but this is one of the only pieces I’ve seen that I think actually has a chance of getting through to some of them.

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Having solved the mystery of The Haunted Island, Grace Bruxner’s ace amphibious sleuth will return later this year. Bruxner has announced Frog Detective 2: The Case Of The Invisible Wizard, a spooky new case for our frogfriend to investigate in Warlock Woods. I adore her funny, friendly, and offbeat style (do check out The Fish Market and Alien Caseno for a free introduction) and am glad to see more of this frog.

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