As a fan of giving games with stupid names even sillier ones, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice has me stumped. Stumped in name and stumped in-game, where a big drunk man with a sword and poison grog keeps slamming me into the ground until I’ve got a good idea how Loki felt in that scene from The Avengers.
Speedrunner “Danflesh111” is not stumped. He’s beaten the game in 52 minutes. Of course he has.
There is an alien bird in front of me, and it is adorable. It s all pupils and cuteness, a squeaking, big-eyed blob snuffling happily away at my feet. Or rather at the feet of Alex Hutchinson. He’s the creative director of Journey To The Savage Planet, and he’s guiding me through his new studio’s “optimistic and colourful” sci-fi exploration game. It’s about finding a new colony for humanity. About setting off on “a purely positive mission to get out there and find something for people.”
Hutchinson kicks the bird into the maw of a carnivorous plant, then cackles as the sated beast retracts to open up a new path. You don’t always need to visit other planets to find savagery.
Little Big Adventure 2 (which went by the only slightly better name of Twinsen’s Odyssey in the US) was a follow-up to the previous alien action-adventure I’ve already talked about. But this time it’s in 3D. If there’s any lesson to take away from this, it’s that fixed camera angles do not work in 3D, outside of horror games. I recently revisited it and it’s arguably a decent sequel, but with that huge camera-based caveat.
Ninjas are the new hotness again and Cyber Shadow is the latest to remind us that the shinobi mask/scarf combo never goes out of style, if you’re a ninja. I’ve been following the development of this one for a while. It’s developed by one-man studio Mechanical Head with some musical help from chiptune maestro Enrique ‘Pentadrangle‘ Martin. It’s a very Ninja Gaiden-ish (NES) platformer starring a high-tech ninja in a world overrun by robot monsters. I clearly wasn’t the only one impressed by the game so far, as Shovel Knight crew Yacht Club have stepped up to publish it. Below, the debut trailer.
The Division 2 is a big game, taking most folks around thirty hours of looting and shooting before you even meet its fourth set of ‘endgame’ villains. Next Friday’s big update on April 5th will give players even more to chew on for free, especially those who have worked their way up through the World Tiers battling Black Tusk forces. Those who have looted and levelled all the way up to the end of World Tier 4 will soon have the chance to storm the home of the invading techno-mercenaries – the new Tidal Basin stronghold – and progress to Tier 5 with even more invaded missions.
Her Story was an interesting experiment in FMV sleuthing, and writer Sam Barlow’s followup Telling Lies looks like the next step for the format. Players are asked to pick through four people’s lives through stolen and secretly recorded videos, and unravel the truth behind a “shocking incident” linking them all, plus an oddly specific “96 small lies” along the way. Developers Furious Bee have roped in a cast of professional actors for this ambitious mystery, who you can get a peek at in the debut trailer below.
A cybernetically-enhanced futurecop is on the trail of several strange murders in Whispers Of A Machine, an adventure game collaboration between Kathy Rain creator Joel H st and The Samaritan Paradox maker Petter Ljungqvis. It’ll launch on April 17th, publishers Raw Fury announced today, which is doubly welcome news because I’d entirely forgotten about it since it was announced two years ago despite enjoying Kathy Rain. Solving futuremurder with technobits and, frankly, a copy of my haircut circa 2013? I’m in.
Co-op Nazi-mangling spinoff Wolfenstein: Youngblood launches on July 26th, just before my birthday. It looks to be a gift that literally keeps giving, too; the Deluxe edition comes with a ‘Buddy Pass’, so you can invite a special someone to join you on your power-armoured rampage. Set some years after Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus, it casts one or two players as BJ Blazkowicz and Anya’s twin daughters, now old enough to hunt Nazis for themselves with the aid of matching super-suits. Check out the debut trailer below, featuring Carpenter Brut’s appropriately titled Turbo Killer.
If Overwatch slash fiction existed [it obviously does – ed.]>, and there were posited romances between Junkrat and Roadhog [there are so many – ed.]>, then their lovechild [I believe that would be “mpreg” – ed.]> would be Apex Legends newest character, Octane.
Masked, shrieking, obsessed with goo and stimulants, and sprinting on two metal legs after an explosion stole his flesh ones, Octane looks like he s burnt out on Burning Man and acts like a drug-obsessed Roadrunner. He s quick much quicker than most of the other characters in Respawn s first-person Battle Royale thanks to a suite of syringes that he can jam into his chest in order to get a six second speed boost.
If the recent months of Epic Games hot takes and flamewars hadn’t given you at least an inkling that Epic are the gods of hellfire and they bring us fire, they’re now flooding the world with lava. Fortnite Battle Royale today launched its new ‘The Floor Is Lava’ event mode, which is a bit like that childhood favourite game except the lava is real and it is slowly rising higher and higher, drowning the land as the circle closes in. Soon, everyone will be forced into something something [remember to come back and finish a ha-ha-hilarious joke about removing choice which SLYLY can also be read as a comment on Epic Games store exclusives -ed.]>.