It’s been three years since Night School Studio released its bewitching coming-of-age debut Oxenfree. Its next game, Afterparty, looks even stranger and more surreal. We meet Lola and Milo, two recently deceased best friends who wind up in Hell. Their only chance of escape? Beating the Devil and his horde of demons in a drinking contest.
Yes, you read that right. Satan has a taste for booze and demons like to party just as much as teenagers do. It sounds like Disneyland for burnouts, where lurid cocktails replace rainbows and monsters prowl the streets instead of cute animals. Fitting considering the inspiration that had been brewing for a number of months before development began.
“The core concept came from a series of conversations that Adam [Afterparty and Oxenfree writer] and I had while walking around a massive cemetery across the street from our office,” says Sean Krankel, co-founder of Night School Studio. “It’s where Michael Jackson, Walt Disney, Carrie Fisher, and Lucille Ball are buried, and we used to wander around the grounds to get our creative gears going. Weird, I know.”
At first Krankel and his team wanted to make a game about being in a bar “because bars in games and real life are pretty rad”. But they began to wonder, would you play as a bartender or a drinker? Well, of course a drinker. And would it take place in one bar or many? It had to be a pub crawl. And would you be trying to outdrink anyone? Who would be the craziest person to topple? In the graveyard it hit the two friends—Satan!
Yet Night School’s depiction of Hell is far from the traditional ones we’ve seen in art and literature, where a labyrinth of flames promises endless suffering for its eternal guests. Here it’s a modern cityscape of winding streets and grotty bars, brought to life in pops of romantic neon like the colours you find in bottles of strawberry liqueur and crystallised violets.
“We knew fairly early that we wanted to move past everyone’s stereotypical vision of Hell,” says Krankel. “We wanted to draw from a wider variety of cultural and geographical reference points, to create a new, nightlife-fuelled, hybrid underworld. So if an artist or writer wanted to have a district inspired by Shibuya, or another with cobblestone streets and cute pubs, let’s make room for it! We’re creating [our] own version of Hell, one that we can think of as distinctly Night School.”
One for the road
While the characters and dialogue options are very similar to Oxenfree, there are so many new features for you to look forward to. For example, every bar you visit in Hell sells a variety of drinks, and every drink unlocks new dialogue trees. Want to be flirty? Aggressive? Sloppy, funny? Afterparty’s bars are littered with options. While you’re at it you can play beer pong, dance, and take part in drinking minigames with the assorted demons you meet.
Yet the story still feels cut from the same cloth as Oxenfree. What is it about young people that resonate so strongly with Night School?
“Our games are inhabited by people who are hopefully very relatable, but dealing with circumstances that are wholly unfamiliar,” explains Krankel. “Being a teenager or in your early 20s is a magical, messy moment because huge pieces of your core personality are formed, yet so much of who you yearn to grow into is a mystery. So as you hack through all that stuff, you do it with friends. It’s a hazy, perfect window of time where love, trust, and personal goals are still malleable, and it makes for a great canvas for interactive stories.”
Originally released in August last year, Doom Remake 4 is a huge mod compilation for the original Doom that basically turns it into a modern first-person shooter. In addition to turning the old sprite-based items into full 3D (everything from objects to enemies), it introduces new HD textures with physically-based rendering, meaning surfaces will interact with lighting.
Meanwhile, enemy corpses disassemble (ie you can shoot them into bits) and weapons have 3D models, but otherwise the game is completely faithful to the original: no tweaks have been made to the maps, and the weapons function the same.
A new Experimental Edition of the mod was issued earlier today, adding a new texture lights script resulting in more impressive physically-based rendering (ie shinier and more responsive reflections). According to modder vasyan777, who oversees the mod, this new edition has been released separately because it's "quite resource hungry".
Whatever the case, it's definitely worth a look, even if you opt for the non-Experimental version. There's a video of the Experimental Edition in action below. Thanks to DSO Gaming for the heads up
Warning: This article contains major spoilers for Game of Thrones.
Last weekend, Game of Thrones fans were treated to its most climactic battle yet: The Battle of Winterfell. Called The Long Night, the episode saw a small army of men fight a winner-take-all battle against the Night King and his army of the dead. It was supposed to be a cathartic and dramatic end to one of the series' longest running story arcs, but for members of the Total War subreddit, that moment was ruined by the laughably stupid tactics employed by the Winterfell defenders.
After the episode aired, hundreds of Total War fans congregated in an reddit thread to play "armchair general" and critique the episode's ridiculous use of medieval tactics. Meanwhile, Total War YouTubers started pumping out videos using games like Total War: Warhammer 2 (which conveniently has an entire faction of undead)to replay the events of the episode. But while their own strategies differ greatly, there's one thing they can agree on: The tactics used in The Battle of Winterfell were beyond dumb.
In the video above, YouTuber 'milkandcookiesTW' offers an excellent breakdown of all the problems in the episode. Easily the most hated moment for Total War fans happened before the battle itself even began. After the sorceress Melissadre ignites the weapons of the Dothraki cavalry, they stupidly charge headfirst into an undead army that feels no fear, is enormously large, and completely concealed by the dark of night.
"What the fuck was that cavalry charge?" reads one of the comments in the thread. "You're facing a fragile enemy with no missiles, no spears and no cavalry of their own so you just decide to Leeroy Jenkins your only mounted guys. Alexander the Great is rolling in his grave."
That's just the beginning, though. Others are quick to point out how dumb it is to put your artillery beyond the confines of the walls, where they can quickly be overrun and destroyed. Similarly, the vast majority of the Winterfell army is also placed beyond the safety of a flaming palisade that ultimately ends up trapping a good number of them. And, as one redditor points out even the walls of Winterfell were barely defended, all but allowing the undead to quickly swarm and take them.
Even the Night King's own strategies has glaring holes in it: "Why is the night king attacking the castle from one side only? Why doesn't he flank the defenders? Why does he wait to resurrect the fallen?" asks redditor Emberwake.
Of course, these questions don't compare to the much bigger ones Game of Thrones fans are left with after that episode and this week's episode aired. But clearly Daenerys Targaryen and Jon Snow need to pick some better generals or their claim to the Iron Throne isn't going to mean much.
Heaven's Vault is a really good archaeological adventure game that "does a beautiful job of letting you unlock a language, and thus a dialogue of sorts, with the past, via a wonderfully engaging protagonist," as we said in our recent 88% review. It's available on Steam but not GOG, which in itself is not all that unusual: Lots of games are available on some storefronts and not others. Inkle's previous releases, the outstanding 80 Days, is on GOG, for instance, but the one before that, the also-excellent Sorcery!, is not.
But while its absence isn't remarkable in itself, what caught the eye of adventure game fans on Resetera and other online forums is the fact that it was submitted for consideration, but rejected by GOG.
"We can't get into specifics, but they gave reasons stemming from their experience playing an early build of the game and what they think their audience wants. Which was definitely disappointing—we had been hoping that GOG's adventure game audience would embrace Heaven's Vault, and reaching that audience can make a huge difference to whether or not small studios like ours survive," Inkle co-founder Joe Humfrey explained in an email. "But the game's doing pretty well on Steam, so no complaints there."
Specific player numbers aren't available but the critical success of Heaven's Vault is obviously a big plus, and the volume of activity on the Heaven's Vault Discord server suggests that a committed community has built up around it. And it may yet find the adventure game audience on GOG that it's so far missed, too: A rep said that, "seeing the general reception of the game by the community," it's going to give the game another look and possibly (I would guess likely) change its mind.
"This is nothing extraordinary, as we sometimes go back to games that were previously rejected and decide to release them on GOG after another review," the rep said. "Our curation is a human process, and we may miss a release that is interesting for gamers. But we’re not afraid of going back and changing decision if it really makes sense—after all GOG is built with gamers in mind and we’re doing it for them."
Inkle recently released an update to Heaven's Vault that improves the fast travel function and map interface, and makes "the usual collection of minor story fixes, typos, and tweaks."
If point-and-click adventures are your thing, or even if you're not sure but think that maybe they might be when you're in the proper mood, then you should probably pop over to Steam and pick up Kathy Rain, from the makers of the recent Whispers of a Machine, for free.
Kathy Rain tells the story of a hard-living journalist in the 1990s whose investigation into the mysterious circumstances surrounding her grandfather's death forces her to come to terms with her own troubled past. From the Steam listing:
"As she follows a trail of clues he left behind, questions emerge... What was Joseph Rain really looking for that night all those years ago? What turned him into a mere shell of a man, confined to a wheelchair? What secret did a suicidal young artist take with her to the grave, and why are so many people in Conwell Springs going mad? The truth is dark and sinister..."
It's well-regarded on both Metacritic and in Steam user reviews, and coming from the makers of Whispers of a Machine is a credit too: Whispers wasn't quite the 'big ideas' game it set out to be, but it works very well as an entertaining point-and-click detective story with a sci-fi twist. And hey, it's hard to go wrong at the price.
Kathy Rain is free, for keeps, until 10 am PT/1 pm ET on May 7.
With 64 players hacking and slashing across medieval battlefields, Mordhau is bloody, chaotic fun. But all those severed limbs and battlecries disguise what is one of the most nuanced melee combat systems ever devised in a game. If you go in mashing buttons and wantonly swinging your sword left and right, chances are the only head you'll see rolling is your own—and the unfortunate teammates who happen to get in your way. That's why we've rounded up some helpful Mordhau tips to get you started.
Learning to be a lord of war in Mordhau will take a lot of patience and some trial and error, but this guide breaks down some basic concepts and includes links to more in-depth reading material should you really want to study the blade. Further down, you'll also find some rapidfire tips of some systems you might not be aware of.
The most important Mordhau tips
Mordhau is not a hack-n-slash kind of game. If you want to survive, you're going to need to think carefully about your attacks while reacting quickly to your enemies'. And with a combat system as in-depth as this, you could spend hours pouring over guides to every little detail that goes with swinging a sword.
To start, though, complete the combat tutorial which walks through the basics of attacking, parrying, and feinting. It's a lot to take in, but starting out you should focus on these simple basics:
Practice morph attacks, with the simplest being an overhead slash into a stab. These attacks are great for baiting out an early parry, leaving your opponent vulnerable.
Practice parrying properly by turning your camera to follow the tip of the player's weapon. While some weapons have a wider angle of parrying, others are quite narrow. You should always be in the habit of parrying attacks this way, instead of just facing the enemy and holding the right mouse button. This becomes even more important if you're pressed up close with your enemy, as their swings will arc from either side beyond the range of your parry, forcing you to turn your camera to block them.
Once you're feeling more comfortable with the weight and timing of your weapons, I highly recommend reading this Steam guide that covers everything about Mordhau's combat in great depth. It's a fantastic resource to pore over as you continue to play.
Weapon ballistics are both amazing and frustrating
Mordhau's combat is governed by a robust physics simulation that is extremely fun to play with, but can also be frustrating. Most of it operates on basic logic: If a character has a shield on their back, you won't be able to shoot them with arrows from behind. But there are more nuanced interactions than that. Arrows and thrown weapons can be parried if timed perfectly, but you can even hit them out of the air with a well-placed swing. If someone does manage to stick you with a throwing axe, you can often see it lodged in your own body, allowing you to grab it and throw it back at them. Likewise, you can pluck throwing axes out of bodies of teammates or even enemies during combat.
Get used to your weapon being caught on players or the environment. In Mordhau, your weapon won't magically clip through the environment or other players, which means you have to always be conscious of how much space you have before attacking. A room with a low ceiling will block your overhead swings, for example. Likewise, be conscious of friendly players who are near you before you swing from side to side, as you're liable to hit them in the back and damage them.
Build your own class right away
Mordhau provides almost a dozen default classes that you can use from the beginning, each one fully kitted out in armor and weapons that you might not have yet unlocked. But once you've completed the tutorial and earned a few thousand gold, you should build your own fighter right away. Not only is Mordhau's armor and weapon customization extremely varied—offering a ton of options to customize your appearance and kit, but creating your own class unlocks options that aren't normally available to you, like perks.
Like armor and weapons, perks cost points, but their passive effects can be really helpful in combat. For new players, grabbing Friendly is worthwhile since that'll limit the damage you inadvertently do to your team (which will be a lot, at first). Fireproof is also valuable. Though it costs a lot, Bloodlust fully heals you after a melee kill, which can be extremely powerful if you can spare the extra points.
More importantly, building your own class lets you build a character perfectly tailored to your strengths and weaknesses. Plus, every class can benefit from secondary items like firebombs or medic bags which aren't available on most default classes.
Ping matters a lot
You can get away with a suboptimal ping in a lot of multiplayer games, but Mordhau is not one of them. Because its combat is so subtle, requiring you to instantly react to the slightest of cues or die, and because everything is handled server-side, you really need a strong network connection. Without one, your parries will always feel a second too late and a swing that looks like a miss will end up cleaving your arms straight off. It's frustrating.
In my experience, anything more than a 75 ping is going to start to impede your ability to fight effectively. Fortunately, Mordhau has official servers in eight regions, including three for just the US alone. Even better, there's a wide range of custom servers that can sometimes provide much more favorable network connections. If you find it hard to consistently get a match where your ping is 70 through matchmaking, try using the server browser to hone in on servers closer to you.
Other quick and simple Mordhau tips
Don't ignore medic bags that players drop on the ground. These bags have limited number of uses but can restore your health to full and are an invaluable resource for staying in a fight.
Try out your 'R' alternate grip for each weapon. Each weapon has a unique alternate grip that changes its stats in useful ways. Swords can be held by the blade to pummel enemies with the grip, while spears and longswords can be held to shorten their range but increase their damage or speed. Some single-handed weapon can be thrown by pressing 'R' too, so be careful.
Don't ignore the engineer class. This support class can barely fight, but it can build all sorts of extremely useful defensive structures like cover for archers or spikes that will instantly kill enemies and block off useful flanking routes.
Kicking open doors knocks down anyone on the other side. Make a proper entrance and get in a quick stab or two while they're trying to get up.
Use the mouse buttons for certain attacks. Though you can swing your weapon by angling the mouse in specific directions, there are also some handy shortcuts that you should use, too. For example, mouse wheel down will do an overhead slash, which makes morphing an overhead slash into a stab as easy as flicking the mouse wheel back then forward.
Think twice before attacking someone covered in blood. It's easy to mistake which team a player is on if they're covered in blood. The last thing you want to do is kill a friendly or get killed by someone you thought was one.
Ubisoft has confirmed that there's something new cooking in the world of Ghost Recon, and whatever it is will be revealed later this week. A rumor that began a few months ago picked up steam last week on the "official" Skell Technology website, in a promotion for an event called "Skellcon" that's scheduled to begin at 11:30 am PT/2:30 pm ET on May 9.
Ubisoft nailed that down to something slightly more specific (but still very vague) earlier today on Twitter.
The Skelltech website is "official" because Skell Technology doesn't actually exist: It's a tech company in the Tom Clancy game setting that makes a lot of the high-tech weapons and gear used by Ghost Recon, Fourth Echelon, and Rainbow. It also figures prominently in the new Ghost Recon Wildlands expansion Operation Oracle, in which a guy who really looks (and, I guess, sounds) like Jon Bernthal hooks up with the Ghost Recon team to recover a Skell engineer who's been captured by the Bolivian special operations unit Unidad.
Ubisoft hasn't offered any hints about what's coming in this big world premiere, nor, annoyingly, has it officially confirmed anywhere I've seen that this guy who is obviously Jon Bernthal is actually Jon Bernthal. So here's my baseless (but still pretty good, I think) working theory: The Ghost Recon angle is a bit of a misdirect, and the reveal will actually see Cole D. Walker—the maybe-Bernthal from Operation Oracle—transition from Ghost Team leader to (hold on to your hats) Splinter Cell.
Rumors of a new Splinter Cell are thin but persistent, and Bernthal's turn as The Punisher demonstrates that he'd be great in the role, if perhaps a bit noisier than his would-be predecessor. And as much as I hate to say it, Michael Ironside is not getting any younger. Replacing Ironside as Sam Fisher is clearly a dead end, but replacing Fisher entirely with a man of gravelly voice and violent impulses absolutely could.
So that's my bit of wild speculation for the day. We'll find out on May 9, which is just a few days away.
Medieval multiplayer combat game Mordhau has quickly become a massive hit, despite some launch-week server issues (in fact, the overwhelming popularity of Mordhau is part of what caused its server issues). But players aren't just hacking and slashing each other to death with swords and maces, they're also rocking out. One of the items in the game is a lute, which you can play by moving your mouse in various directions to strum different notes.
Or you can have a third-party program called Lutebot do it for you. Lutebot (with a bit of tweaking) can play just about anything you can find in MIDI form, which is how I wound up running into battle playing Yakety Sax on my lute. You can see the video above (or here on YouTube).
It wasn't quite the inspirational, motivational battle hymn I'd hoped for, though considering the frenetic and largely uncoordinated battles that take place in Mordhau, it still seemed quite fitting. If Yakety Sax isn't your thing, below you can see a guy rocking out to Doom's E1M1 "At Doom's Gate" to the delight of a teammate.
See, Lutebot translates the musical notes from MIDI files into your character's directional movements and feeds them into Mordhau's console (which is why I can only stutter-step across the battlefield while strumming). It plays all the notes for you, in other words. The MIDI files can require some experimentation if there are multiple music tracks in the file, and you can play with them by turning them on and off in Lutebot's track filtering menu and seeing what works best.
If you're wondering how you too can annoy the hell out of friends and strangers alilke in Mordhau, start by downloading Lutebot here, and making sure you read the full description of how it works and what the various settings do. Then head here for a lengthy but useful tutorial on how to get it working, including some MIDI files you can test out which are listed in the video's description. Happy strumming.
Kotaku reports that employees at League of Legends developer Riot Games are preparing for a walkout this afternoon to protest the company's practice of forcing employee lawsuits into private arbitration, as well as what they consider an insufficient response to the problems which led to those lawsuits. The lawsuits came in the wake of last year's in-depth Kotaku report which exposed pervasive sexism at the studio.
Not all employees are going to take part in the walkout: One organizer told the site that they expect roughly 100 employees will go, a small fraction of the studio's estimated 2,500 employees worldwide. But it's still a significant number, and could encourage more employees (and those at other studios) to take part in future actions if their complaints go unresolved.
While not the first organized walkout at a major studio—there was a strike at Eugen last year, and Crytek developers walked out in 2014 to protest unpaid wages—the Riot walkout is one of very few high-profile cases of game industry employees taking direct action to be heard.
A Riot rep said that the studio will do its best to accommodate the walkout, apparently scheduled from 2-4 pm local time, and "will not tolerate retaliation of any kind as a result of participating (or not)." But it also reaffirmed that it will not change its policies "while in active litigation."
"As soon as active litigation is resolved, we will give all new Rioters the choice to opt-out of mandatory arbitration for individual sexual harassment and sexual assault claims. At that time, we will also commit to have a firm answer on potentially expanding the scope and extending this opt-out to all Rioters," the rep said. "We are working diligently to resolve all active litigation so that we can quickly take steps toward a solution."
Kotaku will be reporting from the scene of the walkout, so follow along there for updates as it happens.
Update:Upcomer has posted a trio of photos taken at the walkout on Twitter.
You may remember The Swords of Ditto, the Zelda-like action RPG with the utterly charming art style from a year ago. While we quite liked the game, there were complaints about its punishing permadeath system. Developer onebitbeyond has released a big new update for The Swords of Ditto, and permadeath is now a thing of the past.
The update, called Mormo’s Curse, touches most of The Swords of Ditto’s systems.
“The game structure has been totally gutted, and the divisive permadeath feature has been removed,” the developers write in an update on Steam. “You will still fail a story if you die while climbing Mormo’s Palace at the end, or if you play in Hero Mode, but otherwise, if you fail, you will collapse and wake up in your house having dropped some cash and fragments.”
The studio says it has also improved Ditto’s overworld, added new areas, and reworked the endgame to give players more to do after they defeat Mormo. Once you’ve beaten her once, she will add a curse to your next story that acts like a mutator for that playthrough.
This reminds me a bit of the adjustments Tribute Games made to Mercenary Kings last year that wound up finally drawing me into to the game, and it’s a perfect opportunity for players who were put off initially by The Swords of Ditto’s permadeath to give it another go.
