Come fly, come fly let’s fly away. There are monsters here, after all. Dream Engines Nomad Cities is an upcoming “survival city-building” game, where at a certain point you can nope out and relocate to where the grass is green and the girls are less likely to eat your face off. It’s pretty, to boot. Here’s an enticing announcement trailer.
WARNING: If you’re reading this, there is a very strong chance you’re looking at news on your favourite game. Please, it’s imperative you click on to discover crucial information.
For all its dreamy landscapes, talking robot toys and unusually high population of poisonous frogs, Papo & Yo is not a happy game. Based on designer Vander Callabero’s own troubled childhood, Papo & Yo is very much in the same vein as games like That Dragon, Cancer and The Town of Light – hard-hitting, true-to-life stories that use the game as a lens to tackle difficult themes and subjects.
There are still moments of levity to be found in this puzzle-y platformer set in a Brazilian favela, though, and my absolute favourite is the time you get to play footie with Quico’s hulking great Monster friend.
It s time to pack your Cities: Skylines inhabitants off to uni, where they will surely get up to nothing but sombre study. There will be no mischief, though there may be some handegg, which is essentially the same thing. The update will include five sports, in fact, along with other faculties, new policies, and new maps. You can get a glimpse of some of it in the trailer below.
There are few more enticing video game settings than crystal clear underwater glades, and Koral, an explore-o-puzzle game launching next week has them in spades. It s got sort of an Abzu meets Ori And The Blind Forest look, by which I obviously mean, ahhhh, it s all colourful and gorgeous and there are fish friends. Come and dip your toes in the trailer yourself.
Screenshot Saturday! The best day of the Twitter week where I get to become very excited about upcoming games and then immediately have to temper myself because, oh, god, do you know how difficult it is to make video games. If none of these ever come out, or if they are entirely changed from what s presented here, I will completely understand. We re also a mere month from E3, which is once again reminding me (as if I ever forgot) about all my deeply complicated feelings about the nature of hype in the industry.
But also! Look at these games! I want to play them! This week: a beautiful hand-drawn greenhouse, some UI design respect, and a destructive rampage gone a little wrong.
I really like Hades, Supergiant Games early access roguelite. It s a bit of a surprise early access and roguelite are never usually descriptions that I seek out when I m choosing what to play. Even more surprising, then, that it s exactly those two things that I really appreciate about the game. Let me explain.
Sundays are for finally going on one of the nice walks you told yourself you’d do when you moved to Brighton. The South Downs are lovely. I will be there, rather than reading the best writing about videogames from the past week (and beyond). I’m sure that’s lovely too.
Here’s an interesting bag of thoughts from Michael Heron over at Meeples Like Us. They concern accessibility, the value thereof, and how Heron differentiates the term from “learnability”. He covers a lot of ground, and mostly comes to conclusions I agree with while hitting a few I don’t along the way. Dark Souls on easy mode may not ‘be’ Dark Souls, but it would still include a lot of what makes it great, designer intent be damned. I’d rather live in a world where we have both.
Clair De Lune is a lovely piano piece by Claude Debussy. Claire De Lune, on the other hand, is a video game about a woman called (you guessed it) Claire, who goes missing in space after her family s spaceship decides to take a tumble out of the sky and onto the planet below. Surely it should be a moon rather than a planet, but still, if the song doesn t play in some pivotal moment in the game, I shall be rather cross. It doesn’t feature in this trailer, which is all dramatic synth and an overly enthusiastic AI companion instead.
They say that before you agree to marry someone, you should go on a long trip with them. Perhaps all the way into space, in an airtight submarine plagued by maintenance issues and alien attacks. What I m saying here is that if you and 15 friends can get together and survive the chaos of Barotrauma intact, it s only logical that your next move is to all get hitched.
I saw this game at a Daedalic Entertainment event a couple of months ago and mostly what stuck with me is the way the models move, like unhinged posing dolls, limbs each beholden to their own physics. Depending on where such things fall for you it could definitely push the game much closer to either the horror or hilarity axes that it s trying to balance between. See for yourself in the trailer below.