A report surfaced last month that Echo Fox founder Rick Fox had threatened to leave the company over an investor's use of racist language in an email sent to former Echo Fox CEO Jace Hall. The report prompted Riot Games to launch its own investigation into the allegations—Echo Fox maintains LCS [League of Legends Championship Series] and Academy [an LCS development league] teams—saying that it would "respond accordingly, based on available actions within our team agreements and the LCS Rules." 

Today Riot announced that the preliminary investigation has concluded, and it clearly did not like what it found. 

"If Echo Fox does not take action by removing any individuals whose actions violate league rules and agreements within the required time period, the League will take formal action that may adversely impact the future of Echo Fox in the LCS," a followup tweet from LCS Commissioner Chris Greeley said.

Calling for an ownership change, even if it's just the removal of one member of the investment team, is a serious line in the sand for the LCS to draw. It's also laudable. It's easy to say that there's no place for racism in esports (or anywhere else) but much more challenging to put some actual muscle behind it, especially in a high-profile matter involving a popular, successful organization like Echo Fox. The LCS may have been been vague about exactly what will happen if action isn't taken, but "may adversely impact the future of Echo Fox in the LCS" sounds like legalese for "clean up or clear out."

Despite its ominous tone (or perhaps because of it), the LCS response may actually be a boon for Echo Fox. Rick Fox said a couple weeks ago that he'll stay with the team if it cuts ties with Amit Raizada, the investor who used the slur, but the "complicated financial situation" of his investment in Echo Fox through the private equity firm Vision Venture Partners could make forcing him out a difficult process. But the LCS effectively threatening to remove Echo Fox from one of the top leagues in all of esports could prove to be a powerful motivator for other members of management.

Riot Games declined to elaborate or comment further on Greeley's statement.

Skull and Bones, the open world pirate game Ubisoft unveiled at E3 2017, has suffered another pushback. The company said in its full-year 2018-19 earnings statement that the game, which was delayed last year into the 2019-20 fiscal year, has now been pushed to sometime after that. 

There's nothing more specific to go on—"The release of Skull and Bones has been postponed to after 2019-20" is the full statement—and that far-off open-endedness (Ubi's 2019-20 fiscal year will conclude at the end of March 2020) is worrying for a project that was showing off gameplay two years ago. The Skull and Bones Twitter account wasn't much more helpful, although it did confirm in various tweets that there are currently no target dates for beta testing or release. 

"Our first goal is to make Skull and Bones awesome for our players. We believe in our vision for the game, while also making sure the voice of our community is being heard," Ubisoft tweeted. "As soon as we're ready to share more, we'll do so."

Chris took Skull and Bones for a spin at E3 last year and found it far more combat-focused than Sea of Thieves, his then-and-still seadog sim of choice, but also very promising: There were still a lot of blanks to be filled in, particularly about non-combat activities, but the naval combat "is just as much fun as it was in Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed games." (And in case it's not clear, he thinks naval combat in Black Flag and Origins is a lot of fun.)

Ubisoft also said that Skull and Bones will not appear at E3 this year. 

Retro sci-fi RPG CrossCode has been bolstered by a big update today, chucking in new quests, S-rank battles, an arena and, more important than any of that, loyal pets who will follow you around on your adventures. CrossCode's already a huge game—and pretty great—but there's always room for pooches. 

Dogs are far too precious to fling into battle, of course, so don't expect your pets to get stuck into the extremely brisk real-time combat. They'll just hang back and give you moral support. Remember to thank them once you've killed your enemies. 

Next to the pets, the most notable addition is the Rhombus Square Arena. Inside, you'll be able to arrange fights against regular enemies, dungeon enemies and bosses. Each cup contains multiple rounds, either taken on individually or in a rush mode where you do the cup in one go. Medals you win can be exchanged for coins that can in turn be spent on new gear, decorative stuff and pets. The extra step seems a bit unnecessary.  

The new combat rank makes enemies respawn faster, so you can try to get longer combat streaks, while the turret defence mini-game now includes a challenge mode and, yes, more rewards. 

CrossCode 1.1 is available now. There's also a demo on Steam if you're in the market for a new RPG.

Don't Starve: Hamlet has made it through the trials of Early Access and has launched on Steam. The third DLC for Klei's endearing survival game swaps the wilderness for a lost town full of aristocratic pigmen, complete with homes and shops and all the trappings of civilisation. Unfortunately, that inevitably comes with new dangers, not least of which is a huge robot with a penchant for murdering people with lasers.

To survive, apparently, you'll need to befriend the pigmen and start a new life with them. You'll be able to become a resident yourself, getting a new home that you can renovate and decorate. No more mucking around in the woods for you! OK, some mucking around in the woods.

The porktropolis is surrounded by a tropical jungle that hides plenty of things that want to kill you, but also secrets to discover in the ruins of an ancient pigmen civilisation. Archaeology is a pretty respectable profession if you want to join the porcine gentry. There are new crafting recipes, too, and you'll probably need to venture out into the jungle to search for the ingredients. 

A trio of new characters join the game, including a little plant fella, while all players will get access to the eccentric inventor Wagstaff, even if they don't grab the DLC. 

Don't Starve: Hamlet is out now on Steam for £5.19/$7. 

SteamWorld Quest: Hand of Gilgamech, Image & Form's card-based RPG, is finally coming to PC after launching on Switch in April. Instead of digging mines or flying around in spaceships, this time you'll be leading a party of robots through a fantasy realm, duking it out with knights and monsters in turn-based card battles. It's the fourth time the developer has experimented with a new setting and genre, and judging by the Switch version's reception, it sounds like a welcome addition to the series. 

Image & Form has proved to be a pretty agile developer, taking its robots in vastly different directions with each new game, though it did return to prospecting with SteamWorld Dig 2. SteamWorld Quest looks a bit more like Heist than the others, both being turn-based games where you control a customisable party, but the card-based combat is a first for the series. 

You can build your deck from over 100 punch cards, including spells for your robo-wizards, found while questing or crafted. They can be upgraded, too, and chained together in battle or used to create combos. At the start of each turn, you select three cards, using some to build up steam, which can then be spent on using more costly abilities. So there's resource management to worry about, too. 

There's your typical RPG stuff, as well, like exploring dungeons, hunting down chests, building up your band of heroes, slaying dragons—the traditional duties of an adventurer. And like the rest of the SteamWorld games, this medieval romp is pretty easy on the eyes and boasts some cracking character design. 

SteamWorld Quest is due out on Steam on May 31.

When I think of the science fiction genre, the first thing that comes to my mind is the tour of the Nostromo that opens 1979's Alien. It's a surprisingly delicate sequence—the slow drift of greebled spaceship-surfaces past the camera, then the cut inside, patiently sliding through corridor after corridor of angular metal and ornate panelling. We finally settle, after ducking under a ceiling slung with machines and monitors, at the ship's bridge, and just as we are wondering when something is going to happen the ship blorps to life, rattling at us like a disturbed snake. The sequence as a whole is a kind of calling card for cinematic sci-fi, a commitment to the drama inherent in being enclosed inside a giant machine, floating in a void colder than death itself. 

In comparison, the opening sequence of Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare feels distinctly inelegant. Coming to the game this year, motivated in part by research for my own science fiction game, In Other Waters, I was only playing the game to wander around its central spaceship hub, The Retribution. I wasn't impressed by the opening, starting on the soft curve of the Earth with its accompanying narration on the villainous Settlement Defence Front, or by being dumped behind the visor of one of the series' near-inseparable soldiers (Wolf, this one is called) ready to drop onto the ice of Europa. There were bloody melee kills, synchronized headshots and everything else I was expecting from a Call of Duty game, but then minutes later Wolf was dead, and something new began.

Two breathless hours later, now securely set up in the Bridge of the Retribution, I understood that there was more to this game than I had expected, and, with my mind drifting to thoughts of Alien's opening sequence, I realized that against all the odds, Infinite Warfare manages to not just be a serviceable science fiction game, but a great one after all.

That was doubly surprising considering Infinite Warfare's shaky pedigree. After all, this is the bad Call of Duty, the one whose YouTube debut was disliked to oblivion, the one where that pernicious military phrase “boots on the ground” came into use and the one that sold 50 percent less than its series counterparts. After release Activision even distanced itself from its own game, with CEO Eric Hirshberg claiming “it just didn't feel enough like Call of Duty”. It's also hard not to see Infinite Warfare's 'failure' as contributing to the death of the Call of Duty campaign, with Black Ops 4 releasing last year without one altogether (although this year's entry will reportedly have one).

But perhaps “not feeling like Call of Duty” is what allows Infinite Warfare to aspire to something else. After the rote prologue, the game abandons the series' typical character switching, for example, instead keeping you firmly in the boots of one Commander Nick Reyes. This allows it to string together a continuous set of missions that seamlessly take you from a grand celebration, through an invasion, into orbit, into a chaotic space battle and then drifting into land on the Retribution. Unlike the prologue, this exhilarating charge doesn't dump lore on you, instead it elegantly lets you walk through it. Walk-and-talk is the trick here, switching out cutscenes for mobile meetings that keep forward momentum and stay economical on the details. Momentum is everything in these first missions, and there are few games that can match the sense of headlong pace the game delivers. And in these two hours Infinite Warfare comes to life in the transitions it makes between the shooting, not the shooting itself.

The true star of the show is the tech that enables this pace. Call of Duty has always had a slightly unsettling obsession with deadly military tech, but with Infinite Warfare this obsession mutates from weird gun-fetish to something that meshes beautifully with its science fiction world. Just as it was Ridley Scott's famously detail-obsessed eye that led him to start Alien with a loving wander through all of his pristinely fashioned sets, so it is Infinite Warfare's love of chunky, believable tech that leads it to lavish the players attention on the literal nuts and bolts of the game. 

From the moment the game puts you in the cockpit of one of its Jackal multi-role fighters you begin to understand the drive behind it. Decked out with what sound like chunky CRT monitors, mechanical keyboards and enough toggle switches to outfit the bridge of the Nostromo, these jets are less futuristic sheen and more Top Gun in space. Like Alien's iconic industrial spaceship, the focus here is less on “realistic” and more on “real”. Holograms, AR and touch screens may be more convincing future interfaces, but nothing feels or sounds as real or as tactile as a monitor warming up, a toggle switch flicking back and forth or a vacuum seal locking in.

Once the game stations you on the deck of the Retribution this tactile, Top-Gun-in-space feel only increases. Everywhere you go on this ship (which is less of a space cruiser and more of an '80s aircraft carrier with all the external doors welded shut) you are accompanied by the groans of the hull, the hiss of pipes, the click-clack of mechanical keyboards. Every surface is covered with tech, yet these are not the nonsensical greebles of Star Wars, but heating pipes, cable rails, fluorescent tube fittings. 

Many years ago I used to work on the HMS Belfast, a WW2 warship permanently docked in central London as a floating museum, and it is the engine rooms of this stout and storied warship that Infinite Warfare brought back to me, not the interior of a Millennium Falcon or USS Enterprise. These wonderfully functional spaces are filled with busy-ness too—the cacophony of the flight deck (inexplicably wet, as if it had just been whipped form the top of an ocean-going vessel) loaded with working engineers and whining forklifts, or the focussed studiousness of the bridge, with its retinue of ceaselessly typing sonar operators bathed in screenlight, a bottle of water propped up in the corner of their stations. 

Yes, I was pleased to find the game's hub to be as wonderful as I had imagined, but it was the way this weighty, tech-obsessed feel bled out into the rest of the game that really got me. Every mission you take, for example, the game has you launch your Jackal from the Retribution. The launch sequence, an exquisitely detailed process focused on the drama and texture of hydraulic lifts, airlocks and shimmering interfaces filled with obscure calculations, tells you all you need to know about where developer Infinity Ward's priorities were. And yet they don't waste this space, using it for a quick back-and-forth between you and your wingwoman which sets up the mission ahead better than any briefing, showing that the game's economic approach to space doesn't just apply to the ship design.

The missions themselves also flicker with the drama of shock depressurisation, ridiculous transforming weapons, and jumping from ship to void, to interior and back out again, with all the crunching tech those transitions entail. There's a love throughout, not of scientific accuracy usually associated with “hard” sci-fi, but of engaging with the physical and technical weight of war in space. In Infinite Warfare physics is not a rulebook to be religiously followed, but a generative system, one that allows Infinity Ward to imagine what solutions and systems of offence and defence combat in a vacuum might entail and have fun making them as weighty and satisfying as possible. 

It's all about texture, the texture you can feel—that's why everyone in the Retribution's bridge is endless clacking away at their keyboards, or your Jackal has a bespoke animation for the little ladder that hinges out of its ornately plated hull panels. That's what Alien's opening is about too, surrounding you with texture, with detail, with a sense of the danger of the void. Infinite Warfare wants you to feel that texture, to engage with it. It basically forces you to by making you launch your lovingly crafted space-jet every mission. That's where its sci-fi greatness stems from: this understanding that it's not the lore dumps and text scrolls of intergalactic wars or whimsical planet-hopping that makes space such a compelling setting, but the sheer weight, the complexity, the technicality of life and death among the stars.

Modders have had a lot of fun with Sekiro, whether it be adding Thomas the Tank Engine or allowing us to murder Shrek. But this latest mod has a bit more staying power: it replaces the player-character with 2B from Nier Automata.

If you're a fan of Nier you won't need any more convincing, but in case you're yet to play Yoko Taro's bizarre triumph, 2B is a battle android with deadpan attitude. Sadly, that attitude is unlikely to shine through since this mod doesn't come with voice audio. But you can at least use a seperate mod to install a female voice track.

Created by asasasasasbc, the mod is available on Nexus Mods and seems pretty simple to install. You'll need to make sure you have the DS3 and Bloodborne Material Pack installed first to get the most out of it.

Here's some footage:

I was surrounded on all sides. I'd managed to rescue the prisoner, but now we had to fight our way back out of the dungeon. Reinforcements poured in from the south, so I sent my beleaguered party north. When we made it to a room with pressure plates and fireball-spewing statues, more reinforcements spawned at the entrance and quickly closed in.

What followed was a harrowing, tense turn, as I carefully positioned my warden for a whirlwind strike, blasted out a fireball with my acolyte, and tried to figure out what I could do with a useless unarmed prisoner. That’s when I remembered the pressure plates, and smiled as I noticed the bad guys were standing pretty close to those statues. He may have been unarmed, but his legs were working just fine.

That wasn't the first dungeon escapade I just barely scraped through in Druidstone: The Secret of Menhir Forest, a new tactical RPG from the creators of Legend of Grimrock. Druidstone is out on May 15, and though it's not a first-person, grid-based dungeon crawler, it shares much of the DNA that made the Grimrock games so good. The lush fantasy art style, stirring orchestral soundtrack, and carefully balanced level design all survived the transition to a strategic top-down RPG.

The Legend of Druidstone

For Druidstone to be born, The Legend of Gimrock had to die. Or at least be shelved for the time being.

"Grimrock 1 and 2 took over four years to make, and we poured our hearts and souls into those games," says Juho Salila, art director for Druidstone and the Grimrock series. "It would be a massive task to make Grimrock 3 and improve the game as Grimrock 2 improved Grimrock 1. We needed a break from that world." The team at Almost Human began to break up, with many developers moving on to other projects.

"At some point Petri [Häkkinen, designer and programmer on Druidstone and the Grimrock series] and I started talking about prototyping games just for fun," says Salila. "After doing several prototypes it got more serious and we started a new company [Ctrl Alt Ninja] to make Druidstone. We didn’t feel the pressure of doing another Grimrock game with the new company."

The Grimrock games sold well enough to help fund the development of Druidstone. As with Grimrock the developers avoided Early Access, and crowdfunding remains difficult in Finland. "We were also not that keen on the overhead caused by the crowdfunding process," says Salila. "We want to make games, not post t-shirts and stickers all over the world."

During Druidstone’s early stages the gameplay evolved substantially. The biggest change: Every level was once procedurally generated. "We really wanted to make the game work with procedurally generated levels," says Häkkinen."I guess we fell into the old ‘Hey, let’s make a level generator and we don’t need to do any level design’ trap. But it didn’t mesh with the compact game design. At one point we made a single level in a few hours and it was more fun than any of the generated levels."

"It’s a lot harder to make the levels look good if everything is randomly generated," says Salila. "We also found that we could actually make more variation in gameplay tactics if the levels were hand-made." 

Clever level design helped make the Grimrock series so memorable, with deviously hidden traps and head-scratching puzzles. While Druidstone lacks dungeon crawling exploration, many of Grimrock’s classic dungeon elements, such as levers revealing hidden rooms, pressure plates activating traps, and surprise enemies spawning in at the worst moments, are included in abundance. "We wanted to make the dungeon levels look and feel like Grimrock—that’s how we like our dungeons," says Häkkinen.

Although the art style is similar, Druidstone takes place in a different fantasy universe than Grimrock, including a different tone. The writing in the Grimrock games was mostly limited to scribbled notes, but Druidstone features numerous cutscenes between my small party of heroes, the druids we work for, and the red priests we fight against. 

Dialogue is quick, snappy, and delightfully funny, particularly from the motor-mouthed pint-sized mage, Oiko. "Whereas Gimrock is dark and gloomy, Druidstone is more light-hearted, with some really fantastic creatures like the Shido," says Häkkinen. "I like to think that both worlds are connected in an overarching meta-universe. Both games have themes of other worlds and links between them."

Tabletop Roots

While Grimrock was clearly inspired by classic grid-based dungeon crawlers, Druidstone owes much of its tactical gameplay to tabletop RPGs and board games, such as Dungeons & Dragons and HeroQuest. "We are avid board game players and Druidstone is certainly inspired by many of them," says Häkkinen. "We really like the compactness of board games, the small numbers, and the emergent complexity that arises from the seemingly simple rules." 

As a big fan of Gloomhaven, a popular tactical RPG board game, I was delighted to see some major similarities in Druidstone. Each of my three party members have basic attacks and special abilities and spells they can perform a limited number of times each battle, not unlike the per-rest abilities in D&D or loss cards in Gloomhaven. The warden’s whirlwind strike hits all adjacent enemies, but figuring out when to expel its only use is often an agonizing decision. 

"I heard about Gloomhaven only a few months ago and immediately knew I had to get it," says Häkkinen. "It’s interesting to see how completely separate design processes have ended up with a result that in some ways resemble each other very much. I was reading [Gloomhaven designer] Isaac Childres’ blog the other day and he mentioned Grimrock as one of his inspirations. Now the circle is complete!"

As my Druidstone party levels up they gain new abilities, and I can use gems earned from completing objectives to enhance those abilities. Gems can boost damage, add status effects, or increase the number of uses per battle. This intuitive and swappable upgrade system works similarly to Into the Breach, which is exactly by design.

"Into the Breach is a true masterpiece, and one of the more recent games I’ve enjoyed," says Häkkinen. "The undo last move feature in Druidstone is directly inspired by Into the Breach." Furthermore the scout hero Aava has the ability to rewind time, letting me fix some of my poorer decisions—let's call them experiments. It's a welcoming feature in a game that doesn’t allow you to save scum your way through a fight.

While I’m a little disappointed that I’m not playing The Legend of Grimrock 3, I’m satisfied that the minds behind one of my favorite indie series are good at more than just first-person dungeon crawling. Druidstone is a triumph of great game design, pulling in the best elements of many tactical board and video games, along with the developers’ signature levels of art, writing, and polish, and a post-launch level editor should help extend its life even further. Says Häkkinen: "We hope people enjoy Druidstone and we can keep doing what we love."

It’s 2 pm in Germany, and David Münnich is ready for bed. His sleeping patterns have been "screwed up" for the past two decades, he tells me, and his working habits are equally erratic: sometimes he’ll work 20 hours straight, sometimes he’ll do nothing for a week and feel guilty about it. Currently he likes to work at night, when his kids are in bed and distractions are minimal, which is why he’s planning to sleep after our phone call in the middle of the afternoon.

It’s an unconventional approach to indie development, but then his latest project, Supraland, is an unconventional game—part puzzler, part point-and-click, part first-person shooter, all set in a Metroidvania version of a child’s sandbox. Münnich says he had zero expectations before last month’s release because "nobody cared about it" during Early Access. "I would’ve been happy if I got 2,000 people to buy it," he says. Now, it’s approaching 50,000 sales, and 96% of its 1,100 Steam reviews are positive.

It’s not hard to see why: Supraland is delightful. You play as a toy exploring a series of themed areas, each full of wonderful ideas. I watered seeds to make flowers grow, then arranged them to please a companion. I triple-jumped huge gaps, blasted skeletons, and summoned purple cubes to activate pressure plates. In my favourite puzzle, I dyed a wooden circle yellow and held it over another toy’s head so it looked like a halo, letting them charm their way into a chapel.

I did all this in the first few hours, and I know Supraland only gets wilder later on. It feels like an instant indie classic made by a large team—but Münnich made it alone in just 16 months. How did he pull it off? Where did he get the inspiration for a first-person Metroidvania? And is he working on a sequel? (Spoiler: yes, and it sounds exciting).

Münnich’s initial idea was as vague as they come: he wanted to make a first-person adventure game. "I'm fascinated by the ability to freely look around in first-person, find things, handle objects," he says. "In first-person, it’s me in that world instead of me controlling some dude in third person... they’re the only games that really immerse me." 

To hone his plans, he played his favourite games and made a long list of everything he liked, before further narrowing them down to a few must-haves. That list, he says, gave him the "Supraland formula"—a first-person Metroidvania full of varied puzzles, which he wanted to feel as tactile as Portal's.

Supraland’s choice of perspective is unusual, and he kept searching the web for evidence of other first-person Metroidvanias, only to come up empty. But to him, it seemed like an "obvious combination. I have no clue why everyone thinks their Metroidvania needs to be a sidescroller. Opening those 2D games up to 3D just makes it easier to create more interesting exploration," he says.

Map time

First-person meant Münnich could let players follow their natural curiosity without much guidance. You orient yourself by looking at the large objects in the distance, so when an NPC tells you that an important upgrade is hidden near a giant chair, you just need to glance at the horizon to know which direction to head. You never need a map, which Münnich says was a "central design decision."

"Maps might bring comfort, but they also degrade the entire 3D world to meaningless geometry," he argues. "I want people to always carefully look at their surroundings because this is where the immersion and satisfaction comes from."

His first step to designing the puzzles was to nail the abilities. He started with a list of 30 before whittling it down to only those that were versatile. "Unlike in a regular Metroidvania, where an ability can be used for one or maybe two things, I dismissed any ability that didn't at least have six completely different use cases," he explains. "So the magnet will not only allow you to climb metal things, but at some point you will be able to use it to erase a hard disk." 

From those abilities—double jumps, air stomps, a gun that fires yellow blobs—he crafted his puzzles. The aim was to make it feel like "a point-and-click adventure, but better," and to reward experimentation. 

"In the old school point-and-clicks... you would drag one object onto another and then hope the game would execute the solution. But most of the time it would just tell you that it isn't working," he says. "What I wanted to achieve is that you have lots of abilities, and you execute them yourself... if it happens to not work after all, you will at least have seen exactly why it didn't. And sometimes some unintended solutions might even work. So I'm just giving you the tools, and you [play] around with them."

By gradually layering in puzzles to match those abilities, and building the world so that it constantly loops back on itself, Münnich has created a game that feels rich and varied. By its very nature it feels bigger than it actually is—players can end up spending a lot of time in a small area.

Lessons for a sequel

Like most game designers, Münnich isn't fully satisfied with what he's made, despite the early success. There are "tons of things" he wishes he'd done differently, from the angle of your jump—it doesn't get you high enough—to parts of the world being too linear. He's not planning expansions or major updates, and says most patches will just be bug fixes, but the lessons he's learned will go into Supraland 2, which he's already planning.

The sequel will be an extension of the original, and you’ll control a tiny character inside the child’s bedroom. But with a bigger budget, Münnich is aiming for higher production values, and to make the world more interactive. "[In Supraland], most objects are just normal big objects scaled down. In Supraland 2 you will really be surrounded by real-world objects…that have their actual purpose. Think of a giant match box, and you hold a giant match in your hands and scratch it over the side of the box to get fire. I hope to have the world filled with these kinds of things."

He wants to beef up combat, which feels undercooked in Supraland. He wants a system in which difficult enemies bar your progress, and can only been defeated after you’ve found certain abilities by searching secret areas. "Right now, combat is actually pointless—you can die your way through the game because dying doesn’t matter. I want… not quite like bosses, but rooms where you have to beat enemies and it will be quite hard unless you get a lot of secrets and upgrade your stuff properly."

He's currently trying to work out how to marry this system with making the game world feel open, which is one of Supraland’s strengths. He’s considering having the giant child following the player around, giving hints about abilities they’ll need in a given area, and sees GLaDOS from Portal as a possible comparison.

Supraland 2 won't be a one person job. Münnich has already secured a combat designer and a narrative designer, and is looking for two more developers to join the project. Working alone has its advantages, he says, such as being able to put his "crazy ideas" straight into the game without running them past other people, but it also means all the pressure is on you. "You grow a lot in the process, but I don't feel like doing it again," he says.

He admits he feels under "so much pressure" to push out a console version of Supraland, and further pressure to get the sequel right. "I hope it wasn’t a fluke and I know what I’m doing so that I can repeat it." He hasn't had time to take a proper break since the game came out on April 5, and rarely has even a free day to relax. 

Münnich doesn’t mind that heavy load, and loves working on a game that he’s passionate about. But hopefully he finds some time to enjoy Supraland’s success and recharge in the coming months. He doesn't know when his ambitious sequel will take shape but, judging by his first effort, it will be worth the wait, however long it takes. 

GTA 5 is still selling well six years after it launched on consoles and four years after it finally appeared on PC. On a recent earnings call, publisher Take-Two noted that sales of GTA 5 have outperformed so far this year, while GTA Online continues to grow, with earnings exceeding expectations. Not bad for a game that came out in the last console generation.

The open-world caper has nearly hit 110 million sales, which is an absurdly high number, but perhaps not all that surprising given how it never seems to leave the Steam top sellers list. 

Take-Two pointed to GTA Online's continued updates, notably Arena Wars and After Hours, for keep players inside the anarchic sandbox. It's hoping the same will happen with the more disappointing Red Dead Online. Red Dead Redemption 2 has already raked up over 24 million sales, but its online mode leaves a lot to be desired. Take-Two is optimistic, however, and said that net bookings have grown.

Unfortunately, the success of the cowboy game has not inspired Take-Two to announce a PC port. The publisher continued to be coy, saying the ball is in Rockstar's court. There are still plenty of reasons to expect it to eventually make its way over to our neck of the woods, though. Check out everything we know about Red Dead Redemption 2 on PC.