Scroll right down to the bottom of the Epic Games Store, and you ll find a forgotten and totally free, game. It s existed since before Epic set about its masterplan to take over the PC games market, but now, buried beneath the exclusives and novelties, lies Unreal Tournament, the latest entry in the iconic shooter series, whose development was halted in 2018.

The game disappeared quietly, and I wanted to peek behind the curtain. To try and find out what happened, I spoke to some of the leading community contributors, as well as a contracted developer who worked on the project. The story that emerged suggests the community and the developers were never quite sure how to coexist, or how to turn the dream of open development into a reality.

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Change is scary, I know, but now that the dust has started to settle on yesterday’s big Google Stadia price and games reveal, I thought I’d take a bit of time to reflect, consolidate and put everything we currently know about Stadia into one, handy guide, answering all your biggest Stadia questions with the best information that’s available to me. Here, I’ll tell you exactly what you need to know about Google Stadia, whether the Founders Edition is really worth buying, who it’s for, what kind of internet you need for it, how much it all costs, and whether it’s the end of PC gaming as we know it. Spoilers: it’s not.

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After looking back to ye oldene dayes with N64-style collect-o-jumper Yooka-Laylee, developers Playtonic Games are now leaping back another generation with its follow-up. Today they announced Yooka-Laylee And The Impossible Lair, a side-scrolling platformer linked by a top-down overworld with mild puzzling. After more years and maybe they’ll go through Super Mario, then back through Donkey Kong, Pong, and oscilloscope games, ending with unidentifiable games played with knucklebones and entrails. That can wait. Before then, Yooka and Laylee will go 2.5D later this year. Come see the trailer.

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Forming a boundless ouroboros of nostalgia and referential humour, mid 2000s B-movie sandbox shooter Destroy All Humans is getting the remake treatment. For those who missed it the first time, it’s roughly Grand Theft Auto wrapped around the aesthetics and tone of Mars Attacks and Invader Zim. Playing as big-headed invader Cryptosporidium, players probe, mind-scan and otherwise explode a bunch of ’50s American stereotypes. While the original game was made by the sadly-defunct Pandemic Studios, the remake is being handled by Black Forest Games. Below, a debut trailer with a similarly dated Rammstein song.

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Oh, the many things I cannot tell you, readers! They are many, and they are things. One thing I can tell you is that argh, howl, yes, I am indeed working on the enormous pile of hundreds upon hundreds of indie games that are surely aiming to destroy me. The second thing is that it’s time once more for the world famous round-up of the best indie games on Steam that, round here, we call Unknown Pleasures.

Maintaining a stoic silence this week: spikey frights, fighty tykes, and flighty sprites.

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I sometimes announce, to rooms at large, that I wished Assassin s Creed Odyssey wouldn t tell me what to do as much, and let me just explore. Imagine my shock, therefore, at the reveal of The Sinking City, a Lovecraftian detective game releasing just the other side of E3, promising zero hand holding . No objective markers on the map, and no trails on the street to follow – just your own wits.

In The Sinking City we have a map, and every street has a name, said Wa l Amr, the CEO of developers Frogwares. The evidences tell you that the cross road on this street and this street — you have to physically go there, and you have to find the house, the place, the person that you’re looking for there.

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Hackers making games run on odd hardware is always at least a giggle, and Flappy Bird on a plotter instead of a screen actually adds to it in a way. For our younger readers, I’ll explain a plotter is a type of printer which draws on paper with a pen. For our even younger readers, a printer is a device which ‘printed’ computer documents onto paper. For our youngest readers, paper is a thin, lightweight material made from mashed-up trees, nowadays mostly used to make bags for Greggs sausage rolls. Plotty Bird uses one pen as the bird, leaving lines of its path as it flops and crashes as a delightful record and artifact.

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Today in the Fortbyte challenges in Fortnite, we’re taking to the skies and falling through rings. Fortbytes been going on a little while now and even though some are easy, others will need the Battle Pass to be purchased in order to complete those challenges. To make things easier, we’ve updated the table so that it has each of the links to the Fortbyte you’re looking for. There are a hundred in total and I will be going over all of them. Wish me luck.

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As I climbed the steps toward the final, final boss of Octopath Traveler, I knew I was done for. Over the past 80-odd hours, I’d battled my way through this exquisite 3D pixel diorama the only way I knew how: with my three favourite and strongest characters doing most of the heavy-lifting. The fourth and final character in my party was whoever out of the eight-strong cast of do-gooders I happened to be pursuing the story of at that particular moment. Sure, it meant I had a 30-odd level gap between my best and worst fighters, but anything else would have required an excessive, and I really do mean excessive>, amount of grinding.

But having endured each of its eight separate character stories, I’d assumed that three Lv.65 warriors and one Lv.50-ish bloke would probably be enough to finally put this game to bed. Then it asked the impossible, bringing everyone> into the mix in a way that utterly destroyed any chance I ever had of emerging victorious. And it was at that moment that I thought, “Stuff it. You can have this world, evil menace. I am done.”

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A team at Blizzard had been working on a first-person shooter set in the world of their StarCraft real-time strategy games, the rumour mill says, but it’s recently been cancelled. One secret source told Kotaku that the game was a bit “like Battlefield in the StarCraft universe” though we may never see or know much more about it. Cancelling unannounced games is fairly standard for Blizzard if they don’t think it’s working out and, without confirming anything, the studio hint that’s the case here. Kotaku’s rumours say the StarCraft FPS gang aren’t being laid off, rather put to work on Diablo 4 or Overwatch 2 instead.

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