It’s all change for free-to-play action-RPG Path Of Exile today. As well as the usual quarterly start of a new league with new quests and challenges for players, Grinding Gear Games have rolled out their long-awaited melee overhaul. Animations can be cancelled out of and into, movement skills have become instantaneous and your character will automatically switch targets if you hold down the attack button. On an aesthetic level it should be more satisfying to whack people with swords too, thanks to more varied animations. Below, a trailer giving an abridged version of the enormous patch notes.

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Hellblade developers Ninja Theory are apparently trying their hand at four-on-four multiplayer next, if a leaked trailer for their next game Bleeding Edge is accurate. Blurrily captured at a Microsoft keynote at the weekend by Xboxer (they’re Slovakian, so you may need Google Translate), it shows us a cast of brightly coloured cyborg weirdos gearing up for a rumble. One’s part unicycle with buzzsaws for hands, another’s a weird skeleton-faced guy full of guns. It all reminds me a bit of Platinum’s underrated Anarchy Reigns by way of Sunset Overdrive, and is apparently due to begin technical alpha testing on June 27th.

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It’s no secret that poetic plague survival sim Pathologic 2 is hard. Developers Ice-Pick Lodge even say that the experience is “intended to be almost unbearable”. Unfortunately, ‘almost’ is a very fine line for many, and was just too much for some, including Brendy, who bounced off the game’s starvation systems, despite noting he enjoyed appreciating its writing in his Pathologic review. While I’ve had a better time (mostly due to accepting death), today’s big update should make some people happy, as the game is now practically wriggling> with difficulty options. Below, the developers and my own musings on the game’s challenges.

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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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