Silly medical management sim Two Point Hospital continues to expand in weird and wonderful ways. Yesterday, its third major chunk of DLC, Close Encounters, landed in stores with an meteoric crash. As the name suggests, it introduces all manner of extraterrestrial weirdness to the already bizarre game, with three high-tech new hospitals to run, new patients to treat from way out of town, and thirty-four new illnesses to cure.

As usual, Two Point Studios' pun game is on point. You'll have to treat aliens and astronauts alike for cases of Science Friction, Aller-Gs and Lack Of Humanity. Eleven of the illnesses have external symptoms for extra sight gag fun, and there's three new curative machines to build to hammer the misshapen patients back into shape.

That's all well and good for existing players, but newcomers have a few extra options too. There's a free weekend running until next Monday for the main game, and they've halved the price on a bundle with the main game and the previous two expansions (mountain and tropical-themed, respectively), which is nice.

It's well worth taking a look, too. Fraser Brown found its brand of Theme Hospital-inspired nonsense to be highly infectious when he reviewed it last year, and between patches, expansions and likely future support (thanks to Sega snapping up the studio) it's only likely to get better.

Two Point Hospital is free to try on Steam until Monday, September 2nd, and half price if it tickles your fancy. The Close Encounters DLC is also on Steam for £6.29/$8.09 after the 10% launch discount.

Update:  The Marble Nest DLC will be a "polished and optimised version of what was once Pathologic 2's demo," according to Ice-Pick Lodge. The developer has confirmed that they're working on porting the game to consoles at the moment, but they don't have any details to share about their plans for the Bachelor or Changeling's stories.

Original story: Pathologic 2 by Ice-Pick Lodge was never going to set the world on fire. A dark and theatrical plague survival sim, set in a dreamlike, pseudo-Russian industrial town wracked by crises both self-made and supernatural. It's dark, weird and stressful, like living in one of David Lynch's more vivid fever-dreams. It's a hard sell, but it's a game I hold dear to my heart, making it all the more tragic that it hasn't sold as well as it might.

According to this interview with Russian games site DTF.ru, the poor sales of the game have changed the studio's plans for the future. Responding to a question on whether the game had was under-performing, studio head Nikolay Dybowski said this (translation via Google Translate):

"Yes, it is. And it will affect the further development in the most difficult way. Most of the team will disperse, the studio will again be reduced to a few basic people—exactly the same thing will happen after the failure of Eureka!

I think that, as in that situation, a small mobile game will save us. Only after that we will be able to take on the promised scenarios of the Bachelor and the Impostor—the studio simply will not have the technical ability to make them without money and people."

To clarify, Pathologic 2, as with the original game, was planned to have three playable characters. The Haruspex, the Bachelor and The Changeling (translated by Google as Impostor), but due to budget and time constraints, only the Haruspex made the final cut at launch. The studio has been weighing up plans to release the other two characters as DLC, paid or free, but whether they'll happen at all now is in doubt.

Despite these troubles, there's some small free* (the trailer doesn't say what the asterisk means) DLC on the way. The Marble Nest shares a name with the standalone demo released some time ago, and promises another two hours of focused story, separate from the lengthy sandbox survival experience of the main game.

Still, Pathologic 2 means a lot to some people, especially those involved in its production. Writer Kevin Snow (who was brought in to lead the English localisation effort) is imploring his Twitter followers to buy the game so that he might have the chance to translate the other two character's stories.

I've got my fingers crossed. The English script was one of my favourite parts of the game, and for a game with such dark subject matter, the dialogue frequently had some laugh-out-loud funny moments. It'd be a tragedy if we never got the other two thirds of this strange nightmare story.

I've reached out to Ice-Pick Lodge for more details. 

The latest Planet Zoo video discusses the importance of creativity and simulation in Frontier's forthcoming game, and their role in informing features like the ability animals have to climb player-made structures. But fast-forward to 3.16 in that video and you'll see something else pretty neat: Aardvarks.

We know that Planet Zoo is going to feature a wide array of creatures from Brazilian wandering spiders to reticulated giraffes, but aardvarks are a new one for the list. The adorable burrowing mammals are shown in the video to demonstrate how players will need to create habitats that suit specific animals in their zoos, with walls that can be heavy-duty brick or one-way glass, and enrichment items like feeders that make animals work for their meals to prevent boredom.

It all sounds pretty neat, and in-tune with the way modern zoos work. Planet Zoo will be out November 5 on Steam.

"The stages look incredible", we wrote in our Dirt Rally review back in 2015. "Dust plumes out from under your car as drones buzz through clear skies. Ice patches shimmer as you hammer past snow-laden trees, picking out the road through fog. Hot air balloons rest as you slide a 1970s escort around a hay bale. Mud flings into the air as you tumble a Lancia Delta down a cliff towards a pond. Watching replays are a joy and irresistible if you've had a decent run, made all the better by respectable engine noise and chattering pace notes." Players agree, and it's sitting on a Mostly Positive rating on Steam.

Until September 1 at 10am Pacific Time, or until supplies last, you can get a free Steam key for Dirt Rally by subscribing to the Humble Bundle newsletter. 

The retro-styled first-person shooter is hardly a new phenomenon: Ion Fury, Amid Evil and Dusk are only three recent examples. But Dark Data feels especially novel, as its clearly a hat tip to a distinctive, platform-specific style of FPS, namely, Nintendo 64 classics like GoldenEye 007 and Perfect Dark.

Those games haven't exactly aged well (I'm sure many will disagree with me, and that's ok), which is probably why it's taken so long for a game to ape their style. Dark Data nails the aesthetic, especially the awkwardly chunky character models. That said, modern concessions have clearly been made, as you can see in the trailer below. The lighting looks far more advanced than anything the 64 could ever manage, and the frame-rate looks alarmingly smooth. Like, it's definitely running consistently higher than 20fps. If you're a stickler for authenticity, that may be a deal breaker.

There's no single player component: Dark Data is a local multiplayer FPS with four game modes including deathmatch, team deathmatch, "HOLD YOUR DEATH" (dunno) and "Capture the Floppy" (Capture the Flag but with floppies, I guess). It supports up to eight players in a match, or four on a team, and there are bots if you need 'em. The game boasts 17 weapons, 10 maps, a character creator and a bunch of cosmetic stuff to earn.

Here's the trailer. Dark Data launches September 4 on Steam.

Spiders' newest RPG Greedfall releases on September 10, and I for one am pretty exciting about it. Inspired by 17th century colonization, the game is by no means based on true stories (it has monsters and stuff), but its strange amalgam of fantasy and history is fascinating. The video above shows the most substantial chunk of gameplay footage we've seen yet, and I've got my fingers crossed that Spiders nails it with this one. It looks great.

As you'll see, the combat borrows equally from The Witcher 3 and Dragon Age: Inquisition. It's possible to use a tactical combat pause, and like Geralt, the protagonist will be sniffing out clues regarding the whereabouts of their larger foes. But in a lot of cases, you'll be able to stealth your way out of encounters, which is welcome news for this sook.

The game world isn't a single open world sprawl, but instead a series of open-ended areas, and if the video above is representative of the whole game, these areas will be packed with consequential discoveries and encounters. The game launches September 10.

I'm a crow gliding over a vast desert, catching updrafts, plunging through ravines, and gathering with other crows on creaking, wobbling weather vanes. Sometimes I'm a child, too, running through a gloomy, ruined city, pushing a massive golden ball with the help of other children and watching as a bridge of rusted steel knits itself together ahead of us and vanishes in our wake.

This is Vane, an atmospheric and surreal adventure where sometimes you play as a bird, and sometimes as a kid. Both of these forms are needed to progress through a series of environmental puzzles in a beautiful and oppressive world that transforms while you travel through it, like a rusting and ruined City 17 that seems to both grow and decompose at the same time.

There's very little guidance in Vane—just finding an environmental puzzle and figuring out what, exactly, makes it a puzzle, is just as much a puzzle as the puzzle itself. It's best to act on instinct. If a glimmer of something catches your eye in the distance, if there's a small pool of light in the darkness, or if you find yourself drawn in a particular direction, you'll probably come across something that needs solving.

Even the basic controls are never shown on screen, with the exception of a prompt that tells you how to use your voice (both as a crow and a kid) and another when you can interact with a certain kind of object. This is both good and bad. I enjoy having to figure things out and beginning a game with a series of movement tutorials would take away from the mysterious and engrossing world. It's bad because it took me a while to realize that flapping my wings required me to click the mouse button each time. That's a bit annoying, when holding down the mouse button to flap continuously would have worked just fine.

That's not the only issue with controls. Vane presents the kind of world I'd love to explore more between the environmental puzzles needed to progress. I'd be happy to just take wing as the crow and inspect every dune and rock in the desert, or poke my nose into every corner of the twisted metal structures while playing as the child. But as the kid, my running speed is extremely slow and the third-person camera is sometimes completely obscured by the geometry, and both are discouraging to exploration. Playing as the bird, clicking the mouse button for each wing-pump is tiresome and even just landing on something can be an awkward wrestling match with the mouse.

It's a real shame! Getting immersed and lost in a strange world is difficult when you're fighting with a camera or getting a cramp from mouse-clicks. The last thing you should be thinking about in Vane is the controls.

Luckily, Vane mostly makes up for it with its mood and mystery, and the puzzles are usually pretty satisfying to figure out. If you have some patience with the controls and don't mind not knowing exactly what's going on or what you should do next, it's still something I can recommend.

I'm not a deep thinker so I can't really tell what Vane might be about. As with any game featuring children lost in spooky industrial environments (like Inside), I'll make a (probably incorrect) guess that it's about how much school sucks, maybe? You huddle close to the handful of friends you find and vow to force your way through the nightmare as more and more dark obstacles grow and loom in front of you. And as much as you thought you were different than the cold and aloof adults of the world, will you really turn out any better?

But, I don't know! I hated school and I turned into a crummy adult, so that's just my interpretation. Maybe you'll have a different one.

On PC, Vane appears only to be available on Steam. You can visit the official site here for a game trailer and some lovely artwork.

CD Projekt recently took a look back at the first half of 2019, and it saw some interesting things. Cyberpunk 2077 preorders have been going well, particularly on GOG: One-third of all digital PC preorders have been on CD Projekt's own platform. But the primary driver behind the company's financial performance is actually The Witcher 3, despite the fact that it was released more than four years ago.

"Our financial result for the first half of the year was again mainly affected by sales of The Witcher 3, which remain strong. This further confirms our belief that investing in top-quality games pays off, and that such games may continue to sell well for many years," CD Projekt CFO Piotr Nielubowicz said. "In the first half of 2019 gamers actually purchased more copies of The Witcher 3 than during the first half of the previous year!"

CD Projekt has also continued to grow over the first half of the year, according to a management board report: There were 953 employees at the company as of June 30, 2019, up from 887 at the end of 2018. CD Projekt Red accounts for 777 (up from 698), while GOG is down slightly, from 189 at the end of 2018 to 176 on June 30 of this year. CD Projekt said the increase "is mostly due to the upscaling of business and development activities."

But what might be most interesting is the suggestion that more Gwent-style spinoff projects are in the works—and that we haven't seen the end of The Witcher, either.

"Managing two separate major franchises (The Witcher and Cyberpunk), along with several independent development teams, enables the Company to conduct parallel work on several projects and smoothens its long-term release schedule," it states. "This migration towards a dual-franchise model supported by several independent product lines also permits optimization of manufacturing and financial activities, mitigates important risk factors and makes it easier for Company employees to seek professional fulfillment."

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is coming to the Nintendo Switch in October, but given that the original was released in May 2015, that on its own hardly seems enough to maintain CD Projekt's status as a "dual franchise" company. For now, though, CD Projekt is fully focused on Cyberpunk 2077: A livestream featuring 15 minutes of gameplay from a demo shown at Gamescom will begin at 11 am Pacific/2 pm Eastern on August 30—that's tomorrow.

Thanks, @DomsPlaying.

Noita, the "action roguelite" in which every pixel is physically simulated, is headed to Steam Early Access on September 24. To mark the big news, developer Nolla Games dropped a new trailer showcasing how that simulation translates into gameplay.

James described Noita in a preview last year as a "hilarious, horrifying wizard death experiment," because magic is necessary but the results of using it are unpredictable—often dangerously so. Waving your wand around carelessly is as likely to bring a ton of rocks down on your head as it is to dispatch your enemies, and it seems remarkably easy to set yourself on fire. 

I'm not sure what Noita is actually about, but I don't think it necessarily matters either. The goal is simply to delve as deeply as you can—that is, until you die—and experimentation (and quick thinking) would seem to be at the core of the experience: Dispatching enemies may be easy enough, but can you avoid the fallout that follows? 

Noita is expected to be in Early Access on Steam for about a year.

The Lab was one of the first big showcases of modern virtual reality, and one of the first experiences many had after picking up a first-generation Oculus or HTC headset. Today, Valve are keeping up with the times and updating their free VR playground to better reflect modern technology, such as their own Index VR hardware.

In what they're calling the Hands-On update, every part of The Lab now gives you properly physics-driven virtual hands, whether you have a finger-tracking controller like the Index or not. They reckon that your skeletal three-dimensional meathooks should be future-proofed and ready to map to controllers that don't exist yet, but also will work with older setups with binary grips or just simple buttons.

And what's the point having hands if you can't poke things and laugh when they fall over? The other major change to The Lab is a physics overhaul. Almost every interactive object is now a solid physics-driven entity that you can pick up, throw, smash or otherwise make a big mess with. Suddenly I understand why cats push everything they can off tables; it's shockingly cathartic.

Under the hood, Valve are making some nice technical improvements that shouldn't be too obvious unless you're looking for them. The Lab should now support all possible refresh rates (such as the Index's 144hz mode) without the physics getting squirrely. They've also made some changes to the audio engine, so that you should have properly spatialized 3D sound no matter your headphones.

You can see the full patch notes here, and grab The Lab free on Steam here. You will, of course, need a fancy pair of space-goggles.