Pretty pop-philosophy FPS series BioShock is to return, 2K announced today, with a new game coming from a new studio. 2K don’t reveal even the name of the new game, let alone in which sort of strange city it’ll (surely?) be set, but it’s official: BioShock is back, baby. 2K have muttered about resurrecting it several times in the years since the release of BioShock Infinite and demise of creators Irrational Games, and this time it seems to be real. The new BioShock is being made by Cloud Chamber, a new studio who’ll be working on the game “for the next several years.” Don’t hold your breath. Unless you’re underwater. In which case, do.

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I return to Amnesia: The Dark Descent with one question alone: will it still scare me?

Amnesia scared the bejesus out of me in 2010 when it first came out. But we all know how games age, and the magic can wear off. At the time the graphics and physics on offer were really astonishing work for a tiny indie team, but what about almost a decade later? Can it still make me do that bum-clenched mad panic thing where I lean in forward in my chair in an effort to get away from the monsters faster? Or will it seem a little quaint now?

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Over the weekend I successfully got a wizard to invent the internet, thanks to spotting Robert Yang’s attempts to make an AI gay. We’ve both been mucking about with AI Dungeon 2, a text adventure game that will take a crack at responding to anything you type. It’s built using OpenAI’s GPT-2, a text generator they trained by reading the internet – the one they’ve refused to share their full research on, they claim in case people abuse it to create fake news.

Nonsense like this is allowed, though. It’s about telling a story alongside a robot, rather than attempting to win.

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I’m surrounded by three people, each trapped in a vertical cot. We’re staring at each other from respective cages as we plunge into the depths of our prison, having been pressganged into resolving the warden’s monster problem. It won’t be long until we’re at each others’ side, tiptoing past sleeping abominations. It won’t be much longer until we’re screaming and scurrying away, after one of us wakes them up.

I’m playing co-operative survival horror game GTFO at a preview event in Copenhagen. The wholesome lights of the Christmas market I just walked through outside contrast with the virtual gloom and steel that now surrounds us, as well as the assault rifle I’ve chosen to deal with its denizens. Bullets are scarce, and supposed to be something of a last resort. We burn through a lot of ammo in the first room.

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Vehicles and Aircraft are your greatest weapons in Phoenix Point. They are your transport, your artillery, and your speedy getaway all rolled into one. But with each faction offering up their own unique airship and land vehicle to compete with the Phoenix Project’s own starting Scarab and Manticore, it can be a challenge to know exactly which vehicles are the best choice. Our Phoenix Point Vehicles & Aircraft guide will compare stats and offer our take on each of the different vehicles in the game, both on land and in the air.

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It’s been a while since the big TFT purge, but we’ve seen some interesting developments with the meta – mostly the dominance of a particular hyper-roll build. The next patch should be arriving within the next day or so, and there are hints that this patch will address the balance by nerfing key champions of the “Eggroll comp”. Here are some things potentially coming in the TFT 9.24 patch notes, as well as the full 9.23 patch notes for those wanting to keep up t0 date.

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Mondays are for eating your housemate’s (freely given) banana bread. I wish I was the type who spent their weekends actually baking banana bread, but here we are instead, reading the best writing about videogames from the past week.

For EGM, Mark Hill spoke to the authors of Second Life’s official guides, which include titles like “The Entrepreneur s Guide to Second Life: Making Money in the Metaverse”. What a time to be alive.

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Discworld was an adventure game that took me a while to get into, but one I’m glad I saw through to the end – even if I had to use guides on demo CDs. The game was received as being incredibly difficult for an adventure game even during the 90s, thanks to puzzle solutions that seemed totally random. But one thing is unmistakable: it was a fitting homage to the books.

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There is something very badly behaved on the other side of door eight of the RPS Advent Calendar. Badly behaved and very noisy.

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After fifteen years of development in one form or another, Black Mesa is almost finished. A new public beta build of the Valve-sanctioned Half-Life fan remake unveils the final chapters of Xen, the alien world much-maligned in Half-Life and absent from the initial release of Black Mesa. With this, the game can now be played in full from beginning to end. And damn, their expanded version of Xen is real fancy. The developers still have some work to do before leaving beta and say they’re keen to hear feedback from players but the end is so close I can smell G-Man’s government-issue aftershave.

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