Alright folks, Stardew Valley just wasn’t pleasant enough. The animals are cute, the spouses are cute, and even the monsters are cute. But you do> have to kill the monsters and that is decidedly not cute. You’ve got to whack them with increasingly edgy swords as you dive deeper into the mines beneath the mountain. Who are you to come into the monsters’ territory and smack them with a Lava Katana, hmm? A Stardew Valley modder is doing away with all the violence beneath pastoral Pelican Town with Pacifist Valley.

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I’ve been quite jazzed about Spiritfarer since it was first announced last year. The cozy crafting and management game has a much different vibe from the last Thunder Lotus game I played. Jotun kicked my rear right through the final moments so I’ll be glad to have a different relationship with this next one. There’s a new trailer out today showing off some of the gathering and crafting you’ll do while piloting your ferry.

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That scrappy Polish studio that developed a computer RPG based on the monster hunting novels by Andrzej Sapkowski is all grown up. CD Projekt, parent company of The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 developers, are now valued as the second largest gaming company in Europe, beat only by Ubisoft.

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Blizzard have cancelled a series of Overwatch League matches that were set to take place in South Korea over the next few weeks, “in order to protect the health and safety of players, fans and staff”. This comes just a few weeks after they announced they were cancelling the games scheduled for China amid coronavirus fears. Blizzard have said they’ll be trying to reschedule the matches, so for now it’s a bit of a waiting game to see what happens with the coronavirus outbreak.

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The wild west is a dangerous place. You’d think it’s because of the cougars and grizzly bears and alligators but no, my real nemesis in Red Dead Redemption 2 is riding or running straight off a cliff I wasn’t playing attention to. Inevitably that ends up with me dead at the bottom of a ravine, preserved in a loading screen as death by falling, though it should really claim death by dumb. Some players have found a way around that, though it requires a level of forethought that I apparently don’t have.

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Wolcen has a lot of spells and abilities that you can assign to your character. But just using skills is scratching the surface, as Wolcen allows you to apply modifiers, changing how a skill works. These can be as small as increasing overall damage dealt, or major alterations that transform the skill into something else entirely.

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There s no shortage of games about the novel coronavirus or COVID-19, which has, over the past few months, created a global miasma of paranoia, racism, and fear. Global Game Jam 2020 was peppered with virus and outbreak-themed games, including a 2D action game named 2019-nCOV Stole My DNA and a Taiwanese game where players must monitor the proper use of face masks.

Thanks to the relentless nature of modern news cycles, creators have had a lot of material to work with hoarding, mask shaming/policing, misinformation, and a heightened level of self-surveillance that would make Jeremy Bentham proud. And as affected Asian countries prepare to ride out the economic aftermath of COVID-19, the impact will be particularly hard on China s community of indie developers.

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It’s said that the aerodynamic design of Formula One cars generates so much downforce that you could, theoretically, drive one upside-down. In reality, nobody seems willing to risk vehicle and vertebrae to attempt this stunt. But in GTA Online, we’re mere bytes so of course driving on the ceiling (oh what a feeling!) was one of the first things people tried when the first F1 car arrived last week. It is possible, and it’s great fun. I won one myself and frankly am now more interested in F1 stunting than the F1 races launching this week. Come see.

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With Valve Index stock a bit on the low side right now, those looking to get a VR headset ahead of the next month’s release of Half-Life: Alyx may want to turn their attention to the HTC Vive Pro, as the starter kit bundle is currently 220 cheaper than normal.

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Has science gone too far? If there’s just a bunch of buzz saws flying around a room that you for some reason willingly walked into, I’ll argue yes. Devolver Digital announced Disc Room today, a gore-y new game where you’re a scientist who’s had the rat in a maze paradigm flipped on them. Now you get to find your way through a maze of rooms except also they all want to kill you.

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