The surreal simulated world of papercraft creatures in Paper Beast is creeping onto PC before the end of the month. The equal parts cute and horrifying critters are part of a VR game led by Pixel Reef founder Eric Chahi who you may recognise from Another World and From Dust fame. Pixel Reef have published a new trailer to announce the July 24th release date and a developer video describing some of the tech behind the simulation.

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Stylish narrative game Necrobarista is serving up a release date at last. It’s got snark. It’s got references to Dungeons & Dragons alignment. It’s got baristas serving brews that can literally wake the dead. The anime-inspired visual novel debuted an intense new trailer to announce that it will be releasing next week on July 22nd.

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While your AI-controlled teammates in Ghost Recon Wildlands were not the brightest sparks, they were handy for filling out your squad if you didn’t have co-op pals – so it was weird that the sequel straight cut them. No more. By popular demand, Ubisoft today add AI squadmates to Ghost Recon Breakpoint in a free update. They’ll follow your lead, do fancy tricks like execute synchronous shots, and can be customised to make your dream team. To celebrate the arrival of our new cyberpals, the open-world tactical sneak-o-shooter will hold a free trial weekend, starting Thursday.

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Oi, you. You saw that Hyper Scape was a battle royale game and immediately lost interest, didn’t you? That’s fine. I understand. But I still want to try and tempt you specifically, because it feels so very different to every royale I’ve battled in so far. There’s very little of that meditative nonsense. No quietly stalking through fields, or merrily yet slowly looting your way up to a deadly loadout. This is all guns all the time, baby – when it’s not all skyward leaps, groundpounds, teleports and bouncing metallic bubble shields. It makes Apex Legends look like a snail on valium.

If you do like battle royale games, I think it already goes without saying that you should check Hyper Scape out.

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Amazon US are at it again with their big WD storage sales, as today they’ve cut prices on some of their jumbo external HDDs and SSDs by up to 25%. The star deal of the day is $24 off their 4TB WD Black P10, which has finally fallen below the $100 mark for the very first time to $96. They’ve also knocked over $100 off the 4TB WD Blue 3D NAND SSD as well, bringing this once $530 internal SSD down to an almost-Black Friday price of $397. That’s still a hefty chunk of change, but if you’re in the market for a truck load of storage, there are some great savings to be had here today.

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Having bounced off the opening exposition of Death Stranding on PS4 last November I was not anticipating falling in love with its craggy exploration on PC. And yet here I am, some 40 hours under my belt (along with a pair of spare boots and 30ft of climbing rope) and readily committed to 40 hours more. Underneath that initial hit of lore, acronyms and holographic Guillermo del Toro (yes) lies a brilliant take on open world exploration; a full body cleanse of the genre’s worst habits.

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After three years of us cooing over it, Ooblets today launched in early access. To be crudely reductive: it’s a bit ‘Stardew Valley meets Pokémon, but cutesy’. There we are, growing crops on our little farm and befriending folks in the local town. We’re also growing little critters named ooblets, who we raise and train to compete – though rather than bite, claw, electrocute, and drown each other, they bust moves in dance-offs. Adorable.

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Netflix last night announced that their Dragon’s Dogma anime series will arrive on September 17th. Based on Capcom’s open-world action-RPG of the same name, Dragon’s Dogma follows a dude who’s been brought back to life as an “Arisen”, tasked with taking out monsters that represent the seven deadly sins. Netflix announced the series last year, and now they’ve finally given a tiny look at it.

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Marvelous Ms Marvel will assemble the super friends in September, but you’ll be able to go for a test flight a couple weeks earlier. Crystal Dynamics have announced the beta test dates for Marvel’s Avengers. Before that, another War Table livestream is queued up for the end of July to give you another look at the super squad in action.

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Ooblets

is what it looks like. That can be a bit of a cop out as descriptions go, but I saw almost no footage of it before guessing it was a cross between a Harvest Moon farming/fix-up-the-town game and a Pokémon-style monster collector, and so it is.

But while both those types of game tend to soak up days of my life and leave me with powerful grinder’s remorse, Ooblets feels less insidious than either. Time was going by a lot faster than I’d realised, but not in the mindless haze of repetition or chasing numbers. It’s a good time.

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