If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to become a very tiny child forced to survive in the jungle that is your own back garden, well, today is your day. Obsidian’s Honey I Shrunk The Kids-like, Grounded, releases in early access at around 6pm BST, inviting you to make spears out of twigs and create armour from the carcasses of your buggy foes. I mean buggy as in, you will have to fight bugs – though it is in early access, so I suppose you could be fighting the other kinds of bugs, too.

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Mums, eh? Can’t live with ‘em, literally can’t live without ‘em. Sadly, some take this as a certificate of ownership, allowing them to subject their offspring to the worst things imaginable, like offering them as a guinea pig to a class of trainee hairdressers. A perfect storm of nerves and> scissors. Sorry, I should probably keep this for therapy. The point I’m getting to (ignoring the ones jammed into my 11-year-old head) is that whatever their faults, no mother has anything on Othercide’s matriarch, birthing an army of warrior daughters to fight a flood of meat monsters. No thermal spa voucher for her next Christmas. (more…)

Factorio mods

have been around almost as long as the game itself – and for good reason. While already an enormous and startlingly polished game, introducing the right mods into the fold will not only expand the game with tonnes of new features to discover and master, but also simultaneously improve the base game experience with dozens of quality of life improvements.

Keep reading for our list of the very best Factorio mods out there, along with instructions on how to get started downloading mods of all shapes and sizes to augment your game.

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Look, we’ve not got time for life histories here. If you’ve read anything of mine on this site or elsewhere, you’ll know full well I really like, y’know, fish and that. Sea Geezers. Damp Daniels. The Wet Squad. Call them what you will, I’m into them. I subscribe to Practical Fishkeeping magazine. My office at home has ten fish tanks in it. If you weren’t aware this was my thing, you are now. So you can imagine how keen I’d be on the prospect of a proper aquarium management game. Now admittedly, Megaquarium is not my ideal> aquarium game. But since that would be a game so hideously in-depth and dry that it would probably sell about eight copies, all to me, I feel it’s a decent compromise with the appetites of reasonable humans.

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Stylish visual novel Necrobarista launched just last week but Route 59 are already brewing a second batch. The anime-inspired click and read ’em up will be getting several free DLC chapters to flesh out the stories of some characters you might have been curious about. The developers say they’re planning for these story additions, and some gameplay updates, to start rolling out later this year.

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Playable comic book Liberated has looked pretty slick ever since I got my eyes on it. The developers at Atomic Wolf have explained during a digital Comic-Con presentation how they’ve achieved the stylish balance between digital comic and game, along with some of their inspirations. The cyberpunk noir game launches this week on July 30th, so we won’t have to wait long to see how this story ends.

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The line “respecting the legacy while adding fresh ideas” is one you hear almost verbatim about any series reboot, so it’s no surprise to hear something of a similar shade from Microsoft on the subject of Fable 4.

The next game is being developed by Playground Games of Forza Horizon fame, as former Fable makers Lionhead Studios were shut down in 2016. Microsoft are touting Playground’s experience with open world environments as part of what they’ll bring to the next Fable game. They also haven’t definitively shut down rumors that it’s an MMO, so do with that as you wish.

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Looks like Valve are rolling out a way to play games in beta, or a purpose-built way to do so at any rate. A new button for requesting access to a playtest has appeared over on the store page for the Hearthstone-looking card game Total War: Elysium. It appears to be the first so far, though more may follow.

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We may still be coaxing strand man Sam across the United States in Death Stranding, but Kojima Productions are already looking forward to the next strand of their game development plans. Not only did KojProd recently tease work on a new project, but that doesn’t seem to be the only iron in the fire. Horror manga artist Junji Ito says that he might just be talking with Kojima about an upcoming horror game.

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Adding to the ever-growing list of places the next Call Of Duty game has leaked, fans have reportedly discovered a promo for Call Of Duty: Black Ops Cold War on some Doritos packaging. Of all the leaks we’ve seen so far, this is absolutely the one I’d believe. See what happens when you leave your announcement too long, Activision? Gaming snacks don’t have time to wait for you.

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