Mondays are for hoping your new graphics card arrives, seen as your old one got burgled last week. I’m fine! It’s fine! Burglar: caught. Videogames: written about. Here’s the best writing from the last week.

For UpperCut, Grace Curtis spoiled Life Sim games forever. She’s managed to describe the listlessness that crept into my Stardew Valley farm so eloquently that the prospect of ever booting up something similar now fills me with dread. Thanks, Curtis.

(more…)

Sherlock Holmes. DC/PC. The Cocaine Think Boy. The Big Hat. Whatever you call him, Arthur Conan-Doyle’s detective’s detective is iconic to this day, inspiring loads of adaptations and remakes and modern updates. Games, as well, are just as susceptible to Holmes’ allure. Since the 2000s, developers Frogwares have been putting out an enduringly popular series of Sherlock sleuth’em ups that are getting pretty bloody close to perfecting the gamification of detection.

They recently announced their next step in that endeavour: Sherlock Holmes Chapter One, a new game in the series due in 2021, and serving as a prequel to the rest. Set when Sherlock is 21-ish and exploring a Mediterranean island from his childhood, Chapter One will see tweaks to combat, detecting, and the addition of a more open world format. As a fan of the series and detectives in general, I was intrigued. And like any good gumshoe, I had questions. Frogwares? They had answers. Which Sergey Oganesyan, Producer and Comms Manager, gave me. He was actually very accommodating and shared loads of details, so it wasn’t too intense an interrogation.

(more…)

As bearded strategy game Dwarfheim drills down into its development strata, they’ve sent up some ore to be refined into shiny news. I’ve been digging around in the bucket for riches and found a nice chunk. The biggest nugget revealed that you will be able to invite friends to play multiplayer with you even if they don’t own the game.

(more…)

It’s been over two weeks since Kojima’s mad courier sim Death Stranding came out on PC, but during that time I’ve only just about managed to make it across Lake Knot to the game’s second big area.

It didn’t help that, once I’d arrived at the big port town and finished showering its first boss monster with a torrent of poop grenades, I decided to go all the way back across its first bit of map to finish up some extra delivery quests. But a big part of why it’s taken me so long to get to the other side of Lake Knot is that I can’t stop taking pictures with Death Stranding’s excellent photo mode.

(more…)

The 2012 browser game now has a Steam presence in Frog Fractions: Game Of The Decade Edition. It is, I suppose, an arcade game with an educational element – or perhaps more accurately a spoof of games with an educational element. You play as a wee frog who perches on a lilypad, defending your pond from waves of incoming flying insects by lashing out with your tongue.

The main gimmick is the scoring system, which eschews integers, and instead grants points in fractions, decimals, and indices – although it should be noted that you don’t have to understand fractions to play the game, and it will not teach you to understand them either. And nothing else ever happens.

(more…)

A team? Abilities? Economy? Pfft, get rid of it. Valorant‘s second Act is dropping this week, bringing with it a brand new free-for-all deathmatch game mode in which you’ll have to rely on your shooting prowess alone to guide you to Victory. It’s coming to Riot Game’s guns n’ wizards FPS on Wednesday 5th August. The day before that, however, Valorant Act 2 launches, with a new battle pass and some funky cosmetics for you to buy and unlock.

(more…)

Blightbound

is a three-player 2D action RPG about… well it has a plot, but come on. It’s about tearing up some monsters and taking their stuff. And it does that pretty well.

The world is blighted by the dying gasp of an apocalyptic monster, and you set out as part of a team of three to fix it by stabbing everything. Rather than a linear campaign, you run at dungeons in a 2.5D style, exploring each small network of interconnected screens and treasure rooms. As you gather resources and rescue NPCs, your base camp will be upgraded with more features, letting you buy and sell weapons, order custom gear, recruit new characters, and unlock new areas. It’s all very typical, on the face of it, but there’s enough charm coursing through its veins to help it punch above its weight.

(more…)

First up, I’m going to incept the Halo theme song into your brain: Oohwawawawahwahwawha…>

There, that should do it. Now we have the scene properly set, I’m excited to tell you that the Halo: The Master Chief Collection isn’t going to settle on just bringing the Halo series back to the PC. There are plans afoot that will let Xbox One and PC gamers fight together in multiplayer. Everything is connected, people.

(more…)

Dell’s big summer sale may be over, but this weekend saw the start of yet another season of discounts on loads of Alienware and Inspiron gaming laptops and monitors in the UK and US. The UK sale isn’t quite as good as it was before, admittedly, but there are still decent savings of around £170 to be had on Dell’s range of Inspiron gaming laptops, as well as up to £200 of their Alienware monitor line-up, the best of which I’ve highlighted below.

Over in the US, meanwhile, there are buckets worth of deals to be had, particularly if you’ve been eyeing up one of their Alienware m15 or Inspiron G7 15 laptops, which have had between $750 and $1300 shaved off them. So read on for the best UK and US Dell deals you can buy right now.

(more…)

I wrote about AI Dungeon 2 when it came out last year, but I really should have been keeping up with it. It’s essentially a messy yet occasionally flabbergasting chat bot that spins up text adventure games, improvised from your prompts and the stupid-big amount of data it’s been trained on. Developers Latitude have updated it loads since I posted about it in December, adding multiplayer and jazzing up its memory.

You can also customise it, so its prompts are all geared around a certain concept and you get more consistency. Creator Nick Walton just released one about giving an AI therapy and it’s a little bit surreal.

(more…)