has been plenty scary for years, in my opinion, but this year Hinterland Studio are upping the horror vibes for spooky season. Escape The Darkwalker is a new in-game event that will force you to stay on the run ahead of an invisible, evil entity. Because being stalked by wolves and weather sure wasn’t enough. Escape The Darkwalker will run from October 29th to November 12th.
After a year of Epixclusivity [correction: oh god, and the Microsoft Store, I forgot]>, The Outer Worlds today launches on Steam and GOG. Obsidian Entertainment’s sci-fi FPS-RPG feels a whole lot like a return to their days of Fallout: New Vegas, but in space. If you’ve been waiting for it to land on a store you like more, here you go. Or if you’ve been waiting for it to be cheaper, hey, it’s half-price right now too.
This week, I had my first Apex Legends boxing match. If you’re a fan of the battle royale, you may have seen clips of this phenomenon on social media. It’s when squads of total strangers manage to make peace, drop all their guns and armour, and settle their final standoff by throwing hands (and occasionally feet). This will never happen to me>, I thought, I’m far too distrustful of enemy players just to drop all my loot>. That was, until the other night, where I had my favourite match of Apex I’ve ever played.
The original Little Nightmares is one of my favourite horror games ever. I admire a horror game that doesn’t rely on the first-person perspective. Little Nightmares is scary in the same way it was scary to hide in your parents’ wardrobe because you were planning to jump out at them, but then you sort of fell over your dad’s shoes and you weren’t sure what it was you were sitting on and oh dear.
I was therefore thrilled when Bamco announced a sequel to this most stylish of puzzle-platformers, due out early next year. And, having played half an hour of Little Nightmares 2, may I just say: nope. Hard nope. Stop that this instant. This is too> scary.
It’s no secret that big publishers spend small fortunes on marketing, but it’s rare that we get to put actual numbers to it. Here’s one: Ubisoft are paying approximately 11 million Swedish krona (around £940k/$1.23m) for one trailer. That’s according to the company who this week announced they’ve signed an agreement with Ubisoft to create a trailer. You probably don’t know their name but you might know some of their work, like the Cyberpunk 2077 trailer from E3 2019 which revealed virtual Keanu Reeves.
D’you like dogs? I like dogs. How about five> dogs? Hot diggidy daffodil, now we’re talking. In The Red Lantern you’re a musher who has decided to adopt a bunch of sled dogs and take ’em over the Alaskan wilderness to a distant cabin that you’re pretty sure definitely 100% exists. This is, of course, how idiots die. Solo sled across Alaska, they said! It’s easy, they said!
But even though I knew this was a roguelite survival adventure going in, I wasn’t expecting there to be quite so much adventuring to it and so little chill sledding with my dogs.
My biggest ludological disappointment of 2019? Close Combat: The Bloody First, without question. Slitherine’s 3D take on Atomic’s gripping top-down wargame series should have been irresistible, but a host of bugs and questionable design decisions left many of the pages in its copybook looking like Rorschach tests. Curious to see what difference a year of fairly regular patches has made, I reinstalled last Friday. (more…)
The honeycomb below is a fancy form of wordsearch in which every cell is used, and words can curl and zigzag but never overlap. Each hive foxer has a theme (some previous ones: sheep, mazes, earthquakes, and The 39 Steps). Identifying the theme is a vital part of the defoxing process. Today’s puzzle is made up of 18 answers, two of which are abbreviations. (more…)
A little while back I restarted Baldur’s Gate III to play through as the most interesting person I could make in the current character creator. Owing to several comments misunderstanding a cheap joke I made in an image caption, this character is now known as Wonderwall, although technically the game thinks their name is Tav.
Despite my misgivings about the chaotic and impractical nature of their build, ol’ DoubleDoubleyou and crew are actually going okay, mainly because all of the NPCs are competent at their roles, and Wonderwall is a decent archer so they can stand at the back and not get in anyone’s way. But as well as going okay, their adventure is also going very slowly, and I am finding this an ideal turn of events.
There’s nothing like a spot of cheery post-apocalyptic city building to keep you going in this fine year we call 2020. After a year of Epic exclusivity, Surviving The Aftermath has arrived in early access on Steam. It’s one of those strategy and management games where you can build a colony for some apocalypse survivors to hang out in, with the ultimate goal of restoring some civilisation to the doomed world. So, you know, good practice for the years to come.
