Thank Christ 2020 is over. While we’ll be able to regale our grandkids with stories about toilet roll shortages and incompetent governments, last year would’ve been better if we were able to just do the things we’d all been planning to do.

However, now that we’re a couple weeks into the new year, we know that things didn’t drastically change at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve. The calendar might as well read December 2020 II: Once More With Feeling. But, look, we can all do our bit by just staying in doors with some lovely new video games.

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I have often related how, whilst covering E3 2018 from the UK, I was watching Bethesda’s live show at some ungodly hour in the morning, having not slept for some days because of watching other live shows at ungodly hours in the morning, and suddenly Andrew W.K. happened.

He and his band absolutely crushing Ready To Die (Mr. W.K. proving he is indeed a very accomplished piano player in the process) whilst the camera kept cutting to Bethesda’s visibly bemused live audience of tired journalists and industry investors and producers – one woman even has her mouth hanging open – broke something within me and I laughed so hard I couldn’t breathe and nearly fell off my chair. And this was all because of Rage 2.

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Spooky sequel Little Nightmares 2 is just around the corner waiting to pop out and scare you in February. If you’ve not played its predecessor puzzle platformer, well not to worry, you can snag it free for keeps through Sunday, giving you plenty of time to creep through it before the sequel. Bandai Namco have also scared up a frightful new trailer for the occasion.

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If you hadn’t heard, CD Projekt Red’s big RPG Cyberpunk 2077 was quite buggy at launch in December on both PC and consoles. CDPR certainly heard, and expressed their intention to provide “regular updates and fixes” for their open world sci-fi ’em up. They’ve now released a roadmap showing their patching priorities in 2021 and a video explaining some of the how and why of Cyberpunk’s messy launch.

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Don’t start packing your trunk just yet, wizard wannabes. Hogwarts Legacy won’t make it for this year after all. After years of rumors, Warner Bros. finally announced the big open world wizards game near the end of 2020 with their plans to release it in 2021. No such luck after all, though. Hogwarts Legacy will now be arriving sometime in 2022.

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Too often, I first hear about neato-looking indie games when they’re barely more than a sparkle in the creator’s eye. It’s a real treat when something falls in my lap that I’ll be able to play before I’ve forgotten it exists. Enter this action-packed platformer Blue Fire which is launching on February 4th when you’ll be hopping, hacking, and slashing your way through its dark world.

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Frontier Developments have been cooking up a new expansion for big space MMO Elite Dangerous but hold up, it hasn’t been cleared to disembark just yet. Elite Dangerous: Odyssey had been planned for early in 2021 but that window is getting bumped back thanks to our constant companion Covid-19. Odyssey is now expected in late spring for PC players, Frontier say in a new announcement.

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In a 2019 interview with Retronauts, inXile Entertainment founder Brian Fargo recalled what Interplay hoped to accomplish in Tales Of The Unknown: Part 1, the seminal RPG more commonly referred to by its subtitle: The Bard’s Tale.

“We were trying to set a mood and build a sense of being there… that there was a world… in our own primitive way,” Fargo said. “You started off in a bar; you got to walk around outside, you had to go down to the dungeons, so you felt like you were living in a world; you weren’t just thrust into a wireframe dungeon and that was it.”

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EA’s exclusive hold over Star Wars has ended with the news that Ubisoft are making an open-world Star Wars game and Lucasfilm are looking to work with more folks. So, what game would you like to see made now? RPG? FPS? Walking simulator? Spacepub landlord sim? Dream big. Any genre, any development team, any budget. Pitch whatever you want. I happen to know a man who says he knows Mickey Mouse, so I can put in a good word for you.

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The studio behind The Division are making a new “story-driven, open-world Star Wars game,” Lucasfilm announced today. They revealed plans to start working with more developers on Star Wars games, not just Electronic Arts. However, they do say they are still working with EA on new projects. This news arrives the day after Bethesda announced an Indiana Jones game, being made by Wolfenstein studio MachineGames.

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