Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Tonight, Annapurna Interactive held their very first E3-like showcase, showing off loads of games they're publishing over the next year or so, as well as revealing new developers they're working with. We saw new gameplay for Stray, Neon White, Skin Deep, and a very special announcement from Outer Wilds developers Mobius Digital about a cryptic new expansion.

If you missed the stream, read on, because we've made a big list of everything that happened at the Annapurna Interactive Showcase.

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Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Skin Deep, the next game from Quadrilateral Cowboy and Thirty Flights Of Loving developer Brendon Chung got a new gameplay trailer at tonight's Annapurna Interactive showcase, showing lots more weird and wonderful ness for the "Die Hard in space"-like. It's a game where you've been, uh, "hired" by cats to be their insurance guy during a space flight. So, when pirates attack the ship, they pop you out of a container to fend them off.

Naturally, I had to ask Chung: why cats?

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Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Announced at the Annapurna Interactive showcase, the skating, monster-killing, vibey and vibrant Solar Ash will be released on October 26th. It's the next game from Hyper Light Drifter developers Heart Machine, sharing Hyper Light's cool and colourful 80s aesthetic, but flipping from 2D to 3D and putting a real emphasis on fluid movement throughout a huge world.

I had a chance to chat with the devs about Solar Ash, and they told me a bit about why they decided to go for something so different, and about the challenges of making such a speedy character.

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Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Neon White sounds like a lot. As you may have seen from tonight's Annapurna Interactive Showcase, it's a speedrunning first-person shooter where you use decks of cards that represent weapons to stop demons invading heaven. It also has dating sim aspects where you can chat and have a nice time with the other Neons (the demon slayers you're sort of working with). Better yet, it's made by the developers of Donut County, and designer Ben Esposito tells me that massive tonal change was because he wanted to go "apeshit".

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Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Starbase looks like one of those games you could lazily suggest throws everything but the kitchen sink at the player, but after seeing the asset browser in the latest trailer, I think it might even have one of those in there, too. It’s Trine developers Frozenbyte’s fulsome space survival sim, one where you find resources, build ships, explore, trade, and fight with others. I could have listed way more things, but it was getting silly. And this is an early access release, so there’s more to come.

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Rock, Paper, Shotgun

14 years on, it might say more about me than about games that I automatically want to reference Portal when I play a game like Claire De Lune. It's a bit unfair to compare everything in the first person physics puzzle subgenre to one of the best games ever made as a default.

You have a zappy non-violent gun necessary for navigating a series of platforming challenges. That's... actually where the similarities end. Instead of the increasingly sinister laboratory and wry humour, Claire De Lune crashes you into an alien planet and asks you to reunite with your daughter while periodically getting a flash of sad backstory.

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Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I grew up in the countryside and thus Cottagecore has always faintly amused me as a concept. My experience was more ThereIsAlwaysASpiderInTheBathcore. You may imagine that you spend your days picking letterbox-red strawberries from your garden, under the heady scent of roses, but in actual fact if you do not get to the strawberries within about 30 seconds of them ripening then they will be eaten by slugs. But I don't want to destroy anyone's dream, and if real-life cottage fantasy doesn't work out then there's always The Sims 4: Cottage Living.

This latest expansion to EA's (already monstrously expanded) life sim allows you to live out the ultimate Cottagecore fantasy. Compliant hens, a Llama to joke with, the ability to commune with wild foxes and birds, and loads of cute wooden furniture. It's probably my favourite expansion in recent memory, maybe because Maxis appear to have embarked on a tactic of taking note of the most popular community mods and then making them. They should have just done that years ago. We'd have had official bunkbeds for ages.

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Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I know these monthly lists often highlight the 10 games that you should keep an eye on over the next month, but I’ve bumped it up to 12 for August. Because, if you haven’t heard, video games are back, baby!... And they might disappear again at any moment, so please just let me celebrate the fact that there are more than 10 computer games coming out over the next four and a bit weeks.

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Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The original King's Bounty was a classic RPS game. A sort of janky but inventive tactical mash-up that took Alec Meer (RPS in peace) into a battle inside his own belt for the right to upgrade it. This small glimpse at the upcoming King's Bounty 2, along with Ed’s hands-on preview a few weeks ago, doesn’t really hint at the extreme options the 2008 offering had, but there are moments in there that suggest at alternative routes and game-altering decisions.

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Rock, Paper, Shotgun

This week The Electronic Wireless Show Podcast is all about the best robots in games, which is another one of those topics we might have done before. But we're doing it again because darn it, robots are cool. Obviously this means we have a short discussion on whether cyborgs count as robots (yes, probably, but not in all circumstances).

As well as what I feel is actually a very productive chat about robots this week, we also talk about Miles Jupp and his thousands of children, Thomas The Tank Engine, and Matthew does a truly stunning Cavern Of Lies themed around Ace Attorney.

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