El Shaddai: Ascension Of The Metatron will arrive on PC on September 1st. The 2011 action game was announced for PC back in December 2020, but developers Crim announced the release date and price with a new trailer, which you can watch below.
Japanese indie game festival BitSummit is returning and has just revealed its lineup of games. There's some familiar faces among the mix - Haven Park, for example - but as usual there's also a bunch of stunning-looking games we haven't written about previously.
Among them, Two Strikes, pictured above. It's the sequel to One Strike, and must be a contender for Biggest Series Glow-Up.
Stardew Valley is about leaving the city behind for a simple life where honest toil is rewarded with a flourishing home. Lightyear Frontier asks: what if your honest toil was performed from the cockpit of a stompy mech with lasers on its arms?
The game was announced with a trailer during tonight's ID@Xbox indie game stream, and you can find it below.
There's a type of Special Ridden in Back 4 Blood called a Sleeper. It's a torso encased in a fleshy pod which, in the Freudian nightmare of my brain, is kind of part-barnacle, part-vagina dentata. The Sleeper will launch at you without warning, trapping you and ripping with teeth and claws to do serious damage. The first time I was ambushed by one I swore with such depth and vehemence that it shocked the colleagues I was playing with, including my actual boss.
"That's because you were off on your own, and you weren't watching your corners," says Brandon Yanez, adopting the tone one might use to tell a toddler that it's their own fault they fell over when they were told not to run around the pool. It turns out the Sleeper was designed almost specifically to punish over-confident fools like me. "That character actually came from a want to keep players together. We added the Sleeper as basically a trap," Yanez says.
As a child, I wanted to be a Ghostbuster or an Indiana Jones. TBH, I’d still quite like to be either. But I don’t want to be a Witcher after watching The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf's new trailer. It shows off the really rather stressful process that creates a Witcher, and it’s something I don’t want any part of. I prefer my fictional job goals to involve way less imbibing of mutagenic goo*.
I've never played a single second of Left 4 Dead. So, I can't properly compare the new game to the source material. However, I can say that I had a ball playing the Back 4 Blood beta with other members of the RPS treehouse. It's good, old-fashioned zombie killing funtimes!
One of the many surprises of the Steam Deck announcement concerned SteamOS. The underlying software of SteamOS 2.0 was Debian (back when Steam Machines were a thing) but that’s been dropped for Arch Linux for version 3.0. Valve says the switch will let them use Arch’s rolling updates to keep their gaming slate up-to-date.
Are you in need of some practical Splitgate tips and tricks? Often described as "Halo meets Portal", Splitgate has exploded onto the scene out of the blue after 2 years of Early Access, and a great many players are only now discovering that it's about as brain-meltingly complex as it sounds.
In this beginner's guide to Splitgate, I'll walk you through some top tips and tricks that have helped me dominate any map and mode in the game, covering everything through portal usage to weapon types and map knowledge.
I'm a lifelong JRPG fan, but my history with Bandai Namco's venerated Tales series is spotty. I'm not sure how that happened. I might’ve been turned off by the 2001 fan translation of the original SNES game - yes, the same translation that suggested 17-year-old heroine Arche Klein “[Fornicates] like a tiger.” Or maybe it was Tales of Phantasia, in which all instances of the word “Ragnarok” became “kangaroo” thanks to a sloppy localization error. Again, I turned away. Finally, in 2019, a breakthrough. I bought Tales of Vesperia: Definitive Edition and was quickly enamored. Tales' traditional action-heavy combat system worked well with Vesperia's lush, ruins-dotted world, and its wise-cracking characters are honestly hilarious at times. (Foul-mouthed researcher Rita Mordio is a hoot, especially when she torments Karol, the party’s tagalong brat.)
Not surprisingly, there’s good and bad about previewing the long-awaited Tales of Arise with only Vesperia under my belt. On one hand, I can compare Arise's storytelling and mechanics with one of the best games the series has to offer. On the other hand, I can compare Arise's storytelling and mechanics with one of the best... well, you probably know what I'm getting at, here.
In what can only be described as a natural transition, Bossa Studios have followed up physics based platformer I Am Bread with I Am Fish. The premise remains similar, but you could say that yeast has been swapped for beast this time around, as you take control of four different fish and help them escape to the ocean.
But the journey from bowl to surf is far from simple. From the early build I played, I'd say I Am Fish is an absolute nightmare, both in the sense that it's difficult and also genuinely frightening. Don't let the cutesy Pixar look fool you; this game will have you in tatters.