Deck Nine's next supernatural drama 'em up Life Is Strange: True Colors is just about to land in September and Square Enix have now queued up a longer look at an early part of the game while you wait. The new 13 minutes of gameplay show off protagonist Alex Chen's first meeting with two other main characters—and potential romantic interests—at the local record store. Perfect place for a bit of bants about Smash Mouth and Kings Of Leon, naturally.
Our experience of time isn't fixed. If you're told you've got two minutes to put away the washing then it doesn't feel like any time at all. If a stranger is staring at you on a train, however, unblinking and silent, then you realise that two minutes is, in fact, an eternity. 12 minutes would seem like a luxurious amount of time in many contexts, but when you have that amount of time to incapacitate a cop, untangle a murder and escape a time loop, all from your one-bedroom flat, it turns out it's quite short.
Nevertheless, this is the challenge presented to you in the puzzle game Twelve Minutes. You play a man voiced by James McAvoy who comes home for a nice evening with his Daisy Ridley wife, only for a Willem Dafoe policeman to burst in, zip tie you both, and strangle you to death for objecting to these circumstances. Luckily, every time you are murdered by Willem, or even try and walk out of your flat, or burn out the 12 minutes, you start the loop all over again.
I had to write guides for Dark Souls III, so I am in the position of being acceptable at playing Soulslikes games, while also not being mad about them. I appreciate the artistry involved, and the accomplishment at being great at them, but I'm just not often in the mood for a game to be outright mean to me.
Tails Of Iron kind of tricks you into thinking it's not mean, because it's a nice 2D kingdom of little rats who all flute at each other like Clangers (because, producer and designer Jack Bennett told me, they tried squeaks and it was too annoying). Aw, how sweet! You can give your little rat armour and a sword! They think they're people! Oh. Oh dear, I have just ripped the intenstines out of a giant frog that was trying to crush me. My goodness.
When Valve first released the Steam Controller, it had a hidden, latent gyroscope inside it that Valve switched on later to get it extra hardware functionality. Alas, anyone hoping for similar technological surprises inside their upcoming portable Steam Deck PC are going to be disappointed, as Valve designer Greg Coomer has assured me there "isn't something secret embedded in the Steam Deck that we're going to turn on later" (if only because it already has a gyro built-in). It will, however, continue to get plenty of additional post-launch updates that will give it new features on the software side, he said, including a bunch of nifty cloud capabilities.
Back in June, Syndicate and Ultima Underworld I & II disappeared from GOG.com at EA's request. Then they returned to the digital storefront earlier this month without much explanation, and are being given away for free for a period of four weeks by way of apology.
Now EA have said they'll have a "process in place" in future so things like this don't happen.
Whoa, this is kind of crazy. Normally we see sales on older, more budget NVMe SSDs, but today we have a scorching hot deal on one of the very fastest drives on the market. The XPG Gammix Gaming S70 is a PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD, capable of ludicrous sequential speeds - up to 7000MB/s reads and 6400MB/s writes. The 2TB model is down from $499.99 to $269.99 on Newegg right now - and it comes with a free $30 gift card, bringing the effective price to $239.99. That's an incredible value for a drive of this size and speed.
Patron looks to me like The Settlers: a peaceful medieval citybuilder about laying down paths and watching your peeps trundle between farmstead and market. It is, according to its Steam reviews, more akin to Banished: a survival citybuilder about both outlasting winter and appeasing the social simulation of your town.
In either case, Patron feels worthy of further patronage. It came out a week ago and there's a demo available.
The Dell S2522HG is a solid 240Hz gaming monitor based around a 25-in IPS panel, making it an ideal choice for both competitive gaming and content creation - and now it's reached a new low price thanks to a code available at Dell's UK store. Use code DELLNJMON103 to knock £26 off the listed sale price, dropping the monitor from £260 to £234 - a great value.
Fortnite now has a new mode called Fortnite Impostors. I'll give you two guesses as to what it is, and if you get the first one wrong I'm going to assume you're the impostor. I mean, it's in the headline>.
The mode is Among Us, more or less, and there's a trailer for the backstab royale below.
Last week I wrote that best-game-of-last-year Hades was coming to Xbox Game Pass in August, alongside some other fine games such as Curse Of The Dead Gods and Katamari Damacy.
This was apparently insufficient, since Microsoft have just laid out more games coming to their game subscription service in the Month Of Aug, including Humankind, 12 Minutes and Psychonauts 2.