With the October 28th release of Age Of Empires IV looming, last week’s Gamescom event saw a clutch of new reveals for the medieval strategy extravaganza, including a new trailer, a couple of live interviews, and - my personal favourite - an unexpected short documentary about trebuchets. In just three minutes, it told us a surprisingly large amount about history’s finest rock-chuckers, including the fact that they were sometimes armed with such strange ammunition as diseased livestock, dead bodies, and bee hives.

Naturally, then, when I spoke with AoE franchise creative director Adam Isgreen and game director Quinn Duffy following the show, there was one question I needed to ask more than any other. Indeed, so urgent was I to know, that I entirely forgot to say hello or introduce myself, instead opening the interview by blurting, “so, we’ll be able to shoot bees, then?”

I certainly know how to make an entrance.

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A while ago, I wrote about the weird stained glass puzzle game that is Glass Masquerade 2. Unfortunately I tore through all the puzzles on that pretty quickly. But thank goodness, now there is a new one! Let me welcome you into the early access puzzles of Mosaic Chronicles, which are a bit weird, but I want more of them asap.

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Want to learn how to create the best build for Yanfei in Genshin Impact? Animalistic demigod, maritime lawyer, Pyro Catalyst wielder — Genshin Impact's Yanfei certainly has a lot of plates spinning. This young polymath from Liyue has achieved a lot in a short time, so if you end up with her in your adventuring party, you'll be unsurprised to learn that she performs best when leading the charge as your DPS main with the help of her trusty book of elemental power.

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We're drowning in remakes and remasters. Big publishers are rereleasing every game which is older than three years and sold at least thirty copies. Some of these remakes, I suspect, sold as few as seven copies. But they're 'IP', precious intellectual properties to be recycled and rebooted and combined in new forms until the sun burns out in the sky. So why have we still not seen the one we actually need: a $500 million remake of the Mavis Beacon minigame where you type words to make penguins jump across ice floes.

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Want to learn how to create the best build for Rosaria in Genshin Impact? Cryo Polearm wielder Rosaria joined Genshin Impact's hero line-up with the v1.5 update in April 2021. A member of the Church of Favonius in Mondstadt, Rosaria is extremely bored by her religious devotions and would much rather be following her own path instead. In-story she's not much of a team player, but nevertheless she'd probably jump at the chance to join your adventuring party if it means getting out of daily prayers and choir practice.

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Gun to your head, if you were forced to staff a post office with flightless birds, which kind would you pick? Personally I'd go with ostriches, because they are both tiny of brain and aggressive of temperament (plus their long necks would reach high shelves and they would be very fast at delivery). But the good people at Stonewheat & Sons are clearly cowards, because they picked kiwis, the little avocado-shaped birds of New Zealand. Although, bonus points for featuring cassowaries as mail carriers, a species whose first Google autocomplete suggestion is "cassowary attack".

KeyWe feels like a name that was generated pun first and ask questions later, which is a design method I have immense respect for. In this case, your two little kiwi pals must run a small regional Telepost office that has almost terminal levels of whimsy. The telegram machine is split into separate groups of keys that spin, swap places, and, worst of all, do not follow the standard QWERTY layout. Packages are labelled according to the personal notes enclosed with them: set up this scarecrow as soon as possible, but remember his stick body is very fragile. The mail room is also run by an octopus.

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EA will today give a wee work-in-progress peek at their remake of Dead Space, 2008's sci-fi horror shooter about removing legs from monsters like a cruel child playing with a spider, except here sometimes the monster is a cruel child who's also a spider. Dead Space is a good'un but, like so many other games getting remakes and remasters these days, still basically fine. I'll be curious to see what's dramatic enough to warrant a full-on remake. This Twitch stream will be at 6pm today (10am Pacific), and you can watch it here below.

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Out of all the games announced at this year's Geoffscom, action adventure game DokeV was easily my highlight of the show. Unlike everything else, which made some sort of sense, this game took a bold choice and made none. It made no sense at all. All we got was a barrage on> the senses, and I respect that rogue attitude. Instead of opting for a PowerPoint presentation like its peers, it just blared K-pop at everyone for three minutes and then moseyed off like it was nothing.

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Suiting up as a mercenary member of the Gemini II squad to dive into a mine crawling with alien creatures to harvest precious Viridium sounds sounds right off the back of an ancient cartridge box. That's definitely by design, because B.I.O.T.A is a Metroidvania 'em up with a rather retro face. It's also a shooter with some nice modern concessions like manual saves and teleportation escapes for those of us who have nightmares about the platformers of yore. You can take a shot at it in Biota's demo before it launches in full later this year.

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As we learned last week thanks to that snazzy animated trailer, viking action craft 'em up Valheim is summoning its major Hearth & Home update in September. We've gotten teasers on quite a bit of the update's features over the past couple months—from new building pieces to special treasure chests, and more. The latest detail is that you'll be able to vomit. Yes, that's actually a thing you might want to do on purpose. Iron Gate demonstrate your nasty new ability in a quick developer update.

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