Every weekend, indie devs show off current work on Twitter's #screenshotsaturday tag. And every Monday (well, unless it's a holiday), I bring you a selection of these snaps and clips. This week, my eye has been caught by decorating tapes, a wide range of wet worlds, a spread of cool violence, a murderous squirrel, and yes, immersive sims. Come admire these attractive and interesting indie games!
Vampires might be the themed threat for Diablo 4's second season, but it was arguably its own player base who drew first blood when season one started at the end of July. As you may have heard by now, Diablo's Season Of The Malignant didn't exactly go down all that well, with much of the hissing and fang-bearing directed toward its nerf-heavy balance patch that arrived a couple of days before the season started in earnest - a series of events that Blizzard's franchise general manager Rod Fergusson describes as "a perfect storm of a couple of situations" when I sit down to talk with him at Gamescom.
"Season one was exceptional, because we did something we'd never do again," says Fergusson. "As part of listening to players wanting to carry over their renown, we had to put the patch out a couple of days before the season. The intention is that a season and a patch would go [live] the same day, so at the time we make a balance change and you start a level one character, it feels differently to go through the progression with the new balance."
But you know. In a good way. My waking hours are, currently, beset by stress and anxiety from a number of different directions, and I've only had time to play about about an hour of Mediterranea Inferno so far. It's quite a short game, though, and I'm sort of transfixed. It's about three men in their early 20s who, pre-pandemic, were the toast of their party scene in Milan, and after a couple of years apart enforced by a lockdown they're reuniting for a summer mini-break. Having blazed through my early 20s I no longer really remember that unique, potent mix of feeling simultaneously fragile and invincible, but it's captured in this almost occult, yet hyper-real visual novel.
I may be playing on a Steam Deck on a rainy day, but the bold colour contrasts and the desperate enthusiasm of the dialogue really get over the feeling of a too-hot summer, of trying to force fun and recapture a friendship when you all want different things. The most intense segments of Mediterranea Inferno are the Mirages, visions that merge past and present and metaphor, giving explicit form to each character's wants and anxieties. It's unreal and yet a distillation of reality. It's quite an intense ride so far, but it's a good one.
It's a three-day weekend for most of us here, so we'll be a bit quieter until Tuesday. Possibly a helpful time to play one of those giant games coming out amongst all those other giant games. Or to curl up on the floor with a kitten who can't decide if she wants to groom you or eat you. What are you playing this weekend? Here's what we're clicking on!
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We're in the midst of an unspeakably good couple of months for game releases, even if you ignore the boring corporate ones that we'll never hear the end of. The downside of such a bounty is there are even more gems getting overlooked than usual, because nobody has the time even when we're aware of them. Like, for example, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk.
It absolutely is the Jet Set Radio tribute it looks like, and it's a delight even if, like me, you never really liked the originals. Inspired by, rather than tracing over the rail grinding, spraypainting, all-dancing classic. It plays a little smoother, it clocks in shorter, and runs a little faster, but it's undeniably dancing to the same beat.
Alice0 has a habit of introducing me to weird and slightly frightening games featuring brutalist architecture. Well, not a habit exactly, but it's happened three times now, which is enough to make it a thing. Fugue In Void, by Moshe Linke, is technically and literally a walking simulator, in that you are going for a walk and that's all you do in it, but what it simulates you walking through is kind of a surrealist nighmarescape of raw concrete. I know I'm supposed to be making this game sound like something you'd want to play. Honestly, it's very good.
Around 20-minutes spent with Like A Dragon Gaiden (technically Like A Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name) has helped me fulfil two Yakuza-specific dreams: reunite with Mr. Masochist and fight alongside Mr. Masochist. Having sampled a bit of the colosseum and switched up Kiry- sorry, Joryu's threads, I reckon Gaiden's side hustles are shaping up to be suitably bonkers and remarkably in-depth. Our boy literally has rockets in his shoes, I mean, come on.
Devs GSC Game World are going through an unimaginably difficult time right now on top of leaks and hacker attacks. That has to be taken into account when we think about the development of the game, and it could be why, after 20-minutes spent exploring a bit of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart Of Chornobyl's irradiated world, I'm unsure what to make of it.
Maybe I played a very early build, but while the world itself looks every bit the eerie post apocalyptic survival wasteland you hope, NPC interactions aren't in as great shape. Chats with friendlies are unclear, and in firefights the enemy AI is shonky - to the extent that I think it'll be more useful as a preview to just tell you exactly what happened to me as I played.