Today is Tuesday, statistically the day of the week least rife with wacky hijinks, whimsical calamity, or even, dare I say, madcap antics. However, if you want to buck tradition, you could do worse than playing What the Car?, the upcoming absurdist physics game from What the Golf? and What the Bat? devs Triband. You can do it right now, actually. It’s just gotten a free demo on Steam, alongside a proper release date of September 5th 2024. Don’t do it if you’re actually driving, though. That’d be lunacy. We only promote the fun kind of lunacy here, like the type shown off in What the Car?’s trailer at the Triple-i initiative.

Read more

Revealed at the Triple-I Initiative just now, Vampire Survivors is getting another cool DLC, this one a crossover with classic Konami run 'n' gun Contra. It's called Operation Guns. Get on board. Trailed with, as is now traditional, a cool animated trailer that suggests the game is a Saturday morning cartoon and not a top down pixelated nightmare that will flush out any latent photosensitivity lurking in your skull (complimentary), Operation Guns is arriving on May 9th, so about a month away.

Read more

No one can see the future, but I've a fairly good sense of where at least 300 hours of my life will go next year. Slay The Spire II was announced during today's Triple-i Initiative stream, returning to the towering fantasy city where Steam says I've spent more than 300 hours building decks and battling monsters. While the announcement doesn't reveal much about the sequel, Slay The Spire is still my favourite roguelikelike deck-builder, so that's just grand.

Read more

Action roguelike UnderMine is getting a numbered sequel. That number is two. The follow-up to 2020’s action roguelike is UnderMine 2. It was announced today as part of the Triple-i Initiative, which is a silly name that I’m writing with the correct stylisation out of respect to UnderMine 2’s slimes.

Read more

World of Warcraft Classic is steadily embarking on its time-travelling trip through WoW of old. The next stop is apocalyptic 2010 expansion Cataclysm, which we now know is due to, uh, re>-shatter Azeroth at the end of next month.

Read more

Today’s the birthday of the Triple-I Initiative, a 45-minute showcase of game announcements and trailers from the likes of Slay The Spire devs MegaCrit, Darkest Dungeon devs Red Hook and Dead Cells custodians Evil Empire. What makes a “triple-I” game a “triple-I” game, as opposed to (hawk, spit) a regular indie? I've given it some thought, and I think the answer is: "has more money and status than most indies, but not, like, Call of Duty levels, and also one of our partners is Gearbox Publishing, so this is perhaps ‘indie’ in the Geoff Keighley sense."

Don’t expect any of Keighley's beloved Kojima interludes or dance numbers in this one, however. The IIIIs are a leaner, quieter showcase with no host or advertising or celebrity drop-ins – you can read more about the thinking behind the event in my GDC interview with a few of the participating studios. Find the full stream below.

Read more

Drop Bear Bytes, the studio behind post-apocalyptic RPG Broken Roads, are named after Australia’s deadliest creature. The Drop Bear might look like a normal koala, but they’re actually dangerous predators, fond of jumping from trees to maul unsuspecting chumps who forget to take adequate precautions, like urinating on themselves. Really, the story is a wind-up the aussies like to blag tourists with. If it looks like a koala, it’s just a koala. But it’s this sort of character, inspired by love for Australia’s unique landscape, culture and good-natured mick-taking, that forms the heart of the best bits in Broken Roads. I say ‘best bits’, but I should probably say ‘the only bits that I actually enjoyed’, unfortunately.

Bombs wiped out 80% of Australia’s population, and left the remaining nail-hard Nancys and tough Tobiases to fend for themselves in a world short of resources, but shockingly plentiful in both guns and pre-made Vegemite sarnies. You’ll pick one of four character classes - I went with ‘Jackaroo’ (cattle hand), because it was called ‘Jackaroo’ - before tackling a short tutorial section. You'll then be thrust into some events>, where you’ll meet the rest of your starting party and kick off the game proper.

Read more

Last week I went to a screening of Amazon and Bethesda's Fallout TV show, a spin-off yarn starring Ella Purnell (who voiced Jinx in the Arcane Netflix adaptation) as a recently surfaced Vault Dweller, scouring the irradiated wastelands for [SPOILERS REDACTED]. It's early days, but the show's first two episodes didn't make a massive impression on me, though I will concede that the sight of Amazon's branding on Fallout's infamous Please Stand By emergency broadcast titlecard makes a dangerous amount of sense.

Read more

Bungie have released a big overview video of Destiny 2's Final Shape expansion, introducing a new, openly overpowered Prismatic subclass, fresh Exotic items and the new Dread enemy faction.

Read more

Helldivers 2's Major Orders reward system is getting a full overhaul, following player complaints about their hard-earned medals being slow to arrive and as such, damaging their faith in managed democracy, with potentially dire consequences for their ability to massacre spiky robots and large insects.

Read more