Hyper Light Breaker, 3D prequel to action-RPG Hyper Light Drifter, won't make it out of early access. Developers Heart Machine have announced that its development is ending, with an unspecified number of layoffs at the studio having been announced at the same time.

It's a depressingly rapid downward trajectory for the follow-up to a game which generally received strong and positive reception, tempered by some criticism of elements such as how it handled communicating the best way to keep making forward progress.

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The word choom gets on my nerves a bit, to be honest. Probably because it feels like it's said every five minutes in Cyberpunk 2077. There's now a mod which might persuade me to reverse my stance, though. It's called Gonkle and allows the game to serve you daily Wordle-style puzzles which might improve your Cyberpunk vocabulary.

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Following Microsoft's mass layoffs earlier this year, a group of former ZeniMax developers have formed a worker-owned studio dubbed Sackbird. Made up of folks who worked on The Elder Scrolls Online and a cancelled MMO codenamed Blackbird, the studio have confirmed they're working on an unnamed original game that'll hit PC and consoles.

Zenimax's Blackbird project was one of numerous games cancelled as Microsoft laid of around 9,000 staff in July, with the ZeniMax Online Studios United union left fighting for the jobs of members affected. Bloomberg subsequently reported that Blackbird was a sci-fi noir-ish third-person shooter with looty bits and lots of vertical movement.

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You might remember that a little while ago, Bethesda announced an auction which'd see the winner given the chance to design a character in The Elder Scrolls 6. Bids were donations to the charity Make-A-Wish, and narrowly missing out on top spot was one from the folks behind the Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages, the series' long-running and very good independent wiki. The good news is that those folks how now met with Bethesda and had the chance to design their NPC, which'll be a memorial to a forum user whose roleplaying has crossed paths with official Elder Scrolls lore.

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The code Bandai Namco were kind enough to send me for puzzle platformer Little Nightmares 3 included a swathe of bonus costumes resembling characters and monsters from the previous games. Another way to phrase this would be that, before I'd had a chance to get to know this game's duo of very brave, very doomed children, the game offered me a way to paint over their identities with something I recognised from a time I enjoyed myself in the past.

Hmmmmm, thought I. Then I thought it again. But longer.

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Ubisoft allegedly cancelled plans for a new Assassin's Creed game set in in the aftermath of the American Civil War last year, with online moaning about Assassin's Creed Shadows co-protagonist Yasuke and concerns over the volatility of the modern day US political climate being cited as reasons.

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You could not pay me to go to the moon, I think. I'm glad Mr. Armstrong and Buzz Lightyear had a good time up there, but that place is scary! It's just a massive, dark rock! But in the case of Dark Moon, an upcoming survival strategy game that just got a release date, that darkness is your friend, because if you want to survive on the moon, you've got to protect yourself from that hot, hot orb in the sky called the sun.

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Everybody makes mistakes! That's life, really, a constant series of tiny mistakes that are sometimes good ones, sometimes bad ones, occasionally purposeful, often not. Here's one that was very much not purposeful: Pico Park: Classic Edition, a delightful co-op puzzle platformery game you've almost definitely seen a bunch of Twitch streamers play during COVID lockdown, is now permanently free.

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Are you able to picture things in your head? Try it, right now, we'll go for the classic thing to picture, an apple. If you can't see diddly squat, you've potentially got aphantasia, a condition which is essentially the inability to visualise an image within your head. It's interesting to me because I feel I'm on the opposite end of it, I can picture that apple pretty darn clearly. With that in mind, it makes me all the more curious about Afantasia, spelled with an f not a ph, a "surreal exploration game about a boy searching for identity in his hometown."

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Online video games! They're the future of the medium! Or, I guess they're already here, but still, online co-op is very much in Vampire Survivor's future. It's a feature that's been promised for a little while now, and developer Poncle have shared a little look at it, as well as a confirmation as to when you can expect it: autumn! This autumn, to be precise, which we're currently experiencing, though a more specific window of time wasn't provided.

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