Fish! Turtles! Dolphins! Tridents! All these and more washed ashore in Minecraft‘s Update Aquatic last week, but only for the Windows 10 version. Those salty friends have now appeared on the Java client, along with underwater ruins, shipwrecks and a special block that makes everything near it behave as if it was on dry land.

I went for an underwater wander this morning. The developers have told everyone not to try annoying the dolphins, so naturally that’s the first thing I set out to do. (more…)

A question for you: What should one do when one is reviewing a game, but it’s far, far too hard for one to get anywhere in? I’m asking for a friend. A friend who’s reviewing the early access for To Hell With Hell (THWH), a pixelly bullet hell roguelite that’s tough as really bloody tough nails. (more…)

Magic, vampires, and frogs are among the mysteries, dangers, and opportunities for pashing added to Reigns: Her Majesty in a free expansion yesterday. The ‘Transformation Update’ has brought 200 new cards to the reginal RPG, which draw in three new characters and potentially lead to five new deaths. The game’s on sale to celebrate the launch too. And if frenching a frog gets me killed, so it goes. (more…)

The next update for A Total War Saga: Thrones Of Britannia will introduce an ‘Allegiance’ system, similar to Culture in Total War: Rome II and Religion in Twattila, and Throners can now test it out in a public beta build. The whole idea of the Total War Saga subseries is to streamline and refocus but developers The Creative Assembly concede that some changes left notable gaps in their first Saga. So, for starters, here comes Allegiance to make people say “Obviously we should burn the monarchy before it takes root but I will say this fella’s a good egg”, with kick-on effects for politics and provinces in the historical strategy game. (more…)

Round Christmastime, it’s a tradition in my family to play Don’t Wake The Dreamer by tiptoeing around an uncle sleeping off the sherry in an armchair. You don’t want to know what happens when the Dreamer awakens. Perhaps inspired by this, as well as the stories of a hippy named Happy Lovecraft who was obsessed with higher powers in the stars, Cyanide Studio will deliver a similar game in time for the year’s actual best celebration, Halloween. Their investigate-o-RPG Call Of Cthulhu will launch on October 30th, they announced yesterday. Be careful when navigating the rustling maze of Cadbury Heroes wrappers around Cthulhu’s feet. (more…)

Strategic card-collector Faeria made the jump today from free-to-play to a far less chance-driven model. Gone are booster packs or chests bought with real money – now you just buy the game outright and progressively unlock cards as you gain levels. Our resident wizard Brendan quite liked Faeria when he reviewed it last year, listing pacing issues and its free-to-play progression as its main flaws. As of today, at least one of those is no longer a problem.

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It wasn t as if the tester was having a bad time. He was a pinball fan, after all. It s just that every time he tried to reach for his coffee, the intensity of the game he was testing kept pulling his hand back to the controller. Half an hour later, he finished playing, picked up his cold coffee, and said he d enjoyed the game. As he contentedly walked away, he couldn t know that he d brought about a turning point for its developers, who turned to each other and said, Did you see what happened there? This is not the game we want to make, right?

This was the moment that made Villa Gorilla realise their game had lost its way, the moment that led to the game s transformation into the smart and charming Yoku s Island Express, a game that mixes platformers, adventuring in a freely explorable world, and pinball.

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Over the past several weeks I have sent a lot of interesting people who work in the games industry an email containing the following scenario:

“You enter a room. The door locks behind you. From a door opposite another you> enters. This other you is a perfectly identical clone, created in the exact instant you entered the room, but as every second ticks by they are creating their own distinct personhood. The doors will unlock in 90 minutes. Nobody will ever know what happens in the room. What do you do? (assume the materials you need for whatever you want to do are in the room). Please show your working, if able.”

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Though the Battle For Azeroth doesn’t begin until August, distant drums can be heard beating for World Of Warcraft‘s next expansion. Blizzard this week launched the ‘Battle for Azeroth Pre-Patch’, a big update adding many new features in preparation for war. And to draw more recruits, Blizzard have revamped the MMO’s pricing by removing the need to buy the base game. Subscriptions now include the base game and every current expansion, though Battle For Azeroth will still be sold as an add-on for cashola when it arrives. (more…)

Exapunks is the next game from prolific puzzle-meister Zach Barth and his little studio Zachtronics, creators of the likes of Opus Magnum, Infinifactory and Spacechem. Set in an alternate 1997, Exapunks is about cyberpunk hacking, programming viruses called EXAs (EXecution Agents) to carry out your will, whether that’s tweaking a game on an alt-history Game Boy or robbing a bank. It’s hitting early access on August 21st.

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