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There’s no perfect time to release a video game, but if I were deciding when to release one, do you know when I’d do it? Alongside the largest blockbusters of the year, at a time when everyone is broke from buying presents, and on the same day as a huge awards show is distracting the industry’s media.
Ballionaire apparently shares my thinking. The pachinko-inspired roguelike is launching on December 10th.
This happened on Thursday, but we were busy with other, less interesting news. Late or not, I can’t let it pass unremarked upon: Caves Of Qud, the vast, weird roguelike which has been in development for 17 years, hit version 1.0. It brings multiple endings to the game, a revised UI, improved tutorials and much more.
You could open today’s door, sure. You could also blow it up with an explosive, though. Or shoulder-barge your way through the wall beside it. Or plant some C4 on the ceiling and go up and over. Or I think that’s a load-bearing pillar over there – may as well just bring down the entire advent calendar to find out what’s behind today’s door.
The protagonists of two of my all time favourite RPGs share something in common. Both (the best Final Fantasy game) Final Fantasy 8’s Squall and The Witcher 3’s Geralt simply cannot get enough of leaving their friends and the entire world in mortal peril while they sneak in a quick round of cards, and I love them for it. Way back when the Wild Hunt released, there was a special edition kicking about that gave you a few decks for Gwent – the fleshed-out, playable card distraction that ended up being responsible for some of the game’s best moments. I pined for those decks, but I never acquired them. Now, Hatchette Board Games is putting out a full physical edition of Gwent next year.
The set contains “over 400 cards and a playmat” for £44/$39.99. I’m still recovering from various Fantasy Flight LCGs, so my value sense for this stuff might be a bit skewed, but that strikes me as incredibly reasonable. A good Gwent deck consists of only about 25 cards. They’re not bad cards, either! I’ve got a real pet hate for tabletop versions of videogames that just use in-engine screenshots for the cards, but these ones look to have the proper artwork from the game on them:
Where were you during the Summer of Doronko Wanko? Why, I remember it like it was March, and not actually Summer, when the delightful free game about a mucky pomeranian was unleashed into the world. Yep, yep. It was definitely March. Roughly translating to ‘covered in mud doggy’, the game set you the task of racking up tangible financial damage to your owner’s house by getting mud everywhere – first by normal dog means, and then with giant mud cannons. You can grab it for free on Steam here.
It stole our hearts, it did. And talking of stealing things and having a good time doing it, it’s also releasing on the Nintendo Switch soon, which means the Steam version of Doronko Wanko is getting some free DLC to celebrate. It isn’t arriving until next Spring, but it’s bringing three new mystery dog breeds with it when it does.
If you’d told me last year that face of all-out, GPU venerating, fully ray-traced PC game visual excess would be that of a de-aged Harrison Ford, I’d have asked which exact colour of paint you’d been eating. And yet here we are, with Indiana Jones and the Great Circle loving its ray tracing so much that the effects can’t ever be fully switched off.
Every fascist in this game has a cold. The Hitlerites and blackshirts of Indiana Jones And The Great Circle sneeze and cough as they patrol the dig sites of Gizeh, or the marble corridors of the Vatican. Although this is the Machine Games’ clever way of letting you know where your enemies are at all times, it is also mildly funny, as if all the Nazis have been secretly kissing each other, spreading the same rhinovirus from Italy to Egypt to Nepal and beyond. More than that, it’s a stubborn reminder that, despite the many hours of perfectly motion-captured cinematics that accompany all this, you are still playing a video game. A snotty tissue that separates the Indy of taut two-hour cinema and the Indy of a sweeping first-person punch ’em up that will take days to complete. All this is to say, you will notice the difference. But that might not matter; they’re both still Indiana Jones.
I think It’s safe to say that Trigger Happy Interactive’s upcoming survival horror Total Chaos is a bit of a palette change from their last offering – the frenetic, neon-drenched, chainsaw-legged Turbo Overkill. Still, it’s not often we see psychological horror combined with ultraviolence, and anything that gives off even a whiff of Condemned: Criminal Origins has my attention.
Total Chaos started life as a popular Doom 2 mod, and while I dare the say the limitations of that game sell the atmosphere a little better than this much sleeker update, I certainly trust Trigger Happy enough to make the most of the new engine. The game is set in New Oasis, a “once bustling haven for coal miners” that is now most definitely not bustling, nor haven-like.
Dogubomb’s Blue Prince boasts my favourite shapeshifting house in a video game, which admittedly isn’t setting a very high bar. Perhaps surprisingly, most video game houses do not shapeshift. Despite being made out of pure imagination and carbon emissions, they remain nostalgically shackled to the limitations of brick, mortar and Euclidean geometry. Blue Prince’s abode is different. It is a house made of house. You’ll actually design the layout yourself every time you wander through it, picking from a selection of mismatched room types whenever you open a door.
4X strategy and RPG stalwarts Shiro Games have announced SpaceCraft, a “massively multiplayer management and crafting adventure” set in Normandy during the Middle Ages, haha, of course not – it’s set in space. They won’t be winning the T.S. Eliot poetry prize with that title, but I guess it gets the job done. Here’s a trailer.
