Right, has everyone got Hollow Knight: Silksong out of their system? I’m sure there’s plenty of you that have scoured enough of its map to feel satisfied and ready for another hand-drawn metroidvania. Enter Constance! A game that fits that bill precisely, albeit with its own, quite literally painterly flair, one which is out today.
The former creative director of The Chinese Room’s Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 has finally said the quiet part loud and agreed that the game really shouldn’t have been called Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2. Have you played Bloodlines 2? What would you have called it? I’m going with Vampire: The Masquerade – Third Cousin Twice Removed.
Right, time for some box news. The Steam Machine. Valve have confirmed, or reaffirmed, that its yet-to-be-revealed price will be in line with a regular PC built to similar specs, rather than subsidised in order to try and compete with consoles.
Ubisoft racerThe Crew has avoided yet another shutdown after being ressurected in server-emulated form by fans earlier this year. According to the modders behind its revival project, The Crew Unlimited, a bug would have seen the game stop working once 2029 rolled around. Thankfully, they say a solution’s been found.
November is… merry! As the great grim centipede of people and property that is Videogaming continues its progress of the midnight wood, a dozen auteur designers from theatre backgrounds don coxcomb hats and sequined codpieces. They climb onto carts and stage a chariot race, beating each other with bladders decorated to look like Roger Ebert. There is laughter up and down the train. Meanwhile, the industry seers and marketing-mancers have received hopeful tidings from their friends among the owls and bats. The trees are thinning out ahead. The stars can sometimes be seen. There is wild talk that third-person cover shooters are about to come back into fashion.
That isn’t all the owls and bats have seen, however. As the path curves, we find ourselves in the courtyard of a squat and forbidding tower. Five levels of blood-flecked obsidian and pixelated braziers, each named for a day of the week, each infested by perfectly terrifying new PC games. Never mind that the edifice has clearly been slapped together using assets lifted from a webinar. Never mind that you can see fuchsia checkerboards everywhere. The tower’s frightful denizens must be defeated – or possibly even bought – if the convoy is to proceed.
Gosh, can you believe it? It’s already the 35th anniversary of Ruin! It came out before I was born, but even I’m feeling the passage of time with this one. With such a momentous occasion upon us, a special 35th anniversary edition of the legendary RPG has been released by its developer Official Electric, split across just four floppy disks… except, well, you’ve definitely already clocked that Ruin isn’t quite real. At least not in the way it’s been presented.
Let’s get something real clear here right off the bat: I couldn’t possibly tell you if Team Cherry are planning to make any more Hollow Knight games. That isn’t to say there isn’t more Hollow Knight on the way, as Silksong will be getting… something, at some point, in the future. However! Studio heads William Pellen and Ari Gibson have at least floated a hypothetical idea around how the world of Hollow Knight might get bigger.
I think miHoYo might just have a bit too much money. Somehow, they have yet another game on the way called Varsapura, yet another anime-looking, open-world action game, this time by way of psychic mishappenings. As many have pointed out, there’s a vague Control-like quality to it, at least in its newly shown off, lengthy gameplay demo.
Hytale has had a bit of a rough go of it, given how it’s been in the works for a decade, still isn’t finished, and was unceremoniously cancelled. Not to worry though, as it’s back! And it’s in the hands of its developer’s original co-founders. With the announcement that Hytale will live on, it was also noted that the game’s pricing would be revealed soon, and soon it was as it’s already been confirmed.
It’s been 10 years since Fatshark’s Warhammer Tide years kicked off, starting with Warhammer: End times – Vermintide, and to celebrate that anniversary the developer has been offering up various in-game events and updates in both Vermintide 2 and Darktide. Earlier this week Vermintide 2 received a free new level, a point we’ll come back to, but the big thing you should know first is that you can pick up the co-op dark fantasy game for free on Steam right now, and keep it forever.