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It is inevitable that when a game like Balatro rocks up, is really good, and makes a gazillion dollars, that there will be the odd imitator here and there. Sincerity, flattery, yada, yada, yada, point is, it’s all fine as long as you at least put enough of a twist in there to make it more of an “influenced by” over a “wholesale ripoff” kind of thing. I think Gambonanza, a roguelike deckbuilding chess game, fits into the former quite nicely.
Good, bad, I don’t bloody know yet the thing’s only been about for five seconds, but we can certainly say one thing now: Highguard is out. Now we can sit and prepare ourselves for more inane and pointless discourse about yet another live service shooter that we’ve probably had several times before. Hooray! But before we get ahead of ourselves, a moment of reflection, courtesy of the devs behind Highguard itself, who have spoken out about all that silence following their Geoffies reveal.
Hear ye, hear ye! Embark have shared some more concrete details for Arc Raider’s next main update, Headwinds, which is set to be downloaded onto your platform of choice tomorrow, January 7th. Namely, just what that new matchmaking option is, which is, as it seems, one that won’t be for everyone.
Against the overbearing weight of modernity, Old School RuneScape continues to complete a Sisyphean task of simply existing two and a half decades after it originally launched. It just celebrated that 25th anniversary at the start of the year in fact, and now during a Winter Summit a slew of updates coming to the MMO were shown off in a roadmap from developer Jagex.
Back in 2022, Winnie The Pooh entered the public domain in the USA, meaning that any denizen of that nation can publish work featuring the OG incarnation of A.A. Milne’s honey-supping woodland bear (the UK copyright expires in 2027). At some point in the future, once the newly founded Poohlike genre has matured, we can surely expect a renaissance of Winnie derivatives, ranging from erasure Pooh-ems through josei anime interpretations to Kaufman-ass Hundred Acre existentialism. Right now, though, it’s mostly about horror, because the logical thing to do when the lawyers finally abandon a beloved children’s character is break out the chainsaws.
The movie folk have already given us Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey and its sequel, both apparently dreadful in a bad way. Now here comes Steven H. Videogames with Winnie’s Hole, out in early access today. In this roguelite from Twice Different, the nectar-chugging teddy has become a rambling cosmic abomination, and your job is to mutate his insides using tetrominoes. Oh botherlyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.
Baldur’s Gate 3‘s shift from early access to full release came with heap of tweaks and changes as Larian finalised their huge RPG. Naturally, this meant certain bits or plans not making it into the final cut, and if you’ve come to long for any of those after playing them initially or hearing about them, then odds are a new mod is right up your alley. It’s also really cool if you, you know, just want more BG3.
The Stop Killing Games campaign have revealed the final signature count for their European Citizens’ Initiative, dubbed Stop Destroying Videogames. According to the folks behind the campaign, the European Union have been able to verify that 1,294,188 of the petition’s nearly 1.5 million signatures are the real deal, putting it above the one million signature goal required for EU politicians to look into the issue of server shutdowns rendering online-only games impossible to play.
How do teens in IT classes waste their time these days? When I was a young whippersnapper, when my teacher wasn’t looking I’d head to sites like Miniclip, Nitrome, wherever I could get my hands on some Flash games, to play all sorts of little oddities, particularly system heavy ones that were fun to mess around with for 10 minutes once in a while. Games like that feel rare now with the death of Flash, but I think Tower Lab, a physics roguelite tower defence deckbuilder where you attempt to blast enemies off a ledge into an infinite void to their demise, feels pretty close.
Sometimes, the world you live in sucks. It is a place filled with despair, and misery, and blood, guts, and death. This is much the case with the world of Mörk Borg, an apocalyptic fantasy TTRPG where you have no sense of hope, only dread, that is now also a video game. This video game, Mörk Borg Heresy Supreme, is more of an action RPG, though its tabletop routes are still to be found, and it is as mean as it is darkly enchanting.
Soon after it launched in 2019, Taiwanese horror game Devotion was pulled from sale following some controversy regarding Chinese president Xi Jinping and Winnie The Pooh (long story). It was made available for purchase again a couple of years later, though it should have been a touch earlier than that as it was promised to be released on GOG late 2020. However, on the same day it was announced to be returning, GOG put out a statement saying they wouldn’t be releasing it after all. Now, half a decade on from that, managing director Maciej Gołębiewski reflects on the decision to not put it up for sale, after it stood by selling the also controversial Horses.
