Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Well, swaggle me horns and fasten me timbers so they stop shivering like that, because the noise is quite irritating. Welcome back to another edition of Plundertales – my quest to conquer strategy game Total War: Warhammer 3 without ever stepping foot on dry land. If you don’t know the other rules by now, I can only assume you’ve been living under an extremely specific type of rock that changes nothing about your life except preventing you from reading the previous two editions of this column. Who would carve such a rock? How would it even work? These are lubber-tier queries and shall remain unanswered, because it’s plundering time. Avast!

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Despite my desire for a real life herb garden, I don’t really like farming or gardening games. Distant Bloom could be an exception, except I’m not sure it even qualifies as either, really. It is a little bit about exploration, a little about very light puzzles, and mostly in its heart, about cleaning up and making everything pretty.

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I didn’t have a Game Boy Camera as a lad, partly because I couldn’t afford one, and partly because my “friends” used to troll me (“bullying”, I think we called it back then) about my Game Boy. Amongst other things, they’d reach over and flick the power off while I was playing The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening. I didn’t finish that game for 15 years. I’d flown the family nest before I braved the Eagle’s Tower. Can you imagine what my friends would have done if I’d owned a Game Boy Camera? Probably, they’d have taken photos of… bottoms with it, and such.

I’m aware I’m not making a great case for being a graduate of the School of Hard Knocks. The point is: I didn’t have a Game Boy Camera then, so I’m delighted that the Game Boy Camera has caught on among a later generation of indie PC developers – prominent among them artist and educator Catharine Graffam, whose GB Camera Gallery: Mystery Show you can play for free in a browser.

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Carceri is a fizzy and kaleidoscopic, first-person “chaotic Art-toy” in which you explore/hallucinate an island resort that’s also a concentration camp (“carceri” is Italian for prison) for sentient computer programs. Out sometime in May, it’s the work of James Beech, who describes himself as “an on-again, off-again AAA veteran” with credits on Metroid Prime 4, Remnant: From the Ashes, and Crysis 3. The environments take hefty influence from Carceri d’invenzione, a series of prints created in the 18th century by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, whose name has become a byword for impossible spaces.

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The kids today might be all about their Helldivers 2 premium warbonds and tactical strikes, but back when me and the boys were defending earth against giant insects, all we had were massive riot shields and miniguns, and by jove, we made do. Never speak to me about Terminids. If you can’t finish your truck-sized ants here on earth, don’t even think about asking for bizarre interstellar insectoids to kill. Anyway, good news for me and the proverbial boys, because multiplayer sci-fi anti-ant shooter Earth Defense Force 6 is dropping on July 25th, 2024.

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Good news, people whose day-to-day lives are woefully short on blingy Clancified squad-murdering. Ubisoft’s elusive free-to-play shooter XDefiant finally has a release date, 21st May 2024. Or at least, that’s when the preseason launches, providing six weeks of access to the modes, maps and factions from last month’s server test.

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If I was writing What’s Better, it would be a short series. The first entry would declare that the best thing in video games, obviously, was watching NPCs fight among themselves.

It’s this which most interests me about The Forever Winter, which takes place in a “PvEvE conflict” in which enemy factions – including enormous, stomping robots – are constantly fighting one another while you and your squad try to scavenge and survive in their shadow. Its first trailer showing in-game footage is below.

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Star Wars: The Old Republic‘s ongoing development switched last year from creators BioWare to Broadsword, with promise that the 13-year-old MMO would continue to receive new story content and improvements.

The approaching update 7.5 looks to bring both, alongside a Spring Abundance festival that includes “seed collecting, dancing, pie-baking, animal rehabilitation, and a galactic egg hunt.”

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Chuck the original Half-Life and Minecraft into a reactor core with Lethal Company and the resulting, bleating, pustulant abomination might look a bit like Abiotic Factor, a one-to-six player first-person survival game from Deep Field Games and Playstack, in which a bunch of stranded boffins must find their way out of a massive underground lab.

On the one hand, you’ve got to deal with interdimensional horrors of various flavours, such as multiple-storey cryptids and squishy skinless wolves; on the other, invading squads of Combiney soldiers. Fortunately, you’ve got a big fat Ivy League brain stuffed with knowledge of killer gadgets, base construction, subterranean farming and battlefield medicine. My increasing phobia for survival games notwithstanding, I think this looks and sounds like a hoot – and it’s out now in early access. Here’s the launch trailer.

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Leonardo Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man is a legendary drawing of a nude with his arms and legs reaching towards the rim and corners of a circle and square. It’s often invoked as an archetype for the humanist worldview of Man the Measure and Centre of all Things, holding a perfectly proportioned universe in shape. Rin D’Lorah, the heroine of new narrative RPG Sky Of Tides, is a bit like the Vitruvian Man, and the result is a game I find at once bewitching and powerfully offputting in its refusal to satisfy the conventions of the genre.

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