Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome to Booked For The Week – our new Sunday feature where we ask a selection of cool industry folks questions about books! The very first book was famously written in the 1200’s by notable scholar and six-time wrestling world champion Booker T, a fact you’d know if you simply read more books. This week, it’s voice of Horizon Zero Dawn’s Aloy and many others, writer, singer, and endless other cool stuff, Ashly Burch! Cheers Ashly! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

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I need to take all the opportunities to write about Fall Guys that I can get, given how much time I spend playing it with my son. This is a pretty good opportunity, too: a set of Star Wars skins are coming to the bean battle royale, as announced yesterday on May 4th, and they coincide with some major changes to Fall Guys’ platforming physics.

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The UK government has responded to a petition asking for “government intervention” to force the industry to keep video games “in a reasonably working state when support ends”, rather than allowing them to become unplayable such as when online servers are shut down. The petition was prompted by the closure in March of ten-year-old Ubisoft racing game The Crew.

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Earlier this week, Helldivers 2 players on PC were told that they’d soon need to link their Steam account to a PlayStation Network (PSN) account. Two days later and the game has received 100,000 new negative reviews on Steam.

What’s more, developers at Arrowhead have made several statements to say that they’re on the players’ side.

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Almost a decade after it set crowdfunding records on Kickstarter, and five years after its release, Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night’s developers have announced the final free update for the Castlevania: Symphony of the Night successor.

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The original SteamWorld Heist was an absolute treat, slamming the charming robotic world of the SteamWorld series together with a 2D take on the turn-based strategy of your XCOMs and Valkyria Chronicles and such. With SteamWorld Heist 2 recently revealed for an August release on PC, developers Thunderful have teased some more details on the sequel’s shiny new job system.

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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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