Yapyap is a jolly bit of gang wizard vandalism with a touch of Dark Messiah

Yapyap stands apart from other “friendslop” horror extraction games by giving you plenty of firepower to begin with. Airpower, anyway. You and up to four mates are the boggle-eyed, flap-jawed minions of an enormous, moon-masked wizard. You’ve been summoned to wreak havoc on a rival wizard’s procedurally generated tower. Over the course of three nights per round, you must smash as many fixtures as you can to fill up your quota of Chaos – tapestries, crates, paintings, statues, anything that isn’t nailed down. For this purpose, you are handed a range of magical artefacts.

Some of the artefacts have to be bought with gold, but there’s a tree in the game’s lobby area that grows wands of wind magic, pluckable for free. Wind magic is the Ringo Starr of the four elements, IMO, but the default wands are fun, especially given that you have unlimited mana. There’s a basic ‘Force Push’ style wind spell, used to blow the helmets off zombie knights, a levitation spell to enhance your parkour, and a summonable tornado that will happily engulf the caster.

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With its new season update trailer, Apex Legends would like you to know it has invented windows

Apex Legends season 28 launches on February 10th, and appears to add competitive glazing to the now 7-year-old battle royale. The game’s “newest tactical mechanic”, so says the announcement post, is Hardlight Mesh, a glowy, bullet-resistant window that teams can either throw up to defend a hidey hole or, with enough lead, rockets, and/or angry kicks, break down to form a new ingress point. Holes in walls? That’s old hat. ApeLegs is disrupting holes in walls. There’ll probably be a TechCrunch article on it.

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Amazon’s Fallout countdown delivers possibly the only thing more pointless than a New Vegas or Fallout 3 remaster

While Amazon have been gradually dropping episodes of their Fallout show‘s second series,a timer has been ticking away. It’s been on the show’s website, which is a little interactive map. Surely this timer, set to expire once the final episode of the series went live, could herald the reveal of Fallout New Vegas or Fallout 3 remasters Bethesda may have in the works, some fans speculated.

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Generative AI plays “zero part” in GTA 6, Take-Two boss confirms, but the company do have “hundreds” of AI “pilots and implementations” on the go

Generative AI has played “zero part” in Rockstar Games’ creation of GTA 6, Take-Two CEOman Strauss Zelnick has said at the company’s latest financial numbers get-together, where he also indicated the game’s still on to initially release this November. Well, on consoles at least. Though, back in the AI front, the Z bloke also revealed that Take-Two have “hundreds of pilots and implementations” on the go involving the tech.

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Babbdi dev’s movement-centric, brutalist VHOLUME has what it takes to be the next great parkour game

I have a strange affinity for brutalism. It sucks you in, engulfs you in its stature, kills your spirit in such blunt, obvious ways, that I can’t help but be wowed by in all its oppressiveness. As an architectural styling, it is also supremely opportune for sick parkour tricks, something Léonard Lemaitre (Babbdi, Straftat), Nathan Grange and Niels Tiercelin all deeply understand with the volumetric VHOLUME, a “first-person parkour adventure set in a dystopian brutalist city where bureaucracy turns a simple task into an odyssey,” which now has a demo.

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Clean up aura and gossip with curious characters on a mysterious ship in the very 3DS era Zelda-esque Bel’s Fanfare

It’s undeniable that for throwback 3D retro aesthetics, the original PlayStation and Nintendo 64 are the consoles that most people try to emulate. So I’m always quite chuffed to see a game that takes its visual cues from more recent consoles, like, say, Bel’s Fanfare, a very 3DS-era looking Zelda-esque game where you play as a little demon girl who works as a cleaner on a strange, massive ship.

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Stardew Valley 2 continues to remain a hypothetical, but ConcernedApe did actually consider making it at one point

You know, sometimes I wonder if Eric “ConcernedApe” Barone ever sleeps. At any given moment it sounds like he’s working on something, whether that be yet another update for Stardew Valley, or the definitely still in development, just wait a while you silly sausages, Haunted Chocolatier. And, as it turns out, somewhere along the line, Barone had even considered making Stardew Valley 2.

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Grow your own eldritch horror creature in the very Tamagotchi-esque In Full Bloom

The purpose of a Tamagotchi is to have a tiny, portable digital pet with you at all times that you can feed and feed and feed until it grows into something slightly bigger, different, a new creature almost. It’s generally a sweet, albeit potentially irritating (the beeps…) little micro-game that may cause a touch of stress, but certainly no feelings of fear. In Full Bloom, however, asks “what if your Tamagotchi was actually a blob of an organism with nothing but a mouth that you must continuously feed… or else…”

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