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Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week – our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! No cool industry person this week. Instead, you are stuck with me. In an elevator. And I have eaten nothing but cabbage-wrapped beans for a week. You’ll doubtless want something to keep your mind off that, so let’s talk about books instead.
I feel like money laundering is one of those concepts you see in a lot of crime TV shows but it’s not really something that seems to come up much in games. I certainly can’t think of any games that feature money laundering as an actual mechanic, but I’ll be able to add one to the list next week: GTA Online. The multiplayer game is getting a new update this coming June 17th called Money Fronts, and is literally all about buying up small but generally lucrative businesses that you can sneak some money through.
I’m not much of an MMO person, I’ve dabbled over the years like with RuneScape in my youth, and a bit of Final Fantasy 14. These days it’s the level of commitment that puts me off, even though I really do love being able to partake in what feels like living, breathing worlds, the hustle and bustle of actual people going to and fro. Luckily, I think I have a lower-key way to get this kind of feeling in the upcoming action roguelite Starlight Re:Volver.
It’s a crossover episode! Like the great team-ups of the past (Scooby-Doo and Batman, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Batman), Totally Accurate Battle Simulator and Content Warning developer Landfall, and Another Crab’s Treasure developer Aggro Crab have come to make Peak. As in it’s literally called Peak, not a qualitative descriptor that’s been more widely adopted into Gen-Z slang that you have to Google because you’re not a spring chicken anymore.
Sony have been making a lot of mistakes over the past couple of years, including things like mistakenly thinking they could release 12 live service games by 2026, but the more immediately annoying one is its whole PSN thing. I probably don’t need to remind you of that whole Helldivers 2 fiasco, where they tried to make logging into a PSN a requirement for those on PC and later scrapped this because it went down horrendously. However, there has been one other snag that came with all this PSN nonsense: region locking.
There’s still a few days to go until Remedy Entertainment’s latest entry into their Connected Universe, FBC: Firebreak, is unleashed onto the world. Whether it’s any good or not in its entirety, we probably won’t know for a while yet given that online shooters of its ilk are always guaranteed to receive numerous patches to iron out some kinks. Our own Nic found a good bit to like about the game in his preview, ignoring the at the time rubbish guns, at the very least.
PlayStation’s bigwigs are content to stick with their current approach to multiplatform releases for now, making it unlikely we’re going to see a sudden switch to day-and-date PC ports of Sony’s big single-player games anytime soon.
SlayPtation have been bringing their studios’ multiplayer and live-service games to PC at release for a while now, it making sense with the likes of Helldivers 2 and, er, Concord, to try and ensure the maximum potential player base possible right out of the gate. On the other hand, for single player stuff like God of War Ragnarok and Ghost of Tsushima they’ve been content to wait a year to bring over to the other video game boxes.
If you pine for the rotting corridors and tactical limb-surgery of Dead Space, it looks like Bloober’s upcoming Cronos: The New Dawn may have you covered. Fresh from revealing that they’re remaking the first Silent Hill, the Polish team have released a new trailer for Cronos that shows off more of its bubble-suited third-person gunnery.
In particular, it spotlights the Merge mechanic, whereby guttural tendril beasts known as Orphans devour the corpses of their brethren to enhance their abilities. It’s implied that they can do this more than once, so be sure to clean up after yourself. As in so many other walks of life, punctual incineration may be the cure.
There aren’t many games lately which have compelled me to do a tweet, or skeet, or whatever you prefer to call ejaculating one’s thoughts out onto the socials. The Trolley Solution‘s Steam Next Fest demo not only did that, it convinced me to post a tweet I didn’t even write.
It’s a game from indie dev byDanDans that starts off as a series of moral quandaries, each inspired by philosopher Philippa Foot’s famous and now also thoroughly memed-to-death Trolley Problem. That being a thought experiment which forces you examine the ethics of either letting nature take its course to deliver one outcome that could cause harm to others, or actively intervening to cause another that might do the same in a different fashion. I didn’t go in expecting to become enraptured in what I can only describe as a tragic rail romance.
Good news, people who’re still interested in giving MindsEye a go for reasons that don’t involve gleefully watching as a poor NPC undergoes a sudden glitchy elongation. Developers Build A Rocket Boy have just pushed out the first in a series of updates designed to swat a bunch of the performance and crash-related issues that’ve plagued the game’s launch.
If you were busy with other hobbies such as arctic exploration or hardcore spelunking earlier this week, the GTA/Cyberpunky Mindseye suffered a pretty nightmarish debut. The user reviews weren’t totally negative right out of the gate, but it’s fair to say it didn’t land in the fashion ex-Rockstar bigwig Leslie Benzies’ studio probably hoped.
