Grounded 2’s early access gets off to a flying start as Obsidian detail the next year of updates

Obsidian’s survival game Grounded 2 has launched into early access, and the developers have one of those old-timey roadmaps explaining how it will change before the 1.0 release, give or take a few teasing redactions. This being a game about miniaturised children fighting insects, of course, the road in question may be only a few metres long. A garden pathmap, perhaps? Let’s have a look, then.

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Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound review

In the realm of pixel artistry, action platformer Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound is a pretty work of dither and parallax. It’s full of set pieces reminiscent of a misremembered arcade’s heyday. Between the more standard run ‘n’ chop levels, there are jetski chasedowns, motorcycle pursuits, cargo train battles, bulldozer escapes, and gas chamber breakouts. If it didn’t frequently result in a death screen, I’d say it barely pauses for breath. The whole game is less a mineshaft of nostalgia as it is a shale fracking job, flushing you with jets of high pressure pseudomemory. I’m just a little sad that its strongest gimmick soon dissolves into the background, overwhelmed by floods of demon baddies.

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Peak cannibalism is delivered by the co-op climber’s latest patch

Well, after a prolonged period of teasing, Peak developers Aggro Crab and Landfall Games look to have bitten the human bullet. Nestled among the notes for the climbing game’s latest patch are the words “added cannibalism”.

It’s not enough that you can mod Peak so that you and your buddies will be surrounded by the corpses of fallen climbers as you attempt to do an Edmund Hillary. The folks behind Another Crab’s Treasure and Content Warning want you to casually nibble on your colleagues on the way.

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Elden Ring Nightreign Duos update delayed due to tsunami warning

Elden Ring Nightreign‘s patch 1.02, which’ll deliver the Duo Expeditions players have been asking for, has had its deployment pushed back by a day due a tsunami warning.

The update was orginally set to go out today, July 30th, but will now go out tomorrow, July 31st. The tsunami warning that’s led developers FromSoftware to have to switch up their plans is one of many consequences of a massive earthquake off the coast of Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula.

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Oblivion Remastered mod delivers Tamrielic Teardown by letting you blow buildings to bits, with plans for full-blown house fighting

There are some mods that you need to read up on before you understand why you might want to give them a whirl. There are some mods with which that process can be accomplished via a single GIF. A new Oblivion Remastered work that makes it possible to hilariously reduce the contents of Cyrodiil’s cities to chunks of flying rubble just by slapping buildings with spells is firmly in the latter camp.

Before you get too worried about the karmic balance of the modding wizard powerful enough to make this sort of wanton destruction possible, it’s worth bearing in mind that they’ve previously given players the ability to build new homes any displaced citizens could probably move into.

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Parrying has never seemed more whimsical than in dollhouse soulslike Memoria Wake

There are at least two ways to write about parrying mechanics. On the one hand, you have people like me who compose farking ridiculous intros such as “a good parry mechanic is a kind of redemption”, then spend hundreds of words overegging the pudding. On the other, you have Nic, who sums parrying up far more elegantly as “a pleasingly low-effort method to make your opponent look very silly”. I hope that both Nic and I will be at home in Memoria Wake, a new isometric action-RPG in which you can parry giant black cats with an umbrella. There’s now a demo on Steam.

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Itch.io are seeking out new payment processors who are more comfortable with adult material

Itch.io have announced that they are seeking out new payment processing partners who are more willing to handle the purchase of NSFW games, after delisting or removing a vast swathe of games in accordance with the content restrictions of companies such as Paypal and Stripe. They’ve also offered an explanation for why they’ve recently delisted so many more “infringing” games than Steam, which has carried out its own cull of sexually explicit games under pressure from finance firms. Finally, Itch have acknowledged that their recently posted list of newly prohibited adult material is far too vague to be useful.

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Monster Hunter Wilds is getting an endgame expansion “ahead of schedule”, as Capcom keep hunting player approval

Monster Hunter Wilds is now set to get an endgame revamp earlier than originally advertised, with Capcom having opted to chuck their established update plans for the next few months out of a window. Well, I say that, all they’ve really done is move around some bits.

While performance issues have proven to be the main achilles heel of the action game about hunning mons, the stuff you’re left to do once you’ve slapped up Arkveld has been another source of player ire.

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Baldur’s Gate 3’s Amelia Tyler voices a cursed boardgame in this original Jumanji adaptation in all but name

There are a number of official Jumanji video games, but they don’t seem very Jumanjish to me. You’ve got a bunch of nineties-to-noughties minigame compilations, a pachinko adaptation, and a few reportedly dismal games based on the recent Dwayne Johnson movies, also feat. Steve off Infiniminer and Amy Pond from Dr Avenger: Endgame.

Ludogram’s just-announced streamerbait co-op horror game Invokyr seems to be cleaving a lot closer to the 1995 movie, which is itself based on Chris Van Allsburg’s book from 1981. The game sees you and up to three others playing a cursed boardgame that transforms the house it’s played in.

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Sony are suing Tencent to “prevent irreparable harm” inflicted by Horizon knockoff Light of Motiram

Horizon Zero Dawn/Forbidden West publishers Sony have called in the lawyers over Tencent’s upcoming Light of Motiram, arguing in a lawsuit filing (spotted by Reuters) that the post-apocalyptic action adventure looks a little too much like their post-apocalyptic action adventure. The case alleges that Light of Motiram, currently in development at Tencent subsidiary Polaris Quest, is a “slavish clone” of Guerrilla Games’ original series, and seeks to block its release on copyright infringement grounds.

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