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Bitesize café management game Zipp’s Café has hit PC, landing somewhere between the animal-noir atmosphere of raccoon detective game Backbone and the chill relationships-and-drinks vibes of Coffee Talk.
Good news for those Assassin’s Creed fans who’ve already finished Mirage – a far more accomplishable task than in the series’ last few games – and are itching to dive back into the streets of ninth-century Baghdad for a fresh challenge: New Game Plus will arrive for free next month, along with a punishing new permadeath mode.
“Night Cascades is on sale,” a Steam notification informed me this week. I didn’t remember adding it to my wishlist, and honestly I didn’t remember what it was. Still, a visual novel about lesbians solving occult mysteries? Oh, and it’s made by the studio behind RPS favourites Long Live The Queen and Black Closet? For under £5? Ah, go on. Having now played it, yeah, I’m happy with the spooky investigation and clueless yearning that I got for a fiver.
Hades is one of the many GOTY award winners I feel extremely guilty about barely spending any time with. I think I’ve played a couple of hours tops. Nobody must know! Oh drat. Anyway, despite my lack of expertise, the Supergiant action-roguelite was the first comparison that came to mind while watching the trailer for Realm of Ink, which has just been announced.
It makes use of a similar angled perspective, appears similarly focussed on build customisation, with hundreds of magic items to equip, and sees you playing out the backstories of various mythological personalities – derived, in this case, not from Ancient Greece but China and Buddhism.
Former Dragon Age: Dreadwolf production director and veteran Mass Effect scribe Mac Walters has founded a new studio, Worlds Untold, with funding from NetEase. According to the official site, the studio will develop “triple-A action adventure games with an emphasis on narrative and worldbuilding”: its first project is a single-player-focussed, “near future action adventure game in a breathtaking world filled with mystery and exploration”.
Amongst other things, this reflects Walter’s desire to move away from the “space opera” RPGs he’s made in the past and develop a more linear, story-driven sci-fi game, whose universe might also host TV or novel adaptations. Which might not sound very appealing to BioWare diehards, but you can rest easy on one count: the game will have plenty of lore, though how it’s served up to the player is another question.
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In terms of straight-up savings, the best early Black Friday gaming laptop deals are surely the most generous among pre-Christmas games tech discounts. True, they’re pricier than any gaming mouse or Steam Deck accessory to begin with, but basic principles of proportions mean that the choicest deals will lop off enormous wads of cash.
And these are quality lappies, too. Some of my personal favourites (the Gigabyte Aorus 15X! The Razer Blade 14! The Acer Nitro 5, if you’re on a budget!) have made into Black Friday’s early deal highlights, and there are plenty more besides. Most of them are rocking up-to-date Nvidia GeForce RTX 40 series GPUs, too, so they’ll be able to handle ray tracing and roid their own performance via DLSS 3. To varying extents, naturally.
Reports suggested Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 was a crunch-driven 16 month project, and our campaign review thought it displayed characteristics of a rushed schedule-filler. Besides quality gunplay and a fantastic array of classic maps, MW3’s multiplayer doesn’t do much to differentiate itself from MW2, aside from being more of a frustrating grind. And its awkwardly positioned zombies mode, though it might appeal to some, has been robbed of its sickle-sharpening soul. All of it does smack of being rushed, and I’d only recommend the game if you’re an ardent fan of COD who’s happy to accept little in the way of changes. Otherwise, this FPS simply isn’t worth spending your hard-earned bucks on.
It’s a good day for small form factor PC case deals, apparently, as you can now pick up Fractal Design’s gorgeous wood-adorned Terra case in Jade or Silver for $150 after a rare $30 discount for Black Friday.
This case has attracted rave reviews from hardware journalists and users alike, and just looks completely unlike almost everything else on the market which is awesome.
Many grand strategy games let you hop from a map down to a battle layer where you can control a real-time scrap. Kaiserpunk is the first time I’ve seen a grand strategy game that lets you hop down instead to a citybuilding layer, where the construction of alternate history early-20th century industrial towns will determine whether you have the economic power to win the war.
If my calculations are correct, all the buildings in PowerWash Simulator‘s Back To The Future DLC are covered in some serious shit. It’s your job to clean it off, of course – off the Hill Valley clocktower, Doc Brown’s van, and of course the Delorean. It’s out now.
