Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Some people sing the praises of “visceral” games. Others extol the virtues of “immersive” games. Me, I’m increasingly drawn to “perverse” games. No, not like that. Well, not entirely like that. I mean “perverse” more straightforwardly as in deliberately awkward and unreceptive in their core design, almost self-defeating in a way that has you saying “WTF?” and hankering to know more.

Take The Great Below, a new horror… thingmabob from Porto, Portugal-based Dobra Studios. It’s about exploring a strange house full of dreadful paintings in the dark. It’s a 3D game with keyboard move-look controls, but the twist is that you can only move around while looking at a 2D map, with your position marked as a pair of footprints.

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When was the last time you played a good 3D character platformer? For me, it was probably Psychonauts 2. But before that? Outside of Mario? I’m not sure I’d be able to tell you. For whatever reason, the 3D character platformer has become an increasingly rare breed, it would seem, which makes them even more heartening to see when they do occasionally poke their head above the parapet and leap onto our screens. Song Of Nunu: A League Of Legends Story is one of them, channelling the joyous, boundless enthusiasm of its late 90s and early 00s predecessors to create a simple, but straightforward adventure that you could just as easily enjoy alone as an adult, or with a child in tow. It did not, alas, quite make me cry as developers Tequila Works intended (that honour still belongs to Rime and Rime alone out of their back catalogue), but there’s much to admire here while having your heartstrings lightly plucked at the same time. And you don’t need to know a jot about League Of Legends to enjoy it.

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I’m not sure any of my Lego constructions would hold up to anything more aggressive than an accidental bump or the over-excited nose of a dog, let alone wave after wave of ghastly monsters. Soon I’ll be able to put that hypothesis to the test, as the next game from the creators of shopkeeping-sim-turned-dungeon-diver Moonlighter looks to throw endless horrors at your custom-made grand design.

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Final Fantasy 14’s 7.0 update won’t hit the MMO for almost another year, arriving alongside the game’s next expansion Dawntrail in the summer of 2024. Director Naoki Yoshida already has some plans for the next two major updates after that, though – but he’d really rather you didn’t ask about them.

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80 Days, Heaven’s Vault and the Sorcery! games were all created by Inkle using their own scripting language, called Ink. It’s a powerful tool for creating game narrative using simple markup rather than code, and it’s open source so it can be used by other developers.

One drawback thus far has been that there was no native integration with the Unreal engine. That has now changed thanks to a new open source plug-in created by The Chinese Room.

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Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi originally turned down the roleplaying game’s now-iconic soundtrack by Nobuo Uematsu – until the legendary composer simply changed the track order, that is.

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Final Fantasy 14’s crossover with Fall Guys looks as gloriously chaotic as the original mean bean gauntlet – and it’s out very soon. The incoming minigame playable inside the MMO will see 24 Warriors of Light race across Fall Guys courses given a Final Fantasy-themed twist.

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Final Fantasy XIV is once again dipping into the rest of the storied series in a new series of raids and quests for the MMO.

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LG makes some of the best monitors going, in my opinion, with their Fast IPS panels being the basis of many great gaming monitors from other manufacturers too.

Today we’re looking at one of their first-party options, the 27GP83A, which combines a winning spec sheet with a reduced price: $279.99 for a 27-inch 1440p 165Hz gaming monitor.

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Obsidian Entertainment design director Josh Sawyer has said that he’d be well up for making a new Pillars of Eternity RPG, given a budget on par with Baldur’s Gate 3. Specifically, he’d like to build on Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire‘s combat system, and use a “scripted 3D camera” that avoids some of the fuss of exploring the world and navigating the interface of Larian’s game.

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