Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

What Remains Of Edith Finch is a very upsetting collection of interactive short stories, all devoted to the tragically short lives of a cursed family who live in a monstrous treehouse. It’s also a wonderful show of experimentation, switching genres from story to story – one minute you’re a playable bestiary on shuffle, the next you’re beheading fish in a cannery as the worktable disappears beneath your scrolling daydreams. The developer’s next project seems to be pursuing a similar balance of whimsy and darkness. It’s another anthology experience, which casts you as a field biologist studying “the strangeness of organic life”. Also, chicken-legged houses.

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It’s always nice to say that a big, look-how-much-we-spent-on-pore-rendering AAA game actually runs quite well on PC, as Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 does. Unfortunately for Bl6ps, and for us, that technical success is balanced on the knife tip of some seriously overwrought infrastructure. Mainly in the form the UX nightmare that is the Call of Duty HQ launcher, as well as a meddlesome always-online requirement, itself serving a feature that doesn’t even work that well.

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You can feel two ways about something at the same time. The feuding academics of Life Is Strange: Double Exposure might call this “emotional superposition”. But the word “ambivalent” already exists. So let’s say I’m ambivalent about this new adventure featuring Max Caulfield, the returning hero of Life Is Strange, and time-travelling photographer whose powers have resurfaced after years of off-screen atrophy. I’ve been deeply moved by individual scenes in this sequel. By the end I was sorry to leave its characters behind. At the same time (please now imagine my face is splitting into a second, colour-washed expression with wobbly VFX) I am relieved it’s over, so I don’t have to deal with the inconsistent behaviour of those characters, the flimsy plot, and a convoluted approach to murder mystery.

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If there’s one thing I’d like to get across about my time with Dragon Age: The Veilguard – perhaps a surprise given Bioware’s recent history, Anthem, and some of the early marketing for this game – it’s that in my 50 hour return to Thedas, I very rarely felt I was playing something cynical.

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In case you don’t know the headline reference, Orpheus was a mythical Greek musician who famously descended to the underworld to rescue his snake-bitten lover, Eurydice. The underworld’s rulers, Hades and Persephone, were massively bummed out by Orpheus’s emo lyre-playing, and swiftly agreed to let him lead Eurydice’s soul upward to the waking world, with the extremely simple proviso that he not look back at her till they’re both on the surface.

Being a love-drunk spannerhead, however, Orpheus couldn’t resist a quick peek at Eurydice after crossing the threshold – and the result is a timeless moral about human frailty and the specific truism that you should absolutely never date musicians, which Australian developers Oppolyon Studios have totally ignored in their otherwise-redolent game about kicking your brother’s soul out of hell.

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I’ve often thought lighthouse keeping would make a fine second career, albeit mostly because in my head, it would give me endless time to write (and finish Baldur’s Gate 3). You won’t have much time to write in Static Dread, sadly. The world has ended, the oceans teem with unspeakable biofauna, and it’s your job as the apparent sole surviving lighthouse keeper to distinguish vessels loaded with eldritch horrors from vessels loaded with people who need saving from eldritch horrors.

Going by the teaser trailer, below, this appears to be comparable to playing border guard in Papers, Please, but it’s less political and more tentacular. You field queries over the radio, run your finger down a clipboard, and decide whether to kindle the lamps or beg the coastguard to blast that ship back to hell. There’s a dialogue line in the trailer which I, personally, would consider highly untrustworthy. “It’s consuming my team!” screams a self-described ship captain. “Please, send help! Gosh…” Look, “friend”, no genuine human being says “gosh” in an emergency situation. Not even British human beings say “gosh” in an emergency situation. That’s what you say when somebody tells you the pizza-flavoured crisps are back on sale at Aldis.

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One of my biggest challenges as a writer has been tempering my love of vague gestures at metaphysical concepts with the revelation that the people who read my articles also, apparently, can’t read my mind. Pah. A skill issue if I ever saw one, honestly. Decade is a fascinating adventure game that drew me in with its apparent vagueness but then, like some sort of considerate, sensible coward, went on to explain itself well in on its Steam page.

It’s the end of the world, and you’re not too happy about it, so you’ll be shoving children in a time machine with little more than a rotting Lunchly and some instructions to help you figure out exactly what went wrong.

What are you dressing as for Halloween? Me, I’m dressing as someone trying to bring back “tray-tray” in an effort to give Edwin a seizure. Here’s the tray-tray:

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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! Most of us know about the novel, the novella, and the rare novito, but did you know that Penguin briefly tried to market the ‘big nov’ – single sentences of much larger works, bizarrely serialised into hardbacks weighty enough to club the equally rare giga-seal? Some things are best left forgotten, but not Dragon Age! It’s Dragon Age month, and here’s Dragon Age veteran and good YouTuber, Mark Darrah! Cheers Mark! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

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Ys X: Nordics launched in Japan last year to some critical acclaim, and it has now made its way both west and onto PC. The PC version has a bunch of graphical upgrades and keyboard support, but also – unlike predecessor Ys IX: Monstrum Nox which got co-op as a cheeky post-launch bonus on PC – Ys X: Nordics has local co-op from day one.

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Cities: Skylines received its final piece of DLC last May, as developers Colossal Order shifted their focus to its sequel, Cities: Skylines 2. Eighteen months and the release of Cities: Skylines 2 later… Cities: Skylines 1 is getting new DLC again.

The “Mountain Village” creator pack add 45 new buildings designed to help you construct quaint and picturesque destinations.

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