It’s a beautiful day on the island. The waves are nibbling playfully at the shoreline, the farmyard animals are shuffling about happily in their pens, your little sister is bouncing around being a perfect nuisance like always. Time to get busy, then. The cows need to be milked, the eggs need to be gathered from the chicken coop, the seeds need to be sowed and watered.
You might find an hour to do a bit scavenging, here and there – gathering mussels from the rocks at low tide, or putting aside some wood for that pier your dad asked you to build. Just, don’t forget the gods. The gods have needs too. Today it’s crabs. Tomorrow? Who knows.
Good news, people who prefer their videogame graphics crispy rather than hazy and rainbow-edged! Ubisoft are working on an Assassin’s Creed: Mirage patch that will let you toggle off chromatic aberration – aka the blurring of outlines and details for artistic effect, which you might consider appropriate to a game subtitled “Mirage”, but which some people absolutely despise.
Valve are introducing text message verification for game developers using Steamworks, following what the platform-holders describe as a limited incident which saw hackers taking over several Steamworks accounts and adding malware to their games. Reportedly, fewer than 100 Steam players have been affected by the malware – I hope you’re not among them.
Despite the extremely upsetting news about what nate has been having for breakfast this year, we maintain our composure to deliver an episode of The Electronic Wireless Show podcast all about the Steam Next Fest, currently running until next Monday the 16th. You’ve got a whole weekend of free demos to try, and we’ve knocked back a few to regurgitate into your open mouths as suggestions for what to try first. Plus, we’ve been playing a few current games, and have some juicy recommendations of non-game things.
I was mixed on Dambusters’ Dead Island 2 – I thought the combat had flair but not much depth, loved the game’s decadently disastrous Los Angeles, but hated how exploration boiled down to nosing around for crafting materials. The game’s first story DLC expansion, Haus, amps up the weirdness of the environments by transporting you to a “surreal, psycho-horror dreamscape” in blissful Malibu.
There are flashes of Glass Onion and The Menu here, but I was reminded just as much of the eerier parts of Bioshock, that underwater monument to crackpot billionaires with far too much time on their hands. Here’s a video of the opening.
Lords Of The Fallen is a reboot of CI Games and Deck 13’s 2014 action-RPG called… Lords Of The Fallen. We thought the original was average and largely forgettable, so how does the new LOTF stack up against it nine years later? Well, it’s definitely going to appeal to more folks by being a fairly enjoyable soulslike that ticks most checkboxes, and that rises above most of the competition by popping a magic lantern in your hands.
Raise a light to the dark fantasy world and it’ll reveal a more dribbly parallel universe you can warp between at almost any time. This spooky lantern might open up some cool realm-hopping twists on your grim adventure, and the game as a whole might instil a sense of exploration sure to please souls fans after a familiar hit of uncertain peril, but its finer details chip away at your patience. It’s not long before your tentative pushes through horrible towns and creaky walkways soon give way to wild sprint finishes born from pure frustration.
EGX 2023 is upon us, and you may recall that RPS is sponsoring the Rezzed Zone this year. That means we’ll be tucking into the 50+ indie games that will be there over the coming days, and we can now confirm the full and final line-up of what’s going to be on the showfloor. Most of these are only playable at the show, but you may still find some of them have demos available on Steam thanks to this week’s Steam Next Fest. In any case, read on below to come and see what’s coming up.
Whereas most games begin by getting you into the action as quickly as possible, Saltsea Chronicles opens with a quick note about its save system. It’s a small, but important detail in this story-driven adventure game, as throughout its nine-to-ten-hour run time, you’ll be faced with various decisions about where your crew of post-apocalyptic drifters will explore next, as they set sail in search of their missing captain Maja. By choosing one island at the end of every chapter, you’ll naturally miss out on visiting another – and with 14 locales to explore in total in the Saltsea archipelago (and only 12 chapters to do it in), each playthrough has the potential to end up being quite different from the last.
But up front it tells you “There are no wrong choices, only your choices” in Saltsea Chronicles, and that ultimately this is a tale about “tracing different pathways” using its clever branching save system. While you can, of course, play it through from start to finish in a single swoop, you also have the option to purloin its additional save slots to take those roads less travelled (presented here as delightful, wiggling seaweed tendrils), and all without overwriting your existing adventure. Immediately, that sense of FOMO is dispelled, and instead of worrying about ‘seeing everything’ or making sure you get a ‘good’ playthrough, you can simply enjoy its enthralling tale of high seas soap opera, curious exploration, and the knotty drama that comes with trying to forge connections in an increasingly fragmented world. It’s a journey well worth taking, even if what lies at the end of it didn’t quite come together in the way I’d hoped.
Overwatch 2 is getting new skins that clothe Moria and Pharah in the outfits of Diablo 4’s Lilith and Inarius. Those skins are part of a new wave of cosmetics incoming for the game’s Season 7: Rise of Darkness, but they’re not part of the standard premium battle pass. Instead, they’ll cost you another $40 – as much as the whole of Overwatch 1 did when it was first released. As you can imagine, people aren’t too chuffed.
