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In Quarantine Zone: The Last Check, you play one of the hazmat-sporting goons at a government checkpoint during a zombie apocalypse. Your job is to let refugees through the gate one by one, and appraise them for evidence of infection. You know the kind of thing: hidden bite marks, weird heartbeats, high temperatures, people ripping your face off without showing appropriate documentation, etcetera.
“You OK babe? You’ve barely touched your boost?” mentions a helpful fish in the trailer for roguelike racer Reality Drift, thus setting the new standard for all reminder pop-ups going forward. I tabbed this one because the phrase “racing game where your choices matter” intrigued me. I was unaware of the helpful fish at this point. Or the road signs that offer you a choice between ‘space’ ‘cat land’, and ‘hell’. Here’s a visual compilation of suchlike images, with added movement.
Whimsy, grimdark, and gambling? And a roguelike to boot?! In my 2025 indie game? Eh, go on then. It looks neat. The trailer below features a desolate, hellish area called “The Pläins öf Päin” (umlauts mine) inhabited by lone egg idiot named ‘eggo’. A curse on the egg idiot and his cracked shell, and a curse on the world for allowing this kind of tomfoolery to proliferate unchallenged.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows will get a New Game+ mode on 29th July, Ubisoft have announced in a video about their summer plans for the feudal Japanese open world stab-me-do. They’re also working on a free Assassin’s Creed Shadows update that lets you fast-forward the time of day, an ability that would certainly serve me well right now, as I contemplate the seven grim hours of video game journalism that separate me from the weekend.
Alienware’s laptop range this year includes the Alienware Aurora 16 and its more impressive Aurora 16X. Both are great laptops, but as you may have guessed from the ‘X’ in the title, the latter is the more impressive version.
Battlefield 6 has been revealed, all official-like, after months of leaks. And what a reveal it was, with a trailer featuring enough explosions to satisfy Michael Bay for at least two hours – though without a release date to accompany it.
Yep, we’ll have to wait a bit longer to see if the October date recently cited by a prominent leaker is on target, as for now all we got was a tease of the campaign that ended in promo for a multiplayer reveal next week. Which, to be fair, is a chef’s kiss way to have done things if EA’s aim was to be totally on brand for today’s big shooters.
I promise this isn’t a “gAmErS aRe MaD” story – there’s actual testing and advice and stuff here, honest – but it must begin that way, as I wouldn’t have guessed that birdlike soulslike Wuchang: Fallen Feathers would launch with PC performance issues without a cacophony of (currently ‘Mostly Negative’) Steam reviews saying so. Not after those easygoing system requirements, surely?
Surely yes, it turns out, though maybe not to the extent that a page of 7,000 thumbs-down symbols might suggest. It’s not good. It runs slowly on max settings. There’s stuttering. DLSS 4 frame generation is either broken, or implemented in a uniquely vexing way. But you can smooth things out considerably with a few choice settings adjustments, including on lower-end graphics cards.
You don’t use the mouse in S.p.l.i.t, but you won’t miss it. Games are sometimes described as ‘clunky’, but what’s more satisfying than good clunk? Each key clank here hits like a heart thud. Axel and two associates are scrambling for root access to launch a malware attack on “the facility” – as in “death is the least of my worries. Being dragged into the facility is what scares me”.
S.p.l.i.t is about an hour long and describes its own dingy skeuomorphism as a “diegetic & immersive UI” and it is that, except when it’s alienating; esoteric; repellent. The game starts and I enter the group chat as Axel. A flashing line prompts me to speak but it doesn’t matter what keys I press, Axel types what he wants. Inhabit. Dissociate. It feels like having an out of body experience with a body that doesn’t belong to me in the first place. There is an unnervingly subtle lag to it all. Axel feels exactly one key slower than me.
The last patch is never the last patch. CD Projekt have been teaching us that lesson for about a year with Cyberpunk 2077, and now Hades 2 is the latest game to have its devs go ‘no, wait, one more’. To be fair to Supergiant, they did specify that the roguelike’s previous update would “likely” be the last one before full release.
It wasn’t. An eleventh early access patch has hit the underworld, but the devs swear it’ll be the last one for realsies this time.
Say what you like about Valve, they make the trains run on time. Eventually. Half-Life 2 got a small surprise update yesterday which changed the speed of a train in the 2004 shooter’s driving sequence (the level called “Highway 17”). This change will let you once again beat said train in a game of chicken that it has been winning against most players for nearly two decades.
