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If you’ve read any of my stuff by now, you’d know that I am a simple man who enjoys violence in his games. No story? Absolutely fine by me – cuts the faff. This is why I like the demo for first-person shooter Cop Bastard a lot. It’s set in early 90s Japan, where you’ll smoke fools with guns in straightforward homage to 90s action movies. And it has an updated demo – not officially part of the latest Steam Next Fest – out right now.
Last October, Paradox Interactive announced that they and development studio Harebrained Schemes were breaking up, following underwhelming sales of Harebrained’s 1930s-set XCOMlike, The Lamplighters League. The publishers had already made layoffs at Harebrained in the run-up to release, implying that preorder numbers were low; ultimately, Paradox wrote it off as a $22 million flop. At the time of the “parting of ways”, Paradox chief operational officer Charlotta Nilsson washed her hands of XCOMlikes entirely, commenting that “a new project or sequel in the same genre was not in line with our portfolio plans”.
The developer of Full Fathom describes it as a “thalassophobia sim”. You are the lone engineer on a rustbucket submarine exploring the dangerous waters of a submerged country in an alternate reality 1990s. The warning lights on the control panel are flashing, a buzzer is spluttering like a dying bluebottle, and your robotic assistant is about as useful as an umbrella in the Mariana Trench. Things could not get any worse. And then you see it. Something in the green haze outside. Something with a tail.
How do official Bethesda bug compilation videos coinciding with a game’s launch sound? Or at least, a proper list of known bugs on day one, to preempt any compilations created by vengeful players? Skyrim Lead Designer and Starfield Systems Designer Bruce Nesmith has spoken a little about the “interesting problem” of how open developers should be about technical issues on day one, given the expectation some players have that every game should be “flawless”.
When asked by Videogamer if lists of known bugs (Nesmith throws out ‘700’ as an example for Skyrim) should be shared with fans on launch “to temper expectations,” he responded:
My earliest memory of the Commandos series of tactical stealth games was my dad bringing home a box copy of the original. “The missions take months. Months!” his mate had told him. Get less shit mates, thought I, for I had already played it elsewhere, and knew that the missions took mere minutes if you put the game on easy then rushed your objectives, bonking nazis along the way. I did not rush the new Steam demo for Kalypso’s revival, Commandos: Origins, but it’s still doable inside half an hour. I had expected a little more, but what’s here has certainly given me some optimism that the full game might well be worth sinking – if not months – at least more time than it takes to wildly lunge at a few nazis en route to your objective.
Looking for a new gaming monitor? I don’t mean to tempt you, but this is one hell of a deal. Beating its most recent Black Friday pricing ($1179) by over $200, the Samsung 49″ Odyssey G93SC Series OLED Curved Gaming Monitor is now down to $949 at Amazon. That’s $650 off its original list price, and one of the best deals of the year so far.
Cast your mind back ten years. Done? Good, you survived the hideous form of time travel known as long-term memory. Now, do you see a horrendous first-person shooter anywhere back there, full of memes and intentionally terrible font choices? Congratulations, you may have remembered 420BlazeIt, a freakish eyesore of a game developed during a 7-day game jam by one of the people behind Crossy Road, of all things. It briefly did the YouTuber rounds, back when YouTube was not yet the anxiety-inducing ad factory it is today.
Now I’m going to ask you to come back to the present. But prepare for a bit of a shock – there’s a sequel coming to that bong huffing shooter. 420BlazeIt 2 has been announced for some months, but now there’s a demo you can play too.
Neva is the Sophomore effort from Nomada Studio, who you may remember from their beautiful, dreamy platformer Gris. Neva is not a literal sequel to Gris, but it certainly seems to be one in a spiritual sense, as it, too, is a floaty hand-illustrated platformer fond of metaphor. Neva introduces some drama, with combat and a health system (if not actual stakes because of near-instant restarts), and although neither the platforming nor combat are precise enough to be neat bedfellows, I think we should be willing to forgive most of the mess.
Credit where it’s due to Silent Sadie, whose Steam Next Fest demo is out now: even within the confines of a 2.5D platformer, I don’t think it could lean any harder into its love of pratfallin’, piano-tinklin’ 1920s comedy cinema.
One of the most important lessons in skiing is, presumably, to look where you’re going. You wouldn’t want to ski with your eyes closed or while viewing yourself from a drone pointed back at the mountain from above. That’d be daft.
Or maybe not. Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders is the frosty followup to the mountain biking original, Lonely Mountains: Downhill, and like its predecessor it’s about going fast while barely able to see what’s coming. Yet also like its predecessor, initial frustrations melted away until I was eagerly hitting the slopes in the Snow Riders demo for just one more quick go.
