Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

A big shout out to indie games that are successors to existing games in all but name. It’s gotta be one of my favourite trends. Fed up of waiting for a big publisher to revive a series that’s been lying dormant for decades? Simply do it yourself instead. 11 years after the release of Jet Set Radio Future, and with Sega seemingly unwilling to exhume their cult-favourite rollerblading series outside of weird crossovers with Ubisoft’s Roller Champions of all things, Team Reptile have done exactly that.

Enter Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, as authentic a sequel to Jet Set Radio as you can get. Dripping with style and oozing cool, the team have crafted a carefully observed love letter that both respects and advances the original duology in meaningful ways, while taking a step back in others.

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US author and artist Bill Willingham has rather dramatically announced that he is placing the Fables comicbook property in the public domain, including all Fables spin-offs and characters. This means that – pending a judgement from third-party legal experts, anyway – anyone can now create art of any kind set in the Fables universe. “What was once wholly owned by Bill Willingham is now owned by everyone, for all time,” the author wrote on his Substack. “It’s done, and as most experts will tell you, once done it cannot be undone. Take-backs are neither contemplated nor possible.”

You might recognise Fables as the universe in which Telltale’s The Wolf Among Us is set. It’s a grubby noir fairytale world in which bedtime story characters like Snow White and Prince Charming live discreetly among regular humans, aka Mundies, having been driven from their homelands by a mysterious Adversary. I confess I’ve not read any of the original comics – I’ve only ever played the Telltale adaptation, which I enjoyed. I feel guilty about that in hindsight, because Willingham seems to have a pretty dim view of Telltale’s work, though that’s partly to do with what he considers to be his longstanding unfair treatment by Fables publisher DC Comics.

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Riot Forge have been quietly building up quite the catalogue of League Of Legends side story games over the last couple of years. In November 2021, they launched the double whammy of rhythm runner Hextech Mayhem and turn-based RPG Ruined King, and this year alone we’ve already had action RPG The Mageseeker and narrative platformer Conv/rgence. As you can probably tell, they’re all focused on different genres, different League heroes, and have all come from different developers – and soon they’ll be joined by Song Of Nunu, the next game from Rime developers Tequila Works.

I got to play a very small slice of it at Gamescom last month, and yep, if you’ve been craving another low stakes adventure that’s all but guaranteed to wrench at your heartstrings and wibble your tear ducts, Song Of Nunu will almost certainly fill that Rime-shaped hole in your life when it comes to PC on November 1st.

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Supergiant have announced that Hades 2 – sequel to one of gaming’s smoothest and sexiest underworld capers – will release into Early Access in Q2 2024 on Steam and the Epic Games Store. It’ll drop with at least as much stuff to do, hack apart, loot, fanship, etcetera as the original Hades, and will be preceded by a limited access technical test.

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Cyberpunk 2077‘s Update 2.0 – which adds new skill trees and perks, vehicle combat, and revamped police responses to the FPS-RPG – will launch on September 21st. That’s a little before the release of the paid expansion, Phantom Liberty, on September 26th.

The release date was announced today as part of a developer stream, which also included a new cinematic trailer for the expansion featuring a little of Idris Elba’s character before the events of the game.

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American Truck Simulator has, by my count, now added eleven extra states as DLC over and above the two it launched with. That means there’s a long way to go before it completely unites the states as one country under 18-wheels, but SCS Software are continuing their efforts with the announcement of a third in-development expansion: Arkansas.

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The first three Tomb Raider games are being remastered and re-released. The awkwardly named Tomb Raider I-III Remastered Starring Lara Croft refreshes the graphics, adds quality-of-life features, and will release next year on February 14th.

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I wouldn’t say I’ve been itching to return to Amnesia: The Bunker, Frictional’s perfectly ghastly blend of horror game and immersive sim, but I’ve certainly been itching to write about it. The terrible beauty of that generator-based exploration and scavenging loop. That moment when you walk just a little too quickly down a corridor, and hear the awful rummaging in the walls. The agonising discovery that not only is it possible to roam with the lights out, but pretty much required, beyond a certain point. The dense burden of grasping more or less where to go, without knowing how to survive the journey – and above all else, those goddamn rats, always encountered where least convenient. Shoo! Shoo!

It’s by far the most oppressive and demanding horror game I’ve played in recent memory, and it’ll get considerably worse with the release of the Halloween update.

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On paper, Final Fantasy XIV doesn’t do a very good job of encouraging fishing. FFXIV’s lead director and producer Naoki Yoshida — known as Yoshi P — wanted to create something that was “fun, but relaxing”, and there aren’t a lot of material rewards for the time you put in. You can sell the fish or break them down into other materials, but really the only reason to fish is for the sake of fishing itself.

And yet today Final Fantasy XIV is home to a close knit fishing community of over 27,000 people. This single shared interest has spun off into many different directions, including fishing as a competitive journey, the process of building a space for the hobby itself, and even a kind of metagame. But the main thread tying these all together is the love for fishing, and the community’s central hub is actually located outside of the game – in a Discord server called Fisherman’s Horizon, lovingly nicknamed Fishcord.

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There comes a point in every diary playthrough when the Comet of Invention meets the Cowpat of Diminishing Returns, when the Foot of Unbridled Agency meets the Covert Hedgehog of Limited Design, when Fucking Around meets Finding Not Much Out. I fear we are reaching that point with the life and times of Mary Read, my Starfield character and nowadays quite accomplished space pirate, who has sworn never to land on a planet ever again.

Immediately after conquering the Chimera in Part 2 of the Starfield No-Planet Run, I commandeered a UC Longsword II on the other side of the same system. The Longsword has proven a predator without equal, charging straight through opposing craft even when they’ve got several levels on me, its unforgiving autocannons forming the dominant bassline of every encounter. Frankly, it’s getting repetitive, and while the obvious remedy is to plunge cackling and crying into a star system with an AI threat level in the high double digits, I doubt that will really alter the rhythms of Starfield’s ship combat – it’ll just mean I have to do some grinding.

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