Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Yooka-Laylee developers Playtonic are laying off staff across their operations, as they wrestle with what they call “a period of profound change in how games are created and financed”. It’s not clear what these “profound changes” are, exactly – soaring budgets? Evergreen service games drinking up all the oxygen? Falling interest in the genre of mascot platformer Playtonic are best known for? Either way, the outcome is that a bunch of artists, game designers, narrative designers, producers and UI or UX people are now looking for work.

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I have spun out on wet tarmac again and I am furious with myself. JDM: Japanese Drift Master requires a different mentality to most other racing games. Drifting around a corner is not the side gimmick that you’ll do a few times during races. Drifting is the race. In this self-described “simcade” game, you’ve got to slide around the bendy roads of sunny (and rainy) Japan while delivering sushi and chasing boy racers for style points. It all adds up to some remarkably weighty speedfreakery that is bitingly frustrating when I’m bad at it, and rumblingly compelling when I’m good at it.

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Elden Ring Nightreign might replace its source material’s sprawling RPG exploration with a mad dash around tightly-nestled hotspots, but under the bonnet, this is still essentially just Elden Ring with a quicker sprint and character models of hitherto-unseen birdpeople. Even the system requirements are, save for a minor CPU bump, a copy and paste job, confirming the feathers aren’t even that high-poly.

As a result, this spinoff runs equally well on the Steam Deck, even appearing to take advantage of the same SteamOS/Proton tweak that made Elden Ring less stutter-prone on Valve’s handheld specifically. My Steam Deck settings guide for the base game works here too, though having been yanked around Limveld at greave-splintering speeds by loothounds Nic and Ollie, I actually think further quality cuts could be prudent. This is FromSoft at their paciest, and it makes sense to help framerates keep up.

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Dispatch is a swanky visual novel with light strategy game elements in which you manage a bunch of reformed supervillains, assigning them to pop-up emergencies around town. So far, I have asked a dancing French assassin to rescue a balloon from a tree, sent a randomly transforming literal batman to thwart a boat robbery, ordered a golem and an invisible woman to break up a barfight between rival vigilantes, and tasked a light-manipulating popstar with cutting a supermarket ribbon.

We managed to retrieve the balloon and open the supermarket with flying colours, but the boat is now at the bottom of the harbour. The golem and the invisible woman tried to resolve the barfight firstly by proposing that the participants form a Dynamic Duo, and then by way of a drinking competition. Now, the bar is in ruins. Also, the team’s Human Torch equivalent can’t go on break without starting a fire.

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Although you won’t see everything, you can finish Many Nights A Whisper in under an hour. Each day you’ll train with your fiery sling, lighting braziers and honing your aim for a looming ceremony where you’ll try to hit a distant ritual chalice with a single shot. At night, you’ll sit at a confession wall. People will tell you their wishes, and you’ll decide which will ones be granted if the ceremony is a success.

The whole game takes place on a single large balcony, overlooking the sea. Tradition forbids you from speaking back to the wishful folk that come at night, feeding their braids through a statue for you to cut in acceptance, or else ignore. The only other person you’ll actually see is your mentor, a likeable septuagenarian who’s presided over these rituals for decades. You train, eat, listen to wishes, and sleep. After a few days of this, it’s time for the ceremony. As I say, takes about an hour.

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A sci-fi horror trope I quite enjoy is arboretums that provide oxygen to ships or structures, both because it’s a nifty (if spurious?) idea, and because I like the concept of people who’ve only seen iron bulkheads for months staring wistfully at small trees. I think Alex Garland’s criminally underrated Sunshine did it. Kenny Lentil’s Biological Shock did it. Dead Space too. The derelict ark you’ll be scavenging and surviving in Dandelion Void also has plants, but the caveat is that the plants can move. The other caveat is that the plants are bastards.

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Anyone that’s ever been on the London underground, no matter their background, can all likely agree on one thing: that place is nasty. I mean, it’s all underground, where’s the dirt meant to go? And it’s not like anyone’s putting any money into getting the place cleaned. But, if you’ve ever fantasized about hosing down a Northern Line train for yourself, one, that’s possibly slightly odd, and two, you’ll be able to do almost just that in PowerWash Simulator’s next and last update.

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To be a person that looks forward to video games and DLC for video games is to also be a person that must do so knowing that, at this point in time, they are likely to be delayed. It is what it is! Perhaps the dismantling of our current economic system and rebuilding one that doesn’t put profits first would mean developers could take their time, but that’ll probably also take a while. As a result, we’re in a situation where, earlier today, developer TaleWorlds Entertainment announced that Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord’s first bit of DLC, War Sails, has been delayed.

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“BEING A TEENAGER SUCKS. So we made a videogame about it.” These are the opening words on the Steam page for Jenny Jiao Hsia’s Consume Me, a “life-simulation RPG” about feeling “stupid, fat, lazy, and ugly in high school.” Now, I’m going to go out on a limb and say many of you that are of a post-high-school age probably don’t want to re-experience it anytime soon, but Consume Me looks like such a good time I’m going to suggest you do so anyway, especially because it just got a demo.

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What do you think Islands & Trains is about? I’m not going to give you long, because it really is just right there in the name. As you’ve presumably already guessed, it is a quaint-looking sandbox builder where you make tiny diorama-like islands, adorning them with tracks for trains to choo-choo along. I told you, it’s a name that does what it says on the tin, and if it appeals to you at all, well, there’s some good news, as it just came out today.

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