Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Steam Next Fest 2024 has formally ended, we’ve spent a couple of weeks gorging upon demos of all stripes, from oil spill clean-up to dancefloor kendo, and now comes the all-important process of deciding which of those demos Won. Valve have helpfully shared a list of the most played Steam demos during this latest, gravest round of next festivity, and it covers a reasonable range. I mean, I wasn’t that surprised to see an open world survival shooter with monsters at the top of the ladder – why else would we dedicate a bunch of Best Of features to such things? – but I am surprised that number three is a leering parody of neglect. Also, there’s a game about mopping dungeons that appeals strongly to my Dungeon Meshi-watching sensibilities.

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The Remake Of The End Of The Greatest RPG Of All Time, or TROTEOTGRPGOAT for, uh, short, is a game that exists. I normally wouldn’t let such an opaque stub of a description survive outside of a quick Trello reminder to write something better later, but I’m currently finding it fulfilling enough just to gaze upon that title and consider the fully formed art object that may soon emerge from its tantalising promises. Ok, so the visual component helps too. Orientate yourself by means of the trailer below, and let’s dig into this brazen nose-hooker of a head turner of a game that does exist, about another game that doesn’t.

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Life By You, the Sims-like management game previously troubled by several delays, has been canceled by Paradox Interactive, and Californian studio Paradox Tectonic have been shut down. The news of the game’s cancellation came last night through a forum post, with Paradox deputy CEO Mattias Lilja painting a picture of a game still too “lacking” for more development time to fix. This morning, it emerged that Paradox Tectonic, the studio working on the game, have been shuttered, via GameWatcher.

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Starfield’s first expansion, this year’s Shattered Space, won’t be the only major DLC for the sci-fi exploration game, Bethesda bossman Todd Howard has confirmed.

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A Quiet Place is a very solid horror movie that seemed primed for a video game adaptation from the off. After all, it already had all the ingredients of a video game right there: the whole film is essentially one overlong stealth mission with a punishing fail state – any crunchy glass or other noise would immediately draw the attention of deadly alien monsters – and at one point there’s a whiteboard with the narrative equivalent of Dead Space’s “CUT OFF THEIR LIMBS” graffiti scrawled on it. Lo and behold, we’re getting a Quiet Place video game.

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Remember Lords of the Fallen? No, not that one. This one. Last year’s reboot of the 2014 game of exactly the same name – despite the successor originally being a numbered sequel, then at least having a ‘The’ at the start of its title to help tell them apart a little – will now get its own follow-up in a third Lords of the Fallen game. The upcoming sequel doesn’t have a name yet, but I really hope they stick with the bit and just call it “Lords of the Fallen” again.

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The perpetually scarlet-faced and jovially maladroit folk of Embracer have done their usual vaudeville comedy routine of spinning around with negative-dollar signs in their eyes and trampling on another game development studio – in this case, Pieces Interactive, creators of the recent Alone In The Dark reboot. The Swedish studio’s website is now a tombstone, bearing the dates 2007-2024. Oopsy-daisy!

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Scottish petrochemical horror is not exactly a genre, but maybe it ought to be. From the opening moments of Still Wakes The Deep you know life on its 1970s North Sea oil rig is precarious. Leaky ceilings, busted panelling, faulty drill machinery – the omens pile up as you spend your first thirty minutes wandering through the colleague-packed canteen and over the platform into the boss’ office for a severe dressing-down. It’s a classic pre-disaster setup for a mostly traditional monster story, yet the game sticks expertly to the first-person horror form, and its voice actors’ performances are so spot-on, that it’d feel churlish to judge this foaming fear simulator for sticking to type. It also has some markedly unsettling use of the shipping forecast, a famously dull feature of British radio I definitely did not expect to freak me out in a video game.

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Well, shovel me timbers! Shovel Knight, the retro platformer that started it all (it all being everything from a roguelike spin-off to a Dead Cells cameo) turns 10 this month, and Yacht Club Games are releasing a ultimate edition to celebrate. Entitled the ‘Shovel Of Hope DX’, this definitive-me-doo bundles in the original game with old and new features like saving and rewinding, over 20 playable characters, local and online co-op, and new modes. Grab your shovel and prepare to dig for the trailer, then look foolish as you realise it’s directly below this paragraph.

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“Two’s company, three’s a crowd,” the saying goes, unless the first two are warriors and the third one is a priest, in which case the superior proverb is surely “three’s a moderately balanced squad, two’s a massive liability”? Here to put such kitchen wisdom to the test is BioWare’s Dragon Age: The Veilguard, which “only” allows you to bring two companions into the fray, one fewer than 2014’s Dragon Age: Inquisition. It’s another indication that this will be more biffy action game than thinky party-based RPG. The upside, assuming you find that last sentence disappointing, is that exploration and combat will be more “intimate”, and individual characters will have more screentime to bounce off each other and flourish as personalities. All this comes care of a BioWare Discord Q&A from late last week, which you can watch in full below.

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