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If you’ve played Battle Brothers, you’ll know that Overhype Studios have a way of making you care for an underling, no more so than when you inadvertently send them onto the wrong end of a sharp blade. Menace, their upcoming turn-based tactical RPG, will also put the wellbeing of your chosen fighters at the forefront of your mind – along with a dramatic shift from 2D medieval sprites to the fully 3D battlefields of a unruly space frontier.
To survive in looter-booter Pacific Drive you have to keep the paranormal station wagon you drive around in good nick. You’re constantly repairing corroded doors and swapping out busted engine parts with cobbled-together technology. But maybe this tinkering was a little too much. Our review praised the game for its “trunk loads of atmosphere” but called the constant need to craft stuff “laborious”. If you also felt this, then good news. An update now lets you fiddle the difficulty options a generous amount, say developers Ironwood Studios, making the game easier and bringing crafting needs right down.
Buuut… if you thought the opposite – that the game wasn’t hard enough – you can now tick a box that makes hitting yourself with the trunk door kill you stone dead.
Tiny Glade has been a constant presence on TikTok for the last year or so. It’s never far away. In between burrito recipes and hymns to the Fujifilm X100v, this gorgeous toylike art tool’s gamely turning stretches of balmy meadow into semi-ruined castles, semi-ruined villages and semi-ruined citadels.
Dreamy and slightly haunted, it’s conjured words like “bewitching” and “spellbinding” in the comments sections, too. It makes sense, really. Tiny Glade’s a game about making rustic dioramas and then photographing them. It’s not hard to imagine some exiled magical person might live in here among the rocks and reeds and wild heather.
Alruna And The Necro-Industrialists opens with paired quotes from T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland and Mad Max: Fury Road – a blend of influences that would typically get you kicked out of the Creative Writing Club for being simultaneously too fancy and too obvious, but the game beyond the epigraph looks pretty swish.
It’s “a compact and high-density Metroidvania, with a focus on sequence-breaking and playing things out of order”. It uses a square aspect display ratio calibrated to give wizened Game Boy enthusiasts the shakes, and is made up of 200 single-screen rooms that “slot into the larger puzzle-box of the world”. Also, you play a thorn witch who looks a bit like 1950s Tinkerbell, with a touch of Betty Boop. Here’s a trailer.
Efforts to render Mars commuter-friendly proceed apace as Mars First Logistics embraces the magic of trains. The latest update for the physics-based open world build-a-car game introduces a mountable theodolite, which lets you stitch together monorail networks you can then ride about on.
If monorails strike you as frivolous, don’t worry. It’s more of a Shelbyville idea. And in any case, the theodolite also lets you construct networks of pipes, power lines and rail-less tarmac roads – the ready-salted crisp of the road family. It’s a chonky expansion that, in the words of lead developer Ian MacLarty, has only “scratched the surface of where this new system could go”. I am predicting an eventual pivot into either themepark management or factory simulator.
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I am lost in my own factory. From every direction, every angle, conveyor belts and smelters and assemblers obscure my senses and envelop my being. Twenty hours ago I placed my first manufacturer somewhere around here. Back then it represented the state of the art, hatching me a pristine batch of 1.25 computers every minute – now I’ve forgotten where I put the damn thing, after delving into my factory’s guts to hook that piddly yet still useful batch of old relics up to my main production line. I’m building supercomputers now, and the many manufacturers that make those are hungry.
Something is always hungry in Satisfactory, and that hunger pulls you from task to task in a near-seamless and frankly beautiful daze of ever-escalating industry. It is mesmerising and it is fearsome, and after five years of early access it’s finally complete.
Goichi ‘Suda51’ Suda – of No More Heroes and Killer7 fame – reckons a focus on Metacritic scores is bad for creativity. Speaking to GI.biz recently alongside survival horror genre maker-upper Shinji Mikami, Suda expressed his frustrations with the review aggregator platform’s cultural cache.
“Everybody pays too much attention to and cares too much about Metacritic scores. It’s gotten to the point where there’s almost a set formula – if you want to get a high Metacritic score, this is how you make the game,” Suda51 told Gi.biz.
For all the nightmarish enshittification modern life throws at us, we can at least feel warm and fulfilled about the resurgence of demos. Bountifully they await on Steam, like a friendly worker offering you toothpick-skewered cheese chunks at your local supermarket. And, oh, would you look at that: this cheese has some guns in it. Deeply customisable guns! SULFUR is a shooty roguelike with some excellent goblins and a deep RPG equipment system. And, if the Steam reviews are to be believed, some players are squeezing out dozens of hours from the demo alone.
Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week – our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! This week, it’s writer on Marvel’s Midnight Suns, Hindsight, Life is Strange Season 2 and more, Emma Kidwell! Cheers Emma! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?
Back in June, Edwin covered One Million Checkboxes, a website with one million checkboxes that players could check or uncheck, with any change visible to all other visitors of the site. It became an obsession for some in the two weeks the website was online, as players fought to fill all the boxes, or undo the work of their peers.
The fight was far more complicated than it seemed, as the developer recently explained, with some players finding ways to encode hidden messages in the checkboxes.
