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Classic management sim series RollerCoaster Tycoon will now be published solely by Atari, making the reborn retro video game company the new stewards for the theme park franchise as it marks its 25th anniversary.
Despite seemingly escaping the Embrace(r) of death through their sale to Take-Two at the end of last month, Gearbox Entertainment haven’t quite emerged unscathed. The studio has confirmed a number of layoffs shortly after the announcement of the sale, while clarifying that no positions related to the development of games were affected.
Earlier today Tom Betts – founder of Nullpointer and former lead programmer at The Signal From Tolva developers Big Robot – emailed me about his new game The Horror At Highrook. In the space of a single, rollercoaster paragraph, Betts earned my curiosity by describing himself as a fellow Soul Reaver enthusiast, lost it again by criticising Soul Reaver’s camera – such insolence! – and earned it swiftly back by mentioning that he’s from Yorkshire. Then, he upgraded my curiosity into attention by describing The Horror At Highrook as a “clockwork narrative” horror experience that takes inspiration from Poe, Stoker and Lovecraft on the one hand, and from boardgames, wiki-hunting and escape rooms on the other.
This is a heady brew indeed. Also, there appears to be a cat in the game called Mr Tubbs, described as a “portly grey barrel of fur”. I entertain suspicions of Mr Tubbs. What fell secrets lurk behind his perfectly groomed exterior? Anyway, here’s the trailer.
Do you remember the noughties fan warz over which game had the best terrain destruction physics? The victors of that particular forum skirmish were probably DICE’s Battlefield games, with their woozy Frostbitten cinematography and dependable multiplayer tactic of having a whole team focus fire on a single capture point, gradually reducing it to stumps of foundation. But leftier souls may have preferred Volition’s (RIP) Red Faction series, the third of which, Red Faction: Guerrilla, featured a granular demolition engine that you bash apart whole bases with a sledgehammer.
Well, Guerrilla’s lead tech designer Luke Schneider is still in the architecture-ruining business: his and Radiangames’s latest, the hopefully self-explanatory Instruments Of Destruction, leaves Steam early access on May 10th, 2024. Here’s the 1.0 trailer.
It’s a fond hope, a fool’s hope, but perhaps 2024 will be remembered not as the year of Yet More Layoffs, but the year of Unexpected Hits. Surprise record-setters like Palworld, which I don’t especially like, Helldivers 2, which I rather enjoy, and now Content Warning, which I’m still figuring out. If you missed it, the co-op horror game released on Monday with a temporary free promotion, and racked up a 200,000-player Steam concurrency last night. Published by Totally Accurate Battle Simulator outfit Landfall, it’s sort of like Lethal Company in being about venturing into horrible places as a wibbly-wobbly defenceless explorer, but rather than gathering scrap for resale, you’re filming yourself and the monsters in a bid to publish a viral “SpookTube” video, with tuber celebrity translating into cash for new equipment.
Each video is edited together automatically from your footage and accompanying voicechat, once you return from each trip to the Old World, and you can watch it all on an in-game monitor with a mocked-up chat feed and viewcount. It’s a pungent, potted commentary on the machinations of Youtube celebrity, with heady notes of “cautionary tale about algorithmic content generation” and “cautionary tale about people endangering or hurting themselves being a dependable source of views”. Urgh, I can feel an op-ed coming on. In the meantime, here’s how the developers – a team of only five – are updating Content Warning following its launch success.
“It almost feels like proof-of-concept for a first-person Prince of Persia game, with an ever-so-gentle dusting of Portal,” our Edwin said after playing free first-person platformer Grimhook when it launched in December. It’s a cracking little game, parkouring about with the help of supernatural powers and a grappling hook, but ends right as it feels like it’s getting started. I’d certainly be up for three hours of this, so how splendid to hear that the developers are planning to make a “complete” and fancier experience.
The PC and console market grew by 2.6% to $93.5 billion in revenue last year, according to a new report by video games date company Newzoo (cheers, Kotaku!) That’s good, right? Growth is universally a good thing, otherwise all those nice, dead-eyed men in suits wouldn’t keep saying it was. You can’t just lie about growth, that’s a business crime. However, here’s some slightly more worrying news, depending on how much you value new ideas: Of all the game time that gamers spent gaming in quantifiable Big Year for Gaming 2023, just 20% of that time was gamed on games other than the 66 specific games mentioned in the report.
Evil Empire, the studio responsible for the previous five or so years of updates to Motion Twin’s roguelite metroidvania game Dead Cells, are set to release a new roguelite set in the Prince of Persia universe “later this year.”
That’s according to Insider Gaming, who were told by sources that ‘The Rogue Prince of Persia’, as the game is rumoured to be named, will first release in Steam early access. It’s reckoned to have been in development for the last four years or so, and supposedly came about after a talk between Evil Empire and Ubisoft at GDC 2019.
RPS was on holiday yesterday, which is fortuitous timing because it was April 1st and it meant we missed all the “jokes” (lies) the games industry likes to spread on that day each year.
Credit to Arma developer’s Bohemia Interactive, however. Their April 1st announcement was that the latest update for Arma Reforger was Tiny Wars, a game mode in which you controlled tiny toy Army Men as they waged war around a proportionally huge home. As ever, this isn’t really a joke, but it also wasn’t exactly a lie, because you can actually play Tiny Wars for real now.
Former Dragon Age director Mike Laidlaw is making a new fantasy game. Eternal Strands is third-person adventure pitched as a mixture of Shadow Of The Colossus and Monster Hunter with Tears Of The Kingdom’s physics powers. The trailer, which you’ll find below, certainly has giants you can clamber across and spray with goop.
