The Maw 22nd-27th April 2024

Ugh, I do not have the energy to feed the Maw this week. Sometimes the creature manifests as a proper monstrosity, with B-movie prosthetics and sound effects, and sometimes, it’s more of an… unfathomable annoyance, like a nose that won’t stop running, or a single player game that requires an internet connection. In either case, the Maw must be sated, and fortunately, there are quite a few appetising video-or-computer games out in the next seven days, with at least one behemoth landing on Friday.

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Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes review: a relaxed JRPG adventure with a few old school quirks, but even more pals

Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes is the spiritual successor to a classic JRPG called Suikoden, and it came to be thanks to a very successful Kickstarter campaign. As someone with little knowledge of Suikoden, I went into Hundred Heroes thinking it was going to be a dense, old-fashioned, and slightly impenetrable time. And yes, some of it is annoying and obtuse and will almost certainly suit veterans who enjoy those quirks, but it has a surprisingly easy going nature. Hundred Heroes accomodates new players like me with combat that’s simple to grasp and a story that’s emotional and sprawling and absolutely worth your time.

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Final Fantasy 14’s long-awaited graphics update in 7.0 will look better than the Dawntrail benchmark, Yoshi-P promises

Ahead of Final Fantasy 14’s next massive expansion, Dawntrail, arriving this summer, Square Enix recently put out a graphical benchmarking tool. Dawntrail’s benchmark is especially noteworthy as it’s the first time we’ve really been able to put the MMO’s much-anticipated graphical update arriving with 7.0 into practice and see what sort of demands it might make on our hardware by overhauling the 10-year-old game’s visuals.

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Capcom plan to make Dragon’s Dogma 2’s dragonsplague less frequent, and more obvious

Capcom are working on another Dragon’s Dogma 2 patch, and this one take as its target the dreaded dragonsplague, which causes the game’s AI-controlled pawns to go nuts and murder everybody, including story-critical NPCs, if you allow it to go untreated for long enough. It’ll reduce the infection frequency of dragonsplague, which is spread when pawns mingle with other pawns online, and make the symptoms more obvious. Pawns already get glowing eyes when they’re dragonsplagued – I guess they’ll be all the glowier in future.

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Grow your very own grandpa in this wonderfully unpleasant little indie horror game

I don’t remember much about my grandfathers anymore, only that they were once there and they loved me, and now they are gone. So if I were a small child with quarreling parents and I stumbled across a hidden abandoned lab housing a horrifying shapeshifting psychic lifeform, perhaps I would also try to want this maybe-a-demon to be my grandpa. That’s the premise of Growing My Grandpa!, a delightful little indie horror game about feeding, teaching, and caring for “a grandpa-like entity”. It came out in 2022 and I kept forgetting to post about it, but it’s still great so I’m telling you now, okay.

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Stardew Valley gets yet another update, adding new mine layouts and ominous-sounding “fish frenzies”

It’s starting to feel like ConcernedApe (aka Eric Barone) may in fact be a modern day Sisiphus, destined to work on Stardew Valley forever. Following on from the mega update of 1.6 a month ago, and 1.6.3 soon after that, the hardy perennial farming game has a new 1.6.4 mini update. The key addition this time is more new layouts that will appear after you reach the bottom of the mines, and more layouts for the volcano mines too. If you’ve not played Stardew Valley you might wonder why there are deep mines and volcanos, and to you I say “Pah! You should play Stardew Valley.”

1.6.4 also has a lot of bug fixes (including fixing disappearing pets, new pets being a key feature of 1.6) and some balance changes, as well as a host of fixes for modders and modded players. ConcernedApe said early on that 1.6 would be an update for modders, so it’s nice to see that being supported. You can read the full patch notes here.

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