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Nordic stealth game Eriksholm: The Stolen Dream crept out from behind some barrels during last night’s Future Games Show and hit audiences over the back of the head with a release date. Some of the developers also showed up to share their enthusiasm for the game’s lighting effects, which to be fair are quite nice.
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! No cool industry person this week. Instead, fantastic news: thanks to a new device that identifies trace levels of the arsenic once used to make book covers green, you can go back to laying fat St. Bernards on every sour lime flavoured tome you see, safe in the knowledge that the ones liable to give you the rare nosebleeding condition known as the ‘hungry librarian’ have been safely quarantined. Huzzah.
I’ve been excited about Roman Sands RE:Build since the moment I laid my eyes on it, particularly because it’s from the same studio behind the ever-haunting Paratopic. Roman Sands just has a ridiculously strong art direction to it, very much one that could easily be dubbed Y2K, but I think more accurately should be seen as an evolution of the aesthetic/ era. Almost as if this is the direction it could have gone in.
I don’t think you can more easily sell me on a game than by saying it was made by one of the artists behind Celeste, and has music from Disasterpeace, i.e. the composer behind Fez, Hyper Light Drifter, and It Follows. But that’s exactly what Neverway is, a horror RPG in the vein of Stardew Valley first announced back in April, back with a nice little look-in at yesterday’s Day of the Devs presentation.
Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader and Pathfinder: Kingmaker developers Owlcat Games are venturing into the realm of “hard sci-fi” with The Expanse: Osiris Reborn, a new RPG based on the James S. A. Corey novels and Syfy TV adaptations. It’s an original story that casts you as a Pinkwater Security mercenary, who starts out trapped on Eros Station – an asteroid base that undergoes cataclysmic upheaval in the TV show – and later takes charge of an advanced starship, so as to quest around the solar system. The game is inspired by BioWare’s Mass Effect series, with “tactical” third-person combat featuring two ally characters and cover mechanics. Also, crew romances. Here’s a trailer.
Remember Toem? That was a bloody lovely game. I’m always partial to a game where photography is the core mechanic, there’s such a specific joy in navigating a space attempting to capture a fracture of its essence. Photo modes just aren’t the same, I want someone to textually give me a camera and send me on my way. A sequel was announced last year, quite simply called Toem 2, and during yesterday’s Day of the Devs, some gameplay was shown off for the first time.
While the upcoming Slay the Spire 2 hovers threateningly over the deckbuilding landscape, one game in the genre is replacing the usual boney arithmetic with harsh words, legal loopholes, and subtle threats. All Will Rise is a “narrative deckbuilder” set in a tense courtroom where you play a lawyer cross-examining those who may or may not be involved in the brutal murder of a holy river.
Arc Raiders! It’s an extraction shooter! A fact that will leave many with the question, “is this the one that’ll push the genre to the mainstream?” Personally I haven’t the foggiest, and I don’t have a horse in that race either. That kind of nonsense matters more to shareholders than it does to little old me. Still, we’ve not got a huge amount of time to wait to find out if Arc Raiders is the one to make extraction shooters big, as during Geoff’s Livestream of Questionable Quality and Orbs, it got a release date.
Partly in the absence of real surprises, and partly because the auditorium bass notes were making me feel queasy and dissociative, I spent a lot of this year’s Summer Games Fest showcase transfixed by Geoff Keighley’s balls. I am, of course, referring to the show’s animated backdrops, in which glutinous, gleaming orbs floated like nitrogen bubbles in a cosmic brain – sometimes tossed upon a tide of marbled petro-vomit, sometimes drifting over a scree of lava lamp effluence, sometimes hovering against sherbety silver Bermudas of arches and plinths. Immersive!
Heart Machine’s side-scrolling metroidvania platformer Possessor(s) is Hollow Knight with a splash of Amanita Design’s Creaks. The bulk of your enemies are household objects – vending machines, plant pots, office printers and other fittings that have become vessels for demons. From this premise springs a note of tragedy powerful enough to conquer my outrage at a game title that has brackets in it. The demons are not, in themselves, violent – it’s inhabiting the inanimate that maddens them. “Possessing something cold and dead is agony… so they lash out,” explains Rhem, a mortally wounded devil you meet in the prologue.
