Rytmos is a puzzle game that makes you fall in love with music again

Hello! Come on in. Please, take a seat. Welcome to the inaugural episode of our brand new (and currently untitled) supporter-first indie video show! Every month*, I’m going to be spending some time highlighting a cool indie game that deserves your attention. Think of this series as a supplement to Sin’s Scout Report or our Indiescovery podcast. A brand new method for delivering piping hot recs from my desktop to yours.

My aim is to use this series as a springboard to dive deep into specific elements of a game I find particularly fascinating, sharing my discoveries with you lot behind the paywall first (and don’t worry, regular readers, I’ll also be making each of these videos public for all to see after a month, which should roughly coincide with the the next one going live for supporters). In it, I’ll be discussing some common themes between multiple games, digging into underappreciated gems from years gone by… The remit is broad and nebulous, to the point where it’s clearly obvious why I haven’t been able to come up with a name for it yet.

(If you end up thinking of something, please do let me know in the comments. More than anything it’ll stop me messaging Katharine a list of awful possibilites every other week, which I can only imagine is negatively effecting her feelings about me, the site and the endeavour of games journalism in general. They really have been that bad, folks. Proper rancid stuff).

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Square Enix turns Dragon Quest creator’s classic visual novel into an odd “AI Tech Preview”

In the summer of 1983, publisher-that-was Enix released a murder mystery visual novel called The Portopia Serial Murder Case. Designed by Dragon Quest’s creator Yuji Horii, it never saw a release outside of Japan – until now. Square Enix are re-releasing the classic on Steam in two days, calling it an “AI tech preview,” and tacking on “natural language processing” technology, in perhaps the oddest port I’ve seen so far.

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The Division Heartland’s free-to-play survival shooting goes rural, while The Division 2 goes back to New York

Ubisoft held a livestream last night to lay out the future of their MMO shooter franchise. The stream covered a roadmap for The Division 2’s fifth year of support and a deep dive into the upcoming The Division Heartland, a free-to-play spin-off that’s more focused on the series’ survival aspects.

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Dead Island 2 PC performance and the best settings to use

Can you imagine if Dead Island 2 didn’t arrive with actually-quite-good PC performance? All those years, all those developers, and it turned out rubbish? Perish the thought. But nah, Dambuster Studios have ensured it finally hits shelves in a solid technical state; a welcome return to standards for the big-name gamesmaking biz, which has largely spent 2023 chucking out sub-par PC ports.

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You can try Street Fighter 6’s open world mode in next week’s demo

Good news road brawlers! Capcom held a livestream for the upcoming Street Fighter 6 last night – hosted by lifelong fan Lil’ Wayne – and it delved deep into the game’s customisable avatars, post-launch support, and open-world World Tour mode. Oh, there’s also a demo available next week that’s more focused on singleplayer stuff.

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Six minutes of Immortals Of Aveum’s Doctor Strange-style magic shooting

Immortals Of Aveum has a magic bracelet and quip-laden cutscenes and if you saw a clip of its reveal trailer out of context, you could easily mistake it for Forspoken. This is a first-person shooter with a boy protagonist called Jack (sorry, Jak) from a former Call Of Duty and Dead Space fella, though, and a new “gameplay first look” trailer does more to distinguish itself.

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Humanity’s release date trailer references a golden age of video game TV adverts

Humanity is a puzzle game about controlling a glowing Shiba Inu who can drop instructions for a streaming crowd of human beings to follow. It’s a concept reminscent of Lemmings, but wrapped in a style that evokes the self-assuredly video gamey early PlayStation era. That’s what its latest trailer does, too, while also announcing a May 16th release date.

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