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Hideo Kojima is his own Peter Molydeux, in that he’s forever out there pitching Kojima-like ideas for games he might make. Hideo Jokima? On a recent episode of his Japanese radio show, KOJI10, the designer of Metal Gear Solid and Death Stranding pitched a few ideas he had for games based around time. The best of the bunch: a game in which your character gradually forgets information if players take too long a break from playing.
Surreal first-person medical sim Pathologic 3 will be different from its plague-ridden predecessor in a lot of ways. In Pathologic 2 you played a roaming surgeon rooting around in bins for sustenance, and this time you play as the Bachelor, a well-fed doctor who diagnoses patients by inspecting their bodies and investigating their homes for signs of disease. But one of the biggest changes regards the open world. You won’t freely explore the remote steppe town this time, but instead dander through isolated pockets, with lots of loading screens, map plotting, and fast travel. That’s made a few fans grumpy, but developers Ice-Pick Lodge are sticking to their plans, as they’ve stated in a development update.
Objects of power play a crucial role in the fiction of Control, the setting for three-player co-op shooter FBC: Firebreak. In the lore, they’re archetypal artefacts that have gained strange powers. In Firebreak itself, they represent random events that can suddenly make the game’s enemies, the Hiss, more powerful for short bursts – and there’s usually enough of them that a short burst is all they need for things to get frantic quickly.
You might even say power is a major theme of this setting. Power over the control of information. The institutional power of the Federal Bureau Of Control itself, in whose brutalist, labyrinthe HQ the game is set. The power of the archetypal ideas that give the altered objects their strength. One thing you won’t be thinking about power in relation to, however, is the guns. They are, in a word or two, wilting shitlillies.
Details from 89 million Steam accounts have reportedly gone up for sale on the dark web. Since RPS’s dedicated tech team have just informed me that the dark web is not the thing you get when you click ‘incognito tab’ and is actually potentially much scarier than that, you might want to consider changing your password. Or maybe not. As I say, it’s all alleged at this point.
Speedy fender-bender ’em up Wreckfest 2 has added two new cars to its roster of smashmobiles alongside two new tracks, including one track from the first game that’s been given a “makeover”. The racing game is still in earliest of access, so this only brings the total number of vehicles up to six, and the selection of tracks is still limited too. But it’s the start of what developers Bugbear see as steady progress, with more cars and courses set to come next month.
So there’s a passage in biographical novel The Moon & Sixpence where art connoisseur Dirk Stroeve spends months helping painter Charles Strickland recover from a life-threatening illness. Once well, Strickland returns the favour by promptly nicking Dirk’s wife Blanche. Strickland eventually leaves her, Blanche gargles acid and dies, and a hangdog Dirk returns to the apartment to find Strickland’s nude painting of Blanche, mocking his heartbreak. Manic and inconsolable, Dirk grabs a paint scraper and flings himself at the painting ready to destroy it, but can’t. He’s overcome by an appreciation for the work; in awe of the object that mocks him.
I get it, really I do. I’m standing before horrible strategy game Anoxia Station, with my paint scraper, ready to gouge a hole in it for making me feel like shit. Stressed. Anxious. Irritated. Exhausted. When Anoxia Station wants to tell you that temperature has dropped to dangerous levels, it shoves a steamy, cracked-ice overlay on screen that’s so opaque it makes interacting with the game a chore. I should be furious.
I think it’s kind of under-appreciated how funny Tetsuya Nomura is. In recent years his social media presence has become quite mysterious, in that he’ll just kind of drop some kind of cryptic tease on Twitter and then not explain himself. Despite not having revealed a single drop of information about Kingdom Hearts 4 since its announcement three years ago, Nomura hinted at some deeper lore about the series’ paopu fruit in a very nonchalant manner. It’s just funny at this point! And he’s done it again, this time with a Magic the Gathering card.
Crossovers! Collabs! Whatever you want to call them, love them or hate them, in an age where the biggest companies only seem interested in serving you the same thing over and over again, we’re stuck with them. This time around, it’s a bit of an odd one, as Palworld is getting a Terraria-themed update sometime this summer. Why Terraria? Genuinely no idea, I suppose they might appeal to a similarish kind of crowd, outside of that I haven’t the foggiest.
FBC: Firebreak is a bit of a departure from Remedy’s usual games, given that it’s a three-player multiplayer first-person shooter. The shooty bit is nothing new, that’s pretty typical of Remedy’s games, even if the shooting always has something slightly off about it. It’s the multiplayer angle that sets it apart, and, funnily enough, the fact that Remedy don’t always make shooting feel all that great, so it’s left me curious as to how it actually plays. I’m assuming some of you feel the same way, and there’s some sort of good news: you can sign-up to playtest it this week.
More than two years on from Microsoft’s last mass round of layoffs, the company is laying off a huge amount of staff once again. As reported by CNBC, the tech giant is laying off 3% of employees across the entire company, meaning all levels, teams, and geographies. While nothing has been directly confirmed as of yet, this does include the possibility that some games studios it owns will be affected too – we’ll provide an update if there is one.
In a statement provided to CNBC, a Microsoft spokesperson said that the company will “continue to implement organizational changes necessary to best position the company for success in a dynamic marketplace.” The spokesperson also said that one objective of the layoffs is to reduce layers of management. As always, a ridiculously heartless way to frame such a thing.
