Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

“What morbid force is calling you deeper into the heart of the caves?” asks the Steam page for The Cave Diver. It ain’t calling me, developer Ovsko. I read the opening words of your description and immediately started running away from my laptop. I’m still running, in fact. This article is being breathlessly dictated to Oisin over the phone. I’m somewhere in the vicinity of Luton, now, and hope to make it all the way to Scotland by the weekend.

After that, there’ll be the problem of securing naval travel as I continue my headlong flight. Then I’ll have to worry about frostbite as I gallop past the North Pole and begin my long traversal of the Pacific. At some point I will reach New Zealand, which – according to this handy antipodal mapping site – is approximately as far away from The Cave Diver Steam page currently loaded on my laptop as I can get without venturing into outer space. I do not rule out venturing into outer space, which is notable for its complete and categorical deficit of caves.

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Despite the best efforts of all concerned, there are once again new PC games this week. See how they frolic among the days ahead, trampling all over our life commitments and need for tranquility like boisterous, fugitive oxen. Please equip yourself with a broom, weighted net and klaxon and help me herd them back into the pens, for proper disassembly. Here are a few I’ve rounded up already.

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If internet videos with titles like “Supersonic Golf Ball to the Forehead” have taught us anything, it’s that a slow motion chthonic mace to the dome is a weighty chthonic mace to the dome. So goes the thinking being Doom: The Dark Ages liberal dolloping of slow motion effects all over its melee attacks and parries. The FPS does away with the series’ canned glory kills, so it’s nice to take a split second of mud time to catch your bearings where you can. Still, the game isn’t exactly shy about its application.

I was watching a Doom 3 retrospective last night that talked about how the original copies of the game came with a note explaining that “Doom 3 is not for cowards!”. By contrast, the amount of accessibility options and sliders in The Dark Ages, alongside Id saying that it was ” a game for all Slayers!” is, you know, at least one nice reminder that games are far less twattish than they used to be. In some ways, at least. One thing those sliders don’t allow for, however, is removing the abundance of slow motion effects. Once again, modders have our backs. Thank you, modders. That’s my favourite back and I’d strongly dislike having to replace it.

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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 (I’d like requests though. No Classical Gas), but I want to get back into the habit of posting the column regularly regardless, since the comments are always a medium good time, which is the maximum amount of good time allowed on a Sunday.

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It’s been a little under a year since the vehicular combat racing game Warhammer 40,000: Speed Freeks launched into early access, and yesterday developer Caged Element Inc. announced that it’ll be receiving its 1.0 launch next week, May 22nd. There are a couple notable changes that come with this launch though. For starters, Wired Productions are taking over from Plaion on publishing duties. As the devs explained in a Steam post, the reason this matters to you is the second change, which is that you’ll have to pay for it when it arrives next week. Some of you, anyway.

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These days, when there’s so many games coming out that I feel like an overwhelmed dog with free reign in a butcher’s, there’s no sweeter sentence to me than “this game will take you no longer than two hours.” I know for some people length is everything (don’t), but personally I love a short, good time (seriously, leave it out). So the second I saw Formless Star, an eclectic little creature cataloguing game, and read that it was one to two hours long, I was immediately in.

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At a time where there is constantly word of this or that game shutting down, even successful ones, it will never fail to surprise me that Final Fantasy 11 is still going. You can’t play it on PS2 anymore, but there’s still an active community on PC even now. The MMO just celebrated its 23rd anniversary yesterday in fact, with a new update video and letter from the producer Yoji Fujito released to highlight some of the new and upcoming features.

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Earlier this week, it was leaked and then later confirmed that Stellar Blade, that Nier and Bayonetta-esque one with the jiggle physics cranked up to the max, would be coming to PC next month on June 11th. This was obviously welcome news to the kind of people who enjoy that sort of thing (more or less no judgement here). But it quickly became apparent that there was a bit of a caveat: the action game isn’t available to pre-order in all regions on Steam.

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Bungie aren’t having a very good week are they? First there were those accusations of Marathon using assets without permission from the artist 4ant1r34l (Antireal), which Bungie admitted to taking place. Then yesterday there was a livestream featuring game director Joe Ziegler and art director Joseph Cross which was filled with chat messages about said asset usage for practically the entire stream. Ziegler and Cross did at least address those messages, but with the response to the shooter already being quite mixed thus far, it doesn’t amount to much right now.

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Blades Of Fire is the latest dark fantasy smackeroo from Castlevania: Lords Of Shadow developers MercurySteam. It takes place in a world where steel is a divine substance passed down to humanity by the mysterious Forgers. Some sinister young queen has, however, cast a spell that turns everybody else’s steel into stone, granting her followers a near-monopoly on all the butt-kicking.

Playing as bleak and burly beardyman Aran “We Have Kratos At Home” de Lira, your job is to chase down that queen, murder her minions, and craft a whole bunch of Darksiders-esque weaponry. Aran is accompanied by Adso, a juvenile sidekick in the vein of Atreus, who catalogues the game’s “over 50” enemy types and can also translate lore written in the ancient Forger language.

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