In survival strategy game Dark Moon, you can’t stop moving lest the sun turn you into a burnt roast dinner

You could not pay me to go to the moon, I think. I’m glad Mr. Armstrong and Buzz Lightyear had a good time up there, but that place is scary! It’s just a massive, dark rock! But in the case of Dark Moon, an upcoming survival strategy game that just got a release date, that darkness is your friend, because if you want to survive on the moon, you’ve got to protect yourself from that hot, hot orb in the sky called the sun.

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Pico Park: Classic Edition is accidentally free forever, and a great lesson in double checking Steam’s weird rules

Everybody makes mistakes! That’s life, really, a constant series of tiny mistakes that are sometimes good ones, sometimes bad ones, occasionally purposeful, often not. Here’s one that was very much not purposeful: Pico Park: Classic Edition, a delightful co-op puzzle platformery game you’ve almost definitely seen a bunch of Twitch streamers play during COVID lockdown, is now permanently free.

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Afantasia, not aphantasia, asks you to delve into memories and help a boy figure out his identity in a moody pixel art town

Are you able to picture things in your head? Try it, right now, we’ll go for the classic thing to picture, an apple. If you can’t see diddly squat, you’ve potentially got aphantasia, a condition which is essentially the inability to visualise an image within your head. It’s interesting to me because I feel I’m on the opposite end of it, I can picture that apple pretty darn clearly. With that in mind, it makes me all the more curious about Afantasia, spelled with an f not a ph, a “surreal exploration game about a boy searching for identity in his hometown.”

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Vampire Survivors gets online co-op this autumn, even if its devs know “no one plays together anyway”

Online video games! They’re the future of the medium! Or, I guess they’re already here, but still, online co-op is very much in Vampire Survivor’s future. It’s a feature that’s been promised for a little while now, and developer Poncle have shared a little look at it, as well as a confirmation as to when you can expect it: autumn! This autumn, to be precise, which we’re currently experiencing, though a more specific window of time wasn’t provided.

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Here’s a proper look at Starseeker: Astroneer Expeditions and its spacey, co-operative gameplay

How about a fresh look at Starseeker: Astroneer Expeditions, that not-an-Astroneer-sequel from System Era? The developer revealed an extended look at gameplay yesterday, detailing what it is you’ll be doing exactly. As has already been established, it’s an online co-op game, one of those “friendslop” kind of games you’ll see people be mean about on Ditter and TikTok comments. To be specific, you can play it solo, or with three of your friends, but there are elements that draw on other players (more on that in a bit).

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Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is getting a whoole free update with a new location, boss battles and threads

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 developers Sandfall Interactive have wheeled out news that the RPG‘ll be getting a free update which’ll include a new location for its party to explore, more boss battles, and some extra costumes. The studio are teasing that there’ll be other stuff packed into this update, which they say is designed to act as a thank you to folks who’ve delved into the Belle Époque Frenchness.

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Baby Steps has a multiplayer mod and it looks like the ultimate breeding ground for bumbling betrayals

Falling over is the thing in Baby Steps. Sure, the goal in Bennett Foddy and co’s walking sim is technically getting from A to B despite your doughy corpus’ best efforts to get in the way, but it’s the constant stumbling and hilarious unintended pratfalls which make these sorts of games really sing. You get plenty of that playing alone, but for those who want to take things to the next level, Baby Steps has a multiplayer mod that’ll let you slap against your mates and gently bump their mushy forms off course.

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Medieval dinostrategic warfare will soon be unleashed, as a Dinolords closed alpha roars into life this month

As someone from the north east of England, there’s a good chance my genetic makeup’s some mix of old school celt and one of the many Scandinavian invaders who sailed across looking to conquer back in a time when blokes called Cnut roamed northern Europe. I offer that background in case it helps you understand why, even though I’m not part t-rex as far as I know, the premise of Dinolords very much gets my blood pumping.

It’s a hybrid of medieval strategy and action RPG which injects rideable t-rexes into a war between the Danes and the English, and a closed alpha test of it starts on October 31st, ahead of an early access release next year.

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PowerWash Simulator 2 will release October 23, and here’s a trailer to mock you for enjoying cleaning games

The world is insufficiently clean and sparkly, so here comes Futurlab with Powerwash Simulator 2. The floor-mopping bonanza will release on 23rd October, a few short weeks from now. The release date announcement accompanies one of those satirical “corporate training” videos, commonly used by videogame creators to sneer indirectly at the sad unfortunates trapped in their Skinner boxes.

The trailer comments of the sequel’s new cleaning tools, for example, that “it all does basically the same thing, but it gives you a false sense of progression, even though you’ve really achieved nothing”. Fine then, Futurlab. I was looking forward to your glorified adult colouring book. I was modestly anticipating the opportunity to absent myself from my personal squalor and while away some hours in your pseudo-therapeutic tribute to Mr Muscles. But now that you’ve ripped off the mask and explicitly told me that I’m an addled hamster, deserving only of contempt, I guess I’ll buy this game about pissing on people instead.

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