The Maw – 13th-17th May 2024

Some fresh astral god trivia from my accidental molar expedition a few weeks back: each of the Maw’s teeth is different. Some form a fractal baleen network of crosshatched layers disappearing backward into the vanishing point; others are shaped like lockpicks, raccoon heads and semi-detached houses. This week’s new game releases are no less motley and misshapen, though thankfully not quite as heavily varnished with plaque: there’s something in the shop for everyone, I think.

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What’s on your bookshelf?: El Paso, Elsewhere and Hypnospace Outlaw’s Xalavier Nelson Jr.

Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome to Booked For The Week – our Sunday feature where we ask a selection of cool industry folks questions about books! Did you know that if you cup a book over your ear you can hear the gentle ambience of a thousand seagulls screaming how Charles Bukowski is literally them fr? I cannot judge these irritating gulls. “Air And Light…” is still one of my all time favourites. This week, it’s El Paso, Elsewhere developer, Hypnospace Outlaw writer, and RPS contributor Xalavier Nelson Jr! Cheers Xalavier! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

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Instruments Of Destruction, from one of Red Faction Guerilla’s demolition tech wizards, is out in 1.0 now

Instruments Of Destruction goes to the trouble of having a voiceover offer a preamble to each of its missions, but I don’t need it. Its launch trailer knows I don’t need it, as its own voiceover makes clear: “Take this vehicle, destroy those buildings. Do I really need to explain why?”

Nope! You don’t. And the smashing simulator’s 1.0 release is out now.

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Warner Bros. are returning some Adult Swim-published Steam store pages to their developers after all

Warner Bros., owners of the now-defunct Adult Swim Games publishing label, have contacted some developers about returning ownership of their game’s Steam pages. The developers of both Small Radios Big Televisions and Duck Game shared the news on X yesterday. It’s a seeming reversal of Warner Bros. stated policy back in March, when all Adult Swim Games seemed destined to be delisted.

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Homeworld 3 review: a lavish and often gripping RTS that is overly reliant on playing the hits

Spacefaring RTS Homeworld 3 is good sci-fi. Monolithic structures scorched with plasma burns. Sleek spacecraft. Alien sunrises. It’s also good sci-fi because its characters converse through reams of inscrutable but cool-sounding space science, and at no point does a grinning quipster tell a scientist: “Whoa there, professor. Why don’t you try saying that again… but in English!” Basically, if your wishlist for Homeworld 3 has tone and atmosphere at the top, rest easy. At no point did I get the sense that Blackbird ever took making the first proper Homeworld in eight years lightly.

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Dead by Daylight is teasing a classic Dungeons & Dragons monster as its next killer

Having brought the likes of Resident Evil’s Nemesis, Silent Hill’s Pyramid Head, Stranger Things’ Demogorgon and Alien’s Xenomorph to its one-versus-many game of deadly hide-and-seek, Dead by Daylight is digging back into the vaults for its next classic killer. This time, it’s not horror video games or scary movies serving as inspiration for DBD’s next chapter, but 50-year-old tabletop fantasy RPG Dungeons & Dragons.

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Manor Lords gets its first big patch, with new taxes, animations and changes to trading

Harken to me, serfs! There’s a big new patch for Manor Lords now available in beta testing for all players. Developer Greg Styczeń has blogged about it in depth. Yes, this is one of those update changelogs, the one that keeps on scrolling with hypnotic insistence till at last you tear your eyes away and look around and oh hell, it’s night and why am I standing over this altar, holding a skewered doll?

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Oh no, I accidentally got really into Helldivers 2

Regular Nic Reuben enjoyers, should such people exist, will remember I wrote a supporter post a few weeks back about wanting to spread my personal gaming fun time out among new and exciting games. And by ‘spread it out’ I mean maybe play 15% less Total Warhammer. As is often the way of things, I followed what I thought was prudent advice, and now there are bugs everywhere. Big bugs. Also, robots. Helldivers 2, it turns out, is really quite excellent. Who woulda thunk! Everyone else. Everyone else woulda thunk.

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Here’s a demo for Reka, the bewitching forest fantasy game with the chicken-legged house

As I have now casually mentioned in about 400 news posts, I’m moving flat soon. During the quest for a new flat – a quest I would slot somewhere between return to Ravenholm in Half-Life 2 and the Shalebridge Cradle in Thief: Deadly Shadows in terms of overall hopefulness and unpleasant surprises – I toyed briefly with the idea of living in a mobile home.

You can find all kinds of weirdo moving property on Gumtree – houseboats, caravans, yurts, large coats, coffins – but they all share the disadvantage of being cramped and more expensive than described and inadequate to the power and internet needs of a Maxed-Out Videogame Journalist. If I’d seen a house with chicken legs, though? It’d have been worth the sacrifice. Just think, whenever James Archer gives me grief about my performance in Lethal Company I could send my house to step on him.

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Runes may one day be a great RPG – it’s currently an entrancing oddity filled with accidental cyborg ninjas

Open world fantasy RPG Runes emits a deeply powerful aura. I can tell it’s deeply powerful because MSI Afterburner’s fan control immediately went mental after I loaded up its free Steam combat demo. What do you mean ‘unoptimised’? That alarming sound is simply my computer shaking with awe at the fearless flippancy required to leave enemies fully untextured so they resemble Metal Gear Solid’s cyborg ninja. The promise of an indie fantasy RPG drew me in, but I must admit, I almost didn’t bother writing about this upon learning the demo is just a pre-Kickstarter combat slice. But something about it entrances me. What it lacks in textures, it makes up for in sheer moxy. You can’t optimise moxy! You can either make MSI shudder in terror or you can’t.

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