Have you played… Shelter?

Shelter 3, Lynx mums in Shelter 2, and the OG badass badger mum in Shelter 1. Sure it’s kinda terrible that the only major rep mums are getting in video games is in the form of Might and Delight’s animal tales, but I’ll honestly take any story about motherhood I can get my paws on.

As much as I love Shelter 2 (less so Shelter 3, unfortunately), Shelter 1 holds a special place in my heart, mostly because no other animal-focused survival game has come even remotely close to claiming the coveted title of “most brutal animal sim that made me ugly cry.”

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Play as a frog knight surviving on dice rolls in this smart, compact roguelike

big fan of frogs in games. If I see a cute little green lad in a game, then I’m absolutely going to play it. This is how I started playing the free prologue demo for Die In The Dungeon, a turn-based roguelike where you place dice on a grid to slice and , er, dice your foes. It’s smart, concise, and I can’t stop playing.

Playing as your little green knight, you are given five dice each round to place on a game board. Each one represents a certain action, the basic ones being attacking and defending, but ramping up to mass healing and boosting the stats of other dice. Energy points dictate how many dice you can place on the board, with each one costing the number on its face. Placement is key, as different combinations can lead to better outcomes like, for example, how you can place an attack die in a space affected by a booster die to up its damage.

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The future of the metaverse is either nothing or Fortnite, this year’s GDC survey reckons

Fortnite is the game best positioned to deliver the vision of the metaverse to us, the Game Developers Conference have revealed. The results of the GDC’s 11th annual State Of The Industry survey were released this week. The survey checked in with more than 2,300 developers to pick their brains on contentious issues facing gaming, ranging from unionisation and harassment to, erm, blockchain.

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Rain World’s Downpour DLC cements it as a fascinating and underrated beast

Stray, but an older and much more brutal feline saga, Videocult’s grim survival action game Rain World. The thematic overlap of these games, coupled with their contrasting design philosophies, provides an excellent springboard to reassess the latter – one of the most opaque, challenging, and underappreciated titles in recent memory, just in time for the arrival of its first official DLC, Rain World: Downpour.

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The infamous GTA Trilogy is now on Steam, and it’s coming to Epic Games Store

Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – Definitive Edition to Steam more than a year after its disastrous launch. GTA Trilogy was originally released as a Rockstar Store exclusive, and packages together GTA III (the first 3D one), GTA: Vice City (the best one), and GTA: San Andreas (the one with CJ in it). The collection’s arrival on Steam replaces the original versions of each game on the storefront, and coincides with a publisher sale that ends February 2nd.

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Hold back the endless hordes when Endless Dungeon begins this May

Endless Dungeon is set within Amplitude’s Endless universe, but it’s neither a 4X strategy game like Endless Space nor a turn-based tactics game like sorta-predecessor Dungeon Of The Endless. It’s instead a co-op action roguelike, which takes the spaceship exploration and wave defense of Of The and makes it real-time, frantic, explosive.

It now has a release date, too: May 18th.

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