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Grotesque new platform game Gennady takes place in a squelchy, eminently punchable world of procedurally generated, wriggling alien cubes. Burst a cube and you’ll be rewarded with juicy, golden maggots and a shower of delightful green ooze. Sometimes the ooze spawns a grotty little janitor monster, who slinks up behind you with mop in tentacle. Yes, this is a game in which the filth tries to clean up after itself. Good luck with that, filth. Here’s a trailer.
Stab-o-sneak merchants Ubisoft are pushing back the release of several unspecified big name projects in the wake of Assassin’s Creed Shadows, which CEO Yves Guillemot says “has reaffirmed the power of the Assassin’s Creed brand”. The tactical snoop ‘n’ shoot peddlers are also looking to cut costs by at least €100 million across their organisation, following a difficult year in which they’ve partnered with Tencent to launch a new corporate subsidiary dedicated to their most popular games.
Friends, it is my sad duty to inform you that One Million Checkboxes creator Neal Agarwal is up to more of his crowdgaming mischief. He’s published another online squabbling sim called Internet Roadtrip. It’s a roaming Google Streetview cam in which viewers vote on the direction of travel every 10 seconds. The thinking behind Saltybet applied to the experience of driving your kids to Disney Land, in short. It is possibly a commentary on self-piloting vehicles, but mostly, it is a celebration of the raucous magic of chatboxes. You can also vote to honk the horn.
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.
