Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

“Ardenfall is almost cheeky in how close it is to a classic ‘thesda game,” Alice Bell wrote of the demo to this open-world RPG back in the Aliceful year of 2023. She also asked me about my own propensity for game discovery in my staff writer interview, to which I replied she knew I was OK at it because she nicked the idea for the Ardenfall article from a comment I left. Good taste, Alice, and good taste, me: Ardenfall is great fun. It’s had a demo kicking around since 2022, and now it’s set for an early access release this year. You’ll find a steamin’ hot tray-tray* below.

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What can we learn about games by comparing the thrill of a nailgun kill in Quake to the elation of triple word score in online Scrabble? For Richard Garfield, creator of Magic: The Gathering and KeyForge, it’s actually quite a bit.

Taking place over progressive rounds in which you’ll pick and assign your force to capture victory points over an expanding tileset, Vanguard Exiles exists because Garfield is “smitten” with autobattlers, a love he traces back to an “epiphany” he had in the 90s thinking about the different roles a computer could play in both natively digital games and what he calls “paper games”.

“Yet they were both games,” Garfield tells me over call, “I was playing them both digitally. The computer is vital. It serves a really good purpose, and yet, when you play [an autobattler], it feels like you’re playing a paper game. You can sit back, think about your moves and understand really everything about the game before you execute, which is not the standard in a lot of digital games.”

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Fans of damp tunnels and chatty skeletons may have enjoyed Lunacid, a first-person dungeon crawler which left early access in October 2023. Sin called it “lo-fi first-person dungeon skulking done right” and suggested that it “could well earn a place in some best of the year lists”. (It didn’t appear on ours, but in fairness, that was the year Baldur’s Gate 3 devoured everybody’s brain.)

Lunacid takes copious inspiration from Dark Souls developer FromSoftware’s old Shadow Tower and King’s Field games for PS1. Now, creators KIRA LLC are going even further with Lunacid: Tears Of The Moon – a new RPG made using FromSoftware’s ancient Sword Of Moonlight: King’s Field game creation tools from 2000, which came with hundreds of map parts, objects and characters plus scripting features and the ability to insert AVI movies and even a credits reel.

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Konami have given us our first proper look at Silent Hill f, a new incarnation of the survival horror series from Hong Kong-based Neobards Entertainment, which takes place in 1960s Japan. You are Shimizu Hinako, a schoolgirl equipped with the trademark Silent Hill combo of a broken-off pipe and a cartload of psychological baggage, whose hometown Ebisugaoka is engulfed by a monstrous fog.

The choice of a non-US setting has ruffled the plumage of players who cherish Silent Hill’s association with Twin Peaks and New England. Personally, I welcome the departure after the heady retro fidelity of the Silent Hill 2 Remake, and besides, the overall ambience doesn’t seem that far removed from the elder Hills. Look, they’ve even got Akira Yamaoka contributing to the soundtrack.

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Here’s one for the sci-fi slurping doomers among us. Hello Sunshine is a “survival mystery RPG” from the makers of Draugen, in which you must navigate a blistering desert by sheltering in the constantly moving shadow of a friendly robot. A collapsed corporation called Sunshine has turned the planet into a scorched wasteland leaving behind only warring mechs and dusty vending machines. “You play the final employee,” say developers Red Thread Games. “Walk in the shadow of a giant robot during the sweltering days; stay close to keep warm during the cold nights.” I wonder if any of this is a metaphor. Ah, who cares, it’s got a cool trailer.

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Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 hath been Patched, Adorning the Right Goode RPG with the Wondrous Art of Barbering and the Dark Science of Steamworks Modding, together with Sundry Fixes for Quests, Crashing and Performance Problems, Skills and NPC Behavioure. Yes, I’m aware the previous sentence can’t work out which century it’s in. In a perfect world I’d have had the time to dig out a medieval dictionary and translate this introduction into proper 14th century English. As it is, you’ll have to make do with the one middle English word I can reliably remember from university: ywys! It means “indeed”. This latest Deliverance 2 update? A mighty addition, ywys.

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Alienware Area-51 gaming desktop is the kind of PC that makes console players jellous. It’s big, powerful, and costs as much as a used car. But if you’re dropping this kind of cash, you want to make sure you’re getting the best deal.

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Teardown is one of those games that’s just fun to look at, with all of its completely destructible voxel environments. When it first got announced it kind of reminded me of those old Flash games where you had simple creatures you could shake around and chuck stuff at, the joy of it being to see how far you could push things.

Messing around like that is all the better with friends though, I reckon, and would you look at that, developer Tuxedo Labs have just announced today that a multiplayer update is on the way to the sandbox game.

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Zen-like spout splasher PowerWash Simulator is getting a sequel, and you need to get some mates: it’s got both couch co-op and shared online campaign progression. It’s also self-published by FuturLab this time, which likely means less Final Fantasy motorbikes but more revenue for the developers to make their own gilded nozzles. Here’s a trailer.

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The Sims players among us have been gazing cautiously at inZOI, a new neighbourhood and life management game from Krafton. I am cautious for essentially two reasons. One is that the game makes use of live generative AI: you can stuff its jaws with text, images and video to create items such as outfits and animate your pet humans, here known as Zois. Your Zoi’s “actions and thoughts” are also based on “small machine learning” tech, which as the name implies is a teenier species of generative AI that commonly runs live on the user’s own hardware. Going by the Steam page disclosure, the actual base game assets weren’t AI generated, but then again, Steam AI disclosures can be rather unrevealing.

We’ve published a fair bit about the risks and potential abuses of generative AI tools in video game development, so we’ll be looking at that in more depth when the game hits early access on 28th March. In the meantime, here’s the second reason I’m cautious: inZOI’s key selling point over its obvious (and massively updated) rival The Sims 4 is that it has photorealistic visuals, and frankly, they creep the hell out of me.

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