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In 2023 EA opened a new studio named Cliffhanger Games, led by former Monolith head Kevin Stephens, and announced a new third-person, singleplayer game starring Marvel’s Black Panther. They’ve now cancelled that game and shut down that studio, IGN report.
According to EA Entertainment president Laura Miele, via an email sent to employees, this has been done to “sharpen our focus and put our creative energy behind the most significant growth opportunities.”
“Greebling” is George Lucas’s term for the decoration of spacecraft models with showy, superfluous details – clumps of antennae, bulky rivets, bulging pipes, anything that whiffs of function. Speaking as the human grown from the ashes of a child who once built the Death Star out of LEGO, I do enjoy a good greeble now and then, but it very easily becomes a parody of itself – like turning a machine inside out, but none of the exposed parts are meaningfully connected. Liliana, founder of Eridanus Industries and lead developer of space tactics sim Nebulous: Fleet Command, has more practical objections to greebling, based on her eight years in the US Navy: excess surface details are an absolute dust trap for radar waves.
Elden Ring had a starting class named the Wretch that gets a club and some ratty underwear filled with dreams and nothing else, and there’s something special about the first few hours in Limgrave playing them, scavenging your first pieces of mismatched armour and build-defining treasures. The first time you hit a site of grace, that initial stat boost feels like a deific power surge. Insomuch as Elden Ring’s most memorable stories run tangential and emergent to its static lore, this early fraught scramble is the player’s self-woven tale at its most captivating. Soon enough, though, the feeling is gone. You’re as powerful as god, desiring nothing but more bulbous Albinauric skulls to toss on the pile.
Elden Ring: Nightreign feels unique among FromSoft’s modern catalogue for its flippant attitude toward a convincing sense of place, and so regrettably sacrifices much of its studio’s identity as committed worldbuilders, even while amplifying some of their more peculiar and interesting beats. It’s tempting, then, to ask why it exists in the first place. On a generous day, I’d say that Nightreign exists to recreate – over and over – that same, wretchedly gratifying early-game feeling. Where every scrap of progress feels like a milestone, dull smithing stones shimmer like silver, and each incremental bonk stat increase is a hero’s journey in miniature.
There exists in this world much which, if stripped of even one of its components, would be rendered naught but a frail illusion. Roast pork without applesauce? An insult to god and man alike. A sword without a hilt? Merely sharpened iron, stripped of use or dignity. As our band of eight rode into Heuwiller – Thillmann at the head as befitted his command, Slackbladder at the back as befitted our nostrils – a dark cloud fell upon us. For what is a village without a single poxy alehouse in sight? Nary a trough full of fermented carrot juice. It was going to be a long day.
Ho, Lethal Companions! Put down your airhorns, let fall your precious armfuls of plastic fish, and prick up your freakin’ ears. Something is coming to 2023’s breakout horror multiplayer game. Something that will make the music boxes and springhead marionettes look like child’s playthings! I mean, like the child’s playthings they already look like, but without the parts that make them horrifying. That something is… to be announced, but I considered the below teaser text pithy enough to be worth a shout regardless.
I am falling asleep at the wheel of a big bulldozer. RoadCraft is not necessarily a boring game, but it is so meditatively slow, lumbering, and bit-by-bit that I find myself dozing when I’m supposed to be, um, dozing. Some of this is down to simple tiredness, but there’s also a dreamy sensation while playing this engine-purring infrastructure ’em up. I don’t mean dreamy in the sense that it fulfills the promise of nostalgic fantasy put forward by the game’s trailer (the one that suggests you’ll feel like a child playing with toy diggers again). I just mean that flattening sand makes me sleepy.
Two very good skating games are back up for sale on Steam after disappearing for four months. Bright ‘n’ cheery skateboarding game OlliOlli World and dystopian rollerskate shooter Rollerdrome both vanished in a cloud of toxic corporate smoke in February this year, some time after the closure of the games’ developers Roll7. But it looks like the poisonous fumes have finally cleared, and the games are once again available.
“The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne,” wrote Chaucer. But you’d trained hard with that crossbow, and let any man in bolting distance try to claim you hadn’t mastered it. You never wanted to go to war, but the crops were failing, you’d just lost your seventeenth child to medium-pox, and dark portents swirled on the horizon like curdled goat’s milk. Also, the actual goat’s milk was curdling.
In that tent, you’d communed with angels, and the righteous fury of all the heavens coursed through every fibre of your being. You’d likely die today, you knew. But you’d die knowing you did all you could to put this fair kingdom to rights. You step outside, breathe deep the morning air, and immediately eat a point blank pump-action shotgun to the torso. Then you lose both your legs to the tank shell. Then someone runs over your corpse with a dirtbike. Bloody typical.
Earlier this week, one of my industry peers James Bentley (they’re over at that other site about PC games, GamerPCs I think it’s called) put out a video essay titled “I Can Guarantee You This Game is Going to be Underrated“. Trusting in James as a critic of varied and interesting taste, I clicked through and found that yeah, they’re right, it probably will be. However, I also get to write about indie PC games for a living, so I’d like to do my part in telling you about this strange, point-and-click/ visual novel called Decade.
I think there might be a chance, just ever so slightly, that the development of Cities Skylines 2 has been a bit difficult. The game launched back in October of 2023 and has suffered from performance issues, rushed DLC, and a delay to its first expansion Bridges and Ports. This expansion was meant to come soon after the Beach Properties DLC, but that obviously didn’t happen, catching a delay to sometime in the second quarter of 2025 specifically to continue improving upon the base game. Except the expansion has been delayed once again.
