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This week is the week of Summer Game Fest and its entourage of accompanying showcases. As such, the feeling right now is of preparing for an avalanche. Join me as I play out the next few days in my head.
Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week – our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! Did you know that adopting language altered the position of the human larynx, making us more susceptible to choking on food? I learned this because I’ve finished Blood Meridian, and was reading McCarthy’s musings on the evolution of language as a chaser. Proof, then, that the only truly fitting way to leave this world is to die choking on a book. Perhaps this week’s guest can recommend a good one?
The next Phasmophobia update, Chronicle, is due out next month with a newly revealed June 24th release date, and developer Kinetic Games have offered up some details on what it calls one of the game’s “biggest updates” so far. So, let’s have a look at what that entails! The key addition with this update is the arrival of sound evidence, which as you can probably guess is a new haunting paranormal proof type that you’ll acquire by using the newly added sound recorder.
Developer Rebellion Developments revealed a first look at Atomfall’s first DLC expansion yesterday. Titled Wicked Isle, it unsurprisingly brings you to an island called Midsummer Island that is, in fact, a bit wicked, but like, in the bad way, not in the something a teen in the 2000s would say about something they like kind of way. Specifically it’ll have a bit more of a folk horror vibe to it, which I’m certainly into conceptually. Lots of great folklore in the UK, as long as it’s not stepping over frequently trodden upon territory.
Yesterday, ZeniMax Workers United-CWA, the union made up of more than 300 quality assurance workers at Microsoft via its subsidiary ZeniMax Media, reached a tentative contract agreement with Microsoft. The union was formed back in 2022, and has been bargaining with Microsoft in the intervening years since. Last month, the union was preparing to potentially strike against Microsoft, but now it seems like this may be avoided.
Earlier this week, EA did the thing they oh so frequently loves to do, which is making a bad decision. This time, it was cancelling Marvel’s Black Panther, alongside shutting down the two year old studio that was making it, Cliffhanger Games. As every single announcement like this over the past few years has been, it was an incredibly frustrating one that can’t be justified. Now, a new report from Bloomberg has shed a bit of light on why it was cancelled, as well as what the game might have been like.
Elden Ring Nightreign is, to the surprise of no one, off to a bit of a flying start (even if not everyone is completely in love with it just yet). I have no intention of diving into it just yet, in part because the solo experience doesn’t interest me all that much, and I don’t really want to be matched up with two other randos that would surely abandon me the moment I forget what my character can do. There isn’t a duos option either, the thing I’m actually after, something that was a bit forgotten about during development, but might be coming further down the line. The power of modding always comes through however, as despite only launching yesterday, there’s already a seamless co-op mod that allows for duos.
Yooka-Laylee developers Playtonic are laying off staff across their operations, as they wrestle with what they call “a period of profound change in how games are created and financed”. It’s not clear what these “profound changes” are, exactly – soaring budgets? Evergreen service games drinking up all the oxygen? Falling interest in the genre of mascot platformer Playtonic are best known for? Either way, the outcome is that a bunch of artists, game designers, narrative designers, producers and UI or UX people are now looking for work.
I have spun out on wet tarmac again and I am furious with myself. JDM: Japanese Drift Master requires a different mentality to most other racing games. Drifting around a corner is not the side gimmick that you’ll do a few times during races. Drifting is the race. In this self-described “simcade” game, you’ve got to slide around the bendy roads of sunny (and rainy) Japan while delivering sushi and chasing boy racers for style points. It all adds up to some remarkably weighty speedfreakery that is bitingly frustrating when I’m bad at it, and rumblingly compelling when I’m good at it.
Elden Ring Nightreign might replace its source material’s sprawling RPG exploration with a mad dash around tightly-nestled hotspots, but under the bonnet, this is still essentially just Elden Ring with a quicker sprint and character models of hitherto-unseen birdpeople. Even the system requirements are, save for a minor CPU bump, a copy and paste job, confirming the feathers aren’t even that high-poly.
As a result, this spinoff runs equally well on the Steam Deck, even appearing to take advantage of the same SteamOS/Proton tweak that made Elden Ring less stutter-prone on Valve’s handheld specifically. My Steam Deck settings guide for the base game works here too, though having been yanked around Limveld at greave-splintering speeds by loothounds Nic and Ollie, I actually think further quality cuts could be prudent. This is FromSoft at their paciest, and it makes sense to help framerates keep up.
