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With several Disco Elysium spiritual successors in the works from former staff, controversy regarding the exits of key team members behind the beloved RPG, and an in-development expansion cancelled, you might have been wondering what Studio ZA/UM will do next. Well, that answer is here. In a recent presentation held for the press, ZA/UM revealed a first look at their next game. It’s called C4 and it’s about espionage.
The first enemy I encounter in the Steam demo for Songs Of Rats is a giant golem, encased in fridge-thick armour with fists the size of fridges and a thousand-fridge stare. If RPGs are good at anything, it’s making numbers scary. To wit: The battle golem has 40 health, and I have a nerf crossbow with pretensions that does one entire damage. I manage to do two entire damage, and he downs me in two hits.
This may well be what it feels like for a real life rat to fight a real life fridge, and in that, Songs Of Rats earns its name. The intro is all 80s cheese meets a desperate melancholy bolstered by bleak and bitty retro-futurist visuals. It’s also very pen n’ paper, down to losing health if you don’t have enough food and the limited action points you have to spend each day on exploration.
A trailer for you. It took some digging, I tell you. A certain other song about rats has monopoly on the search term.
We all know what’s coming up in The Last of Us season 2, right? I mean, everyone knows what happens quite early on in the game, because it was a pretty controversial narrative choice so everyone and their mum has spoiled it. I haven’t played it myself and I know what happens, but it seems like streaming service Max is happy to pretend that everything is peaches and cream (more or less) in their adaptation.
A new trailer for The Last of Us season 2 dropped over the weekend that is full of drama and light on spoilers, which is why I’m staying quiet too, but it has been funny watching all of these trailers knowing that they’re lying just a little bit.
A bunch of playtester footage for the next, modern-day-set Battlefield game has slipped past EA’s non-disclosure agreements and erupted all over social media. The footage stems from the company’s Battlefield Labs community testing program, and consists of multiple consecutive minutes of burly shootyfolks running down alleyways through showers of grit, firing very briefly at enemy troopers, and getting themselves bullet-bonked back to the lobby screen.
EA had been taking the videos down, but have seemingly now decided to let them roll. It’s the kind of tactical withdrawal in the face of overwhelming numbers that seldom occurs to me when I play Battlefield, because I always play Battlefield in the character of a movie extra. I am here to cultivate the ambience for other players by prancing around yodelling “INCOMING”, not contribute to our victory.
Alta used to be a champion fighter. Now, she can’t even lift her sword. After she collapses in the forest, a kindly teashop owner called Boro invites her to join him. Maybe a spell of cozy gardening, cleaning, and making tea for customers will help her feel better? But it’s only an offer. You can go back into the forest at any time.
Obviously, I tried to leave. Firstly because I know how to accurately roleplay a stressed, overly devoted burnout who puts all their value in their vocation. And secondly because, come on. This game was written by Davey Wreden, the creator of The Stanley Parable. There’s got to be some kind of secret to ignoring the clear invitation of the game, right?
Monster Hunter Wilds has a new update that makes copious little and large changes to the popular animal-hitting sim. As often with PC game patch notes, the changelog is a balance of mealy fare such as fixes for broken weapons, and moments of absurdity, such as addressing a problem whereby you’d hack the tail off an Ajarakan only for it to transform into another monster’s appendage. Also, you’ll no longer be able to cheese the Gore Magala by somehow dropping a dozen boulders on it simultaneously.
One of my Foundational Video Games is Mazeworld, an elder Apple Macintosh first-personifier in which you explore a Carollian landscape of blue-walled darkness and rainbow-shelled snails. I was a young slip of a boy when Mazeworld released, and prone to daymares about crocodiles floating through the ceiling at night. Imagine my reaction to a game in which you are immediately confronted by a slathering, bodiless Cheshire Cat, its face a grinning smear that is only visible when it’s charging right at you.
I’m always looking for games that similarly hide themselves, throwing you into a chasm of occult potentiality from which anything might emerge, given the appropriate rites. Games like Nix Umbra, Death Of A Wish and now Nothing Beyond This Point, a topdown metroidvania in which you are a flaming cube surrounded by floating rods, dropped into a pixelart-scuffed void. RPS reader Mr_B recommended it in our last weekend plays thread, and I couldn’t resist trying the demo.
A new trailer for Death Stranding 2: On the Beach has dropped. It puts a ten-minute dent into the upcoming open world game‘s enigma, but the most tantalising question still remains: is Kojima using that subtitle to deliberately remind everybody of the original’s most infamous scene? Bold choice if so, although not the only one. Here’s the trailer, complete with familiar mechs and very familiar bandanas. See Konami, this is what happens when you pop out for five minutes to re-release Suikoden.
Over the weekend, hectic 1v1 shooter Straftat got yet more free maps in an update. The developers added eight new cramped deathzones alongside a further four maps for owners of the “maps ‘n’ hats” DLC, then threw in a new submachine gun and a music player for good measure. But over on the game’s Discord server, amid the mine-laying mercenaries and bum-sliding shootscum, the developers also held a poll that revealed future plans. They asked players what they’d prefer: a 2v2 mode or a four-player free-for-all?
“We’ll do both,” said devbrother Leonard Lemaitre, “but it’s a matter of which one comes first.”
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! I’m starting to regret phrasing it like that, to be honest. The word “selection” evokes either bureaucracy or crap small versions of chocolate bars. I’m now imagining “guy who travels to Europe because he heard the chocolate is better but can only find stale Curly Wurlys“. That’d suck so bad.
This week, it’s Last Call, Tacoma, Lost Records: Bloom & Rage, and loads more‘s Nina Freeman! Cheers Nina! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?
