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.
MindsEye isn’t a real game, right? I mean, I’m sure it is a real game, it’s meant to be coming out June 10th, that’s only two weeks away now, and GTA 3 to 5 producer Leslie Benzies is helming it. It just doesn’t feel like a real game. Take for instance the fact that the game’s latest trailer, which was released today, is its first proper gameplay trailer. There’s been a few teasers over the past few weeks, but absolutely zero extended looks at the shooter. That’s weird for a game due out in two weeks!
As someone who’s never played a Dragon Quest game, seeing Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake last year confused me simply because I didn’t know it was a prequel. I generally prefer to play things in release order, but I understand why Square Enix did it that way around, and why they subsequently announced a double remake of the first two games. The third one launched just last November, leaving 1 and 2 with a vague 2025 release window. Well, until today, when Square Enix shared that the pair of remakes will be launching October 30th.
A new Assassin’s Creed Shadows update is here, version 1.0.5, with this one mostly having a focus on parkour improvements. There are, however, a couple of collaborations that have arrived in the game too, one with Dead by Daylight, and another with Balatro. We’ll get to those in a second, for now let’s take a look at those parkour tweaks.
You may remember that in January of 2022, A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-pooh stories entered the public domain, inspiring deeply crap ideas like “what if children’s character but knives?” in the case of Blood And Honey , and “what if children’s character but mildly naughty word?“, in the case of smirking billboardian human doppelganger Ryan Reynolds. Videogames were not immune. “What if children’s character but Cronenbergian body horror?” asked the developers of Winnie’s Hole when they announced a roguelike dungeon crawler based on the bear in 2023, and there’s now a Steam demo available, should you wish to scoop up honey with arms-where-no-arms-should-rightly-be.
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 am still cross-referencing my way through Blood Meridian, both incredibly vivid prose-poetic alchemy of the profound and harrowingly mundane, and also a bit like if a bible ate a pulp paperback then shat out a second, stupider bible with at least twice the people getting severed dicks shoved in their mouths. I love literature so much.