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Remember when Nvidia announced that Half-Life 2 RTX mod way back in, crikey, 2023? Yeah, I didn’t realise how long it had been either. To be perfectly honest I thought it had already come out, but apparently not, because just this week Nvidia shared that Half-Life 2 RTX is getting a demo next week on March 18th. No, the full mod still doesn’t have a release date, but when do any game projects ever release quickly after they were announced?
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A new week, a new Avowed update, and a pretty hefty one has arrived at that. Before we get on to some of the more notable changes, over on Obsidian’s forum pages where you can read the full patch notes, the developer shared that in the coming weeks it plans to release a roadmap that will “go over some of the plans we have that will be coming to the game over the upcoming year.” Whether that be DLC, free content, or just some planned gameplay changes, I couldn’t tell you, your guess is as good as mine.
People love to go on and on about how good Titanfall 2’s campaign mode is, and they’d be right to do so, but really we all know there’s one specific level we have in mind when it comes to the sidelined shooter: the time travel one. I don’t care for shooters all that much, online or offline ones, yet I still gave a go because the time travel level really appealed to me mechanically. Dishonored 2’s similarly structured time travel section wooed me similarly, so I was very pleased to discover the newest trailer for Tenet of the Spark this week, an action-adventure game that is basically Titanfall 2 and Dishonored 2’s time travel levels made into an entire game.
Earlier this week, you might have seen the abomination that was an AI-powered version of Horizon series protagonist Aloy. It came as part of a leak that showed Sony experimenting with the ability to chat to video game characters that use OpenAI and Chat-GPT to respond, though Sony quickly saw to scrubbing any evidence of footage using the power of copyright laws. Notably the voice behind this AI version of Aloy was not that of her voice actor’s, Ashly Burch, but the voice actor has offered up her own thoughts on the whole situation.
I don’t much enjoy sports sims, but sometimes an imaginative spin on a sport will sneak past my guard. Electro Bop Boxing League has spins aplenty. You probably could have stopped at robot boxers, Developer Dob. You didn’t have to give it a swaggering electro swing soundtrack as well. Special moves depicted as old-timey computer punched cards? Soldering limbs back on between rounds with a Repair-o-Gun? Little eggheads in lab coats clinging to the back of my gymrat C3PO as he pounds some would-be Megatron to shrapnel? Referee counts presented as a rebooting sequence? Developer Dob, you are spoiling us!
In my hectic pursuit of a scoop, I have spent a non-zero amount of today peering at a smudgy image of a London bus sign from a Tides Of Annihilation trailer, trying to work out whether the new gooner-baiting Arthurian slasher has screwed up its portrayal of Britain’s public transport network. If it had, you’d best believe that’d be a headline. I’d have broken the internet with it. “Never mind turning the Dread Knight Mordred into a waifu,” I’d have written, hissing like a kettle. “Those absolute tourists at Eclipse Glow Games have made a mockery of the sacred N19 route from Finsbury Park to Clapham Junction.”
“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.
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.”
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.
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.
