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Earlier this year, Palworld developer Pocketpair announced their intent to get into games publishing using some of that Scrooge McDuck-size swimming pool of money they’ve acquired over the past year. They already had a game signed up too, from Tales of Kenzera: ZAU developer Surgent Studios, and today said indie dev has offered a small tease of a reveal at their upcoming psychological horror game Dead Take.
The State of Unreal 2025 showcase has just offered us a first glimpse at what playing The Witcher 4 might look like, via an Unreal Engine 5 demo build that featured Ciri exploring the wilds and a village in Kovir. Kovir was also confirmed to be a location you’ll visit in the final game, so start packing your bags.
Every few moments in the current build of arcade space shooter Nova Drift there’s a chance the game will spawn a Cargo Train. Whenever the game decides to spawn a Cargo Train, there’s a 1/7777 chance it will spawn a Space Whale instead. “Nonsense,” you bellow. “Space Whales are a myth. Designer Jeffrey Nielson has been telling us they’re not real ever since the original Kickstarter in 2017.” Ah, you poor, unsuspecting mooncalf. You chirpy little starfish. Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide treacherously hidden inside downloadable software packages. Nielson has been telling you porkies.
He did, in fact, surreptitiously add a Space Whale to the game shortly before Nova Drift’s 1.0 release back in August 2024, after years of conspiracy theories. This, friends, is the good kind of lie, the kind of lie that makes combing through a million changelogs for potential headlines worthwhile.
The battle for Super Earth that kicked off with Helldivers 2‘s Heart of Democracy update concluded last week, with players managing to fend off an Illuminate invasion of their home planet. One of the two cities that ended up holding out against the hostile squids was Equality-On-Sea, located in the in-game map’s version of China, and it’s led the shooter to make a local news report in the country.
Having never designed an FPS before, there’s a good chance the following grand theory of combat design I’m about to propose is reeking globnonsense, but here goes: I figure you’ve basically got two approaches. You can either keep it simple but chunky, and use this to lure the player in right away by making them feel powerful and capable. Then, you can keep your relatively pithy verb list interesting by riffing on things like encounter and enemy design.
Then, there’s the Texnoplazm method (Steam demo here) which is to slap you across the chops with a phone book of gun fu possibilities straight from the off, offer a taste of stylishness just piquant enough to convince you that mastering this toolkit seems like a fun and worthwhile idea, and let you loose. It’s the “I suck at this, but I will not suck eventually, and then my enemies will be sorry and also impressed at how cool I look” approach. This method also ends up with you feeling much more capable than the first guy, even though they got to have more fun earlier.
That was a lot of words to say “game good, if a little overwhelming initially”. Here’s a trailer. It may contain the following verbs: punch. Punch but big. Slide. Slam. Dodge. Throw weapon. Grab weapon in midair. Kick. Wall run. Block. Parry. Have impeccable android butt.
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Hitman developer Io Interactive’s James Bond game has been reannounced with a proper title, 007 First Light. It also has some new key art, which confirms some important Facts: unlike Hitman’s depthless master mimic Agent 47, James Bond has hair, formed into a neat side-parting by the passage of a narrowly escaped bullet. He also has ears, a high-collared leather jacket, and a gun.
Or what looks like a gun. He could be just doing a finger pistol to fake us out. I do not trust this particular James Bond. He is, after all, a cousin of Agent 47, that barcode-blazoned Fury peering out of every mirror. Io Interactive’s James Bond doesn’t even have a face right now. The face is hopefully forthcoming in the world premiere later this week during Summer Game Fest 2025, along with James Bond’s legs and feet.
With Baldur’s Gate 3 developer Larian now off doing their own thing and making multiple games that aren’t Baldur’s Gate 4, BG IP owners Wizards of the Coast have just revealed something that might help fill that void. They’ve agreed to a publishing deal that’ll see relatively new studio Giant Skull create a new game set in the D&D universe.
Fallout: London might have launched buggier than a holiday at a nature reserve dedicated to cockroaches and coders, but since that point Team FOLON’s put a lot of effort into making sure people can enjoy the pretty damn good game it’s created. While you’ll have to wait a bit longer for some Londony DLC, you can now play some of the mod in VR.
Elden Ring Nightreign‘s latest patch, version 1.01.1, makes the co-op RPG somewhat easier for single player Nightreigners. It boosts the number of runes awarded for Nightreign solo expeditions, and gives you one free automatic revive per boss battle. A great day indeed for people who wish the game’s multiplayer were still more in-game covenant than feature.
By strange coincidence, the odds that I will actually play Nightreign have now gone up 1.011 times. I was pretty disenchanted by Nic’s review, in which he summarised the game’s Extended Fromverse battle royale bum-rushing as “a stripped-off part of FromSoft’s creative identity with little appeal absent the whole”. If they can significantly decrease the reliance on jolly cooperation I’ll be much more interested – I had similar feelings about Helldivers 2 – though this still feels like a game I’m comfortable skipping.
It begins as every Japan-set dating sim worth its salt does — with a transfer student.
It’s Aya’s first day at the ominously-named ‘Love-Love All-Girls High School’, and they’re (understandably) a little nervous. Shy and socially anxious, they hope they’ll manage to make a friend or two. Turns out their classmates are eager – perhaps a little too eager – to get acquainted. Aya is set upon by a stampede of besotted young women, but Aya doesn’t have romance on the brain themselves. “I Just Want To Be Single!” they yell. Cue chirpy acapella theme music.
I Just Want To Be Single!!: Season One, recently released on Steam in Early Access, is a game you’d be forgiven for overlooking on a Steam Store that today is packed with visual novels from Western indie devs. A handful carry a reverence and understanding of the medium (the excellent VA-11 HALL-A, for example), but many take a mocking, ironic approach, or exist primarily to titillate, such that fans have grown wary. Tsundere Studio’s debut, I Just Want To Be Single!! stands out from this crowd.
Billed as ‘aromantic, asexual, and nonbinary’, I Just Want To Be Single!!’s player protagonist, Aya, is a reflection of its mononymous lead developer ‘m.’. “I’m still figuring things out about myself and this game is an extension of that,” m. tells me over Discord. “The story in this game is largely about finding yourself and who you want to become.”
