Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I’m not sure if the words cosy and apocalypse are generally ones that go hand in hand together, but Doloc Town is positioning itself as just that. Specifically, it’s a quite lovely looking pixel-art farming sim set in a post-apocalypse, and it just launched in early access today. Like in many farming sims before it, there’s the usual thing of tending to and growing your crops, cooking them up, fishing, that sort of thing. Where it differs is it’s all on a 2D plane, obviously meaning you’ll have to think about space quite differently.

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Helldivers 2 is, very obviously, a game where you roleplay as space fascists. Like, the game explicitly treats you as fodder for a war against various supposedly evil species all in the name of colonising other planets. It’s not subtle! But it’s also silly as hell, so the shooter more or less gets away with it. Arrowhead just announced a new warbond though, and I’ll be honest: the new outfits are probably the most fascist looking yet.

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I think this Doom and Wolfenstein Mayhem Bundle from Humble is an easy win if you’re even remotely interested in first-person shooters. For $28 / £21.16, you get fifteen titles spanning decades of FPS history. From the original DOOM to the more recent Wolfenstein reboots, this is a complete collection of mayhem. It’s also the lowest price I’ve seen for a bundle with this much legacy and content in one place.

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What do people that play Frostpunk call themselves, frostpunks? Feels too obvious, but I’m going to do it anyway. Breaking news frostpunks! There’s a new big Frostpunk 2 update that’s just arrived in the game, adding some pretty big additions and changes,so let’s jump into them. First up, The Pit! No, it’s not just some hole to chuck things in, it’s a large new map with a “distinctive ‘proto-crater’ pit counted as mountain terrain,” to be found within.

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Paradox have announced grand strategy game Europa Universalis 5, following some teasers last week. It’s the next big entry in the series of complex globe-spanning historical simulations, and having played a little as the hapless ruler of Korea in the 14th century, I can confirm that it is so far as chunky, complicated, and deep as usual. The changes in this sequel won’t look wild or revolutionary to a dabbler, but seasoned tyrants might find a lot to pique their interest. Come see a trailer below.

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Earlier today there was a mighty eruption of Death Stranding 2: On The Beach previews, featuring commentary on the new game’s themes and social relevance from erstwhile Metal Gear Solidifier and Kojima Productions boss Hideo Kojima. Themes and social relevance, eh! Kojima is one of the few bigwigs who will engage openly with such things, which is perhaps less praise of Kojima than a judgement upon the hesitant and anodyne way other blockbuster game creators discuss the impact of their work.

In this case, Kojima has talked at some length about how Death Stranding 2 builds on and, at times, resists the first game’s theme of connection, based on his experiences of the Covid pandemic and his dislike of the “metaverse” – that ageing umbrella term for a newly monetisable “web 3.0” fauxtopia of networked technologies, ranging from VR to cryptocurrency, which many large video game publishers have sought to normalise in their hunger for profit growth.

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“Attacking is the most consistent element of Elden Ring Nightreign’s gameplay,” says director Junya Ishizaki in a new PlayStation blog, explaining the choice to have players revive each other by hitting wounded mates with swords – a famously crucial tenet of the hippocratic oath. “We tested to see if it would work for resuscitation, and we discovered a wide variety of tactics depending on range, frequency, and probability, so we formally implemented it. We also found it quite amusing (laughs).”

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Today, 8th May, is a day of compound darkness, for it sees the release of (at least) two games with “midnight” in the title: Midnight Special from Scared Stupid Inc, and The Midnight Walk from Moonhood. A coincidence? Absolutely not. This is clearly an occult configuration of daunting power. It’s also an opportunity to briefly compare two video game aesthetics, each comparably dense, tasty and insidious.

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Sharpen your stake and pack some silver bullets because Humble Choice just dropped a May lineup packed with blood, brains, and pure gaming mayhem. For just $11.99 / £8.99 a month, you’re getting eight standout games plus a bonus month of IGN Plus thrown in at no extra cost. That’s over $280 in value, all for the price of a decent lunch.

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This is just a quick write-up, because it’s outside office hours, but… Mobius Digital, creators of wondrous virtual orrery and gravitational stageplay Outer Wilds, are making a new game.

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