Who knows if Stardew Valley is finished, but the dev behind it is “committed to not working” on it until Haunted Chocolatier is done

Remember when Haunted Chocolatier was announced… sorry, hang on, almost four years ago? Cripes, time really does fly when you’re waiting on the incredibly anticipated follow-up to one of the most popular games of all time doesn’t it! It’s no secret that developer Eric “ConcernedApe” Barone is happy to take his time with his next game, and good on him for doing so. However, he also can’t help himself but continue to work on Stardew Valley, releasing another pretty big update for the farming game only last year. The good news is that, based on some comments in a recent interview, Haunted Chocolatier is the main focus going forward.

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Respawn reportedly lay off staff across Apex Legends and Star Wars Jedi teams, cancel two incubation projects

Update: Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier has since reported that between 300 and 400 positions have been “eliminated” across EA, including around 100 at EA. One of the cancelled incubation projects was also apparently an extraction shooter set in the Titanfall universe.

Apex Legends developer Respawn Entertainment have announced that two of its incubation projects have been cancelled, leading to what it calls a number of “target team adjustments across Apex Legends and Star Wars Jedi.” You may notice that this language is particularly obtuse, in that it doesn’t refer to these adjustments as layoffs. However, according to a report from IGN, layoffs have occurred, though just how many is currently unknown.

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Splinter Cell lives… in the form of Steam achievements for the 12 year old Blacklist

If a Splinter Cell remake fell in the woods, would over the top industry secrecy and NDAs even allow us to hear it? That’s the million dollar question literally no one is asking, because who phrases things that way, but enough about that game that may or may not exist at this point in time, we’ve got a different Splinter Cell to talk about: Blacklist. Yes, the, technically speaking, most recent entry in the series just received a little update on Steam yesterday which… adds achievements into the game.

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Devolver Digital reveals Mycopunk, a FPS where you’re a robot nobody wants trying to not get killed by fungus

One of the quieter, more recent trends I’ve been enjoying is goofy extraction games. Whether Lethal Company is directly responsible for that trend, or everyone that spent countless hours playing games like Left 4 Dead 2 as teenagers just kind of all ended up taking similar interpretations, I couldn’t tell you. But I’m quite fond of games like it and Content Warning, and obviously even more recently there’s Repo added to the list, horrendous key art notwithstanding. Now, as revealed in a new trailer, there’s Mycopunk, another one of those kinds of games where you’re a robot nobody wanted.

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Borderlands 4 gets an earlier release date, as accidentally revealed by Randy Pitchford

First-person “comedy” shooter Borderlands 4 will be released sooner than previously expected, according to a video accidentally tweeted too early by Randy Pitchford. The original date of September 23rd is being shifted in some sort of bizarre anti-delay. “Everything is going kinda the best case scenario,” says the Gearbox CEO, “and so the launch date for Borderlands 4 is changing. We’re moving it forward.”

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Here’s 237 itch games for under $20 with funds helping Gazans regain internet access

Skatebird, Baba Is You, and Electric Zine Maker are three of the 237 games you can grab on Itch right now for $16 as part of Crips for eSims for Gaza Bundle. Why, that’s a $822 saving! I mean, it’s technically not a saving if you weren’t going to buy anything anyway, but it’s for a good cause. Here’s the collective in their own words:

“Crips for eSims for Gaza is an international collective of disabled people who have come together in support of Palestinans, helping Gazans regain internet access via eSims (electric sim cards) connected to surrounding networks in Israel and Egypt,” reads their Itch page. “We recognize that everyone in Gaza is now in some way disabled due to the massive number of deaths, traumatic injuries, life-threatening illnesses and near complete destruction of medical facilities”.

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SpreadCheat is the Dark Souls of Microsoft Excel simulators, or something

SpreadCheat is the most fun I’ve had in some time with a game that I completely avoided engaging with in any meaningful way. I solved every one of its simple spreadsheet puzzles by randomly clicking and dragging numbers until something worked, and I had a great time doing it. This is likely because this seems like the intended experience: Office Space your way through with minimal effort, then eat pizza with your bolshy wet wipe of a boss. Have a Steam demo.

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A string of driver hotfixes suggests Nvidia RTX 50 GPUs are having trouble keeping their software down

Nvidia have released the latest in an unusually frequent series of GeForce driver hotfixes, with the vast majority of identified issues affecting the newest RTX 50 graphics cards specifically. GeForce Hotfix Display Driver version 576.26 targets various crashing and flickering problems with, among others, Black Myth: Wukong, Forza Horizon 5, and Red Dead Redemption 2 – though it’s the growing regularity of these patch jobs that’s more disquieting than any particular instance of game breakage.

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Occlude is a “Lynchian horror” cardgame for weird solitaire fans and the “terminally curious”

A few years ago I found an old hardback tome of Solitaire rulesets on a garden wall. It was a bright, unambiguously pleasant day and I remember thinking ‘oh, that’s the wotsit that inspired those regency thingamajigs‘. So I took it home and tried my hand at a few variations, then forgot about the book entirely. After reading about Occlude, I can only wish my discovery had been more ominous, more foreboding. Why couldn’t I have found the book in a secret cellar, its hastily painted-over entrance given away by the motion of air through a dream-catcher? Why couldn’t it have been thrust upon me by a desperate man with hypnotic tattoos, pushed into my hands with a precautionary mutter to ‘Ware The Onyx Triangle?’

This is the ambience cultivated by Occlude, a “single-player cosmic horror card game for the terminally curious”, in which Solitaire is the basis for seven rituals involving Tarot cards, which steadily unlock access to an archive of fragmentary lore. Here’s a trailer.

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