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You won’t need a PlayStation account to play Marathon on PC, promise Bungie as their shooter’s marketing blitz picks up speed. Previous games under Sony’s umbrella, such as Helldivers 2, caused frustration and backlash when PC players were forced to register for a PlayStation account just to play online. But it looks like Sony’s recent backpedalling on this requirement will save the upcoming extraction shooter from pissing off PC folks.
People often get snarky about Reddit but I consider the work of user _inferno_44 to be better games journalism than anything I’ve written in a least a month, probably longer. Three colour coded spreadsheets blocking out three Schedule I NPC’s daily routines, ox watchin‘ style. Cheers, Persil XL 3-In-1 Washing Capsules Gamer.
They’re surprisingly detailed for something that’s mainly there to get you to hoof around a bit. Plus fixed routines are just good world building for a weed selling simulation such as this. They raise pertinent questions. Does the forbidden spinach blur the ache of sharp routine like existential Alka Seltzer? Or does it encourage such contemplation as to appreciate the hidden rapture in the familiar?
I was quite pleasantly surprised when it was announced last year that Moonlighter was getting a sequel. In that “oh, I never would have guessed this game would get one” kind of way. Moonlighter 2: The Endless Vault, as its full name goes, doesn’t have an exact release date just yet, but during today’s Triple-I showcase it did get a release window, which is the next best thing I suppose. It’s a vague-ish window though, sometime this summer.
Right, anyone fancy a small look at the next update for Enshrouded? Today’s Triple-I showcase delivered exactly that, though I have to admit it’s pretty brief, and doesn’t show all that much. The game’s sixth update, Thralls of Twilight, is due out sometime in May, and seems to come with some big additions. For one, there’s new enemies that “creep, crawl, and stalk you further,” which sounds… pleasant.
I’ve been keeping an eye on the Alienware Area-51 reboot ever since Dell teased it at CES. It looked sharp, had decent specs, but for a while, your only GPU option was the RTX 5080. That changed, and honestly, it changed for the better. You can now get it with an RTX 5090 paired with Intel’s new Core Ultra 9 285K, and yes, the starting price is $5,499.99. It’s not cheap, but if you’re aiming for a high-end rig without spending weeks chasing down parts or dealing with shipping delays, it’s one of the more straightforward options out there.
There’s a whole bunch of games set in space that let you duke it out in dogfights, form strategies around entire fleets, terraform planets, all often pretty violent acts. So, I found it very funny to see X4: Foundations at the Triple-I showcase today, which received a trailer for its upcoming Diplomacy update which is literally about just talking things out. Seriously, when it says that it’s introducing diplomacy it means it, as when it arrives you’ll be able to send diplomats to negotiate and forge alliances so that you don’t have to jump to war right off the bat.
FakeFish, the devs behind the cosmic/ survival horror co-op game Barotrauma, have just revealed their next game at the Triple-i showcase, Frostrail. It’s another cosmic horror co-op game, albeit with an incredibly different vibe. Where Barotrauma has you trundling through a submarine, Frostrail opens things up a bit, putting you in an icy, apocalyptic looking setting where you have your own train to get you from place to place.
Announced just now at the Triple-I Initiative, Ikuma – The Frozen Compass is a wintry 3D action adventure in which a tenacious young buck and his dog get stranded on an Arctic island. The key thing to know is that it’s a co-op game, a co-op splitscreen game, if you please, which means that you and your friends must decide, right now, which of you will play the dog.
This game is described as “a powerful story of love, loss, and endurance”, which doesn’t bode brilliantly for the dog, so whoever dons the collar needs to a great tragic actor. I encourage you to spend a few weeks rehearsing the business of lying bloodied in the snow next to a dead yeti, whining heroically at the back of your departing owner, who has decided he’s more of a cat person anyway. Come now, let me see your expression of puppy-eyed anguish. There’s a nice juicy biscuit in it for you if you can make me cry.
The legend goes that in the 12th century, King Canute plonked his throne down on the seashore and commanded the tide to go out, thereby empirically demonstrating to all the toadies at court that he was not, in fact, God Almighty. You don’t need to order the ocean to piss off in Endless Legend 2: it’s already in headlong retreat. But not from you.
In the boss fights of South Of Midnight, you’ve got to find a pulsing wound on the body of the monster and strike it to cleanse the giant beast of its “stigma”. In truth, these creatures are analogues for human characters, sometimes people who have literally transformed into beasts, afflicted by a thorny curse that drives them into frightening states of rage or panic. This is a game about festering trauma – history as a painful wound you’ve got to poke in order to eventually heal. Strip back the scales and feathers of folk allegory and these are human tales of shame, hunger, neglect, and abuse, some more effective than others. It’s a gorgeous game with a killer approach to music, if sometimes hobbled by the ropey trappings of its action adventure genre.
