Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is Sandfall Interactive’s debut, which tells me two things about the French studio. Firstly, that they’re a bunch of utter show offs and, secondly, that they’re a bunch of utter show offs. You can’t do this, Sandfall. You can’t just come storming out the gate with a turn-based RPG possessed of all the flash and experimentation of Lost Odyssey or Legend Of Dragoon plus all the haunting playfulness and bizarre beauty of both Miyazakis having a thumb war while Yoko Taro rolls around on the floor beside them.

I don’t know how they do things in France, but where I’m from, pulling off such clarity of vision on your first attempt is illegal – as is this much earnest outpouring of feeling on any attempt. Indeed, I can see some of you finding Clair Obscur a little too cute, a little too eager to dazzle and move with its operatic spectacle and Lisa Simpson-ish virtuosity.

Me? I find it hard to even get lost in games I love these days. I’ll usually settle for anything that stops me checking my email for an hour. But if Clair Obscur’s brilliant combat had me hooked, the journey it offers had me enchanted. It would appear that they really do make ’em like this anymore.

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What is a video game NPC, if not a scared creature that needs a bit of help? That’s exactly what the just announced PANIK cuts right to the core of, and I’ve been charmed by it quite quickly. In PANIK, there are Panikers, which are a type of scared creature that are just so unbelievably anxious they cannot move from where they stand. This is where you come in, a, uh, well they didn’t name the player character so I’ll just keep saying you.

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In a free world, all Overwatch 2 heroes would be playable no matter how annoying they might be to face off against because sometimes them’s the breaks. We don’t live in a free world though, not anymore at least, as Overwatch 2 season 16 starts today. Most notably it’s introducing its new mode Stadium, but also something that’ll change up the competitive aspect of the shooter quite a bit: hero bans.

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Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 3 is not the third game in a series about creepy rednecks and dinosaurs in a mansion. I’d forgive you if that was where your mind went, given the number three in its name, but I assure you, it’s a brand new game that just came out today! It is also a match-3, survival horror, comedy RPG metroidvania, a combination of genres that I never thought was possible, and yet here we are with a game that looks pretty fun.

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Remember Spore? I never played the original one myself, just that crappy one Spore Creatures on the DS, but I’ve long appreciated what Spore was trying to do from afar. There’s an almost whimsical macabre feeling to it, playing god and all that, leading a creature down the path of evolution. You don’t see too many games like that these days, though today’s a bit of an exception given the announcement of Voidling Bound, a monster-taming/ gene splicing game from a team made up of former Skylanders devs.

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Righto, Diablo 4 season 8 is starting next week, and today Blizzard have dropped a whole bunch of details on it ahead of its release on April 29th, so let’s see what they are! First up, there’s that Belial guy who the season is named after. He’s back, but his “motive is unknown”, and you’ll eventually be able to face off against him in a new quest which introduces a couple of new NPCs. That’s all well and good, but the big thing this season is its new main mechanic, boss powers.

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The closed alpha for Marathon is soon due to roll out to players who signed up, meaning Bungie’s colourful futuristic servers are warming up. Sadly, we weren’t invited – the alpha is only open to North Americans. But, aha, something went awry today and the game became available to play early for those on Xbox. And one quick-witted player streamed a full hour of the game before the servers clamped shut once again.

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At some point in their development of the most recent trilogy, someone at Id Software apparently decided that the most interesting thing about their FPS was the character of the Doom Slayer himself – an odd though not entirely disastrous decision that I’d argue is mostly responsible for the design shape of Doom Eternal. I’m a big fan, even despite this misplaced fascination with its unnecessarily fleshed out gun-numpad-with-legs. I’m hoping to be a fan of Doom: The Dark Ages too, but based on the latest trailer, I’m still trying to tell whether they’ve scaled the Slayer lore back or are still banking on me being enraptured to learn the millenia-long backstory to why I’m yanking a Cacodemon’s eyeball out like clogged hair from shower drain.

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Ah, well thank heck for that. I thought I’d spent my weekend hunched over a screen in a goblinesque sweat-trance. No! Says Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 voice actor Andy Serkis: I was simply partaking in some vital culture; a veritable Wildean sophisticate. Film industry folks thought games were “not an art form in any stretch,” Serkis told Game Watcher, “and gradually it’s taken over the film industry, which could not exist without it.” Take that, Roger Ebert’s dead wrong dead horse of a dead body.

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The maker of cryptic block-seeding puzzler Starseed Pilgrim has announced a new game in which you are invited to do the unspeakable and “kill gameplay”. The End Of Gameplay will be an exploratory 2D platformer according to the tags on its Steam page but anyone who has played the work of creator Droqen might predict those labels to prove looser than a toddler’s shoelace. Enjoyers of obscure and poetic wanderings in minimalist spaces will probably be happy with the trailer below.

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