Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

With a final lick, the weasel expires. Its head is mine. I slink back to my nest and shove this new head onto my strangely thick duck neck. Then, I take off in a flutter and scutter of beetle wings and legs. I pass an Oscar the grouch-style bloke in a basket selling animal body parts for crystals. Ahead lies a giant salamander wearing a fedora. He asks me to go and steal some eggs from an ant queen who’s wearing an actual crown. I refuse. We fight. He keeps whistling for backup. My weasel head bites away, an openly terrified expression written across its whiskers.

That, in so many words, is Strange Seed, which came out in full yesterday and also has a demo I’ve gioven a go for this article. It’s a cartoonish evolution murderfest from devs Chronicle Games, who cite E.V.O.: Search for Eden and Spore’s creature stage as their inspirations.

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I’m about an hour into Whiskerwood, the new city builder from Minakata Dynamics and publishers Hooded Horse, and I’ve already made an absolute mess of my coastline. A clever and charismatic hybrid of Against The Storm, Robin Jarvis novels and the settlement of North America, Whiskerwood puts you in charge of some mice building colonies on cuboid islands. The islands are lovely so far, their Minecrafty nooks and crannies crying out to be decked with gardens and windmills and cobblestone paths. But you’ve got taxes to pay, so the first thing you do is sink a bunch of mineshafts at random, scooping out coal and copper for the literal fat cats back at court.

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Arc Raiders‘ first proper patch, assuming you’re a member of the honourable sect who don’t count hotfixes as patches, has arrived. It’s relatively small, but it does set up three new map conditions that’ll be unleashed in the shooter this weekend, as well as fixing some pesky bugs.

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Last week, GTA 6 developers Rockstar Games suddenly fired around 30 UK-based workers on a charge of “gross misconduct”. According to the UK’s IWGB Game Workers Union, the firings are in fact retaliation against staff for attempting to unionise, as is their right under UK law. They called it “the most blatant and ruthless act of union busting in the history of the games industry.”

This week, Rockstar pushed back against these claims in a new statement to Bloomberg, accusing the fired employees of sharing “confidential information on a public forum”. The IWGB insist, however, that the “public forum” alluded to was just a private Discord channel for IWGB members and Rockstar developers to discuss working conditions and unionisation efforts, and that no confidential information was shared. The IWGB have also organised gatherings across the UK to show solidarity for the affected Rockstar staff. This morning, I attended one such gathering – a protest outside Rockstar parent company Take-Two Interactive’s offices in London.

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Battlefield 6‘s Infantry Fighting Vehicle, which google reliably informs me is a vehicle that’s supposed to carry fighting infantry, rather than fight infantry itself, has had its lock-on missiles taken away for the next little bit. Some problems with countermeasures have rendered them far too effective at their job of blowing stuff up.

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Ubisoft have reportedly offered a corporate spin on the backlash Assassin’s Creed Shadows faced from right-wing grifters prior to release, with CEO Yves Guillemot framing it as “a battle with our fans, to demonstrate that we were, in fact, more of a video game than a message”. The company also seem to be trying to canonise the events as some kind of masterful marketing victory, which arguably isn’t too surprising, even if the fact they’re not trying to pretend the controversy never happened is.

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Oi, gaffer! I know you’re busy trying to work out the exact moment at which we should park the bus and start unleashing the long throw-ins, but you’ll probably want to know about the chunky patch Football Manager 26 devs Sports Interactive have released into Steam beta. It’s aimed at fixing a lit of the initial issues which’ve been causing ire since release earlier this week.

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There is perhaps no better setting than some woods or a forest that just sucks ass. Just a confusing, scary, maybe sometimes enchanting mess of nature that is impossible to navigate. Today’s latest update for Peak just so happens to present such a visage, with towering, beautiful trees, and yet again a wonderful sense of scale.

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Throughout my time playing Hollow Knight: Silksong, I mostly didn’t actually miss the first game’s not-so-titular Knight. I do love that bug, it’s just Hornet made for quite a compelling protagonist (even if I think that the game has a number of issues that go further than just it being potentially unfairly hard). I doubt this will be a universal feeling however, which is where this handy mod where you can once again play as the Knight, but in Silksong, comes into play.

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There are many words that could be said, and I’ll attempt to say a few of them here, on the gamification of both menial labour and tasks, but it is always fascinating to me when a new game crops up that somehow makes me go “oh, sure, why not!” Today that applies to a game called Leaf Blower Co., which is a simulation game about exactly what you’d expect (blowing leaves) and I suppose not what you expect (blowing paper boats and coconuts).

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