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Despelote ought to feel idiosyncratic. Set in Ecuador during the country’s historic World Cup qualifying campaign in 2001, its protagonist is a half-remembered version of the game’s lead developer. Yet there’s nothing peculiar about it, either. Despelote is a game so authentic and personal that it hits upon universal truths.
Open world crime blockbuster Grand Theft Auto 6 has been delayed until next year, say Rockstar, telling fans that they “need this extra time to deliver at the level of quality you expect and deserve”. It’s not the biggest surprise – delays happen. But it’s a slightly embarrassing announcement given that Strauss Zelnick, big boss of publisher Take-Two, has twice publicly reassured investors that the game would release on time in autumn this year. The announcement comes with some sense of relief, however, as Rockstar have now set a firm date in Spring.
Survival hellscape Rust has added a tropical jungle biome to its procedurally generated maps, the biggest change to the landscape of the game in nine years. It’ll appear close to where new players spawn and hides a number of threats and fun. Poisonous snakes will skitter through the undergrowth and riverside crocs will chew your face given the chance. There are ruins and temples hidden among the trees, housing some basic loot. And you can swing from vines, perhaps inspiring a whole new life in the canopy. Probably for the best, considering there are now tigers and panthers stalking the ground below.
The release of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered is theoretically terrible news for the creators of Skyblivion, a long-in-development mod that recreates Bethesda’s 2006 RPG in the Skyrim engine. On the one hand, you could argue that the official comeback care of Virtuos Studios renders Skyblivion unnecessary. On the other, there’s the usual worry that Bethesda’s intellectual property lawyers are going to erupt from the toilets like radioactive rats and eat the modders alive.
The Skyblivion crew professed themselves undaunted by the news, however. “This always was a passion project and still is until the end,” modder KRebel insisted last week. “For the community its a win-win as you get twice the amount of Oblivion this year.” And Bethesda have now met them with open arms by not only declining to sue the pants off Skyblivion for intellectual property infringement, but handing the modders keys for the official remaster and even going on camera to say that they’re looking forward to Skyblivion’s release.
The Photo Of God is not an especially brilliant game, but it is a game I keep thinking about. It’s a spooky, throwaway interactive epistle from the evidently self-deprecating Serious Daniel, in which you play a photographer standing on a rooftop in a flooded city, under a low, funereal sun. The photographer decides he is going to snap a picture of God. To do this, he must first take pictures of birds that form a breadcrumb trail around the rooftop and through an abandoned building, lit by blazing oil drums.
I don’t like sand. It’s coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere. So I can only imagine how absolutely, overwhelmingly irritating it could be on a planet like Arrakis, where a sandstorm could quite easily kill you. Or, I suppose I don’t have to imagine, as that’s something you can actually experience in Dune: Awakening. This is a video we’re talking about here though, meaning there are fixes for problems like these. Namely, base building, which Funcom showed off in a new video of the multiplayer game yesterday.
A frustrating thing I frequently find myself thinking about games is that they very rarely try to be more than what they are, at least when it comes to AAA ones (or any kind of game that has enough money for a full blown ad campaign). They’re just so often… games. No interest or desire to expand the medium. Luckily, there are people doing the work to rethink what games are, and today we now have Despelote, a “semi-autobiographical”, almost documentary-like game about playing football in Ecuador in 2001.
You know, at this point I’m not sure if games, or even just aspects of games, that rely on licensing other works, is really all that good of an idea. It’s probably part of why there are some Fortnite skins you never see in the shop anymore, it’s absolutely why the Friday the 13th game shut down, and I have a hunch that that’s what has happened to Evil Dead: The Game. Recently, the multiplayer game disappeared from both the PlayStation Store and Epic Games Store, leading to a bit of confusion as to its status. Now, the game is no longer purchasable on Steam, and developer Saber Interactive have put out a comment addressing the situation.
I really quite like how simple a title Ratopia has. It’s a 2D strategic survival city builder, where you have to build a nice place for rats to live. Ratopia! It gets straight to the heart of it, and it just received its 1.0 release today after an early access period of 18 months. The game has had a lengthy development time too, starting way back in 2020, and in a Steam post discussing the 1.0 release, developers Cassel Games left a nice and lengthy list covering everything that’s been added across its early access release.
Infinity Nikki has fallen from grace a touch, it seems. The dress-up RPG arrived on Steam last week, almost five months since it launched on the Epic Games Store, but it did so with quite a few caveats. For starters, the game’s latest update 1.5 arrived around the same time, leading to a plethora of issues with the game, quite notably frequent crashes. Then there’s also been a large number of Chinese players expressing their frustration with some of the changes on the game’s Steam forusm, namely the increase in cost of banners. This has led to the game hitting a Mixed rating on Steam, so the game’s dev has come out with a big ole apology literally asking for “one more chance.”
