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I’d have loved to delve into some Next Fest shenanigans, but at the moment guidestown is groaning with work. And there are only so many times I can listen to the Endless Legend soundtrack in one day. I need to expand my horizons.
One of the internet’s primordial New Media experiences is the Wiki Game – an asymmetrical “racing sim” in which you hurry from one Wikipedia page to another by clicking on the fewest number of links. Try doing that in the Museum of All Things, “a nearly-infinite virtual museum generated from Wikipedia”, which you can download for free from Itch. Devised by Maya Claire using the Godot Engine with audio from Neomoon’s Willow Wolf, it’s either a charmingly unusual way to browse a wonderful public resource or a free-associative liminal death-spiral, depending on your mood going in.
“There are too many games,” is a phrase often heard from people who wish to rustle the jimmies of leftists who contend that overabundance and scarcity are market constructs. It’s not something you’ll hear from me, but I do think there are quite a lot of one type of game, a game that spawns incessantly within the corrupted magic circle of my inbox, as though I were playing out a scripted last stand against insurmountable odds. That game is the roguelike deckbuilder.
The upcoming reboot for Fable, the fantasy role-playing game of British chortles ‘n’ chuckles, has been delayed until next year, says head of Xbox Game Studios Craig Duncan. Developers Playground Games need “more time” to create the world of Albion, it turns out, but Xbox has offered a sparse sprinking of of game footage as compensation for the delay. There’s nothing particularly mind-blowing among it. Some combat, some vistas. But it’s something.
I can’t be certain, but the music for Castle V Castle sounds very much like it was made on an old Roland TR-808 drum machine or equivalent plug-in. Your ears will be familiar with the 808 even if your brain isn’t – it’s about as ubiquitous in hip hop as the Amen break. That’s actually quite fitting, because this minimalist strategy game has the rhythms of a call-and-response rap battle. That’s something you could say for all I-go-you-gos to an extent, but the bellicose back and forth here is especially sizzling, snappy, and scintillating.
(The game music is very different from the trailer music.)
In first-person stealth game Skin Deep you are a “deep freeze insurance commando” who gets defrosted whenever pirates board the space vessel you’re aboard. The ships you work are crewed by talking house cats with big personalities and a poor track record in information security. It’s your job, when things go wrong, to save them from their captors. We’ve seen a couple of trailers for this sci-fi Die Hard homage before but now we have a full demo to blast through, in which you can throw fishbones at elevator switches and overflow an entire laundry room with soap suds, useful if you want your enemies slip up and donk their heads. Just be careful, because it’ll do the same to you. The demo takes about 90 minutes (if you’re taking your time like me), but it already feels like Blendo Games at their most playful.
Warner Bros are closing three video game development studios as they seek “to get back to a ‘fewer but bigger franchises’ strategy”, according to a leaked staff memo from Warner Bros head of games and streaming JB Perrette. The three studios in question are MultiVersus developer Player First Games, free-to-play specialists Warner Bros Games San Diego, and Monolith, the 30-year-old studio behind No One Lives Forever, F.E.A.R., Condemned: Criminal Origins, Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, and a troubled forthcoming Wonder Woman adaptation that has now been cancelled.
World Of Warcraft‘s Undermine(d) update launches tomorrow, 26th February 2025, as part of the long-hauling MMO’s War Within expansion. It adds a whirring underground goblin city complete with nickel-plated palm trees and quarrelsome cartels, a new raid, a new four-boss dungeon, a PvP arena and a host of smaller, systemic adjustments. I do not play a lot of World Of Warcraft, so when Blizzard came knocking about an interview, my reaction was a blend of being caught dozing off in history class and being casually asked to defuse a bomb. But Undermine(d) does harbour at least one addition that an Azeroth tourist like myself can understand: cars.
Silent Hill 2 remake wranglers Bloober Team have emerged from the newly high-resolution, volumetric fog to threaten us with the prospect of another “game based on Konami’s IP”. Thank heavens, I was beginning to think we’d never get a new Frogger. Whatever the project is, we won’t hear about it for a while.
A question, readers. What sounds more fun: doddering about on your own two feet – like an idiot – or storming through deserts on a cannon-packing megacrab? I only make such a clearly self-answering inquiry because for some reason DuneCrawl, or at least the Steam Next Fest demo that shows off its isometric action, seems to think both sides have valid points.
