Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Two Point Museum is a game about how the crushing practicalities of life eventually force you to spend less and less time on the things you truly care about.

More specifically, it’s a game where I started every stage as an enthusiastic interior design sicko and gradually devolved into the sort of dispassionate bean counter who’d happily shove a snack machine next to a priceless prehistoric armadillo skeleton if it meant raking in a two percent bump to customer satisfaction. Feast on snacks, you swine. Feast so I may harvest your fulfilment to unlock a wall hanging that looks like melted cheese.

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In typical shinobi style, Assassin’s Creed Shadows has slipped through the cracks of physical and digital retail and sneakishly released itself a month ahead of schedule. The game is due to launch on 20th March, but people are already posting photographs of boxed copies, while others say they’ve managed to lift a code from the crevices of the PlayStation store.

Videos of the game have been popping up on Youtube like Ninja Whac-a-Moles, no sooner seen than shurikened by Ubisoft’s lawyers. Quite how all this has happened remains to be explained, but Ubisoft are naturally rather annoyed. They’ve put out statements asking people to avoid sharing spoilers, plus the boilerplate cautionary note that any footage you encounter isn’t representative of the quality of the final game.

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Sorcerous cardgame Balatro and slot machine RPG Luck Be A Landlord have been reclassified as fit for people aged 12 years and over by the Pan European Games Information board, after they were initially slapped with an 18 rating for “glamorising… the simulation of gambling”.

PEGI have made the change following a successful appeal against the 18 rating by Balatro’s European publisher Sold Out and Luck Be A Landlord’s Switch publisher Fangamer. They’re also going to develop “a more granular set of classification criteria” for games that reference gambling, to distinguish jingling parodies of rentier capitalism from the one arm bandits found in actual casinos.

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I like to think that, having been supplanted by autoshooters and twig-picking survival games as the Steam Next Fest genre du jour, 2D puzzle-platformers can circle back from ubiquity to becoming cool and clever again. In any event, I’ve definitely enjoyed As I Began To Dream, a charmingly hand-drawn side-scroller that delivers its puzzles with a tactile clickiness straight out of your childhood toolbox. The demo is out now.

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Team Jade and TiMi Studio Group have released a free downloadable co-op campaign for their 2024-launched multiplayer shooter Delta Force – the first new Delta Force game since 2004. Inspired by the Ridley Scott film Black Hawk Down, the add-on campaign is designed for a squad of four, but you can play solo if you’re up for a challenge. As of right now, it only works with mouse and keyboard, but they’re bringing controller support in a later update.

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You are playing a co-op session with Julian Gollop, Snapshot Games’s CEO and the man who created XCOM. He’s showing you Chip n’ Claws vs. The Brainioids, a real time strategy game where you’ll gather resources, fabricate structures, and give orders to robot minions in battles against an alien menace. The twist? It’s all in third person, with split-screen couch co-op, real time ranged and melee combat, and even a little platforming.

You’re playing as robot cat Claws, and Gollop is plucky spacefarer Chip. He’s zipping around the map hoovering up resources on a hoverbike he’s nabbed from a building that gifts you both special tech. You’ve got a rocket pack that lets you double jump, accessing new structure blueprints hidden in high places. It’s time to take the fight to the aliens, and Gollop calmly suggests building troop spawners near your main structure – it’s got mounted guns, after all.

What do you do?

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Persona and Shin Megami Tensei composer Shoji Meguro is making a turn-based sci-fi RPG about private military companies gunning through the ashes of a nuclear war. He’s working with Ilya Kuvshinov, the illustrator who created character designs for Ghost in the Shell: SAC 2045, and Lotus Juice, a rapper who has contributed sick beats to any number of Personae. So if nothing else Guns Undarkness is probably going to look and sound quite fancy.

But how does it play? Meguro has made his name as a musician: I have no idea how well that expertise translates to designing combat systems. It’s something to think about while you watch and listen to the below trailer for the game’s first demo, out on 24th February.

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Buried in Brendan Greene and PlayerUnknown Productions’ billowing, three-part, decade-long effort to build some kind of “3D internet” there is a ramshackle but thoughtful Unreal Engine game about wilderness survival and orienteering. Catchily titled Prologue: Go Wayback! and due for Early Access launch this spring, it’s a game about finding a radio tower on a 64km2 map, generated based on a mix of in-house art and public access landscape data fed through the developer’s in-house machine learning technology.

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Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the Airship library, Innersloth and Schell Games have announced a 3D version of popular social stealth sim Among Us. Or at least, they have taken the existing VR version and made it non-VR. It’s a stab in the back for the Meta Questers, perhaps, but it’s great news for me, a person who has only ever owned the launch model of the PS4’s VR headset, and is currently using its box as a draft excluder.

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One of my Xmas selection box games last year was Withering Rooms, a delightfully frightful haunted house action-RPG that balances mazey Metroidvania level design with the ability to be a witch who can supersize herself and gallop around on suits of magic armour. With a quick glance over my shoulder at our dear friend Sir Eugene Optimisation, I dare to describe it as a bit like Bloodborne, if Bloodborne had been made by a tiny independent developer.

Also rather Bloodborney: the recently revealed Withering Realms, a sequel of sorts in which you play a ghost girl clinging to the back of a customisable combat doll. Sir Eugene Optimisation requests I add here that the doll conceit reminds him of well-received Soulslike Lies Of P. Which is a fair observation, I think, though I would also say the doll’s lipless, one-eyed grimace reminds me of Mouthwashing. How’s that, Eugene – three for three? Anyway, here’s a trailer.

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