This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the difficult journeys they’ve taken to make their games. This time, Far: Lone Sails [official site].

It’s there when you first start the engine, in the hiss of steam as you press the ignition button and the rumble as the great wheels begin to turn. Then the music swells and you know the journey has begun.

Far: Lone Sails is a game by Okomotive about piloting a giant land boat across a destroyed landscape, about tending a huge machine through unpropitious conditions: hail and storms, fires, failure and shortages of fuel. And a great deal of your understanding of its colossal workings comes through sound, with music which responds to your actions and many layers of looping sound effects which subtly change shape as you trundle through a vast wilderness. Read the rest of this entry »

When I published my Vampyr review (summary: choice is an illusion, apart from when it’s a roulette wheel; the dialogue’s stuffy but the fights are tight if you invest in them), I estimated that I was about two-thirds of the way through the game. With embargoes and deadlines out the way, I was curious to see how it all resolved, and particularly what, if any, pdark consequences would ultimately ripple outwards from the choices I had made. It’ll just take few hours, I reasoned. One more working day.

16 hours of increasingly maddening play later, I grimly watched the credits roll, my mind a whirl of relief, contempt and despair. If my post-review return to Vampyr had immediately collapsed into the combination of soporific lore and desperately ill-judged combat excess that did its final furlong, I wouldn’t have minded so much. What frustrated me was that this was preceded by a strong stretch wherein it finally became the game of agonising vampiric dilemmas that we’d hoped it would be from the start. So close to brilliance, and then this abrupt decay into absolute folly. Read the rest of this entry »

The thing I thought I wanted most from The Long Dark proved to be the thing I wanted least. For the many years I’ve been returning to this truly brilliant and most brutal of survival sims, I so wanted them to deliver on the Story Mode the title screen would always promise. To have a narrative motivation to persist against the odds and the elements seemed perfect. Then Wintermute was released and “perfect” wasn’t exactly a word being bandied around.

So I know now that what I really want from The Long Dark is just more of it. And now there is! Along with tweaks and an overhaul to cooking, a whole new region has just been added in, called Hushed Valley River, and it’s absolutely savage. Read the rest of this entry »

It was a matter of time before battle royale got spun up from a top-down perspective. True, the surprisingly fun surviv.io was the first to get there – but that’s essentially a 2D port of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, and nearly as shallow as that description implies. Dota 2 is the first game to tackle the genre with a little more depth: I’ve been playing its Underhollow mode, with strangers.

I do not advise playing Dota 2’s Underhollow mode with strangers. Read the rest of this entry »

Symmetra has always been a bit of an odd-hero-out among Overwatch’s roster of characters. She was the only support character not capable of healing her teammates, leaving players unsure of what her role was. Despite a previous rework, she was rarely played. At lower levels she was sometimes chosen in very specific situations, usually as the first point of defence on certain maps, but her pick rate plummeted the further up the rankings you went. In the Overwatch League, she was the only hero to never be played at all.

Yet she was also one of the most hated characters in the game. The main point of contention was her auto-aim primary fire, which locked on to enemies within range and charged up, doing more damage over time. Players who thought the game should only reward a narrow definition of skill, hinging on aim and reflexes, became vitriolic. “No aim, no brain, Symmetra main,” became a meme, often seen in match chat whenever someone got frustrated. And that was a milder comment; when I chose her after the rework was announced (but before it was playable on the test servers), one member of the opposing team told me: “People who play Sym are f*****s and shall be executed.” Read the rest of this entry »

Oh look, this Life is Strange spin-off is due out next week as a freebie. The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit is a two-hour pretend-em-up in which you play Chris, an imaginative kid who fancies himself a superhero on the weekends, and isn’t afraid to take on evil beings like the powerful Snowmancer (a snowman) and nasty beasts such as the dreaded Water Eater (the water heater). That sounds like fun. Until you discover the real enemies lurking in Chris’ modest bungalow. Grief, alcoholism, and neglect are the underlying villains here, if the demo I saw at E3 is anything to go by. More like the Super Concerning Adventures of Captain Sadness, am I right?

*starts sobbing* Read the rest of this entry »

During this year’s E3, I saw the largest screen I’d ever witnessed, folded around the corner of a building like a giant piece of glowing paper. It told me to buy Nike. LA is already the neon futuretown of California, never mind Night City. But I didn’t just see ads for shoes at the LA convention centre, I saw a lot of games too. From the bustling streets of Cyberpunk 2077 to the twisting tornadoes of Just Cause 4. From the crumbling Capitol of The Division 2 to the clumsy motorcycling of Trials Rising. Here are my highlights from the game industry’s annual festival of bullets and colour, the sci-fi dystopia that was with us all along. Read the rest of this entry »

A room full of mannequins is rarely a safe place in videogames, but in Dying Light 2 it looks especially unnerving. Welcome to a zombie nest, where dozens of shamblers sleep during the day, huddling together in the shade of an abandoned clothes shop. They sleep upright, like decomposing commuters nodding off in a packed tube carriage. The best thing to do when you enter one of these “dark places” is to stay low, quiet and – oh god they’re awake get out get out leap through the window climb a drainpipe throw yourself through that door get back to the sunlight go go go. Read the rest of this entry »

As you stare out into the world, at the tumult and turmoil, perhaps you feel the only hope is to turn to the Steam Charts for its comforting predictability and stability. I’m sorry folks, but it’s all gone batshit crazy in here too. Read the rest of this entry »

Sundays are for remembering that you’re an infinitesimal insignificance in a cosmos that doesn’t care, and dealing with the resulting angst by reading about videogames.

On Kotaku, Kate Gray wrote about how a screaming eye-cube helped her learn about gender. Never before have I read something that’s made me laugh out loud by describing monsters with one sentence, then offered illuminating thoughts on a notoriously slippery subject in the next. Read the rest of this entry »

And that was the E3 that was. It’s been a busy week but a good’un. My exhausted brain will blank out most of this week so I look forward to discovering everything anew in a month or so. But I’ll never forget the most important E3 news of all: Yakuza is coming to PC. Oh, and Cyberpunk 2077 sounds wild. And that Grim Fandango read-through was grand. And Pey’j! And shark ’em up Maneater looks delightfully daffy. And… obviously at this point I am reading back through our E3 tag and being surprised by all these games I had already forgotten. I’ll be on holiday next week so I’ll see youse laters.

What are you playing this weekend? Here’s what we’re clicking on!

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The Paradox DLC factory continues to diligently extend the lives of its myriad grand strategy romps, with all but Stellaris getting new DLC announcements at PDXCON last month. We’re getting restless pagan warriors, war elephants and even some sharks. If you can match the feature to the game, you get a polite nod of respect.

Rather than tiring you out, making you click on three articles like a thoughtless task master, I’ve gathered all the sizzling deets in one place. Rest those fingers and direct your eyes below to find out what’s changing in Hearts of Iron 4, Europa Universalis 4 and Crusader Kings 2.

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In order to justify that tortured title and maintain the illusion that The Flare Path is primarily a simulations and wargames column, today’s out-of-character love letter to a football game will follow a quick news round-up involving Harriers, Manx motorcycle combinations, Old West wheelslip, Interwar warship design, and American Civil War ambition.

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Well, that was E3. Another year down, and it feels like a good one. Let’s cap the week off with another roundup of the week’s best gaming deals to check out – and now, excitingly, I can talk about the Yakuza series, so that’s nice. Everything becomes a PC game eventually.

As usual, we’ve got deals that’ll work in the UK, deals that’ll work in the US and some deals that will work in both the UK and US, as well as presumably many other places. Let’s get started. Read the rest of this entry »

Forget Newell’s billions, Plunkbat and whichever indie renaissance is currently happening: the real success story of Steam, over the years, is superficially dour and highly-specific vehicle simulations finding large audiences who have very little interest in steering torque or rim patterns. I have filled these pages with paeans to American Truck Simulator‘s soul-searching road odysseys, to the hypnotic satisfaction of stripping parts in Car Mechanic Simulator 2018, and even to the rhythmic, weirdly cyberpunk otherness of casting lines and gutting trout in Fishing: Barents Sea.

I’d had gentle hope that Bus Simulator 2018 might similarly be more than the sum of its dry, mass transit parts, but actually playing the thing reveals a game working overtime to be charming. This is a bus-driving game that is absolutely delighted to be a bus-driving game, and wants me to feel the same way. And y’know what? I think I do. And it’s all thanks to Mira Tannhauser, the world’s number one fan of being on a bus.
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