Not long now until you get to sit in the cockpit of your own floating Cold War submarine-inspired spaceship, because Objects in Space [official site] is coming out early next year. Before now it didn’t have a publisher, but 505 Games have decided to bite.

If you haven’t heard about it before, it’s an open-world “stealth-action” space game that thinks the ships in other space trading games are too fast and nippy. They should instead be big, bulky, and look like they’ve come straight out of the ’70s. So, you sit behind a retro cockpit, try and stay off other ships’ radars by hiding in asteroid belts and, if combat can’t be avoided, take them out from long distance.

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A cursory glance at the newly announced Quarantine [official site] could easily lead you to say something like “oh, it looks like Plague Inc but from the human’s side”. But you are not thinking hard enough, cursory glancer. As board game aficionados will tell you, Quarantine looks a lot more like a single-player version of the much-loved Pandemic.
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David Lynch-inspired, small town whodunnit Virginia [official site] is gearing up for its launch next week and has released a new character trailer in preparation. We get a closer look at the game’s protagonist, Anne Tarver.

She’s an FBI agent, fresh on the scene after graduation. She drives around Virginia with her partner, Maria Halperin, as they try to solve the case of a missing boy. She has a very official looking badge. She can drive. There is a large telescope. Okay, so the trailer doesn’t actually tell us that much about the character, but the game sure looks pretty.

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Right, I’m going to level with you: I’m really behind on Virginia [official site] news because I want to go into it as fresh as is feasible while retaining my job on this PC gaming website. Single-player mystery thrillers involving FBI agents are very much my area of interest and I do prefer mysteries where I know very little about them going in.

With that in mind, I’m watching this cinematic trailer for Virginia, but I’m doing the kind of watching where I’m deliberately not paying attention, I’m just trying to ensure it’s definitely a trailer and there’s definitely a game and no-one’s accidentally left a bunch of porn halfway through or something:

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It’s been ages since we last visited the Twin Peaks-inspired-ish first-person vignette ’em up Virginia [official site] but whoa hey hello, here’s a release date and a demo out of nowhere. The demo is about twenty minutes long, offering a taste of life as a ’90s FBI agent investigating a missing child in a small town and answering basic questions like “Okay but what is it and what do I do?” That is now answered for me and so I’m quite looking forward to its full launch on September 22nd.

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Last year, Overkill Games upset a pretty vocal corner of their Payday 2 [official site] community by introducing microtransactions to the co-op heist ’em up – something they’d previously promised to avoid. In an announcement made yesterday, Starbreeze – Overkill’s parent company – revealed they’ve now acquired full rights to the Payday franchise and as such will scrap paid-for in-game items via the next update. Oh, and Payday 3’s been confirmed.

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Payday 2 [official site] studio, Overkill, have announced that they’re going to be putting out updates and supporting the game for another two years thanks to a new deal with publisher 505.

The devs certainly seem excited about the news (“We love working on Payday 2 and look forward taking care of our game for two more years, making new free updates, paid DLCs and awesome campaigns together with the community”) but I decided to ask Alice as she’s someone here who actually plays it.

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We gushed a little about Abzû in our E3 chat yesterday but in our fawning, er, hadn’t actually got around to posting about it yet. (The same thing happened with Cuphead.) That may because we don’t much at all about it, other than it’s a gorgeous undersea game and that developers Giant Squid are lead by Matt Nava, who was previously art director of thatgamecompany’s acclaimed console wander ’em ups Journey and Flower. It’s not much to go on, but certainly is enough to pique my interest and fill our heads with fanciful dreams.

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This might be a first. 505 Games have announced the cancellation of Ashes Cricket 2013 after it’s been released.

The game, a terrible mess that certainly doesn’t function as a cricket simulation, was briefly on sale via Steam, before mysteriously vanishing. We contacted Steam and publishers 505 Games to find out why at the time, but no one seemed to know. And now we do. They’re just giving up. And blaming it on the developers, Trickstar Games. This is extraordinary.

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The sorry saga of 505 Games’ Ashes Cricket 2013 continues apace. Beginning with one of the dumbest trailers in gaming history, it was supposed to appear in June this year. You know, in time for the Ashes. It didn’t make it, except they got lucky. For reasons my brain cannot work up the energy to care about, rather than the usual two year gap between the Australia Vs England bat-to-ball grudge series, they’ve started another one already, just a few months later. A fortuitous one-off anomaly allowing the game to slip five months and not suddenly be enormously out of date. So now, in time for the latest Ashes, it’s been released on PC alone. Except, it’s all going a bit wrong. Just a few days later it’s been mysteriously pulled from Steam, the Facebook page has vanished, and there are lots of rather cross customers. And an increasing number of excellent videos.

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It is the future, the year 2013. As technology adapts to the very specific needs of the human race, we are presented with a series of precise options: which exact flavour of survival game do you need to satisfy your apocalyptic escapism? In the case of How To Survive it’s an action RPGish thing, with you beating your way across an island full of the formerly-dead. Take a look at the latest trailer – premised on the rules needed to survive this trouble – below.
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I’m not sure if any of the RPS crew have played Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons yet, but it’s out today and sounds like it’d be the ideal interactive experience for at least a couple of us. It’s a character-driven, single player co-op game, and I’m not sure what either of those things mean. ‘Character-driven’ because it’s about the brothers and their encounters with other people, creating moments of what I believe Professor Henry Playful would describe as ludonarrative resonance. We hear about the dissonance much more often, but occasionally these things called game do resonate along just the right axis. The ‘single player co-op’ part describes the mode of interaction – two characters, one controller. It’ll be interesting to see how it works with the more usual PC paraphernalia. From what I can gather, the joypad controls are a pleasure to use. Trailer below.

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