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Feature: Spice kills - quit now
Star Traders: Frontiers is a huge stellar sandbox with an evolving galaxy that moves forward with or without you. It’s liberating, not being on the hook for every little problem. As a free-wheeling captain, you can ingratiate yourself with the most important galactic players, becoming embroiled in the highest level of politics, or you can just enjoy the life of a scoundrel, smuggling and stealing…
Feature: Possessing
Unavowed is unquestionably one of the most impressive point and click adventures made in many, many years. It's of a scale I wasn't at all expecting, with layer upon layer of complexity and variety in a way the genre has genuinely never seen before. It's also a darned fine yarn of demonic battling across the streets of New York, that tells its story in a…
Feature: Fast food
Co-op chef-‘em-up Overcooked 2, much like its predecessor, is less about cooking and more about chaos management. The sequel builds on the solid foundation of the first game, bringing in new recipes, hazardous levels, and online multiplayer for maximum pandemonium. Oh, and you can throw ingredients now, which can be incredibly slick if you sling them across the kitchen and directly into a pan, but…
Feature: What a handsome rogue
Dead Cells gets into your nervous system like a wonderful toxin. If it wasn’t so fast-paced, you could almost feel the electro-chemical effects pulsing through your body, from hand to eye to screen to brain, as your panicked flurry of knife strikes eviscerates another sewer worm. The game began as a “roguevania”, and it was strong even in its early days. But the final version…
Feature: Yakety yak, Heat attack.
Many games are defined by the amassing of wealth but few take such an unseemly, predatory relish in the idea as Yakuza 0. The first of Sega's Japanese crime epics to appear on PC, it's an orgy of late 80s materialism in which you don't merely earn cash by defeating opponents but punch it out of their bodies - banknotes blasting from collars and shirt…
Feature: I am a leaf on the wind
This odd little game has blown in out of nowhere for me. I'd not heard a single thing about it before playing but within minutes it had completely won me over. After a few hours I adored it. I've never played anything quite like Far: Lone Sails, and in this turbulent world of ours its meditative and gentle journey was exactly what I needed. And,…
Feature: Necronom nom nom
In my time with Cultist Simulator, I’ve browsed hidden book shops for arcane grimoires, sent loyal acolytes on doomed expeditions, and felled nosy investigators with poisoned tea. I’ve been reduced to begging in the street for opium money, and I’ve sacrificed followers with antique daggers in secret rites to restore my vitality. Weather Factory’s first outing is what I imagine playing solitaire with Necronomicon pages…
Feature: Blast from the past
Ion Maiden Preview Campaign is, without question, brilliant. A mad-speed Build engine project that feels like it was made by present-day time travellers who went back to 1996 to make a game. It's stupid and crass and loud and gory and everything else you could hope for. And this is just the two-mission mini campaign while they finish the full game.
Feature: A near-perfect turn-based sci-fi strategy game
Look not to what high-speed, turn-based, sci-fi strategy wonder Into The Breach shares with its timeless predecessor FTL: Faster Than Light, but instead to how aggressively different it is. Though they share a soul of permadeath and moment-to-moment dilemmas, entire limbs have been lopped off and casually thrown aside, teeth and hair uprooted and plugged back in at strange new angles, eyeballs moved to places…
Feature: Mountains of sadness
You're climbing a mountain. It's hard, especially when the wind is cutting through you like a knife and angry spikes are pulsing from the walls. Sometimes you're not even sure if the mountain is actually a metaphor for every difficult thing you've ever done in your life. That's how much trouble you're having getting to the peak. That is my brief summary of Celeste, a…
Feature: Making a splash
The best survival games are about conquering fear. Last year, when I first splashed about in Subnautica’s alien ocean, I was wary of leaving the shallow reef in which you first crash land. I eyed the hazy green water of the nearby kelp forests with fear, knowing it was full of Stalkers, an aggressive fish whose body is mostly one long croc-like jaw. Today, I…
Feature: Oh, the transhumanity
The Red Strings Club is a narrative driven adventure game that explores transhumanism, AI and morality against a cyberpunk backdrop. If you asked me to choose three things that I like to talk and think about, there’s a good chance I’d pick out those three - so Deconstruteam would have been hard pressed to not keep my attention even if they’d somehow failed to take…
Feature: The dog that finally gets its day
It's easy to mock Capcom's seemingly endless stream of reboots and re-releases, but if there's one game in the publisher's back catalogue that truly deserves to be reincarnated for the modern age, it's Clover Studio's Okami. While Clover itself has since faded into the mists of time (the remnants going on to form Bayonetta studio PlatinumGames), its ink-washed tale of Japanese sun gods and monstrous…
Feature: What's cup, doc?
Cuphead[official site] first appeared way back at E3 2014, where it wowed everyone with its gorgeous 1930s style cartoon aesthetic and promise of tough as nails platforming action. It finally came out last Friday and boy, does it deliver on that promise.
Feature: Divinest Divinity
We were supposed to be heroes. As you play through Divinity: Original Sin 2 [official site], your character and companions will be many things to many people: thieves, killers, saviours, fugitives, outcasts, demons, nightmares, lovers, traitors, jackasses, adventurers, pranksters and fools. But heroes? You can play through the entire game, multiple times, and never feel like much of a hero. There's just so much to…
Feature: Dead men tell some tales
In Observer [official site], AKA David Cronenberg's Bladerunner, Rutger Hauer is having a very bad day. It begins with a phone call, some family problems, and ends in blood and regret. Hauer lends his voice to the player character, who is the titular Observer, a special kind of cop who can jack into suspects' memories, hopes and fears as a means of interrogation. To do…
Feature: "Welcome to Darkside, Liz"
Officer Dooley is the best point and click character I've met in ages, and I say that having thoroughly enjoyed the company of Thimbleweed Park's misfits and misanthropes. Dooley is on a different level though. Maybe it's that he's unvoiced and yet so smartly written that I can hear his every word, or maybe it's that he's secretly the world's laziest anarchist trapped inside the…
Feature: Trailblazing
There are a lot of games that look like they might give me that Spelunky feeling but most of them just leave me feeling a little empty. Not Caveblazers [official site] though. Rupeck Games' debut captures the craft and chaotic delights of Spelunky better than anything I've played since Spelunky itself though and it has quickly become one of my favourite roguelike platformers.
Feature: FOB watch
Let's see if I can get through this without using the W word. Afghanistan 11 is a w****** (history-steeped military strategy game with influential terrain and plausible, reality-derived unit relationships) but it would be a tragedy if w******* (habitual users of history-steeped military strategy games with influential terrain and plausible, reality-derived unit relationships) were the only people who ever stumbled into its quicksand. The W…
Feature: Raven about it
The latest adventure from top producers Wadjet Eye, Shardlight [official site], is out today. When I played the first half or so earlier this year I was pretty taken with what was on offer. Does the post-apocalyptic tale of oligarchies, underground rebellions and deadly plagues manage to maintain momentum? Here's wot I think:
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