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Feature: Can I speak to your manager?
I'm all in favour of as many A Normal Lost Phone/Orwell-like games as people can make. A fake phone or desktop, in which a story plays out via the mundane apps we are used to using every day. But, they do tend to miss more often than they hit. Tech Support really needs some.
Tech Support: Error Unknown lets you ask people to turn it off then on again
What if tech support helpline jobs weren't a crushingly unhappy grind for poor pay but a gateway to a world of intrigue? You can catch a glimpse of that in the Tech Support: Error Unknown free demo released today. It's one of those games where your whole view is presented as a computer desktop--Uplikes, as the genre is known far and wide in honour of…
Feature: Trip Advisor
Rats cut my first stellar trip short. On nautical voyages, they used to spread disease and eat supplies that were needed for the long, long journey. Up here, in space, they are a pain in the arse for very different, but even more troublesome, reasons. The rats have forged an empire, you see; an empire built on strict hierarchies, xenophobia and robbing travellers. They also…
Pax Nova takes on multiple layers of future 4X strategy soon
The sheer audacity of Greywolf's Pax Nova is impressive - not content with tackling Civilization-scale 4X strategy as shown above, it stretches out to spacefaring scale as well. Just announced and looking like a hybrid of several major 4X strategy games smushed into a shared hex-and-turn-based format, Pax Nova enters early access "soon" and is to be published by Iceberg Interactive. You can check out…
FTL-like Shortest Trip To Earth makes the shorter hop to early access
The latest in a seemingly new-found genre of space-disaster management sims, Interactive Fate's Shortest Trip To Earth is available now in early access. Alice Bell fell into its gravitational field last month at Gamescom and came away with some pleasant things to say, claiming it went well beyond FTL's simple template to offer "a rich tapestry of exploration and survival". Interactive Fate's crew previously worked…
Feature: In space, no one can hear you dream
At Gamescom I had a (hands off but up close and personal) preview of Shortest Trip to Earth, a roguelike space survival game that is due to go into Steam early access later this year. The team lead, Edvin Aedma, who also wrote RPS favourite Teleglitch, played, whilst I watched and made demands about what our crew should do next. I wondered why I couldn't…
Human civilisation has been in the slow lane since prehistoric times, when Sir Isaac Newton created gravity and suddenly we needed wheels to push around anything (e.g. potatoes, geese, other people, parts to create more wheels). But racing games like Wipeout offer hope of a future where we might perhaps close Newton's Pandora's Box, rid ourselves of gravity, and zoom around mega-fast and upside-down as…
Feature: Dead space
Every week, Rob Zacny heads into the uncharted systems of Early Access in search of new cargo to bring back to the mothership. This week, Starpoint Gemini Warlords [official site]. Starpoint Gemini Warlords is admirably straightforward in its Steam Early Access statement, warning-off potential buyers with an upfront admission that the game is currently an early alpha with only the most basic systems implemented. The…
Inside My Radio [official site] is a platforming game with a rhythm action beat. Levels are made up of the usual hazards you'd expect while running and jumping from left to right, but all of your movements must be performed in time to the music that runs alongside each level. We've written about it before, and the video below isn't new, but Iceberg Interactive have…
This is the year in which I finally fulfilled my childhood dream by becoming an interest following a man who lives on a space station on Twitter. You might think that would be enough hot space action to satisfy my stellar carvings but you'd be wrong. I've got a hankering for space dust that'd make George Jung's eyes as big as saucers. Thank the lord…
I've been away, gallivanting over vales and hills, and living the life of a rugged outdoorsman. Every day, I punched trees to collect firewood and caught fresh fish by sitting beside a babbling brook and engaging in a QTE-based minigame. A sequence of fifteen or higher bagged a sizeable trout, while a score of four or less meant I'd be chewing on a sticklebacks stickles…
"Human-like AI that doesn’t cheat and plays by the same rules as human players" shouldn't be a boast, surely. It should be a given. HAVE YOU LEARNED NOTHING, VIDEOGAMES? But still, this is one of the claims made by Arkavi / Iceberg's upcoming scifi 4X game Star Lords. That's a name which has me wishing for a turn-based Guardians of the Galaxy game, and probably…
The dark saga of unfinished Metroidvania scare-'em-up Dark Matter continues. When last we left our intrepid, um, not-really-a-hero-at-all, it had tossed up a "To Be Continued" screen and blamed the fickle whims of Kickstarter for its wet thud of an ending. However, publisher Iceberg Interactive replied to justifiable outrage by claiming that "a more conclusive and satisfying ending" is on the way. Even so, that…
Update: GOG are offering refunds to anyone who bought the game before 21 October 2013 at 15:00 GMT and it is no longer available through Steam due to "a known issue at the end of the game". The release of Dark Matter might have taken longer to register on my radar if pockets of the internet hadn't become enraged about the game's abrupt ending over…
Adam had a play of Dark Matter back in July, and found himself rather taken with it. At the time it was Kickstartering itself, asking for £50,000. It fell dramatically short of that goal, but since then a publishing deal with Iceberg Interactive seems to have got things finished for Dutch devs, InterWave Studios. The Metroid-meets-horror side-scroller is due out on Steam in the next…
As we cast our ever-vigilant gaze to the starboard bow, we raise a brow to the sight of Starpoint Gemini 2 gently docking with Steam Early Access, a wild frontier station. We haven't heard from the space sim/RPG since 2011, when it first appeared, causing Jim to express conflicted thoughts (interesting, but not necessarily enjoyable or robust). The game is now in full 3d and…
CryEngine tech demos make me want to go on holiday. Beautiful, lovingly crafted locations deserve to be explored with a cocktail in one hand and a camera in the other. To those who were annoyed when alien-mutant-monsters showed up in Far Cry, I say that you should have been annoyed when men with guns showed up. They ruined the laidback adventure of a lifetime. The…
When I see the initials "DLC" not preceded by the word "free" it always makes me wimper a little and remember the effort that once went into expansion packs. Fortunately the generous folks behind Starpoint Gemini have remembered the correct prefix for their freshly announced new content for the space tactic-em-up, called Gladiators.
In some ways it's a bit silly to wait over three months after your game's come out to release a demo. In other ways, it's quite effective. Legendary PC gaming site Rock, Paper, Shotgun mentions your game again, bringing its trillions of readers to your site. Then you become rich, build a rocket, and retire on the Sun. It's the way of things. And so…
