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Feature: Spreading the concept of love
Okay, so technically it wasn't until 2012 that PC players got to skate, tag and grind for themselves, but June 29th marked the 20th anniversary of the original release of Jet Set Radio (or Jet Grind Radio, as it was known Stateside at the time). An anti-establishment skating action game with a killer soundtrack, Jet Set Radio was the hippest thing ever to burst onto…
Feature: From the ground up
Interview: the art and inspiration of Paralives, the indie game set to take on The Sims
If you're a fan of The Sims 4, or you know someone who is, or even if you just follow people who occasionally retweet simsposting into your timeline, you've probably seen something about Paralives by now. It's... a life simulator? A Sims-like? (I know The Sims can't be the only game of its type, but it's dominated the market for so long that the only…
Feature: When life gives you no dragons, make a dragon
Modders are making ambitious things in Bannerlord, even without modding tools
Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord has only been around for a few months, but that’s plenty of time for modders to have a good tinker. We’ve already been blessed with a bounty of minor Bannerlord mods: there are hundreds of ways to tweak, alter and optimise your experience, and the option to turn your character into a sword-swinging, death-dealing toddler is not to be sniffed…
Feature: Where the wild things are
Biomutant sounds like Zelda: Breath of the Wild, but furrier
The Biomutant reveal feels like a lifetime ago. Announced at Gamescom in 2017, the kung fu... cat/panda/bear-thing captured the imagination of everyone with that first trailer. And, despite some delays, the excitement for Experiment 101's open world RPG has been growing ever since. No wonder, I suppose. You are a kung fu cat/panda/bear-thing, after all.
Feature: Listen and learn
How Supergiant Games made the hack’n’slash accessible with Hades
Hades is a roguelike dungeon crawler that sees you fight your way through ever shifting levels of the underworld, from wispy shades of the undead to foes of Greek legend, on frantic battlegrounds that can send you to your death in an instant. As a disabled player, oftentimes I don’t have access to kinds of games like Hades. I have a connective tissue disorder that…
Feature: Train in vain
Monster Train is a game about chuffing through the hills and vales of Hell while mincing up angels with your demonic fiends, angry plants and waxen gentry folk. As Matt has declared, it’s extremely good, and one of the things that I love about it is the way it escalates. That train ride you’re on is a wild, careening one into multiplying attack and defence.The…
Feature: Serfing the web
Inside the wars, triumphs and petty theft of hardcore Bannerlord roleplayers
Much like every other person with a Steam account and a penchant for penetrating plate armour with pikes and pillaging poor pig farmers, I’ve spent a good portion of the last few weeks with mammoth medieval moshpitter Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord. I’ve besieged castles, sired heirs, and sniped horses. But recently, I’ve been wanting a bit more from the experience. Enraptured by the possibility…
Feature: Longing for answers
The real beauty of secrets in games like The Longing is to share them
Popularity poses an interesting dilemma for any piece of media, but especially for those that thrive on their secrets. Attention is the held-breath hope of most aspiring indie developers, but a large enough community will excitedly share guides, forum posts and screenshots that illuminate every last hidden corner of a game. That might well be antithetical to the intended player experience, or an artist’s ultimate…
Feature: First person shooter
How esports photographers are using in-game capture in place of live events
This year was supposed to be the Overwatch League’s big leap into local homesteads, and while no one was quite clear how well it would work, they certainly weren’t expecting a global pandemic to move the whole thing back online again. It hasn’t all been smooth sailing, but they’ve mostly managed to pull it off. In certain spots, the challenge has actually pushed some fun…
Feature: Return of the king?
Having imprisoned you in his dungeon in the bowels of Mount Olympus, Emesdos, the Greek god of computer gaming, asks his customary question. You ponder for a few seconds, more out of seemliness than necessity, before responding with an unequivocal “MicroProse!”. If you have to spend Eternity playing the oeuvre of just one developer/publisher, then obviously that oeuvre has to be the one that includes…
Feature: "Storytelling in a BR game is kind of our thing."
Respawn on storytelling, lore, and Season 11 of Apex Legends
Online multiplayer games aren't usually designed to tell stories. For the most part, they're built around their competitive nature, with titbits of lore to help establish a unique world for players to get invested in. However, the line between these online games and more story driven experiences is starting to blur, as games like Apex Legends begin to throw more narrative into the mix. Storytelling…
Feature: A life aloft
Near the top of my ‘Things to do when lockdown ends’ list is ‘Visit my local public library’. Obviously I'm missing its extensive history and transport sections, and the profound feeling of well-being that comes from being surrounded by the printed word, but there are other draws too. You can meet very interesting people in libraries. People like John Williams.I struck up a conversation with…
Feature: Michael Collins? In The Hound Pits?
Arkane’s Harvey Smith on why the pub in Dishonored is a perfect rebel base
Dunwall is renowned for its striking dystopian aesthetic, blending blinding walls of light with spindly steampunk stilt walkers. But the most memorable part of gorgeous action-assassin hit Dishonored has, for me, always been the boozer where you hang out with your pals between missions: The Hound Pits. It’s a lovely looking pub, for sure. But coming from Dublin, where subversive relics of independence like The…
Feature: It still beats Zoom.
People are using Red Dead Redemption 2 to hold conference calls
"Found my own body floating down the river today. Didn't recognise myself for ages." This may sound like the start of a magical realist detective story, rather than something you'd say in a meeting with colleagues. But in Red Dead Redemption 2, which is rapidly emerging as an unlikely competitor to Zoom and Skype in the world of conference calling, this is business as usual.…
Feature: Nuclear summer
When Bethesda Game Studios decided to bring human NPCs into their post-apocalyptic MMORPG Fallout 76, they wrestled with a kind of temporal dissonance. The new arrivals were a reflection of the year or so of real time that players had spent making West Virginia more habitable. Yet those first quests still remain, locked in their original time period.Night turns to day in Fallout 76, the…
Feature: See through the dimensions
Ori And The Will Of The Wisps feels so good to play. The fluidity of Ori’s movement; his quickness and agility; the sense of his weight and presence in the world – he’s a product of both traditional animation and leading graphics technology which developer Moon Studios has built up over years to make a sequel that surpasses the already beautiful Ori And The Blind…
Feature: License to illager
Hands-on preview: Minecraft Dungeons is an unexpected treasure
When Minecraft Dungeons was first announced, I thought it was a bit of an odd call. Dungeon crawlers are popular, and Minecraft is popular, but… a Minecraft dungeon crawler? Surely, I figured, a switch to isometric dungeoneering would lose all of Minecraft’s creative, construction-toy charm in translation, and I just couldn’t see Minecraft’s gently strange, cuboid world as an intuitive setting for a Diablolike lootstabber.…
Feature: The food of love and/or content strikes
Game composers and YouTubers are in a murky battle for copyright control
Every time I sit down to write, the first thing I do isn’t open up a blank document, it’s find some nice video game music to listen to. And loads of it can be found free on YouTube. Ambient music from Skyrim, relaxing compilations from Animal Crossing, lo-fi Legend of Zelda remixes Sometimes, work or study just can’t get done without my 10-hour loop of…
Feature: Modern world
The modders creating accessibility modes for notoriously difficult games
Whether or not famously difficult games should have an optional easy mode has long been a point of contention. But many already do, albeit unofficially, thanks to modders taking things into their own hands. Take the fella who goes by "n00bplatformer", for example. He recently created an “Assist Mode” for run 'n’ gun action game Cuphead. It makes simple tweaks to some of the game’s…
Feature: What it means for Half-Life 3 and where VR goes from here
We talk Half-Life: Alyx with Valve in “the meanest interview ever”
It's taken 13 years, but we finally have a new Half-Life game. It may not be the long-awaited Half-Life 3, but as you've probably seen from our Half-Life: Alyx review, Valve's first foray into virtual reality shows they're a developer that are still very much at the top of their game. But Half-Life: Alyx isn't just the work of a talented team of developers. It's…
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