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Feature: Choose your own adventure
Metro Exodus wants you to feel liberated from all those trips through the tunnels
It’s deathly quiet in the forest. Then the silence gives way to a man shouting for help. He's tied to a post and trying to fend off a ravenous wolf. A single crossbow bolt takes the feral creature out. The shirtless man pleads for my help to free him, cussing as he explains his predicament. I choose to cut him loose. “I owe you my…
Feature: Faster than the speed of friendship
I'm no Sonichead, but I still got a kick out of Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed. Instead of making you turn into planes and boats, Sumo Digital's new upcoming kart racer makes you turn to your friends. You race as a team of three, passing power-ups between you while boosting behind each other's bottoms. I sat down with Team Sonic Racing design director Derek Littlewood…
Feature: "I’m never worried"
Call Of Duty: Black Ops 4 devs on balancing Blackout battle royale mode
There's a new Call Of Duty around the corner. Call Of Duty: Black Ops 4 is out on October 12th, so I sat down with Treyarch's studio design director David Vonderhaar and Jason "Director of Zombies" Blundell to quiz them about the game's new battle royale mode, Blackout, why they've left regenerating health behind, and how they handled no longer making a singleplayer campaign mode.
Feature: Leave those kids alone
The Book Ritual is a game about shredding a book, made by someone I was at school with
At EGX this year, I went in the Leftfield Collection and I saw a shredder. A paper shredder with a face, and a big pile of books next to it. And a big pile of shredded books underneath it, too. So I ambled over, eager to destroy some literature. It was, it turned out, The Book Ritual, currently free on Itch. The Book Ritual is…
Feature: My favourite is Clomper
Chickadingding, Fleeble, Gullysplot, Plob. “Why, the good people of Rock Paper Shotgun have finally lost it!” you might cry. But these nonsense words are poised to become household names. They’re the names of a selection of Ooblets, the titular cutesie creatures of Glumberland’s upcoming town life indie game. If you’ve seen any of the grassroots marketing behind Ooblets, you already have an idea of the…
Feature: Scary as folk
The rural idyll has a strange pull on us. Picture a green and pleasant land: white sheep dot rolling hills like puffs from a steam train. Children with flowers in their hair dance round coloured maypoles. All the while, in a white marquee, where bunting flaps in the breeze, oversized ribbons are being awarded for best sponge cake. Dig deeper however and we discover old…
Feature: Wiping off some of the slime
Dragon Quest has a messy history outside of Japan, but Dragon Quest XI hopes to fix that
Dragon Quest is one of the prevent-the-apocalypse adventures that paved the way for the JRPG, and its huge success in Japan spawned many clones and competitors we love today. While some may consider Final Fantasy the breakout star of the genre, many look at Dragon Quest as the game that made RPGs possible back in the 1980s. Even with that level of impact and fame,…
Feature: Spawn in 60 seconds
Chances are you’ve caught wind of Minit between its initial release and the clamor for a Switch port. It’s a wee, wonderful, one-bit adventure where, thanks to a cursed blade, you die every 60 seconds. While it’s a romping hoot of a game, it also blatantly wastes your time. I mean that in a good way: Minit tosses away precious seconds with so many fun,…
Feature: Table of reds
Perhaps one of the most challenging things about Pool Panic is figuring out how to define it. “Do we put this in the sports sim category of Steam?” Mike Robinson pondered apprehensively. Angus Dick followed, exclaiming that “No-one’s really made a stupid game like this before.” He’s right; Pool Panic is a deeply unusual indie title, and it certainly earned its place in the EGX…
Feature: A ray of light for developers
Nvidia's new Turing RTX 2080 graphics cards have been the talk of this year's Gamescom for hardware nuts, and with good reason. While their jump in raw performance is still a little vague, at least in terms of RTX 2080 vs GTX 1080 speeds, the new techie bits they're ushering in such as Nvidia's fancy ray tracing light gubbins (which makes shadows and reflections look…
Feature: A dating sim that's also a convincing tabletop RPG
I had some regrets. I’d sabotaged my friend’s chances of dating a stoner ghost, relentlessly mocked another friend until they gave up on love entirely, and trashed the school. As Monster Prom built up to its titular, hormone-soaked event, I turned into a high school asshole. With a gentle touch, the not-really-a-dating-sim nudges you into these familiar roles, and by framing it as a multiplayer…
Feature: Off the beaten track
“I learned to love getting lost. You can get pleasantly lost when you don't know where you are but you know you'll find your way if you just keep going. That's the feeling I wanted to create in a game.” This is Stu Maxwell’s philosophy behind his debut game Shape of the World, a serene exploration game where the world’s lush, alien environment organically grows…
Feature: Bring me the horizon
Sable’s developers are trying to capture the spirit of discovery
Greg Kythreotis and Daniel Fineberg make up Shedworks, a game development studio with four years experience in the industry. They're both self-taught and, as the name suggests, they conduct their work out of Greg's parents’ shed in North London. At E3 this year, both Greg and Daniel took the stage to present their game during The PC Gaming Show. Unlike anything else seen at this…
Feature: About 24 fps
Explore the golden age of Hollywood romance in The Cinema Rosa
Josh Krook is a developer that finds himself frustrated with a lot of walking simulators today. Because, for all their narrative potential, he believes their ability to tell meaningful stories interactively so far still hasn’t been fully tapped into. His new game, The Cinema Rosa, is a first-person exploration game set in a movie theatre, representing his concerted one-man effort to do something about this.…
Feature: Fans of lots of text, rejoice!
Clear 100 hours in your calendar, ‘cos CRPGs are here to stay
In the mid-to-late 2000s, publishers abandoned the CRPG genre – an acronym describing the very specific genre of video games adapted from tabletop RPGs to be played on computers – which a decade earlier had been a cornerstone of PC gaming. They were more interested in accessible, console-friendly series like Mass Effect and The Elder Scrolls, and PC-centric RPGs all but died out. Then, around…
Feature: Systems are doin' it for themselves
The power fantasy of exploring new worlds or meeting strange alien races (and then shooting at both of those things) is the kind of thing that big-budget games tend to focus on. As far as humour is concerned, they’re at best ‘plus comedy’ experiences that deliver on their key points but also have some funny quips along the way. You’re never asked to participate in…
Feature: Scream if you wanna go faster
Four developers of scary games explain how to make scary games very scary indeed
The inspiration for Alien: Isolation came from a simple thought experiment: what if somebody let a lion loose in developer Creative Assembly’s office? “I’d get behind my desk and make sure it wouldn’t see me,” says the game’s creative director Alistair Hope. “Then, you’d need to get to the fire escape. Maybe I’d move desk to desk and distract it. If you are confronted by…
Feature: Cyberchat
A chat with CD Projekt Red about the romances, flying cars and hacking of Cyberpunk 2077
The demo for Cyberpunk 2077 shown to press at E3 was pretty neat. It displayed CD Projekt Red's upcoming first-person neo-noir RPG as a promising city of cybernetically enhanced mercenaries, dodgy information brokers, and corporate maniacs. Without a doubt, that demo will be shown to the rest of the public soon. For now, you can read my impressions or come with me right now, for…
Feature: Sim and wargaming wordage
The mighty Tirpitz spent most of her short life skulking in Norwegian fjords. Fuel shortages and Kriegsmarine caution meant she never braved the Denmark Strait or traded shells with a truly worthy opponent. To get a feel for what the Bismarck's sister ship might have achieved had she been employed more aggressively, you need a game like Command of the Sea.
Feature: "If players [want] better pacing control, it doesn't matter what our desires were"
BattleTech devs talk slowness, mods and what to expect from the next update
I've been on something of an emotional journey with Harebrained Schemes' turn-based mech combat game, BattleTech. I was turned off by its unusually slow animation speeds and drawn-out wars of attrition during my first dozen-odd hours of play, but a combination of speed-up mods and deepening understanding of rules the game itself did not take the time to explain saw me fall ever-deeper in love…
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