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Spooky co-op stealth 'em up The Blackout Club leaves early access on July 30th, after a short but busy run of updates. For those fashionably late (or just on time, really) to the party, it's a four-player (or five, with invasions) immersive sim about a band of teens investigating a very haunted town. Here, sleeping townsfolk rise with eyes still closed, don masks and perform…
If you go down to the woods today, there's a chance you'll be spied on by creepy teenagers. Co-op stealth horror game The Blackout Club now has a splash of asymmetric multiplayer, with an early access update adding an invasion system that lets one child turn stalker. The "Enter The Stalker" update tasks one invader with recording the meddling kids, until an invisible monster drags…
Feature: We can utilise a zeitgeist as well as anyone else
If you’ve choosed-and-adventured through Bandersnatch, the recent Black Mirror thing on Netflix, and aren’t already a fan of experimental interactive fiction: I envy you. It means you’re able to play actually good examples of interactive fiction for the first time. Sure, Bandersnatch has funny lines, surprises and scene stealing performances from Will Poulter doing a “pretty much exactly how I, the writer, talk in real…
Feature: Unless your friends are terrifying
I'm glad no one heard me whimpering on my first mission for The Blackout Club. I was by myself at this point, scurrying through an underground labyrinth full of sleepwalkers and foreboding. I tiptoed within inches of their sightless faces, all the while pursued by a being I could only see when I closed my eyes. Then my friends joined me, and most of that…
Plucky teens are out to spy on a mysterious cult of somnambulists beneath their town in The Blackout Club, a cooperative first-person sneaker which entered early access today. It's the second game from The Magic Circle developers Question, the studio co-founded by BioShock 2 creative director Jordan Thomas and Binfinite FX fella Stephen Alexander. Up to four players will sneak around town on missions to…
The immersive sim supergroup at Question, the studio behind The Magic Circle, have announced their next game. The Blackout Club is a cooperative multiplayer game starring teens who discover a secret nighttime society of sleepwalking adults meeting in tunnels beneath their small town, then set about spying on them, recording evidence, and trying to find their missing friend. It sounds like some sort of surveillance-focused…
Feature: Wheels within wheels
The Magic Circle [Steam page] is a game about an unfinished game. A first person puzzle/exploration/action game about a fictional game also called The Magic Circle, to be precise. After years of development hell, The Magic Circle's fans look upon it with a mixture of breathless anticipation and derision. Those few staff who still work on it either desperately want out or refuse to abandon…
Feature: Hole Kaboodle
Each week Marsh Davies plays unfinished and broken games on Early Access and usually tries to come up with an introductory sentence which says exactly this while using imagery appropriate to the idiom of the given week’s game. But the idiom of this week’s game is being an unfinished and broken game! So, job done. It’s The Magic Circle [Steam page], a game set within…
You can now buy and play Ion Storm and BioShock alumnus Jordan Thomas's emergent oddity The Magic Circle [The Magic Circle], but do be aware that it's not finished yet. No, I know that's the point of the game - that you roam around an unfinished vapourware game, rewriting it from the inside - but I mean it's really not finished. The Magic Circle arrived…
