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Much as my girlfriend adores Stardew Valley, its gentle pace is a little soporific sometimes. Atomicrops, on the other hand, appears to be the game's jittery, over-caffeinated cousin, blending Harvest Moon-esque farming and romance with twin-stick shooter combat and a colourful post-apocalyptic setting. Bird Bath Games's vision of the end of the world is perhaps a little more Adventure Time than Fallout, but I reckon…
Feature: Per aspera ad astra
Talking about a game’s influences is always a tricky business. Sure, developers love to give long talks about the artists they admire. About their inspirations, the concepts they remixed, the idols they wish to surpass. But there’s a difference between the influences they are trying to evoke consciously, and the many-finned chimeras swimming just under the surface of consciousness. Take Sable, for example. When the…
Feature: Live free, pike hard
“The units should feel like humans,” says Oskar Stålberg, co-creator of Bad North, a strategy game about little soldiers defending their islands against bad Vikings. “They’re quite stylised; they don’t have faces and barely have arms, but they should feel human in their behaviour and what they’re capable of doing. They should feel fragile and it should look like fighting is a courageous effort.” You…
Feature: Morally ambiguous west
Bad North is the first game for a long while that has stirred in me a terrible desire to have it in physical toy form. I would, I think, love nothing more right now than to have a tiny island on my desk, with tiny squads of soldiers and tiny corpses of my enemies on the shore, near where they had beached their tiny boats.…
Slimline side-scrolling strategy series Kingdom will continue with couch co-op in Kingdom Two Crowns on December 11th, publishers Raw Fury have announced. I've quite enjoyed the Kingdom games but always bailed when it got frustrating towards the end, so it might be nice to have a pal by my side spurring me on. Two Crowns will also jaunt off to a second land, a kingdom…
Feature: Tactics and hacked bits
I’m not sure if Bad North is a strategy game for the inept or the lazy. It does a lot that speaks to both: the islands you’re defending are small, you’ve only a few units to guide and those instructions don’t extend beyond ‘go there’ or ‘hide in that’. When they do get ‘there’ they auto-attack any marauders in reach and pursue the stragglers. It…
In a bygone age, I used to be a night-shift cabbie. Awful job, but I got to hear a lot of weird stories from drunk or otherwise intoxicated people, and the police even asked now and then if I'd heard anything about the occasional missing person. Never got to solve any murders, though. It's not surprising that upcoming noir mystery Night Call resonates with me,…
Sable makes a strong case for being the prettiest game of E3
I don't really know what Sable is going to involve. I'm not sure I much care, so long as it looks and sounds like this.
Feature: Into The Breach's real-time cousin
Into the Breach is one of the most perfect games I’ve ever played. It’s tactical warfare with every sliver of fat trimmed away and I’d put it up there with Chess and Invisible, Inc. in the pantheon of turn-based games. Bad North will not be entering that pantheon. Not because it doesn’t seem capable of reaching lofty heights – it absolutely does – but because…
Here's one that nearly flew under my radar: Teensy tiny Brazilian studio Long Hat House have been working on Dandara for a few years now. Envisioned as a platformer that can be played equally well on touch-screens and gamepad (although probably not so hot on keyboard), a look at the launch trailer within should be enough to convince most that they've at least created something…
Your island is under attack! That's always cause for concern, I guess, but this island is definitely worth holding on to because it's the prettiest island you're ever going to own. And Bad North is one of the prettiest isometric games I've ever seen. That's almost certainly because of Oskar Stålberg's involvement. We've covered his beautiful planet and building generators before, and I'm delighted to…
Earlier this year, Knytt creator Nifflas and chums released Uurnog, a puzzle-platformer about stealing animals to use them as power-ups, which also rocked neat-o algorithmic dynamic music. It was one of those there 'Humble Originals', smaller games commissioned by Humble for their subscription service and store. Now the devs are revisiting and expanding Uurnog, adding features like cooperative play and a level editor, for a…
The Last Night gets new trailer and the creator apologises for old tweets
The Last Night [official site] was revealed at Microsoft's conference yesterday. It looked great, but that first trailer was focused on showing how the game's world looked more than how it played. Now there's a second "gameplay" trailer of sorts which... Mostly focuses on how the world looks, rather than how it plays. It is longer however, and it does give a better sense of…
When I wrote about The Last Night, an entrant to the cyberpunk game jam in 2014, I said that "I badly want a whole game set in this universe." Well, here it is. The Last Night [official site] was revealed via a trailer during last night's Microsoft E3 conference, and the other things I said about the jam game are true, too: it still looks…
Feature: So many fucks given
Tormentor X Punisher [official site] is projected onto a wall in a dark space in San Francisco and it fills the room with “fucks”. Some are triumphant (FUCK YEAH), some are awestruck (Fuuuuuuuuuuck) and some are short, sharp exclamations of frustration or despair (fuck). Some of these come from the person playing the game, some come from spectators, and there’s another variety that come from…
Feature: Lose your head
GoNNER [official site] is a mystery wrapped in an enigma, and both of those things have been neatly sliced and converted into a fabulous action-platformer sandwich. If you like games about jumping and shooting things, you couldn't really ask for more than a week that contains both GoNNER and Shadow Warrior 2. They're as different as two games about jumping and shooting could be, but…
Gonner [official site] - a side-scrolly playform shooter - took Adam's fancy at GDC. I don't say that lightly either. He proclaimed it "the best pure action game I saw at the show". In case it had tickled your fancy too, it now has a release date of 12 October
Kathy Rain [official site], a point-and-click adventure game about a journalism student in 1995 investigating her grandfather's mysterious death, launched today. John was pleased by the slice he played last month, and now it has a public demo so everyone can give it a go first. Here, look, the launch trailer explains more about the scrapes Kathy will get into after rolling back into her…
Feature: LOSING YOUR HEAD
They had to drag me away from Gonner [official site] in the end. Well, truth be told, they were far too polite to drag me away but they came close to turning out the lights. 'They' are two members of Art in Heart, creators of the game, and half of Raw Fury, a new publisher made up of industry veterans. I was playing the game…
Like an errant fairytale monarch, I neglected Kingdom [official site] when it came out late last year. I'd played it before release and am a great admirer of the minimalist approach to base-building and population management. It's an entire strategy game condensed into a tiny package, driven by a wonderfully elegant interface. At GDC I took a peek at the 1.20 update, which changes the…
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