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, putting you in the well-worn shoes of a Parisian taxi driver trying to solve a series of grisly murders through the surreptitious interrogation of your fares each night. People tell cabbies everything.
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 its own take on micro-tactics takes place in real-time. It’s a game of positional play, providing a handful of units and gorgeous, tiny, procedural islands to defend.
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 that looks very striking in motion.
You don’t have long to wait to try it yourself, if the video tickles your fancy. The PC version rolled out today, alongside a release on the Nintendo Switch.
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 see him working on a game that looks so immediately appealing. DEFEND THE ISLAND FROM THE VIKINGS, it tells me, and I am very happy to do that.
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 new release as Uurnog Uurnlimited [official site]. Have a peek: Read the rest of this entry »
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 how you move through the game’s stunning pixel art cyberpunk spaces. You can watch it below.
Perhaps more importantly though, the game’s appearance at the PC Gaming Show gave creative director Tim Soret the chance to address the anger attracted by some of his old tweets.
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 like pixle art Flashback crossed with Blade Runner.
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 the game itself. They are the snarling aggression of the marine character, as she tears through the hordes of hell.
“Let’s fucking do this!” she yells at the beginning of every round.
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 they’re both excellent.
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 hometown on her motorbike:
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 in a rented loft near the heart of GDC in San Francisco and I thought then – and maintain now – that it was the best pure action game I saw at the show.
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 way all of the games NPCs work, improving AI processing, and allowing them to run in the direction of urgent tasks or away from monsters. There are also new horses to ride, new discoveries to be made in the world and…some secret things I wouldn’t want to spoil. A beta version of the update is available now.
You may remember developer Ditto from the colourful exploration of Planeter (which unfortunately doesn’t seem to be available anymore) and the colourful murderplatforming of Hets. Now he’s back with a new studio, named Art in Heart, and a new load of colourful death. Gonner [official site] is a roguelikelike that wants to make you go “awww” from the cuteness and “ugh” from the difficulty. Often at the same time. Something like “uawwgh”.
*Clears throat, composes herself*
Please follow me past the break to see Ditto’s lovely art in action.
I played Kathy Rain at Gamescom and now that the first trailer is here, I’m eager to share my thoughts. If I hadn’t known it wasn’t a Wadjet Eye game, I would have thought it was a Wadjet Eye game. That’s the greatest compliment I can give to a point and click adventure in this day and age, and Kathy Rain’s grounded small town setting and strongly written protagonist are splendid. Set in 1995, it’s a mystery thriller that is intended to work as a homage to the Lucasarts games of the era, as well as mid-nineties music and television.
