I await Ice-Pick Lodge’s alternate-earth plague survival adventure Pathologic 2 with equal parts excitement and dread. The original, for all its technical (and translation-related) flaws was a systems-rich game where you juggled allegiances as much as personal stats and resources. In their latest development blog post, Ice-Pick Lodge detail some of the interesting new systems that you’ll have to worry about, on top of everything the cult favourite demanded of you.
RPS Feature Immersive whim
Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time.
Accidental death simulators are wonderful. In Streets of Rogue, you can slip on a banana peel and set off a land mine. You can hack a computer and get caught by a policeman, who’ll cave your head in. You can set a bunch of stuff on fire but then run into the fire and die in the fire because it is a fire why did you run into that? Read the rest of this entry »
It’s been a good long while since Ice-Pick Lodge turned to Kickstarter to fund a remake of Pathologic, their award-winning survival adventure, but it seems that 2017 has been a busy year for the studio. It’s now being developed under the title of Pathologic 2 and the developers have opened their doors to give us one last peek at the game before the year’s end.
I consider myself lucky to have the normal, not-terrifying sort of neighbours. I’ve never had to entertain thoughts of what that almost-but-not-quite screaming noise was at night, or wonder what they needed an industrial pressure-washer for. And I’m sure the local rumors are exaggerated. They have to be, right?
Fortunately for me, then, that I can vicariously enjoy those unsettling thoughts through videogames. Upcoming stealth-horror game Hello Neighbor is ready for one more round in the limelight thanks to a spooky new trailer after the jump, and a few announcements from creators Dynamic Pixels.
2015’s Party Hard was a decent little distraction, and the ultimate excuse to crank up Andrew W.K’s Ready to Die to obnoxious levels. A light, stealthy-puzzle game where you play as a disgruntled serial killer trying to very permanently break up overly loud parties that have been interrupting your sleep. So it only stands to reason that the second game in the series is a tycoon-style party management sim.
Wait, what?
Strange as it sounds, Party Hard Tycoon is real and out now, albeit in Early Access form. Hit the jump for an enthusiastically lurid trailer.
Ice Pick Lodge’s remake of Pathologic, their wonderfully unpleasant 2005 horror, has picked up a publisher and a confusing new name. The crowdfunded full remake is now named Pathologic 2 [official site], though it definitely is not a sequel. New publishers Tinybuild say that the name is, somehow, “to avoid confusion”. Right-o. Accompanying today’s weird news is a gameplay vidblast showing sickness, autopsy, and purification in the diseased and dying town. Observe: Read the rest of this entry »
Hello Neighbor [official site] casts you into the role of home invader, as you go breaking and entering into the house of the man who lives across the street. Only, the man is prepared: he’ll lay traps around the house in wait, and will prowl the corridors looking for you while you hide in his cupboards. Think of him as the alien in Alien: Isolation, and you as a particularly brave robber.
We’ve got twenty copies to giveaway, which you can have a chance at nabbing below.
The Final Station [official site] is a game about a train choo-chooing through a post-apocalyptic world, gathering survivors along the way. Split into two sections – on-train management and off-train exploration and baddy-biffing – it’s a side-scrolling survival action game that our Graham found just about pleasant enough. Tomorrow sees the release of a DLC pack called The Only Traitor, which ditches the train in favour of a car. How much that’ll actually change the systems, I don’t know, but it all looks quite familiar.
“Top-down puncher Hotline Miami had brutality and baseball bats, but you know what it didn’t have? Teleportation.”
↑ That is how I imagine most videogames are created. Just one man in a tie who is approached by developers like an oracle and who says: “do X but with Y.” Mr Shifty [official site] is about smashing through crowds of people while using a blink-like teleporting skill to dodge bullets and blows. It’s out today and, like its masked mate from the 80s, it’s all viewed from above. It looks hectic, but you can see that for yourself in the trailer below.
Read the rest of this entry »
RPS Feature "I never asked for this"
Every week we send Brendan out to the slums of early access to see what goodies he can find in the rubbish bins. This time, the absurd chaos of Streets of Rogue [official site].
“You better pay this back,” said the bartender as I took the money from him. I left the bar in silence and went looking for some cocaine. It’s not often you get to play as an investment banker in a roguelike, and I am enjoying it. This one has the special ability to convince shopkeepers and bartenders to lend him money. I made great use of this skill in every bar or shop I came across. “You better pay this back,” each of my “investors” said to me. A couple of levels later, I was suffering withdrawal and trying to find a drug dealer for my fix when a gang of ninjas came out of nowhere and tried to assassinate me for being so deep in debt. “Phew,” I thought as I escaped their attacks and rounded a corner. Then I ran into the killer robot. He was also hunting me, and I’ll say this for him: he has much better aim. Read the rest of this entry »
If you fancy freeing a gorilla to murder some scientists so you can use their cloning machine to create a gang to do in a bartender, you might fancy a crack at Streets of Rogue [official site], which is free to try this weekend. Ignore the name: Streets of Rogue is not a beat ’em up, it is a curious emergent sandbox roguelikelike inspired loosely by games including The Binding of Isaac and Deus Ex. I’ve run through a few missions myself and yeah, even in its early access state it’s an interesting one to prod. Read the rest of this entry »
Dust off your microphone, squeeze into your gold lamé hotpants, toss your best frock over the top, turn your cap backwards, strap on your nail-spiked gauntlets (careful now!), and put your hood up, as Stage Presence [official site] has been released. Again. To refresh your memory, Stage Presence is a game where, following a catastrophic equipment failure at a gig, we’re given the microphone to entertain the crowd by singing, showing off, and generally Bezzing. They may not be forgiving. After a prototype release in 2015, Sea Green Games teamed up with publishers Tinybuild to expand it and ta-da! here we are now. Entertain us. Read the rest of this entry »
RPS Feature What's he building in there?
You can play Hello Neighbor [official site] right now, for free, and I strongly suggest that you do. Not because of any great qualities in the design, but rather because some of my favourite things about it might get ‘fixed’. I’m thinking of the time the chase music began while I was in my own home and the neighbour’s face pressed against the window suddenly as he tried to run through it to murderise me. Or the time when I hid in a wardrobe and tried to lean so that I could peek through a crack in the door only to find myself leaking slowly through that crack and directly into the neighbour’s line of sight.
Good times.
Leaping across the backs of a convoy of trucks as they crash, flip, jack-knife, and explode sounds a right lark. That’s Clustertruck [official site], a timetrialling first-person platformer which launched today. Correction: that’s the early levels of Clustertruck. Then it’ll introduce static obstacles, then swinging hammers, lasers, plummeting… it gets messy. Look, I need to finish this news post before I’m allowed to clock off for the day and play Clustertruck myself, so let’s crack on with it, shall we?
RPS Feature How I learned to stop worrying and tolerate the job
I’m out of my mind. I ate a creepy eyeball and got a new perspective on life. A woozy, trippy, ever-so-slightly nightmarish first-person perspective, instead of a cutesy, plinky-plonky third-person one. My ongoing quest to rid the off-world streets of garbage was replaced by a desperate drive to find anywhere even slightly familiar, and from there orientate myself back to my shabby studio apartment and sleep off the bad trip.
Never again, I swear. Of course, it’s not long before I’m poised to pop another eye into my mouth. Beats street-cleaning, right?
Clustertruck is a first-person platformer about leaping across the backs of a convoy of perpetually-crashing trucks while dodging traps, and yet we’ve not posted about it before? That doesn’t seem right. Maybe someone forget to tag the post properly. And mention the game’s name. And say anything about trucks. Or the post must have said something so libellous that we agreed not only to delete it but submit to mind-wipes. I’m not sure how else to explain us missing such joyous mayhem. Come look at this:
Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor [official site] made Alice swoon at the idea of cleaning up rubbish in a colourful and bustling spaceport. That’s probably because it looks like a brighter and happier Bernband. Well, good news for Alice and anyone else in love with the creator’s gifs – it’s coming out next week. Come see what if looks like in motion.
“I played it very briefly and made a bunch of idiots kill one another by dropping rage poison into the ventilation system outside their hideout,” Adam tells me about the free alpha for Streets of Rogue [official site]. It’s almost enough to make me stop grumbling that Streets of Rogue isn’t a roguelikelike beat ’em up. Instead, it’s some sort of stealth-o-action top-down 2D game with all manner of opportunities for immersive sim antics. Oh fine, that does sound interesting – but it better have neon punks and hot grooves.
RPS Feature A low-budget scifi horror flick.
I hate ladders, ladders are my enemy. The world is coming to an end; I am driving a temperamental train to one forsaken town after another; I am rescuing survivors and then mopping up their remains when they expire in my carriage; and I am hunting for the tools to advance amid derelict buildings full of zombie-like silhouette monsters. But it’s the ladders in The Final Station that provide the largest obstacle.
The Final Station [official site] is preparing for its maiden voyage on August 30. You’re the conductor of one of the last running trains after a zombie outbreak has ravaged the earth. Players chug through the wasted landscape, pistol in tow, collecting supplies and survivors, while making sure the undead don’t find a way to snack on your face in the process.
