Now that the festival of bellowing that is E3 2018 has come to an end, we begin the arduous process of making sense of it all. This means sifting through mountains of press releases and trailers to find all the curious games that lurked outside the spotlight glare of the larger publishers. And we find such treats as Maneater (Jaws RPG where you play as Jaws), Rapture Rejects (battle royale where you fight for the last spot in heaven) and Neo Cab (Uber-sim meets Blade Runner). So many delightful things, in fact, that new video person Noa couldn’t resist gathering them together.
The existence of Unravel 2 was a pleasant surprise at an EA showcase depressingly short of them. Even better, you can play the game right now. Er, if you don’t mind using Origin. I adored Unravel’s physics-based platforming, even if the horned, red figure of Yarny himself is clearly demonic in nature. It’s those dead eyes. Brrr. Making the sequel twice as unsettling is the arrival of a second yarn monster, who adds a dose of co-op puzzling. I bet they team up for a dark ritual at some point, too. But not in the opening 18 minutes, which I present for you here in video form.
Remember the bit in Jurassic Park where John Hammond airlifts a live Ceratosaurus into the food court? No? That’s because it didn’t happen, which was a huge failing of imagination on Spielberg’s part. Hammond was all about show business, after all, and business doesn’t come showier than a dinosaur eating tourists as they exit a burger joint. Obviously, the makers of Jurassic World Evolution don’t encourage you to feed guests to the ‘talent’ – it makes for a doozy of a TripAdvisor write up – but that it’s done with just three mouse clicks suggests they know exactly what they are making.
Driving is not relaxing for me. I failed my driving test nine times before passing, so statistically-speaking, only one in ten driving instructors think I should be out on the roads. I don’t like those odds, and I imagine pedestrians don’t either. When you’ve failed your driving test so prolifically the basic idea of sitting behind the wheel is scary enough without a car of ambiguous meat monsters trying to ram you off the road. But here I am, playing Beware, a survival horror game set inside a single vehicle.
Many things are easy in games that I struggle with in reality. A light jog. Climbing ladders. Carrying stuff (my limit’s an eight pack of Pepsi Max Cherry, let alone five axes and a wheel of cheese). But House Flipper, a first-person handyman ‘em up and current chart champion, is based on my bete noire: keeping a house clean and healthy. I stink at cleaning my house. And now my house stinks. So what better way to test the accuracy of House Flipper’s simulation than comparing its virtual dumps to mine?
Zombie survival adventure State of Decay 2 lurches on to PC next Tuesday – though it’s out today for those who ordered the Ultimate edition – and Brendan kindly put aside his endless shopping trips to help me test co-op mode. Opt for a multiplayer session and you appear as visiting survivors in the host’s game, in this case, Brendan’s. You can help said host progress their story and bring home whatever loot you find, but it’s also fine if you just want to go for a jolly in the countryside and deck deadheads in tandem.
The pinball platformer is an idea developers like to feed quarters into every so often. If a character is round (Pac-Man, Kirby) or can bunch up into a ball (Sonic, Samus, enslaved Pokémon), then they’ve probably been bashed about by flippers at some point. But these games tend to be reskins of traditional pinball; few reflect their source material. Yoku’s Island Express doesn’t have a known mascot to trade on, but it does have bigger vision for bumper-boosted platforming.
Do no harm, goes the Hippocratic Oath. So it’s with trepidation that I approach Two Point Hospital, a spiritual successor to Theme Hospital that could all too easily do harm to fond childhood memories of Bullfrog’s heal ‘em up. Thankfully, Alec’s recent visit to these shiny new wards have put my mind at rest – it sounds like the team has successfully transplanted the heart of that game, but grafted on smart quality of life improvements (to muddle my medical metaphors). And now you can see it all in action in one handy video.
With just ten hours left on Frostpunk’s clock, the people of my city decided to steam me alive. I got those ingrates just ten hours away from the final daybreak, and they treated me like human dim sum. Some of them even clapped with prosthetic hands I had built for them during the harshest of winters. The last thought that popped into my boiled mind? I wish I had watched a YouTube video explaining eight ways to survive the cold in Frostpunk.
Come the zombie apocalypse the jugglers are the first against the wall. What to do with an unemployed children’s entertainer is one of the tamer dilemmas thrown up in the three hours I spent with State of Decay 2. But it’s indicative of Undead Lab’s slightly goofy take on zombie survival, one that has you desperately scavenging for supplies one second and weighing up the combat potential of a barista the next. I condensed all this, and the game’s other new features, into one convenient 20 minute walkthrough.
Last week I popped off to play Bethesda and Tango Gameworks’ upcoming survival horror sequel The Evil Within 2, which adds open world elements to its stomp through a town filled with science-gone-wrong monstrosities. You can read what I thought about it in my Evil Within 2 impressions here, or alternatively you can watch what I did and how many times I got killed by snickering things in the hour-long video below. Read the rest of this entry »
RPS Feature
One soldier, one turn, countless kills
Speaking of the latter, here’s a video I made showing just how off-the-chain crazy the various new abilities, weapons and features can be. In the space of a single turn (the first turn of a mission), one soldier covers almost the entire length of the map, ‘wakes’ pretty much every enemy on it, kills around 15 of them, winds up at the main mission objective and then proceeds to take zero damage on the alien turn. Meanwhile, most of his team never even leave their starting position. All in one turn. It’s bonkers. This is War Of The Chosen.
While playing the sandbox survival mode of The Long Dark [official site] I often feel the urge to share the beauty of the in-game sky and weather effects, or just the really lovely sense of time passing. Screenshots conveyed some of the magic, but not really the desolation or the subtle shifts so instead I’ve opted for videos. They’re from different times of day and different weather and light conditions. It’s only a fraction of what’s in the game but the video has the added bonus of you not needing to wonder whether you’re about to die of hypothermia or wolves or food poisoning or any number of other things!
I decided to make a little video to show you what I like about Walden, A Game [official site]. There’s a bit of Thoreau eyerolling, admittedly, but I’m trying to be reasonable and not judgy (WHICH IS MORE THAN HE DID), plus there’s an OWL! And a BLUE JAY! I refuse to go into the town of Concord but I do show you how you can purposely injure Thoreau’s hand. Swings and roundabouts, really… Read the rest of this entry »
It sounded like people enjoyed looking round my Subnautica base a while back so I decided to make a video tour of my Slime Rancher [official site] base as well! It’s absolutely full of creatures and resources you won’t discover for ages as well as the more basic parts of the game so SPOILERS AHOY. I’d say only watch it if you don’t want to play the game or if you have played a really significant amount and have seen most things! Read the rest of this entry »
RPS Feature
Commentated playthrough of Prey's first hour
Here’s the second and final part of my hour-long narrated playthrough of Bethesda and Arkane’s upcoming shooter-me-do, Prey [official site]. N.B. Contains spoilers for the opening hour of the game, but nothing beyond that. Read the rest of this entry »
The RPS gang sits around in our secret treehouse every day, chatting about the things we’d like to post more of to the site. One of those things is, “Nice things what we read/watched/heard elsewhere on the internet.” Sure, we already have the Sunday Papers, but wouldn’t this be a more interesting, enlightening, day-brightening corner of the internet if we occasionally pointed and yelled, “Look over there!”
A fair few people said they wanted a little tour of my Subnautica [official site] Volcano Base so I’ve made a quick video to show it off – especially the garden which is packed with bioluminescent plantlife!
I like careful, reflective journeys in as much as Alec does, but my other great vehicular passion is tossing cars down mountains and slamming them into brick walls. There’s no greater game for that than BeamNG.drive [official site], which although still in alpha has the best physics and damage model of any driving game I’ve ever played. To prove the point, YouTube channel DragCarTV recreated common crash testing scenarios in the game and then put the footage side by side with real crashes to see how they matched up.
After its extraordinary trailer, I’m glad to report/sad to say that Coast Guard is everything we could have hoped for. I struggled through the first hour of this wave-protecting simulation, videoed it all, and edited that horror down to the twenty minutes that’s safe for you to watch.
