The Maw - 13th-17th May 2024
This week's most splendiferous game releases, plus our weekly newsblog
Live
Some fresh astral god trivia from my accidental molar expedition a few weeks back: each of the Maw's teeth is different. Some form a fractal baleen network of crosshatched layers disappearing backward into the vanishing point; others are shaped like lockpicks, raccoon heads and semi-detached houses. This week's new game releases are no less motley and misshapen, though thankfully not quite as heavily varnished with plaque: there's something in the shop for everyone, I think.
Today, the 13th May, we open with Homeworld 3, the long-awaited space strategy-me-do which Nic has already reviewed and is broadly fond of. It's gracefully accompanied by The Land Beneath Us, a turn-based rogue-lite dungeon crawler in which you tunnel into an underworld inspired by Welsh mythology. 14th May brings Athenian Rhapsody, which brazenly describes itself as "a souls-like platonic dating simulator with cooking-mama and WarioWare style battle mechanics". On the 15th, there's android-bisecting boomer shooting from Mullet Madjack, period RTSing from Men Of War 2, and Paper Mario-ish choose-your-own adventuring from Baladins.
And then, on the 16th, a perfect singularity of little and large, eccentric and mainstream titles in the shape of Histera, a free-to-play PvP shooter in which the arena glitches between time periods, Read Only Memories: Neurodiver, sequel to the 2015 hit 2064: Read Only Memories, Ghost Of Tsushima: Director's Cut, the PC port of the open world samurai blockbuster, and Simogo's Lorelei And The Laser Eyes, which sounds a bit like an Agatha Christie story spliced with the Crystal Maze. For an intellectual end to the week on 17th May, there's Arcane Assembly, a metroidvania in which you program your own spells using a visual scripting language.
Not a bad showing, I reckon! I'll be off on an Exciting Press Trip from Thursday morning - amongst other things, I'm attending the latest Digital Dragons conference in Poland. As ever, you can follow our increasingly baffled and self-defeating attempts at journalism in the liveblog below, and we welcome suggestions in the comments about games or events we've missed.
Seablip is a pixel art pirate 'em up that's out now in Early Access. Looks cute!
There's now a trailer for the Dead Cells animated series, which debuts in France this summer. (It'll arrive in English later this year, but there are subtitles for now.)
The next Call Of Duty will launch on Game Pass on day one, according to anonymous sources cited by the Wall Street Journal.
Redfall is getting one final update after all, despite the closure of Arkane Austin. It'll add an offline mode and a singleplayer pause function.
Death In Abyss is a PS1-looking 3D flight sim inspired by Devil Daggers in which your ship reverses by doing the backstroke. Very enthused about that teaser video. Fairly wowed by the developer's previous creations, too.
Fortnite's next video game crossover is with Fallout, teasing an incoming collab for next season Wrecked when it arrives in exactly one week's time.
As Nic shared earlier, Hades 2 will likely be in early access until 2025, with the roguelite sequel's first big update to add new enemies, maps and features - once some smaller tweaks are done and dusted, that is.
Looks like Valve’s next game is Deadlock, a multiplayer shooter-MOBA mix of Overwatch, Dota and Team Fortress, as screenshots and details leak out of a closed playtest.
Activision have unveiled a new studio working on an original ‘narrative AAA franchise’, days after corporate parent Microsoft shut down the devs behind the likes of narrative-driven games like Prey, The Evil Within and Tokyo: Ghostwire.
SteamWorld Heist II just got a new trailer - it's a 'Story Deep Dive' this time.
Artist Corey Brickley has put together a list of mods designed to turn Dragon Age: Inquisition into a limber 40 hour experience with minimal faff and grind. I loved that game, but I also had to review it in three days, and you'd best believe I would have liked it to be shorter and more story-focussed.
The 1.0 launch trailer for Wantless, another cpt_freakout spot. It's a turn-based tactics game in which you are a magic doctor who travels inside each patient's mind to battle their delusions. A wrinkle from the Steam page: "you start your turn with 8 Action points but spending one grants it to each enemy. The more you act, the more your opponents will react!" Sounds promising.
As reported by Eurogamer, Take-Two have narrowed GTA 6's release date to "fall" 2025.
Take-Two haven't actually closed Intercept Games or Roll7, according to CEO Strauss Zelnick. "We've announced that we're saving $165 million in existing and future costs, but we haven't shuttered anything." That's despite an earlier WARN notice filed in Washington which attributes 70 Take-Two layoffs in Seattle to a "closure".
Two-thirds of the way through this billowing, insubstantial account of what Embracer spin-off Middle-Earth Enterprises & Friends are doing with Lord Of The Rings, we learn that Embracer Freemode CEO Lee Guinchard is "testing a concept AI character aging generator and other tools that might enable both players and game developers to generate depth to the world. He has an internal tool called Ask Gandalf." Hahahaha. If Embracer existed in Middle-earth, Sauron and all the other races would have allied against them.
An update from the Ubisofties: Assassin's Creed Shadows isn't an always-online game, though you'll need internet to install it.
BE RELIEVED FOR FRIDAY
Good morning from Warsaw, where I'm pretty sure I'm seeing a videogame of some description, though it's also possible I fell asleep on the train last night again. FEED THE MAW.As cpt_freakout notes, Arctic Eggs is out today. It's a freaky frying pan simulator that is counter-intuitively set in Antarctica. Eggs aside, you can fry bullets, cigarettes, bottles of beer and what I think are pufferfish. That frying pan is clearly a distant cousin of the Maw.
Amplitude's rather excellent 4X Endless Legend is free on Steam till 23rd May. Here's what Adam Smith (RPS in BG3) said about it back in the day: "Legend feels like an experiment, and it's a supremely confident and engaging one that doesn't quite fit pre-existing templates. It's a 4x game, sure, but it's a not a high or low fantasy one. It's weird fantasy and the weird cuts through to the playstyles as well as the art and fiction."
PREDICTABLY, THURSDAY HAS HAPPENED.
Get some new material innitUbisoft have quietly "stopped development" on looter shooter The Division Heartland, according to an earnings report from the company. They've done this, they say, to focus the resources on "bigger opportunities such as XDefiant and Rainbow Six." Xdefiant is scheduled to come out this month and looks... fine?
Ghost of Tsushima’s PSN login requirement will stop you playing multiplayer on Steam Deck (it'll technically be "Unsupported"), with cross-play in beta at launch.
Dead by Daylight is adding D&D killer Vecna, voiced by Critical Role DM Matthew Mercer, with Castlevania also on the way. There’ll be a supersized 2v8 mode this summer, too!
Assassin's Creed Shadows is both a samurai and a ninja game, as it borrows Syndicate’s dual-character story. African swordsmaster Yasuke will be the series’ first real-life protagonist too, when the latest entry releases on November 15th.
Honestly, "inspired by FF9" is all I needed to sell me on upcoming JRPG tribute Alzara Radiant Echoes, which is currently crowdfunding over on Kickstarter, but "Dark Souls composer" and "Genshin Impact artist" certainly help.
My understanding is that games are always better when their numbers are bigger, so everything in the replies and QTs for this post is therefore a classic.
Do give the demo for Athenian Rhapsody a go, if you haven't already. Game has definite moxey.
The Anniversary Edition of Braid is out now on Steam, sporting 40 new levels and developer commentary. The original Braid is 15 years old now, which also makes me at least that old. Incredible.
Via Gematsu, NieR series producer Yosuke Saito, NieR series director Yoko Taro and NieR series composer Keiichi Okabe have a new project. "It might be NieR, it might not be NieR," Saito told Famitsu, with what I imagine was a rogueish twinkle in his eye.
Here are the global release times for Hellblade 2, which launches in under a week.
Valheim's new Ashlands biome is here. Hope you like it hot.
BE UPSTANDING FOR WEDNESDAY
In a bid to constrain the Maw's rate of ingestion (ROI), the RPS Furnacemasters have produced a variety of toffee so dense that light slows to a standstill in its vicinity. The forges are now full of congealed photon and the afterimages of screaming sous chefs. Utter pandemonium. Nonetheless, we must FEED IT.
Double Eleven, developers on the Prison Architect series for the past nine years, are parting ways with Paradox Interactive just months ahead of the release of their sequel, Prison Architect 2. A new studio, Kokku, will finish work on the management sequel by resolving technical issues which led to a recent delay.
Minecraft is turning 15 years old and Mojang are giving away a Character Creator item each day in the second half of May to celebrate.
Jake Solomon and a crew of former Firaxis and Maxis developers have formed Midsummer Studios, with a few new details on the life sim project we spoke to Solomon about last year.
Trackmania players are competing to finish Deep Dip 2, a 16-storey nightmare track where a single mistake can send you plummeting to the floor.
Whispers In The Moss is a retro RPG 12 years in the making and there's a demo and a release date next month.
A tiny bit of info about one of Elden Ring Shadow Of The Erdtree's new creatures. People point out that it looks a fair bit like the frenzy-inducing Winter Lanterns in Bloodborne. Seems relatively chill, though.
SeekerX says: It occurs to me I didn't actually say what kind of game An English Haunting (or Postmodern Adventures's previous game, Nightmare Frames) is -- they make old-school point and click adventures in the Lucasarts / Sierra mold. John Walker (RPS in peace) found Nightmare Frames to be "a love letter to the horror genre" and "a solid, interesting adventure, and one that’s “adult” in the sense that it’s squarely aimed at adults, rather than the more tiresome understanding of the word", and "a solid piece of adventuring, with a clear passion for its genre."
Ah yeah, I should have included this in the round-up! Alice B likes the looks of it too.
Assassin's Creed Codename RED has been officially titled Assassin's Creed Shadows. This is the feudal Japan-set one. We'll hear more in June at Summer Games Fest.
As promised last week, Fallout 4 has a new patch "that adds the ability to manage your control over the game’s graphic fidelity or performance" alongside "additional fixes and improvements to address some of the feedback you provided us with on the previous update".
Supergiant have detailed plans for Hades 2's first patch and how they're updating the game in general.
Camerooni says: idkfa doesn't contain any dirty language.. that's revisionist history.. all codes start with id + k - keys f - firearms a - ammo maybe true then that don't know f*ing anything *lol* ;) I jest I just, but this is bad YouTube 'influencer' style commentary.
Fear not, I am already getting my arse kicked on this count in the associated news article. Though there does seem to be a bit of on-going disagreement about the term. If John Romero ever lets me interview him again I'll check with him.
And here's a developer diary for part five of The Long Dark's Tales From The Far Territory expansion. It adds a new alpha predator, the Cougar, a new mountain pass region and a... "Misery mode". Oh good, because if there's one thing The Long Dark is noticeably deficient in, it's misery. They're also adding a "Cheat Death System" in fairness.
More Nebulous content for the sirius wargamerz. It's a dev diary about fleet intelligence.
TUESDAY? IN THIS ECONOMY?
Think we could probably make some cuts here, honestly.The first Red Dead Redemption, including zombie expansion Undead Nightmare, could finally be coming to PC - and soon - according to a fresh datamine.
EA are thinking about inserting adverts into games - but don’t worry, it’ll be “very thoughtful”, according to their CEO.
PC classics Ultima, SimCity and Myst have been added to the World Video Game Hall of Fame, along with arcade classic Asteroids and some game called “Resident Evil”?
As Brendan mentioned earlier, Square Enix plan to “win over PC users” with an “aggressive” shift away from console exclusives - so maybe we won't be waiting so long for the next FF7 Remake game to land on PC? Rebirth sometime soon would be nice at least.
Here's a fairly interesting interview with Helldivers 2 lead writer Russ Nickel, in which Nickel names his favourite Helldivers 2 combat barks, and wonders whether AI can write satire.
Zenimax have trademarked IDKFA for videogamey products, IDKFA being an original Doom cheatcode that gives you all the weapons. A new Doom reveal in the offing? I'd tell you what IDKFA stands for but it has naughty language.
A demo for Enter The Chronosphere, an ARPG with bullet hell elements and freeze-time decision-making, set in worlds where "the laws of physics melt".
Via PC Gamer, publisher NetEase have apologised for a controversial - and honestly, a touch dystopian - "non-disparagement" requirement for content creators and streamers that enforced certain restrictions around coverage of Marvel Rivals. It included no-nos on:
a. Making disparaging or satirical comments about any game-related material, such as game features, characters, or music.
b. Engaging in malicious comparisons with competitors or belittling the gameplay or differences of "Marvel Rivals" or providing subjective negative reviews of the game.
While this is all ridiculous, the "satrical comments" part seems especially irksome. Trying to control the tone of coverage is one thing, but telling people they can't be anything but reverent towards your deriative hero shooter is something else. Anyway, at least they've apologised. For being caught.
PRAISED BE MONDAY
Well, don't just stand there gawping. FEED THE MAW.