Review: Little Goody Two Shoes

, the world's first 3D survival horror game that inspired an entire genre, is back with a modern adaptation that honors the original game's creepy roots. THQ Nordic is setting out to recapture the haunting and inquisitive gameplay of the 1992 game. The 2024 remake staring David Harbour and Jodie Comer has even gained the admiration and approval of the series creator, Frédérick Raynal, an excellent sign for survival horror fans.

The original Alone in the Dark was revolutionary, for the time. Skeptical as I am about attempts to play on classic stories and high-profile names, I recently spent time with Pieces Interactive and THQ Nordic's upcoming reboot of the series, one that revisits the setting of the 1992 game that practically invented survival horror. To my pleasure, I found that, true to their word, it wasn't an attempt to recreate or reboot the first game. Instead, it's something different. It's a new and fascinating story drawing on the same elements that I love: cosmic horror, detective fiction, psychological horror, and the good old Southern Gothic.

Call of Duty developers past and present have taken to social media to express their frustration with a comment made by God of War voice actor Christopher Judge at The Game Awards.

Yes, there are countless Far Cry comparisons.

is a game that promises a lot just by existing. Developed by Massive Entertainment and published by Ubisoft, it's a very AAA take on a very blockbuster film franchise, hellbent on creating a beautiful world that's almost impossibly dense with vivid life. Much to the game's credit, it rises to the challenge of rendering Pandora's splendor with care, and a share of somewhat pedestrian elements never manage to overwhelm everything that it does right.

Short of somehow growing a Na’vi neural braid and jamming it directly into the base of James Cameron’s skull, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is pretty much your best option for taking a virtual tour of the stunning alien moon of Pandora. This open-world shooter serves up a mind bogglingly large slice of the fantastic fictional universe to explore, from staggeringly dense forest areas to picturesque open plains and properly intimidating mountain ranges both on land and suspended impossibly in the skies above. However, hidden amongst all that beauty is a disappointing amount of bloat, with copy-pasted enemy outposts and facilities that made venturing off the main story path far less rewarding than it has been in recent landmark adventures such as Elden Ring or the last two Legend of Zeldas. I still largely enjoyed the 25 hours I spent trying to fend off a resource-hungry human invasion, but I wish the environment itself had presented me with more compelling reasons to fight for it beyond its surface-level splendor.

The Play Store seemed to be missing out on decent colony sims until today! Little Village is an indie pixel farming game inspired by RimWorld. This quaint little adventure lets you turn the wilderness into a habitable community for all kinds of zany villagers.

Elden Ring producer Yasuhiro Kitao has provided an update on the game’s upcoming expansion, Shadow of the Erdtree.

Critical Role is pretty much the biggest livestreamed D&D campaign, by sheer popularity and volume alone. Starting halfway through the group's home game in 2015, to call the game's rise to popularity 'meteoric' is an understatement. It's gone from an experiment by Geek & Sundry to its own enterprise with heaps of merch, a charity foundation, officially-sanctioned D&D settings, board games, its own unique systems like Candela Obscura, and a very solid animated series with two seasons and counting. And, according to a recent interview with Dicebreaker, we could get a Critical Role videogame, too. Responding to a question as to whether he'd like to make the leap to a digital world, Critical Role's DM Matthew Mercer responds with a bit of caution, saying it would «require the right idea, the right development studio and the right budget.» However, he goes on to say that he'd «love to see that in the future, should all those stars align». Coming from anyone else, saying 'sure, we'd love to make a game' wouldn't even register on my radar. Everybody with a world and characters they care about would love to make a game, it's just that games are both extremely difficult and wildly expensive to make. Looking back on Critical Role's history, though, I think it's very possible. If Critical Role as a company sets its mind on it, it's even likely. Back when The Legend of Vox Machina animated series was being funded, Critical Role put up a kickstarter with a humble goal of $750,000. It beat that goal, raising $1 million. Sorry, correction—it raised $1 million in its first hour. In total, the Kickstarter for The Legend of Vox Machina broke $11.3 million in funding, which is about 1,500% of the original goal. Not only would a Critical Role video game be able to easily get a huge wad of Kickstarter cash to get things started, it'd sell like hotcakes if it was even a little bit good. It also helps that Critical Role already has good ties to the industry, on account of the fact its entire cast are self-described «nerdy-ass voice actors.» Mercer, for example, voiced Minsc in Baldur's Gate 3—and you've likely heard his voice in a thousand other places before. Overwatch, Fallout 4, Pillars of Eternity World of Warcraft, League of Legends, The Legend of Zelda—he's been in the industry since 2002. If I went through the whole cast's portfolio (like how CEO Travis Willingham is Kingpin in Marvel's Spider-Man and Thor in like, most things that need voice acting for Thor, or how Ashley Johnson is Ellie from The Last of Us, or how Laura Bailey is Jaina Proudmoore) I'd be here all day. 

Studio Wildcard has revealed that ARK: Survival Ascended will be coming to PlayStation 5 earlier than December after all.

The upcoming Fallout TV series will launch on April 12, 2024, and backer Amazon Prime has now shared a first look behind-the-scenes with Vanity Fair. The game's retro-futuristic post-apocalyptic aesthetic does seem like a natural fit for a TV show and the choice of creative leads couldn't be better: the husband and wife team Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, best-known for the Westworld series (which I thought was excellent, albeit I didn't watch beyond the first season). The show's main characters include Lucy (played by Yellowjackets star Ella Purnell), who much like the player characters has spent her entire life in a vault, and her father Hank (Kyle MacLachlan) who's the vault overseer. Some sort of crisis sees Lucy leave the vault and enter the wasteland we know and love. «The games are about the culture of division and haves and have-nots that, unfortunately, have only gotten more and more acute in this country and around the world over the last decades,» says Nolan, who directed the show's opening three episodes. «We get to talk about that in a wonderful, speculative-fiction way.» The basic setup seems to be that Lucy is a nice but naive person whose vault-coddled existence has ill-prepared her for what lies above. Nolan points out the nature of virtue in such a setting as «circumstantial… it's a luxury virtue. You have your point of view because you never ran out of food, right?» Todd Howard also chimes in on the show, on which he serves as executive producer. «We had a lot of conversations over the style of humor, the level of violence, the style of violence,» says Howard, which is quite amusing coming from a guy who directed the Fallouts that gave us the VATs targeting system and its beautifully glitchy slow-mo gibfests. «Look, Fallout can be very dramatic, and dark, and postapocalyptic, but you need to weave in a little bit of a wink…. I think they threaded that needle really well on the TV show.» Howard discusses various previous approaches to such a project, and why they were turned down, saying that when people wanted to make a movie of Fallout 3 his thoughts were basically, «Yeah, we told that story.» The Fallout TV show is set within the games' universe with its own tale, and one that Howard says is canon: which is an interesting detail, and an approach I wouldn't be too surprised to see other shows based on games take.

Bethesda's heaping plateful of space-spaghetti Starfield presently rejoices in the status of a Mixed Steam user review rating, with over 80,000 such reviews posted to date. Bethesda High Command are clearly displeased with this, and several unnamed but platform-verified developers have begun replying to and rebutting individual Steam reviewers, giving apparent priority to complaints about the game's loading breaks during fast travel and when moving between maps.