Exploration News, Tips, Tricks & Ideas

Nowadays, I'm more than happy to sacrifice high frames and a big screen for the comforts of the Steam Deck. I like lounging on the couch, the light forearm workout, and heating my room in only a few minutes. So it's good news that Moon Studios' upcoming ARPG No Rest For The Wicked will be playable on launch for Deck, the ROG Ally and other handhelds. Minimum PC specs also don't look too taxing, but those after the shiniest-looking game on recommended hardware may be in for a shock.

Dungeons of Hinterberg’s alpine mix of dungeon-crawling and relationship-tending will be upon us this summer, with the fetching cel-shaded blend of Zelda and Persona now having a fresh release date announcement for July. Before then, though, we’ll all be able to spend a couple of days socialising and monster-slaying in the Alps next month thanks to a public playtest.

Tucked away in the corner of this year's Day Of The Devs at GDC I discovered a lavish, strangely unattended action-RPG, in which austerely beautiful young women in elaborate skirts kick the bejazus out of each other on fields of whirling flowers. That game was Aikode, the work of Spanish solo developer Ace.

The announcement trailer for Lost Legions opens with a Roman Emperor bellowing “GIVE ME BACK MY LEGIONS” like a kid who’s just had his pudding taken away. I'd just had a big swig of coffee before watching, and was instantly swept off by visions of an apoplectic Roman bigwig rampaging through the forests of darkest Germania, gluing abducted legionnaires together into a sort of Octavian katamari... and then they revealed that it’s another open world survival game, with no less than two trailer beats dedicated to the act of hacking down a tree.

My experience with actual flight simulators typically amounts to approaching the runway far, far too quickly at far, far too perpendicular an angle, so perhaps I’m better off just flying folded-up bits of A4. Happily, that’s exactly what Paper Sky, a "semi-open world paper plane adventure" from solo indie dev Brute Force, is offering.

No rest for No Rest For The Wicked's developers, it seems. The punishing action-RPG launched in Steam Early Access last week with performance issues, among other issues, and Moon Studios have now deployed their first hotfix.

No Rest For the Wicked launched in early access yesterday, but has unfortunately hit a few bumps on its debut.

As a big fan of Ori And The Blind Forest, I am very excited for Moon Studios' new venture No Rest For The Wicked, an online ARPG which swaps the cutesyness of Ori and that ickle wickle forest for top-down fights against abominations slathered in muck and entrails. A new early access release trailer highlights said fights, alongside the devs saying that there's going to be no microtransactions, no always-online requirement, and no anti-cheat software bundled in. I don't want to speak too soon, but so far, it looks like we're onto something pretty darn good here.

I have a rule: no more than one post about a horror game per day. The mind can only withstand so much, after all. But POOLS isn't really a horror game. It's just a walking simulator in which you explore a bunch of underground swimming pools. True, their size and layout defy explanation - what is this, a swimming pool for Slender Men? - but look, there are cute covered slides you can ride down in first-person. You know, like the ones you used to enjoy as a kid. Always that element of anxiety though about getting stuck halfway down, am I right?

Never Alone, a quiet, snowy adventure set in the Alaskan arctic wilderness, won a Bafta in 2014, and at the Triple-I Initiative stream last night we got a glimpse of the upcoming sequel, Never Alone 2. It's still the tale of Nuna and Fox journeying through aforementioned cold tundra, and like the first game is inspired by Indigenous Iñupiaq storytelling traditions, but this time the story unfolds in co-op. No release date, but we have a teaser trailer for your viewing pleasure.

Following a bit of a tease last week, Yellow Brick Games — the studio founded by former Dragon Age creative director Mike Laidlaw — has properly revealed its new third-person action adventure, Eternal Strands, which is coming to PC and consoles next year.

Former Dragon Age director Mike Laidlaw is making a new fantasy game. Eternal Strands is third-person adventure pitched as a mixture of Shadow Of The Colossus and Monster Hunter with Tears Of The Kingdom's physics powers. The trailer, which you'll find below, certainly has giants you can clamber across and spray with goop.

If ever there were a game not to play on a Monday when you've had minimal sleep and basically want to crawl under the table and eat three-day-old pizza, that game - or rather, free "tech demo" - is Fractal Sailor. The work of Struct9 founder Matej Vanco, it hands you a distressingly unwieldy and roofless hovership and cuts you adrift in a vast ocean of malevolent mathematics.

V Rising's two years of early access development are almost at an end; Stunlock Studios has announced its acclaimed vampire survival game will get its 1.0 release for PC on 17th may, with a PlayStation 5 release to follow later this year.

One of my favourite 'jokes'to do is parody Raymond Chandler, i.e. I shout "She had legs all the way up to her thighs!" and then laugh at myself. Chandlers's trademark "blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window" kind of zingers are very hard to do well, so it's better to say you're doing Philip Marlow badly on purpose. The trailer for Nobody Wants To Die seems like it's self-seriousness is actually self-awareness. I mean, I kind of refuse to believe that hard-boiled future crime detective James Karra saying "I'm in the business of secrets... But it's more of an addiction... And I like 'em straight... No chaser..." while sipping from a glass of amber liquor isn't indulging in some amount of winking and nudging.

Ori and the Blind Forest developer Moon Studios has confirmed that its promising-looking Diablo-y Soulslike game No Rest for the Wicked will feature offline play for its solo mode.

Polish developers Mighty Koi have announced The Night Wanderer, a new sci-fantasy Soulslike RPG with metroidvania level design – yes, yes, tick those genre boxes! - in which you are a grim bearded swordsman exploring an alien world that looks a bit like pre-industrial Scandinavia.

Ukrainian developer Frogwares has announced The Sinking City 2, for launch on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S in 2025.

If you dislike getting stabbed in the back in first-person games, you might not like Voin. If you like ravaged Gothic masonry and dramatic evening skies, you might like Voin. If you dislike fighting fireball-lobbing demons with a sword, you might not like Voin. If you like open-ended, changeable levels full of loot and secrets, you might like Voin. If you are confused about whether you'll like or dislike Voin, you might want to try this dark fantasy action-RPG yourself during the first public Steam playtest on Friday, March 8th.

Ori and the Blind Forest developer Moon Studios has announced its dark action-RPG No Rest for the Wicked will launch into Steam early access on 18th April.

The Brew Barons unfolds in a horrifying world where most agricultural tasks and outdoor mechanical activities are carried out using the medium of heavily armed seaplanes. Need apples for cider? Fly through the trees, cannons ablazing. Need to gather wheat? Fly the plane through the field using its propeller as a scythe, with hardier types of wheat requiring tougher propeller blades. Need to haul up scavenge from the ocean floor? Use the plane's sea anchor as a rudimentary fishing claw. Need to open a box you found on the beach? The plane's the thing, etcetera.

This week on the Eurogamer Newscast, we discuss the shocking news that the next big Pokémon game is mysteriously set to arrive in 2025. Hey, that sounds a lot like the intro to last week's episode, when we were discussing Switch 2! Say, could Pokémon Legends: Z-A also be set to arrive on Nintendo's next console?

Austrian developers Microbird released a new trailer for their upcoming Alpine dungeon-crawler Dungeons Of Hinterberg over the weekend, giving us a closer look at some of the eponymous dungeon environments we'll be biffing monsters in come its release later this summer. In addition to the previously revealed mountainsides and glacial snow peaks, it looks like Hinterberg will have a big green swamp to travel to as well. Question is: will it be a poison FromSoft variety of swamp? Or something more innocuous? Hard to tell with that searingly green water on display, but one thing is certain: with Elden Ring: Shadow Of The Erdtree and its confirmed poison swamp launching on June 21st, this summer won't be short on big bog energy.

Modern art puzzler Please, Touch The Artwork was a bit of a surprise hit when it came out in 2022. It not only poked fun at the reverential distance enforced on us by stuffy old art galleries, but it also invited us to recreate abstract modern masterworks by clicking, tracing and generally getting up close and personal with them with our big, colourful in-game fingers. Now, solo developer Thomas Waterzooi is back with Please, Touch The Artwork 2, which takes us on a slightly different journey through the art world as a hidden object point and click game. It's out today, is completely free, and was made to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the death of the Belgian expressionist and surrealist painter James Ensor.

A report by the French video game workers union has raised concerns from staff at Life is Strange and Vampyr developer Don't Nod.

In the event that I walk in front of a particle accelerator, get converted into digital data and am promptly isekai-ed into a gameworld, I hope that gameworld is the opening port town from the original Grandia, released on PS1 way back in 1997 (and ported to PC in 2019). There's something about that game's isometricky vantage point and precise combination of 2D pixel characters and 3D environments. The last sentence describes many virtual worlds of the late 90s, but none have stuck in my mind like Port Parm: that hodgepodge of green and rusty roofs, the canals cutting through the cobblestones, the smoky chimneys and people filling the alleyways. Bliss. I can still hear the seagulls blowing around the screen.

If you’d been gazing at the present glut of new survival games and bellowing for more, as though engaged in a drinking competition with some kind of cartoon Viking, then rest easy. Gord developers Covenant.dev have announced To The Star, a "whimsical" survival adventure that takes heavy inspiration from Alice In Wonderland, and features a cooking system that lets you combine monster parts with "suppressed emotions", so as to produce both consumable foodstuffs and weapons.

I love the idea of cosy living, which is why it was that Tiny Living update that dragged me back into The Sims 4 for a few years there. The issue of course, is that in real life, if forced to live in a space the size of the interior of a camper van, I would pile things on every surface within about 12 hours. Chaos would reign. I would hate it. But I don't hate the idea of it, which is why i enjoy things like Outbound, which is a game about living in a camper van.

Ah sure I've enjoyed the nostalgic resurgence of Quake/PlayStation-grade 3D art in video games, but I am fully blown away by indie game Fragrance Point looking like the truest classic 3D computer graphics: the shiny pre-rendered CGI from TV show transition cards, adverts for double-disc dance music compilations, and Windows Media Player skins. My eyes are still reeling from the gloss and glitz and pulsating lights of the Steam Next Fest demo, and I welcome this pain. Grab the demo now and set out to explore a space station as a bopping security bot with snazzy boots and endless projectile lipstick.

Developer Arthur 'Mr. Podunkian' Lee, who worked with ConcernedApe on Stardew Valley, has announced the release window for his own forthcoming life sim.

What do you do after running away from the big city to start a new life in the country? You run away from the country to start a new life in the big city, obviously. Former Stardew Valley developer Arthur "Mr. Podunkian" Lee has announced Sunkissed City, a life simulation game set in a delightful coastal burb that's reportedly "pumping with funky vibes and quirky characters", together with migraines, stretches of dead water and horrible sewer monsters.

When Edwin popped the reveal trailer for new Metroidvania Deviator into The Maw this morning, he really wasn't kidding about it looking a heck of a lot like Hollow Knight. You've got a small, diminutive hero with a nasty little blade up his sleeve, a haunting and melancholy piano score, a beautiful hand-drawn animation style, and lots of mean-looking creatures to fight. Then again, the trailer also makes it clear there are lots and lots of spikes and traps to navigate here, which puts me more in the mind of Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. Either way, I'm well up for another platforming-Metroidy hybrid, and developers Gami Studio have announced that there's Steam demo coming in February.

Indiana Jones And The Great Circle was announced at this week's Xbox Deveoper Direct. It looks good! There has been much discussion of its decision to make its tomb raiding first-person (with some third-person traversal and cutscenes), however.

I'm pretty sure I've written about this somewhere already - I may have expressed it to a therapist - but when I was a lad, I had a recurring nightmare about a place called Snake World. It was a fizzing neon labyrinth that was both home to various evil snakes and sort of made of snakes in probably-Freudian ways.

I have a sneaking affection for slightly jarring genre hybrids - games like the relatively recent Disintegration and the much older Battlezone 2, which smush action mechanics together with real-time strategy, or the rather more elegant Puzzle Quest, in which you roll around a parchment landscape fighting wizards using the power of match-3. New open world RPG Archaelund, which launched in early access this week, and was brought to my attention by RPS supporter cpt_freakout, has something of that curious enchantment to it.

Surgeon Simulator and I Am Bread creators Bossa Studios have laid off around a third of their staff, with 19 people departing the London, UK-based independent in December due to what co-founder Henrique Olifiers has called "a perfect storm of events" - heavy competition from blockbuster games at the backend of last year, increased operating costs, and delayed funding decisions across the industry.

Brought to you by the decadent intellects behind Incredibly Fast-Paced And Very Rogue Movement Shooters, Completely Fictional Story About A City Inside A Whale is a gentle, comedic exploration game in which you steer a wind-up boat through the guts of a leviathan. It was announced this week and there's a demo on Steam, which I think will tickle the cockles of Psychonauts 2 players and A Short Hike fans alike, though I do wish developers ln404 and akinat0 had taken their own work just a little more seriously.

How do you follow-up a game that attempts to simulate an entire universe for your exploratory enjoyment? Hello Games has just answered that very question with the reveal of its next title, Light No Fire, a co-operative adventure set on a procedurally generated fantasy planet.

WASD to move, mouse cursor to look, space to jump, C to crouch and slide. There, now you know everything you need to play the demo for Blessed Burden, a new first-person "horror adventure" from Podoba Interactive, in which you are "the last surviving priest in a religious apocalypse". I don't know many people in the clergy, but I'm pretty sure the job isn't supposed to involve quite this many swinging blade traps. Here's a trailer.

At the time of Star Fleet II: Krellan Commander's release, I was still learning to spell and wrestling with the whole "going to the toilet independently" business, but if I'd had access to an MS-DOS PC between potty-training sessions, I dare say I'd have tried my hand at being an intergalactic warlord. Originally published in 1989 by Interstel Corporation and distributed by a little-known company called Electronic Arts, it's an absurdly in-depth and fiddly-looking space sim in which you fly around a randomly generated cosmos in your horrible Klingon-adjacent battlecruiser, blowing up or commandeering other ships, bombarding or invading planets, and generally speaking being a nuisance.

The second in a series of new devtalks and previews of features in the works for Albion Online, the team has announced that Tracking will be a new open-world activity option.