Point and click News, Tips, Tricks & Ideas

If you've been eying up your teetering games backlog and thinking to yourself, «You know, this games backlog isn't anywhere near teetering enough!», the Epic Games Store has you covered. It's just announced The Big Con and Town of Salem 2 will be its next freebies, from 18th April.

Your feelings on Funko Pop probably fall into one of two categories: you either hate the black-eyed, copy-paste figures modelled on pop-culture characters with a burning passion, or you own enough of them to construct a small fortress and defend your newfounded Funko nation from the government. Either way, it looks like the first video game starring the ubiquitous toy collectables might somehow scratch your itch.

Trailered last night, Centum is "an unreliable narrative-driven adventure where everything may be a lie", according to the Steam page. Does the suggestion that everything may be a lie also apply to the suggestion itself? Is this an unreliable Steam page? Perhaps the game is secretly a cheerful Playmobile platformer with plentiful ledge-assist, rather than a horrible point-and-clicker that starts you off in a dark cell with a bunch of obviously cursed artefacts, and gets steadily worse.

At the end of last year I played the demo for An English Haunting and got very excited. I like horror that has a generally spooky, creeping dread vibe rather than being wall-to-wall cheap jumpscares and gore, and that sort of stuff is thin on the ground. But it'll be less so from May the 15th, cos that's when this ghosty point and click puzzle adventure is out! Hooray! The demo is still on Steam if you want a taste before then. In the meantime, the release date announcement comes with a new trailer to enjoy.

No Rest For The Wicked, the top-down soulslike that released yesterday in Steam early access, is already seeing its fair share of performance and QOL issues, including instability, lack of keybinding options, and players losing their progress. In response, developer Moon Studios have put out a blog saying that, yes, they’re aware of the problems and, yes, they’re actively looking to address the most common hiccups.

After a lot of speculation and a few rumours, the Five Nights at Freddy's movie adaptation is officially getting a sequel.

Following up yesterday’s news on Ghost Ship Games’ upcoming Judas, courtesy of the Ian Games Network, another interview with the Friends Per Second podcast, via SkillUp on YouTube, has shed light aplenty on the upcoming Bioshock-ian FPS game. The hosts played the game for 5 hours at Ghost Ship Games in Boston, then interviewed director Ken Levine. Here’s a crunchy chipstick of a take to kick things off with; Judas is, says Ralph of SkillUp, “Definitely not Bioshock in space”. I...haven't played it, have I, so I'll put my cynicism in its horrible little cage for a bit. Aesthetically, at least, Judas does look to have a lot going for it.

Good news for people who don’t cringe violently every time they encounter the phrase “Narrative Legos”! We’ve finally got some more details about the extremely Bioshock-adjacent Judas, courtesy of the Ian Games Network, who spent six hours playing the game and chatting to Levine at Ghost Story Games in Boston. It’s a massive interview, but very broadly, it's an FPS game that gives you guns in your right hand and “various organic powers” in your left. It’s got a big focus on story and choosing your own path through character interaction, and it also has roguelike elements. “The ship is different every time you die and come back, the ship layout can be different," says Levine.

It's been 10 years since BioShock Infinite, and creator Ken Levine is still not done with follow-up project Judas. But the game is inching closer, evidenced recently by its appearance in trailers and now, a marketing beat where select people such as Game Awards host Geoff Keighley have now played it for several hours.

Here’s one for all you connoisseurs of the horrific consequences of your own actions. Regicide-em-up visual novel Slay the Princess’ new update brings with it new dialogue and music, fleshing out the game with additional choices, expanded scenes, and orchestral renditions of some choice tracks. The new content takes the form of new animations and “more than 3,000 words of additional and restructured dialogue choices and conversations.” That is easily enough words to tell the Stanley Parable-esque narrator that you’re on to him and whatever mind games he’s playing, with enough left over for the other voices in your head to make you doubt your own morality with alarming frequency.

The next game from Ori and the Blind Forest developer Moon Studios has been delayed slightly.

Jagex, the British developers of veteran fantasy MMO RuneScape, have announced their acquisition by a potentially surprising new owner: the private equity firm best-known for owning major sports brands including Six Nations Rugby, Spanish football league LaLiga, French football governing body Ligue de Football and the Women’s Tennis Association. The deal was reportedly closed for almost a billion pounds.

A re-release of the 90s point-and-click Discworld game «may happen», designer Gregg Barnett has teased. However, the developer said because of the way intellectual property rights work in the UK, 50 percent of the game currently belongs to the crown, which complicates matters a tad.

Cambridge-based RuneScape developer Jagex could soon be snapped up in a £900m deal.

A new Five Nights at Freddy's game leaked online, but rather than getting upset about it, series creator Scott Cawthon has said we can all chat about it.

Graham remarked the other day about how strange it can be to see which indie megahits spawn waves of homages and which ones don't, noting that Lucas Pope's Papers, Please has surprisingly few immitators. His post reminded me of Pope's other hit, Return Of The Obra Dinn. The closest we've come to a "Dinn-like" is probably 2022's outstanding The Case Of The Golden Idol, though as I said in my review, its fill-in-the-blanks murder tableaus felt just about distinct enough to be their own separate thing.

I mentioned this in a What Are We Playing? and the podcast last week, but I've been playing a point and click puzzle game called Twilight Oracle, which is out at the end of the month. It's cool! It reminds me a lot of Legends Of Kyrandia, in that it doesn't need to explain why stuff in the world is like it is, it just is. Big talking fish? Sure. Skull floating in space? You betcha.

Listen, I know we've spent the better part of the holidays harping on about all our favourite games of 2023 (and many more besides as part of our bonus Selection Boxes), but here's another one for you that I mainlined in a single day over Christmas and absolutely loved. It's Makoto Wakaido's Case Files Trilogy Deluxe - a collection of not three, but four detective stories in which you go about solving grizzly murders across different towns and villages in Japan. In short: if you like the investigation bits of Ace Attorney and need something to whet your appetite before the Apollo Justice Trilogy comes out on January 25th, this will be 100% up your street. It's currently just over a fiver in the Steam Winter Sale, and there's a free demo you can try as well for good measure.

Infamous crowdfunded disaster Godus and its spin-off Godus Wars have both been removed from sale on Steam. A statement from studio 22cans says that "an upcoming technical change to Amazon Web Services" is to blame. Both games had been in Steam Early Access since first launching in 2013 and 2016 respectively, receiving few updates since and mostly or overwhelmingly negative reviews.

As Dusk Falls — previously an Xbox exclusive — is heading to PlayStation consoles on 7th March, as announced at tonight's Game Awards show.

Well, hello there, sequel to excellent detective game, The Case Of The Golden Idol, didn't expect to see you here. Announced during the pre-show of tonight's Game Awards, The Rise Of The Golden Idol exists as little more than a brief teaser trailer right now, but to be honest, I'm sold already. Sign me up, please.

After spending hours poring over Alan Wake 2 this week, corkboards full of photos, red string and important little clue nuggets have definitely been on my brain. Alas, Remedy's horror-fuelled detective 'em up keeps its problem-solving a little too much at arm's length for my tastes. Every piece of evidence you collect has its own set place on the board, for example, and heck, even the thrill of joining the dots with a set of pins and string is taken away from you, as its deduction work is all swept up in a wave of automation.