Story Rich News, Tips, Tricks & Ideas

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.

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.

I'm the kind of awful person who looks at the background actors in TV shows and wonders what life is like for e.g. the old woman who sells birdfeed in Trafalgar Square in Mary Poppins when said upper-middle class domestic isn't singing about her. What fate the Warcraft grunt when he is too old to work work? It's probably pretty bad, right? Now let me slop Innkeep down in front of you like a big bowl of rat stew. Developer Daniel Burke furnished me with a little playable slice, and boy, Innkeep is a grim old time. I mean that as a compliment.

The problem with deciding to play every single Nancy Drew mystery puzzle game for a column is that, because they have been coming out since the 90s, Her Interactive have built up enough steam that I may never catch up to the front of the plucky citizen detective train. They have today announced a release date of May 7th for Nancy Drew: Mystery Of The Seven Keys, along with the official trailer.

Tropes aren't actually bad, right? Like, I'm not actually mad that a lot of games use 'the world is ending and you have to save it' as an inciting incident. When people complain about something being 'tropey' I think often what they're complaining about is that the work isn't putting any kind of interesting spin on the tropes. Great God Grove is a weirdo puzzle game where you have to stop the world from ending, and the only way you can communicate is by sucking up things people say to you and then firing them back out of your news cannon. It's coming to PC in 2024. Jolly good.

Earlier today Tom Betts - founder of Nullpointer and former lead programmer at The Signal From Tolva developers Big Robot - emailed me about his new game The Horror At Highrook. In the space of a single, rollercoaster paragraph, Betts earned my curiosity by describing himself as a fellow Soul Reaver enthusiast, lost it again by criticising Soul Reaver’s camera - such insolence! - and earned it swiftly back by mentioning that he’s from Yorkshire. Then, he upgraded my curiosity into attention by describing The Horror At Highrook as a “clockwork narrative” horror experience that takes inspiration from Poe, Stoker and Lovecraft on the one hand, and from boardgames, wiki-hunting and escape rooms on the other.

Chymicalia is an adventure game and/or visual novel "about causing chaos in a small Yorkshire town with unlicensed alchemy". Hey, I'm from a small Yorkshire town originally! I recognise that chip shop with the palsied neon sign! And hey, that looks like the underpass they told us kids to stay away from! And the textile mill they eventually turned into an old folks home! And the teleporting sentient potion shop where we used to hang out and play pogs! Wait, scratch the last one.

Still Wakes the Deep, the promising-looking narrative horror game set on an oil rig, will launch for PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S on 18th June.

Ninja Theory has confirmed Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2 will — like its predecessor, so not exactly a massive surprise — have a photo mode on release, meaning you can go wild recording its striking visuals for posterity when it launches for Xbox Series X/S and PC on 21st May.

If you're fond of the fairly specific blend of doomy theology, rich art direction and Soulslike-tinted metroidvaning encapsulated by Blasphemous, you might also enjoy Saviorless from Cuban team Empty Head Games and publisher Dear Villagers, which now has a PC release date of 2nd April.

Indie dev Firenut Games has confirmed its upcoming «dark horror adventure game», Shines Over: The Damned, will be coming «exclusively» to PS5 later this year.

This week's Nintendo Direct was stuffed full of games that will also be making their way to PC over the next few months, but the one I haven't been able to stop thinking about is the newly-announced Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure. It's the debut game from a team of indie devs that include Braid artist David Hellman, Carto writer Nick Suttner and Ethereal designer Nicolás Recabarren, and they've also partnered with composer Tomás Batista, who did the music for both Ethereal and Martian colony builder Per Aspera. It's a pretty stacked line-up as these things go, but it's Arranger's world of constantly shifting sliding tiles that's really piqued my curiosity. Come and watch the lovely announcement trailer below and see what I mean.

We've eschewed any Valentine's theming this year, but Edwin put this in our news queue last night as a sort of dare for our evening shift, and let the record show I am less of a coward than Graham Smith. The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood, a visual novel Tarot-themed card game from perennial (perhaps perineal, in this case) favourites Deconstructeam, was praised by Edwin in his review, and I was going to use the same strapline for this news post had he not got there first. Because now, in time for the season of romance, they've teamed up with sex toy purveyors Uberrime to create a frankly prohibitively massive dildo as an official tie-in for the game, which can be won in a free competition by three lucky people living in either the UK, EU, US or Canada (as in, they each win their own dildo; they don't have to time share).

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.

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.

Remember last year, when The Last of Us composer Gustavo Santaolalla first suggested a new version of Part 2 was on the horizon? He said players would be able to make his in-game character «play certain themes» during the then-unannounced remastered's release.

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.

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.

Sony has filed a patent which could see difficulty levels adapt and adjust as users play.

Life Is Strange superstars Don't Nod are once again returning to spooky happenings amongst teenage girls, though this time in retrospect. In Geoff Keighley's Advert Amphitheatre today they announced Lost Records: Bloom & Rage, a new spooky story about young friends who encountered something strange in the summer of 1995 then became very much not friends for decades after. It looks interesting! Check out the announcement trailer.

Naughty Dog has revealed the characters we will be able to play as in The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered's No Return mode.

Flock, the next game from the developers behind Hohokum, now has a free demo available on Steam.

When first I learned of Born Of Bread, it was getting towards lunchtime - yes, 10.30am absolutely counts as "getting toward lunchtime" - and my brain was immediately filled with savoursome thoughts of simulated baking. Born of Bread isn't actually a baking sim. Even better than that: it's some kind of spin on vintage Ninty RPG Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, except that instead of being made of paper, the main character Loaf is made of living dough... but kind of looks like he's made of paper, this being a 2.5D game with flat character art. Look, just watch the trailer while I make myself a sandwich.

Endure The Swarm, which launches on Friday 8th December, takes that most abstract and respectable of game genres, the block-pushing puzzler, and fills it with ghastly, flesh-eating insects. There’s no amount of pesticide that can stay this tide, nor (sadly) is there the option to stand on a chair screaming and waving a broom. Rather, you must call upon your mammalian mastery of spatial reasoning to survive. The insect hivemind, you see, is incapable of grasping the complexities of block positioning.

NCSoft unveiled new trailers for its upcoming games Project M and LLL at G-Star 2023 which show off new features.

This week on the Eurogamer Newscast, we discuss this year's various video game remakes and remasters, including the recently-announced The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered, which is headed to PlayStation 5 in January.