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หลังจากพักกลับไปสู่เกมรูปแบบดั้งเดิมใน Assassin’s Creed Mirage ล่าสุดเราก็ได้กลับมาสู่สไตล์เกม RPG อีกครั้งในภาค Shadows แต่ตัวเกมดูจะมีความแตกต่างบางอย่างที่จะทำให้เกมไม่ยืดเยื้อจนเกินไป

สิ่งที่เห็นได้ชัดเจนที่สุดคือ Naoe ตัวเอกคนหนึ่งที่เน้นการลอบเร้น ซึ่ง Gameplay ของเธอจะใกล้เคียงกับภาคต้นฉบับ พร้อมกับการเคลื่อนไหวที่ลื่นไหลเหมือนในภาค Unity อีกสิ่งหนึ่งที่น่าสนใจคือแผนที่ที่หลุดออกมา ซึ่งมีขนาดเล็กกว่าในภาค Odyssey และ Valhalla มาก

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Dead Cells developer Motion Twin revealed its new game during a surprise announcement at The Game Awards tonight, a high-speed roguelike battler called Windblown that sets players off on a quest to protect their home of floating islands from the invading forces of the Vortex.

As Leapers, players will move through the open, ever-changing world known as The Ark, a place “teeming with secrets” and, unfortunately, overrun by deadly Sentinels, the minions of the Vortex. Leapers will have multiple weapons at hand and can shift their builds on the fly, and also have the ability to absorb the memories of their fallen predecessors, enabling the use of stronger and more complex weaponry and allowing players to push deeper into the game with each new run.

“Windblown’s combat is tough but always fair,” Motion Twin said. “Every run is a lesson, so learn from your countless deaths, memorize enemy movements and leap back into action stronger than ever.”

Very broadly, Windblown’s roguelike gameplay bears some similarities to the outstanding Dead Cells: The memory unlocking mechanic, for instance, sounds similar to the “cells” players collect from fallen enemies in Dead Cells t…

There’s a common experience among Europa Universalis 4 players, which is that of loading up the game, picking a nation in Eastern Europe or Asia, and then getting completely stomped by the Ottomans. This massive empire, the popularisers of the funky fez, will stomp you into the dirt like a cigarette. I’ve got some bad news for players who already fear the Ottoman advance: they’re now even stronger than they used to be, as one player has proved by conquering the world with them in 73 years, without resorting to the popular speedrun tactic of starting as a horde.

The player, Trisolarian, carried out a blistering advance across the early modern world, with their entire world conquest taking from 1444 to just 1517. If you’re wondering how they managed to conquer the world so quickly (it’s not uncommon for it to take players until 1821), let me tell you. The latest EU4 DLC, Domination, has given the Ottomans a particularly problematic perk. That is the ability to make Eyalets. Eyalets, which Wikipedia drily describes as ‘a primary administrative division of the Ottoman Empire’, manifest themselves in-game as somewhat autonomous vassals. 

While the Ottoman player does…

I look out my window and I see snow on the ground, and so I remain unconvinced by this notion of spring having sprung. Nonetheless, the spring sales are indeed upon us: The big Steam sale (with the first-ever discount on the Steam Deck) kicked off last week, and now GOG has begun its own Spring Sale, complete with daily deals and the traditional free game for everyone.

Lorelai is the concluding chapter of the Devil Came Through Here adventure game trilogy, which began in 2012 with The Cat Lady and continued through Downfall in 2016. The Cat Lady is dark and weird, but very good, and the second and third instalments fill it out nicely.

“[Downfall and Lorelai] each feature characters from The Cat Lady and really dig into what those eldritch bums the Queen of Maggots and the Crow, and some new freaky friends, are all about,” we wrote in a 2020 retrospective. “There just isn’t any videogame trilogy quite like this: dark, strange, and a little rough around the edges, but above all earnest and beautiful.”

(The Cat Lady and Downfall are both available on GOG if you want to start from the beginning, but Lorelai works fine as a standalone game too.)

To get y…

Recent PC Gamer editorial “The cinematic BioWare-style RPG is dead, it just doesn’t know it yet” caused quite “a commotion” between the lead designers at developer CD Projekt Red, Cyberpunk 2077 quest director Paweł Sasko said in a recent PC Gamer roundtable interview. “Everyone actually, after reading this article, said: we mostly agree, actually, with the thesis. At least when it comes to triple-A, we are just running at a fucking wall, I think, and we’re gonna crash on that wall really soon.”

Sasko’s comments above kicked off a discussion on the technology behind today’s big-budget games and the expectations players have for them. The “wall” Sasko referred to is the ballooning complexity and expense of making games like Cyberpunk 2077. Before it released, I think it’s safe to say many RPG players assumed that if CD Projekt had done such a fantastic job with The Witcher 3, it should be able to do the same with Cyberpunk.

But Cyberpunk’s more immersive first-person presentation ended up making it a vastly more difficult game to build in ways that aren’t obvious to most players.

The triple-A crisis

“Witcher 3 has so many fucking tricks,” Sasko said…

NASA is currently testing an autonomous snake robot, which looks to have a lot of potential as an alternative to current Rover units. Dubbed the Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor (EELS), the project aims to create a robot that can handle much more extreme terrain than its predecessors. 

The project came to life through the “desire to look for signs of life in the ocean hiding below the icy crust of Saturn’s moon Enceladus”. That’s how NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab tells the story, anyway (via Universe Today).

With the difficult goal of traversing Enceladus’ rough terrain set—which would involve checking for extraterrestrial life inside the vents of geysers strong enough to blast vapour into space—EELS had its work cut out. So far, that goal has birthed an extremely resilient, versatile robot that looks like it can go just about anywhere.

“There is no textbook about how to design an autonomous snake robot to boldly go where no robot has gone before. We have to write our own”, says Hiro Ono, EELS principal investigator.

Right now, the prototype is 220 pounds, 13 feet long, and is propelled by screw-like segments, with a nifty grabber for a …

Borderlands is a funny old series—one I have plenty of affection for, clumsy story aside. Its formula hasn’t changed much in the past few years, ignoring the industry landslide of looter shooters all becoming live service games in favour of your bog-standard ARPG model, sans some expansion packs and class additions along the way.

Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford, naturally, has a lot of affection for it too. So much so, in fact, that he appears to have said too much and all but-confirmed a new Borderlands game is in the pipeline with details coming soon, stopping short of a wink wink, nudge nudge.

In a recent interview with TheGamer, Pitchford opens with an “Oh man,” like he’s been busted vandalising public property in a Simpsons episode, adding: “I don’t think I’ve done a good enough job of hiding the fact that we’re working on something … And I think people that love Borderlands are going to be very excited about what we’re working on.”

Dear reader, I try not to put words in people’s mouths as much as possible, but this seems like a pretty clear-cut overshare to me—a new Borderlands thing is in the pipeline, and is going to be announced…

Songs of Conquest, the really quite good and really quite pretty Heroes of Might & Magic-like that first hit early access in 2022, has reached its final form. Well, kind of. The game has finally left early access for the sunlit uplands of a 1.0 release, but the devs promise more development to come: “This is merely the beginning of a new chapter in our epic saga,” they say.

If you’re not familiar, Songs of Conquest is a tactics game in the classic vein of stuff like Heroes of Might & Magic 3. You pick a faction and guide heroes around a sprawling world map, capturing resources, battling armies on a hex-based grid, and generally doing all you can to crush your enemies. At the same time, you have to defend your home base and guide it up a ladder of production from ‘dinky hamlet that spits out the occasional pikeman’ to ‘dread factory of war’.

It’s a good time, especially given the striking absence of HoMM-likes on the modern videogame market, and it earned the much-sought approval of PCG’s own strategy czar Fraser Brown in its early access form. With the 1.0 release comes a new campaign that will “conclude the epic adventure that began with the Baronies of Arle…

The cast of Baldur’s Gate 3 has evolved over the game’s Early Access period and beyond—Wyll in particular had a whole rewrite between the game’s conception and its full release. Whether it’s whole storylines shifting or just toning down Gale’s accidental thirstiness, finding the core of a character in a story this large is bound to be complicated.

But not for Lae’zel, according to a recent interview by IGN with Larian’s CEO and Founder Swen Vincke, as well as lead writers Adam Smith and Chrystal Ding. “In the beginning she was very aggressive towards the players, so we toned her down a little bit”, Vincke admits, but that was pretty much it.

“She is probably one of the companions that changed the least throughout the entirety of development. She was so very well-defined from the get-go,” he continues, noting that Lae’zel’s writer Kevin VanOrd “found her voice instantly.” Heads up—I’ll be getting into some spoilers for Lae’zel’s character arc and endings.

What Vincke is saying here makes sense: Lae’zel isn’t a simple character by any means, but she knows who she is—or, at least, she thinks she does. “She has al…

In a poll of Skyrim’s most annoying NPCs I suspect Nazeem the walking meme would score pretty high (“Do you get to the Cloud District very often?”), along with Cicero the jester, Whiterun’s shouty god-botherer Heimskr, and that one kid in Solitude who says, “I thought adventurers were supposed to look tough?” Spare a hateful thought for Belethor though, the sleazy owner of Belethor’s General Goods in Whiterun, who condescendingly says, “Dooo come back,” when you leave his store.

Belethor also says, “Everything’s for sale my friend. Everything. If I had a sister I’d sell her in a second.” That seems to have given prolific modder wSkeever an idea. Belethor’s Sister is a quest mod for Skyrim Special Edition that reveals the pawnbroker really does have a sister, named Lelaegh, and he really did sell her. Your job is to track Lelaegh down, rescue her, and then help her take control of her deadbeat brother’s shop.

Finding Lelaegh isn’t easy. The trail of people who have bought and sold her leads through various existing merchant NPCs and dungeons until finally you have to travel to the Soul Cairn from the Dawnguard DLC, which means you’ll need to do a chunk of that questli…

Get ready for some close-up card-driven brawling, because battler Fights in Tight Spaces has a sequel-spinoff coming: Knights in Tight Spaces, a fantasy themed throwdown that’ll have you take a party of ruffians engaging in a tactical brawl against not just action movie mooks like the first game, but skeletons and wizards and rock monsters.

It’s just as stylized as the first game was, though definitely refined into something even prettier than before, with a hybrid kind of lined and woodcut print looking aesthetic that’s much easier to read than the prior game’s black-and-red-on-white.

“Knights in Tight Spaces is a tactical deckbuilding game in the same universe as Fights in Tight Spaces, the successful game by Ground Shatter. It is a standalone title that sends us back to medieval times, building on the much-loved gameplay in new and dynamic ways,” says the developer.

The first game was notable for its use of tight terrain maps over the deckbuilding layer, forcing you into tricky tactical choices that had you carefully placing characters over and around obstacles and enemies. The combination of turn-based tactics and deckbuilding has been done before, but Figh…