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The event will focus on games about “the spirit of investigation and solving mysteries”, and will include not only discounts but new demos on “current and upcoming games”. Valve announced the fest earlier this week, inviting game developers to submit their eligible games for inclusion. Earlier this year, Valve announced some tweaks to how they operated sales, lowering the ‘cooling off period’ between discounts for developers and introducing several genre-specific sale events....

“To be clear: We’re not holding anything back from the main game for the season pass,” Schofield said. “We haven’t even started work on this content yet. It’s all new stuff that we’ll be working on in the new year. Fans have asked for EVEN MORE deaths, so we’re making it a priority next year.” Schofield had talked about The Callisto Protocol’s gore system and death animations in interviews earlier this year....

“I was very inspired by Studio Ghibli films, and especially the film Spirited Away,” Stjärnljus told us. “That’s been kind of like a guiding star from the beginning in terms of tonality with this serious, emotional story, but [also] still, like, a fun quirkiness to it, and really this sense of exploring another world, which we really want.” Stjärnljus was also inspired by the “epic sidescroller adventures” he liked growing up, name-dropping OddWorld, Flashback and Another World....

Building and running a railway in Astroneer seems straightforward enough. One of the major benefits of placing rail connections between your bases is automation, because these beauties can pilot themselves. Rail lines carry power and oxygen too though, so that’s a handy way to extend your reach and connect distant bases together. You can construct rail cars with medium storage slots, and rail engines to carry a passenger and boost your trains’ speed....

If you’d not kept tabs on it, this Tales story revolves around two main characters and their home planets. Alphen, the fella with the white hair and mask, is from a low-tech planet called Dahna. He’s partnered up with Shionne, who comes from the planet Rena which invaded and enslaved the people on Dahna 300 years ago. What we hadn’t heard as much about yet was Arise’s combat and how it will be familiar or different from past Tales games....

Temtem is an unashamed rip-off of Pokémon in almost every respect, but that’s why it’s good. It’s an homage to Pokémon before it was Pokémon, the 25-year-spanning, $900 million dollar-grossing mass entertainment franchise plastered across every schoolbag on Earth. Temtem is still just Temtem, first of its name, estranged child of multimedia mammoth and heir to legions of PC players who have been sweating for an MMO collect-‘em-all since the first time they saw the chunky electric mouse do a lightning bolt....

Those five new maps are Frostwatch, Frostcliff, Rumford, Frosty, and Coal Pit. The update notes provide no details beyond the names, so feel free to make up your own. I imagine Frostcliff has a big frosty cliff. Your stocking should contain one of 23 new community-contributed cosmetics, potentially with one of 17 new community-created Unusual effects. Those are the effects that can give your hats and whatnot some kind of aura, with these including swirling musical notes and snowflakes....

It’s been a while since we’ve found ourselves here, looking at some indie games, and once again I have been drawn to some that are a little melancholy, but in a sort of healing, wholesome way. I’m not sure if that says anything great about my state of mind right now, but hey - the nights are drawing in, there’s a bit of a nip in the chip, and it’s the time of year when we’re encouraged to think about family, found or otherwise....

Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator Who’s it by? Strange Scaffold Where can I get it? Steam How much is it? £15/€17/$20 Obligatory disclosure for Xalavier Nelson Jr., whose game this is, having written for RPS quite a bit. This game is a nightmare, but in, like, a good way. You are, as the title suggests, involved in the trading of organs, via space. Although my avatar is a lil dog in a cool hat....

The best co-op game picks follow some simple criteria. If you can play with a pal without competing, then it’s a co-operative game. It’s not enough if it’s a team-based competitive game, which is why you won’t see games like Dota or Counter-Strike here. Those are over in our best multiplayer games list. We’ve also excluded games that switch between PvP and PvE like Sea of Thieves of DayZ. They’re all great games, but they belong on a different list....

Ah, religion. I know this is a topic we all have trouble agreeing on. But fear not, humble practitioner of a good pray, I am not here to squint angrily at your favourite book of life advice. I’m only here for the videogame religions. The ones that are very, very, very, very bad. You know, the gun-loving cults and the xenophobic people-burners. The (mostly) fictional religions that involve an uncommon volume of murder....

When they’re not busy pressing random buttons on controllers linked to the wrong consoles, typical TV players spend their time being awkward around girls, rambling about the nature of reality, or murdering people because videogames make you evil. Being a nerd-adjacent hobby, comics tend to portray videogames in a more sympathetic light, giving space to nuanced stories about games and the people who play them. So lo and behold! Comics about people playing games....

It’s not actually a time-gun after all. Entropy’s the scientific concept that identifies the tendency the Universe has towards disorder, innit. You know what’s disordered? Puzzles. Better shoot them with your blaster in short order, then. Your talking gun Astra – did I mention that it talks? – says that “puzzles are the most efficient way of generating entropy energy”. You’ll need all that lovely energy to keep the Entropy Centre organisation’s space station, and the whole planet Earth, in one piece....

As with so many of Final Fantasy’s strengths, the best examples can be found in Final Fantasy VII. Already considered by many to be the pinnacle of the series, the upcoming remake (eagerly awaited but a PlayStation exclusive until April 2021) has seen Cloud’s battles against Sephiroth back in the headlines. It’s been talked about so much since its original 1997 release that it’s hard to imagine anything about it remains underrated, yet the flowers are a seldom appreciated piece of Final Fantasy VII’s world building which the high definition makeover really must get right if it’s to get anything right at all....

It sounds very much like this is just the virtual reality equivalent of Valve’s regular Steam Next Fest events, then. Valve say the event is an official Steam themed sale and will feature on the storefront’s homepage. Valve filed a patent last year for a new VR headset, codenamed Deckard. Will we see a reveal next week to coincide with the new festival? They still don’t have a wireless headset to compete with Meta’s Quest series....

Epic Games and Fortnite landed 14% of the vote when devs were asked which company and game are best placed to bring the concept of the metaverse to life. For those who are still a little fuzzy on what the metaverse actually is, it’s essentially a big interconnected, snazzily presented virtual world that we can all pretend we live in. Y’know, rather than the increasingly awkward and polluted real one....

According to the leaked specs, the RTX 3090 will be built from the same underlying GPU chip as the RTX 3080 Ti (or Super, because who even knows that these cards are going to be called until Nvidia makes a proper announcement about them) and RTX 3080, but will have 24GB of double-sided GDDR6X memory, a 384-bit interface and a massive TDP of 350W. The RTX 3080 Ti, meanwhile, will apparently have 11GB of regular GDDR6X memory, a 352-bit interface and a TDP of 320W, while the regular RTX 3080 will have 10GB of GDDR6X memory, a 320-bit interface and the same 320W TDP as its Ti sibling....

As with so many other games in development, 2020 didn’t go as planned for the two remaining developers on Ever, Jane, explained 3 Turn Productions in August. They attempted to keep the game’s servers running by asking players to sign up for a subscription, but weren’t able to drum up the $500 per month needed to pay for Ever, Jane’s servers. The developers announced at the beginning of December that the game would shut down before the end of the month....

This week it’s the FTL-inspired The Last Bastion that’s making things difficult. You’re the leader of a defeated army regiment, retreating across a series of regions to a stronghold where your king plans to make a last stand. It’s sort of roguelike, with a hint of something like Reigns in balancing your forces and reputation, with light interactive fiction parts. I’m a little bit annoyed that I like it.

It’ll now arrive on March 28th. Naughty Dog tweeted the news in traditional fashion: “We initially announced The Last Of Us Part 1 PC release would be March 3, but we’ve decided to push its launch date out by just a few weeks; it will now be released on March 28,” begins the statement. It goes on to say that they’ve loved seeing the reaction to the TV series, and that they therefore “want to make sure that The Last Of Us Part 1 PC debut is in the best shape possible....