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Set in artist Jakub Rozalski’s 1920+ universe (a well also drawn upon by the fantastic board game Scythe), Iron Harvest has a pretty strong foundation to build on. But then, what world wouldn’t be improved with a few hundred mechs? Iron Harvest paints an alternate turn-of-the-century Europe - pastoral, imperial, and flooded with stonking great killer robots. Each side - the Republic, Tsardom and Empire respectively - has their own outfit of massive metal men to unleash, alongside crowds of squishier foot-soldiers with more conventional tools....

PINCH! PUNCH! it’s the first day of the month AND NO RETURNS. (Yes, I know Metal Gear Ray returns - as will the baddie who’ll try to give you “a flick and a kick for being so quick”. Show no mercy today, reader dear.)

In a response to the news, Carmack says “I think Microsoft has been a good parent company for gaming IPs, and they don’t have a grudge against me, so maybe I will be able to re engage with some of my old titles.” That “grudge” may be eons old in internet time but in human years it’s not been so long since Carmack and ZeniMax Media were tied up in a lawsuit over his work on Facebook-owned Oculus VR headsets....

But that’s getting ahead of ourselves a bit. The origins of Wolfenstein 3D, a gloriously violent game that paved the way for the even more gloriously violent Doom, can be found in a somewhat more cutesy series of titles: the Commander Keen series. id Software made four of these side-scrolling platformers for MS-DOS in very quick succession between 1990 and 1991, and studio co-founder John Romero tells us that the team was definitely ready for a change....

Below we’ll walk you through every ability and upgrade in Kena: Bridge Of Spirits and what each one does, along with how to unlock abilities, how to gain Karma, and how to increase your Rot Level to make use of these new abilities. Kena: Bridge Of Spirits abilities and upgrades Aside from her regular light, heavy, and charged melee attacks with her staff, Kena quickly gains access to various powerful abilities to use in combat in Kena: Bridge Of Spirits....

“We thought: people are going to compare this to Portal, so let’s give them Portal. Let’s write out everything we know about Portal, let’s make puzzles that look and feel like Portal with Portal mechanics, but let’s talk about it in a way that’s funny and will interest players.” Lab Rat is a block-pusher (or sokoban) puzzle game that’s designed to satirise games and game genres, and basically poke fun at lots of different things....

Here he is with a lesson on how to play the gorgeous Good Riddance on guitar. For the game, he actually used a Turkish instrument called a bağlama, so if you happen to have one of those lying around, that works too. As well as sheet music, the video shows guitar tabs for each part as he plays, so you can follow along nice and easy if you have an instrument to hand....

This isn’t the first time the Life Is Strange franchise has branched out into another medium besides video games. A series of tie-in comics continuing on from one ending of the first game debuted in 2018 and ran for six volumes, before wrapping up early this year. However, Steph’s Story will be the first official prose fiction entry added to the series’ canon. It’s being published by independent genre fiction specialists Titan Books and written by young adult author Rosiee Thor, whose previous books include Tarnished Are The Stars, Fire Becomes Her, and The Meaning Of Pride....

Original Story: This year had us stuck in many video game time loops, but one of my absolute favourites was Loop Hero. I never thought an autobattler RPG would hook me the way it did, but I spent hours upon hours helping a little knight circle a seemingly endless void, and had a wonderful time doing it. If you didn’t have a chance to play it earlier this year, it’s now free on the Epic Game Store until tomorrow....

Man Of Medan’s extra chapter is called Flooded. Sounds sufficiently watery for that Dark Pictures instalment. Supermassive say the chapter “introduces new gameplay and new deaths to the climactic ending of the game”. Both Man Of Medan and its follow up Little Hope have also been given new difficulty settings and QTE warnings, an improved UI, refreshed event triggers, and extra accessibility options including the option to change subtitle sizes....

If you’d lost track amidst the talk about post-launch content and online multiplayer and all, Marvel’s Avengers does have a singleplayer campaign. After a disastrous explosion at the shiny new Avengers headquarters, the crew disbands and super folks get outlawed. A few years later, Kamala Khan, known as Ms. Marvel when the suit’s on, reassembles the squad to defeat evil corp AIM. You’ll beat up the baddies with the crew as you unlock their super abilities turn them into dress up dolls with all the fancy outfits you find....

Your Marvel Snap deck consists of 12 cards, with each card featuring a superhero or villain from the Marvel universe. Or multiverse, rather, since there are multiple versions of the same characters. The trailer above shows 8-bit versions of the Guardians Of The Galaxy cast, for example. You’ll use those cards to fight against other players, with each of you taking simultaneous turns as you fight across three locations. Win two of those locations and you win the match, and earn Cosmic Cubes/Tessaracts for your trouble....

You can catch a glimpse of Flight Sim’s snow in Microsoft’s holiday advert below. It also features a couple of very good dogs having a nice time in Minecraft before blowing up Halo’s Master Chief. Festive. So, Microsoft Flight Sim has added “real-time” snow and ice to the entire (uh, in-game) planet. They use live weather data to adjust what’s happening in Flight Sim, so if it’s snowing somewhere in real-life, then you might see it in-game as well....

Learn how to find Amethyst Geodes in Minecraft 1.17 and how to use it to craft new items or add a musical touch to your latest base. How to find Amethyst Geodes in Minecraft Amethyst spawns in all its forms inside Geodes, which are a type of naturally occurring structure in Minecraft 1.17. Geodes spawn underground (though occasionally they might be visible from the surface), and they can spawn inside any Overworld biome....

Coming soon to PC Game Pass: Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga (December 6th) Hello Neighbor 2 (December 6th, day one) Chained Echoes (December 8th, day one) High On Life (December 13th, day one) Potion Craft (December 13th) Hot Wheels Unleashed GotY Edition (December 15th) Rainbow Billy: The Curse Of The Leviathan (December 15th) Monster Hunter Rise (January 20th) More games will surely be coming to Game Pass before Rise, mind....

I think it’s because Monster Hunter Stories 2, the second in a new series of turn-based RPGs spun off from Monster Hunter prime, just feels like a watered down Monster Hunter. It takes the well known bits from the mainline series and packs them into a Pokémon mould - but only some of them stick, while the rest spill over the edge. I’ve spent a few hours with MHS 2’s opening chapter, which was basically a tutorial island....

Another game for this heaven-set killfest might be ‘Paradise Killer’, and its colour palette and music evoke last year’s first-person detective game. The actual action of Neon White looks more like Quake 3 though, with the player seemingly zipping along a linear level with rocket jumps, dashes and other movement trickery. All those tricks are deployed via cards - for example, dash is a single-use card called “Godspeed”, and there’s a move you can use while falling called “Stomp”....

That’s what you’re doing in Nerdle, which is Wordle for maths fans. The same genre principles remain: you have six guesses to solve one puzzle per day. Make a guess and the numbers and symbols that don’t feature in today’s solution are marked black, those that are in the wrong place are marked red, and those in the correct place are green. Rather than being present in the game’s dictionary, each guess you make in Nerdle must be a valid sum....

Quantic Dream are the first European developers acquired by NetEase, who also gain the company’s offshoot in Montréal, Canada, established in 2021. Alice O. reported on NetEase’s initial minority shareholding in the French company back at the start of 2019. This investment helped Quantic Dream return to releasing their games on PC, ending more than a decade of PlayStation exclusivity. Why do that to us, NetEase? “By combining the wild creativity and exceptional narrative focus of Quantic Dream with NetEase’s powerful facilities, resources and execution capabilities, we believe there are infinite possibilities that could re-define the interactive entertainment experience we provide for players worldwide,” NetEase’s CEO William Ding said....

Netflix just posted the intro to the upcoming Cyberpunk anime, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, and it’s got a Franz Ferdinand track over the top - but hey, it’s still pretty good. Edgerunners is a ten-part anime series set in Night City and written and produced in partnership with CD Projekt Red, but with a different cast of characters than Cyberpunk 2077. It’s being animated by Studio Trigger, the Japanese anime studio responsible for Kill La Kill, SSSS....