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To further shake things up this time round, Flying Wild Hog have tossed in some new movement options. Shadow Warrior 3 lets you wall-run, slide, double jump, dash, and use a grappling hook to either swing between areas or jump towards an unsuspecting demon. These enemies are a group of variously-sized and variably outlandish monsters with glowing red eyes and, e.g., accordion bodies that spit saw blades. There’s a high level of precision to the controls as you platform between arenas, and they manage to balance keeping Lo Wang feeling super light with being really responsive....

Consider the progress of information. It’s a sci-fi roguelike best played, I think, in 4-player online co-op. You play a sword-wielding combat mech. You also control a small frog standing on the mech. You drop onto proc-gen planets overrun by a kind of magical accelerated entropy, that turns everything black and pink and grey. By destroying totemic altars orbited by floating eyeball robots, you start to re-energise the planet, so areas have grass and butterflies....

The next update will add two new areas, which I got to try out recently, and some new pro skater faces. If you can ignore the frequent wacky physics hiccups and the rigid, nonplussed reaction your character has when they should, by all rights, be landing flat on their face, you’ll find a surprisingly chill skating game. It’s less about hoarding points with as many tricks as possible and more about pushing languidly around a city as viewed through a seasoned kickflipper’s fisheye goggles....

Here’s the trailer: Look, I think all this cross-brand promotional metaverse stuff is nonsense, but… This one works for me. I do have nostalgia for some of these characters - or for being a young boy in the ’90s and watching these characters, at any rate - and their presence here is odd enough that I think it works given how odd the original source material of these shows was....

As was somewhat expected prior to the show, yon 2010 game Sonic Colors is indeed getting a remaster called Sonic Colors: Ultimate, developed by Blind Squirrel Entertainment. Colors is a 3D Sonic adventure about battling Dr. Eggman in an interstellar theme park to free alien pals called Wisps. Sega say that the new release will include “stunning upscaled visuals, additional features, a new game mode, and enhanced gameplay”. That new game mode is the “rival rush” mode where you’ll be challenging Metal Sonic to races to unlock goodies and all....

“It’s been a long journey since we first started ‘Sons of The Forest’ development and it’s grown into the biggest most complex game we have ever made,” says the announcement. “There is still so much more we want to add; items, new mechanics, gameplay balance and more. We didn’t want to delay again so have instead decided to involve the community in the continued development of this project and keep our February 23rd release date but instead release in Early Access....

Aside from my – our – achievements, I learned that the game is a perfect measurement of fatigue. Where rulers calculate distance or Ollie’s highly scientific WIPERS precipitation system measured the best rain in games, Spelunky 2 is the ultimate tool for accurately determining just how tired someone is.

“Gear up your research caravan, boot up your GPS, spread out your map and head for the depths of Melmoth Forest,” say the creators. “As a rookie field researcher, you’ll place cameras during the day, and watch the footage at night, tracking the movements of a scurry of squirrels.” That sounds sweet and simple enough but oh no, please watch for the ending of this here trailer. What on earth are the squirrels doing with dynamite?...

Corruption 2029 is set in another grim future, though this time it’s a dystopian American with states splintering off. It’s less instantly appealing to me than MYZ but I’m willing to be proven wrong. They did strike a good tone last time. No pigmen or duckboys here, though. As for how it all works, here’s a half-hour lump of gameplay from an early level, narrated by two of the Bearded Ladies gang:...

Formerly know as Project Athia, Forspoken is an open-world game starring Frey Holland, a New Yorker who’s harmlessly walkin’ heah when she’s pulled into a fantasy world full of dragons and wizards who need a kicking. Also she gets some neat-looking movement abilities to zip about. It’s the first game from Square Enix’s Luminous Productions, a studio formed largely of former Final Fantasy XV folks. Seems they want more time to deliver the sort of game you might expect from a team like that....

The obvious touch point when talking farming games these days is Stardew Valley, but the heavy emphasis on RPG combat here puts it more into Rune Factory territory. It’s also firmly in Square Enix’s comfort zone: there are crystals and they’re going wrong; there’s an amnesiac protagonist; and there’s a Jobs system. The Job scan be switched between at any time during combat and determine what weapons and abilities you can use, and the options include Fighter, Mage, Shadow Walker and Sky Lancer....

I remember watching this trailer when it was first released, and it felt at the time like a statement of intent, where the intent was “We will not be Star Wars Galaxies.” The first swing at a Star Wars MMO was notable for supporting roleplay as all kinds of characters within the universe, letting you be a humble Tattooine cupboard maker if you wanted to be, and initially making the role of Jedi difficult to attain....

Stargate: Timekeepers was announced in May last year and is the first licensed game set in the Stargate universe approved by MGM in more than a decade. It’s similar to Shadow Tactics: Blades Of The Shogun, Desperados 3 or – if you’re ancient and remember when Stargate: SG1 started like me – Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines. You select a small team of characters with varying skills like sniping and camouflage, some of whom have to be taken on particular missions while others are optional picks....

I’ve less of an excuse not to do it now however, because a Steam client update released yesterday added Steam Input support for “Nintendo Online classic controllers.” Steam Input is Valve’s platform for enabling players to use more or less any controller with more or less any game. It lets you do things like map the PlayStation controller’s trackpad click to a button in a game designed for an Xbox controller, or even map the Switch’s gyro motion controllers to mouse movement....

There are decent discounts for Katharine’s beloved Dorfromantik, my beloved Slipways, and many generally beloved digified board games. Most of the sales end on December 12th, so don’t spend too long thinking about it. Reality’s turn-timers aren’t optional. You can head over to the sale’s Steam page to see all the deals. There’ll be a batch of new ones at 1pm EST/ 6pm GMT tomorrow, too. Many of the better deals are for older board games, including classics Wingspan, Terraforming Mars and Istanbul....

I could do with a soak in a hot spring myself once the day’s over, mind. These tiny farmers don’t know how good they have it. If you’ve played, well, any of our favourite Stardew Valley-likes, you’ll know the drill. Coming into ownership of your gramps’ old farm, you’ll have to sow your own crops, stable up some delightfully chunky animals, all while getting to know the folks hanging around in Mineral Town....

Fist things first, the punching. You’re a team of old fighters and new faces, with names like Blaze Fielding and Cherry Hunter, and your job is to hit the baddies and GO when the big arrow tells you to GO. There’s a handful of punch combos, kicks, volleys, knee digs, grabs, throws, flying kicks and other assorted knuckle employment to get you to the boss at the end of every stage....

That looks good, that. Love a group of teenagers at risk of getting slashed to pieces. I really enjoyed Until Dawn, Supermassive’s PlayStation-exclusive breakout hit about teenagers getting megamurdered. But their latest interactive horror stories, The Dark Pictures Anthology series, have been distinctly less good—though the latest turned things around a bit, as Alice Bee will tell you in our House Of Ashes review. But The Quarry, yes, I’m very here for this....

Based on a new report by Bloomberg, it seems the extra year and a half may have less to do with the pandemic and a lot more to do with a big studio shakeup orchestrated by KSP2’s owners Take-Two Interactive that’s ultimately resulted in Star Theory shutting down. Back in 2017, Take-Two bought Kerbal Space Program from its developers at Squad. After that, they handed off development of the sequel to the developers at Star Theory....