Revenant might look like a ghoulish Terminator, but he’s got the heart of a real boy inside him. A real, soft, bounty huntin’ boy who quickly turns a business social into a penthouse meat-puddle. I say this nearly every time Respawn pop out one of these videos, but gosh. Imagine a world where Apex: The Game looked half as stylish as these shorts. Respawn have increasingly buried more plot leads into these trailers, and eagle-eyed pilots will notice a quick nod towards Titanfall 2’s villainous android, Ash....

The trailer mostly shows the sorts of things we’ve seen already: it’s a big, open world extreme sports/racing game. What we saw that’s new was more of the meta structure that surrounds the events. It is what you’d expect: you get points for almost everything, points can be used to customise your rider, and there are lots of modes and creative widgets to play with. There was a point during the trailer’s early tour of the ‘hub’ area that I realised that it had a very ‘Horizon festival’ vibe....

Bursting into early access last March, Risk Of Rain 2 pulled the first Risk Of Rain’s massive battles and outlandish item builds into the third dimension. It’s proper great fun, even if Matt reckoned it wasn’t quite as good as he’d have liked. Since then, Hopoo have been at work adding grappling hooks, lizard-dogs and overgrown robots. But while the team were preparing for a spring launch, this week Hopoo revealed a revised early access roadmap....

That’s right, folks. No Skyrim. Will it make the cut in 2016’s Time Capsule? Who knows! I am very excited to find out when we eventually get there. Why have we made such arbitrary rules for ourselves, you might ask? Well, that’s because these Time Capsules aren’t intended to be definitive best games of the year lists, but rather the games that hold important lessons for the future - and I’d argue that 2016’s Skyrim SE is a much better artefact to preserve than the 2011 original....

Riot have also taken the time to explain their approach towards bug fixing, which I find succinct and agreeable. It would have been even more agreeable if these worked in the first place, but hey ho. Here’s the Reddit post from Runeterra engineering lead “Exis”. I’ll just pop the exact fixes here: Exis says more fixes will come “in Patch 1.1 next week”, and that “these are just some of the most important ones that couldn’t wait”....

The first season of Sam & Max adventure games by Telltale released in 2006 before they became Telltale of The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us fame. Sam & Max are of course the wonky dog and rabbit-thing Freelance Police duo from Steve Purcell’s comics. Get a gander in this announcement trailer at the updated lighting, tweaked character models, and other modern touches in the remaster by Skunkape Games....

This is relevant to my thinking about Saturnalia, an upcoming survival horror game by Italian studio Santa Ragione, where a small group of outsiders try to escape a village on the night of an ancient ritual. I’ve been playing a preview build of Saturnalia for the last week or so, and also got to talk about it with the studio director Pietro Righi Riva. “I usually tell people, ‘Oh, you should make a game in like six months’, and I have tried to do that in the past,” he tells me....

The Next Fest demo covers most of the game’s first chapter, putting you right at the start of Dr Kate Ward’s adventure. It skips the preamble of how she actually winds up on this ashen, alien planet, but I’m guessing she’s been zapped there by the strange ‘Metahedron’ structure we saw in that first reveal trailer. You know the one - the big ominous pyramid hanging in the sky above Earth....

Airdashing through spooky spindly forests looks very much my bag in open-world action-RPG Jumun - Will on the Blade, which is made by a solo developer: Grappling hooks AND hoverboards? I’m feeling spoiled by Withersworn (coming to Steam): RetroSpace (coming to Steam) does indeed have a hallmark of modern immersive sims: electrifying a puddle. I believe I’ve posted the duelling clip from this yet-unnamed detective game before but oooh look at the rest of this!...

As regular readers will have pieced together, it’s become harder and harder to filter through all the retro-PS1 horror games flooding the #screenshotsaturday tag lately. Oh, I think they’re all fantastic, but there’s only so many crunchy, low-poly meat factories I can dump into this column. To see this content please enable targeting cookies. Manage cookie settings — ?️ (@colorfiction) April 11, 2020 That’s why Becalm developer Colorfiction’s landscapes struck me so hard....

To see this content please enable targeting cookies. Manage cookie settings — Rare Ltd. (@RareLtd) October 8, 2020 When I first hit play on this I found the extremely west country vocals a little… jarring. It almost sounds as though a farmer snuck about the ship to perform a concert. The piratey instrumental behind it all is really lovely, though, and there’s a pretty epic concertina solo in place of the famous guitar solo which is an absolute delight as well....

Players joined together to showcase their outfits, but in terms of style and personality rather than price tag. They “had to walk and emote creatively according to the themes”, as you can see in the below video. The sauntering, oh god the sauntering. It’s perfect. Some characters built looks inspired by characters like Malfoy, Rambo, or herself out of Brave, while others contented themselves with dancing, capering, and some drinking too much and then chucking up....

A big blast of style right there. Serial Cleaners will put us in the quiet shoes of crime scene cleaners, folks like The Wolf in Pulp Fiction. But we’re called in once the cops are already on the scene, so making it a bit easier to mop up blood, haul away bodies, and so on. This time, it’s set across the 90s and will have four different characters to pick from on each mission, each with their own technique....

I have been playing the Mass Effect Legendary Edition recently because I am only human. And for whatever reason it has made me really want to find and congratulate “person who did all the diegetic computer noises in Mass Effect”.

Here’s the announcement trailer: It looks more serious than SSX’s cartoony sliders, and anything that takes inspiration from social media is immediately offputting to me, but otherwise I’m on board (pun intended). The snowboarding looks good, the snow looks good, and I hope it lets me slide down a big mountain. There’s very little other detail available about Shredders. The game’s page on the Xbox site mentions that you’ll be able to do tricks and “master the art of ark riding, buttering, rails and massive kickers....

The seemingly old footage has already been taken down, but the official Skull & Bones Twitter account has tweeted a hint that it won’t be long before we see something more official. The four minute video surfaced via Reddit earlier today. While it’s not clear exactly when the footage is from, PC Gamer’s Chris Livingston says that it looks similar to what he remembers playing in 2018. The game has probably changed a lot since....

The quest in question isn’t a large one, to be fair. Your hero comes across one Corrick Northwode who wants help avenging his wife’s death by slaying some goblins. No problem, just head on into a nearby mine and whack them with your sword. Grab an amulet off the wife’s body and bring it back to Corrick for a reward and presto. That’s a quest. You can catch it at about the eleven minute mark in the update video up above....

Also, the Steam page notes that “items shout their names as they’re added to each dish”, and I am deeply into the idea of tipping a bowl of eggs into boiling water while they all shout “EGG! EGG! EEEGGGGG!”. Surely it’ll be horrifying, but the trailer is cute: Ingredients yelling out their names is part of creating a playful atmosphere, alongside dough which “reacts when it’s punched” and and “eclectic soundtrack composed of food-themed tunes....

Spelunky 2 had its release date dug up during tonight’s PS4 State Of Play, courtesy of a short tour of several new features scattered throughout the sequel’s caverns. PC or not, tonight’s trailer did show off enough shiny newness to get excited about a return trip to Derek Yu’s mines. Naturally, we get to see more of the sequel’s online co-op nonsense and beautiful fluid physics. But then, we see a lovely little hub space to chill out in before adventures - your own personal Moria, filled with NPCs met along your travels....

No, really. It’s right there, just below Hyper Scape. It’s not an entirely unprecedented move, and even Steam has dabbled in non-games from time to time. But they tend to be creative toolsets or professional software packages, a little more niche than broad appeal streaming services like Spotify. This isn’t a one-off, either - from the sounds of it, Epic plan to bring more non-games apps to their Store. “Spotify is among the first non-game applications being offered on the Epic Games Store, and you can expect more in the future,” Epic wrote in a press release “We’ll continue to work with partners to continue to grow the store’s offerings for our players and create a more robust platform for developers....