Still, these comparisons aren’t entirely unwarranted. The game takes inspiration from the children’s books of German writer Michael Ende, whose escapist worlds are world-renowned thanks to works such as The Neverending Story. In a moment of cross-cultural pollination, this game is the product of Kyoto-based developer room6 and publisher G-Mode, who are hoping to create a game that can also share lessons of wisdom to the children and adults who encounter it....

To access Qurious Crafting, you’ll need to hunt monsters using the new Anomalous Investigation system. This guide will walk you through unlocking investigations, raising your Anomaly Research Level, and powering up your Sunbreak builds with the new Qurious Crafting Augments. How to unlock Anomaly Investigations and Qurious Crafting To unlock Anomaly Quests and Investigations, you need to reach Master Rank 10. You will need to complete Sunbreak’s main story and defeat Gaismagorm to uncap your Master Rank, then run a few more hunts to reach MR10....

“In the early stages of planning, we decided on going with [a] castle and vampires motifs,” Takano tells IGN. “However, we did not want to be constrained by how vampires have been portrayed in various forms of popular entertainment.” He says they went with the concept of a “bewitching vampire”, inspired by Anjelica Huston’s Morticia Addams, 16th century serial killer Elizabeth Báthory and Japanese urban legend, Hasshaku-sama. This has been an excellent reminder that I’m very overdue a watch of Addams Family Values....

Wild West RP is a private, modded server for Red Dead Online where players get together to act out their roles as cattle ranchers or bank robbers or any number of other characters in the 1899 North American frontier. When it came to roleplaying the server’s first official cattle drive, that meant several players ended up taking on the role of the cows. In order to make the sale of four cows and a bull from Emerald to McFarlane ranch feel more legitimate and special, members of the server roleplayed driving them from the sellers to the buyers....

It’s bad. The worst. A buff baby-bonced man stalks the intro to the game like, hmm, nope. I’ve run out of metaphors for this one. It’s the first of its kind. Rosemary Redfield. Say her name. Or at least try to between the screams. I tried to pretend that it was three-babies-in-a-trenchcoat to add some levity to it, but she’s too assured. No toddler wobble here. Just towering, weaponised newborn menace....

“Although humanity uses analog technology, it has conquered vast amounts of planets and ventured into many other galaxies thanks to it,” Starward Industries explain of the world. “Set in a distant galaxy on the mysterious planet, Regis III, players will take on the role of scientist, Dr. Yasna, and can look forward to multiple story paths and endings in this cinematic adventure thriller.” Down here in its first proper trailer you’ll get to hear from main characters Dr....

Insufferable cutscenes aside, this is a thrilling downhill racing simulator in which you, a new arrival to a vast landscape of snowy peaks, scorched desert badlands, towering forests and rain-lashed mud flats, must repeatedly hurl yourself down the side of a mountain faster or more stylishly than your opponents. The world is a compressed version of California with all of the San Franciscos taken out, leaving just a bizarre population of baggy jeans wearing Urban Dictionary acolytes, and a vast interconnected series of freely roamable tracks and wilderness littered with activities to complete and landmarks to discover....

Happily, a side effect of having a chronic bowel disease that has recently flared up a bit means that I have actually lost weight during the lockdown so far, although this is obviously less an indication that I am healthy and more an indication of the opposite. Anyway, following a successful eBay auction my flat now has one (1) copy of Ring Fit Adventure. And while I knew I was unfit, I was unprepared for how appallingly unfit Ring Fit Adventure has proven I am....

Update: Riot now tell us that “Ron Johnson is no longer employed at Riot Games.” Vice report that Ron Johnson, Riot’s global head of consumer products, shared a loathsome image on his personal Facebook. You can go to Vice to see it if you really want. “The media and the left have made George Floyd into a martyr, but who was he really?” asks the image, going on to list his criminal record then suggest it’s “too bad” Floyd wasn’t shot years ago....

Here’s a trailer for the mode, which launched a couple of days ago: There’s more going on here than just removing the ball and changing the shape of the arena. As the Rocket League website’s news post explains, this new mode switches up the controls to allow you to attack other cars, block incoming attacks, and even ‘grab’ opponent cars and then toss them. You can toss them into hazards that little the levels for an instant knockout, or you can fling them out of bounds....

Sure, there are newer, slicker Frontier vacation sims (in both Coaster and Zoo flavours) to get in line for these days. But following some legal nonsense, one their best has been closed for over two years. See, Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 has actually been impossible to purchase on Steam and GOG since May 2018, following licensing disputes between Frontier and the game’s publishers Atari. Frontier had just taken the publishers to court over unpaid royalties for the game, and while the delisting was never officially linked to the case, a GOG statement at the time implied as such - noting that “due to expiring licensing rights, we were asked to remove the product from our catalog for the time being....

Of course, conventional bait-and-switch writing would dictate that this is the point where I tell you that, aha, after playing Portal again in the blinding light of 2022 it’s actually a heap of rubbish, such as could only otherwise be found on the streets on day ten of a two week bin-lorry strike. But obviously that is not the case, because we’re talking about Portal. If anything it’s even better than I remember....

You know the drill by now. These Time Capsules don’t exist to debate the definitive best games of the year. Instead, they’re the games we believe hold an important lesson for the future, whether that’s because they’re still the best example of their genre, or they did something special that future game developers ought to take note of. As a reminder of some of the other rules we’ve set ourselves in creating these Time Capsules: it’s the year of a game’s PC release we’re looking at here, not when they might have first come out on consoles....

You inherit this shop, along with its secrets, a folding map of the area to go exploring, and shelves of odd plant specimins. Sometimes it is raining. It is a real October vibe. There is a strange mystery, involving cultist and murder - a stranger in a beautiful jade mask comes to the shop, sometimes, as well as the detective struggling to solve a number of troubling murders in the area....

“The previous week, we were editing the video about our motion-capture studio”, the video begins, showing footage of actors in mocap suits. “We wanted to show how the cutscenes were created. Took time to watch videos, write scripts and speak with actors. “The previous week was ages ago.” The video then shifts to footage of Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine. “On the 24th of February, Russia declared war on Ukraine and sent rockets, tanks and soldiers to our Homeland,” the video continues....

It’s not like I haven’t played LucasArts’ other 1993 masterwork a bunch too. I’m the sort who finds it hard not to respond to “Mind if I drive?” with, “Not if you don’t mind me clawing at the dash and shrieking like a cheerleader.” But as I remain reeling from the fact that it’s four stinking years since DOTT was remastered, it’s probably over a hundred since I’ve returned to S&M....

Everything in the Samurai Warriors series is as stylised and dramatic as a cat that’s spotted its own reflection. The puffed up action of the Sengoku period piece will throw you into a slashy fighting game that’s almost exclusively combos and special moves. If you needed further proof, check out its natty theme song trailer below. There are 27 characters to play with in Samurai Warrios 5, and an additional ten supports who aren’t quite as nimble as the main stars, though I still wouldn’t piss them off....

In fact it was not stillness, but the panic-sprint into darkness that became my main and oft-unsuccessful tactic whenever I heard the creature of Gravoi. Gravoi itself is a small but inconveniently maze-like fictional Sardinian town, host to a yearly folk festival that, every so often, involves the unwary being carried off and killed by a… something. Unfortunately, four very unwary outsiders - rendered outsiders for a variety of reasons, whether they’re locals or not - find themselves having to survive the night of this festival, armed with things like matches, firecrackers and a polaroid camera....

There’s plenty to see in Ubisoft’s Legendary Sale, and you can browse the whole lot by clicking that link. There are 108 games and accompanying DLC being discounted until June 1st, though that obviously includes a lot of duplicates and special editions. If you fancy developing a Rainbow Six Siege addiction, for example, you can buy the regular edition for $8, but you could also get it in Deluxe ($9), Gold ($30), or Ultimate ($49) flavours....

Honestly, if I had parkour skills like the animator of Thirsty Suitors (coming to Steam), this is how I’d come downstairs in the morning: What swish swinging! High-speed platforming in Starbuster (demo available on Itch.io): Intense Hellish spaceship shooter violence: I want to run my hands across the backgrounds of puzzle-platformer Seedlings (coming to Steam): And I want to bury my face in this foliage on the right: And the hoof fungus on this witch in card battler Princess Hunter (coming to Steam) certainly is, ah, eyecatching: Things would have gone a lot better in Yharnam if Bloodborne’s hunters had the arsenal of roguelikelike shooter Voidborn (coming to Steam): A terrible thing to do to such a helpful pal in gunslinging adventure game Dead Horizon (coming to Steam): A striking look to “dice-deck-building roguelike” Astrea: Six-Sided Oracles (coming to Steam, with a demo out now): A moody market: And more mood from this yet-untitled game built inside GZDoom, a modified modern version of ye olde Doom engine: I like to see this citing grimcute adventure game Little Misfortune as an influence while looking quite different: And to close, here’s some real garbage in SNES-style RPG Kingdoms Of The Dump (coming to Steam): What else caught your eye this weekend, reader dear?...