I’ll save the Aussies in the audience any pained Crocodile Dundee references. In part because I’ve never seen the thing, but mostly because Frontier didn’t even give me any crocs to work with. Planet Zoo’s Australia pack brings five Aussie beasties into your zoo. Koalas, kangaroos and dingos headline the selection, sure, but they’re joined by the lesser-known (if equally lovely) southern cassowary and eastern Blue-tongued lizard. A safe selection for a country with such a famously bizarre and deadly ecosystem, mind....

None of this comes close to the experience of playing Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3?! with a broken keyboard. CSD3 left early access today, and is a frantic time-management-meets-typing game. You, a chef (in this third entry, a chef for a food truck travelling across a wartorn, post-apocalyptic United States), must prepare delicious meals for extremely impatient customers. The food is put together by hitting a letter that corresponds to the correct ingredient, but these do not always follow the logic you would naturally assume....

There’s a bit of Spiritfarer to it, in that you’re performing your tasks for the departed, but its hand-drawn isometric art also reminds me of Don’t Starve - only, like, Don’t Starve if it got really into Cbeebies instead of Tim Burton movies. It has a a dose of Animal Crossing to it, too: the events on the island occur in real-time, and your dead chums will only give you so many tasks to perform in a given day....

Yes, this is a thinly veiled excuse to compel you to read a good article. For The Observer, Michael Segalov spoke to several people in America, Australia and the UK who have made finding lost and stolen pets their livelihood. There is, it seems, a growing need for pet detectives at a time when pet ownership has surged due to Covid-19 locking people inside, and when the increased demand has caused a similar surge in pet theft....

We talk about the different types of games that may lend themselves to podcast listening - games that are clean, simple, and don’t split your attention, games that are so noisy that you don’t need to pay attention because you’re succeeding at them with every interaction, and games you know really really well. We also, as is our established wont, go off on some long tangents. Matthew explains a particular and surprisingly piece of music that is forever associated with war in his mind, for example....

In today’s announcement, Ubisoft give the now pretty standard delay post that we’ve become familiar with since 2020. They thank fans for their feedback and support first off. Announcing a delay without a new expected date isn’t a fantastic sign, but Ubisoft certainly aren’t the first to do so lately. Dying Light 2 did it, and Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 did as well. Neither of the two have since pulled a release date out of the hat, unfortunately....

Here’s a trailer: With the expansion activated, there will be several methods for the undead infection to spread in your prison. An inmate can get spontaneously sick, the dead can rise via the graveyard, and once you’ve got a zombie wandering about, they can bite and infect others. To help you fight the undead plague, the DLC also introduces the “Bounty Hunter Emergency Service”, who can be summoned to assist inmates and guards, as well as new traps and tools, including zombie lures and a chainsaw....

It’s out now to mark Quake’s 25th anniversary and available for free to all existing owners of the game. Here’s the trailer, which was broadcast during this evening’s (ongoing) Quakecon streams: The Quakecon schedule accidentally spoiled the surprise regarding a new Quake project last week, but we now know all the details. It’s all listed in the patch release notes. Quake now includes “better lighting, new models, updated maps, and a dynamic shadow system,” all of which can be turned on or off according to your preference....

You know you can pay it, theoretically. You could gather together the energy and focus it takes. It is not beyond you to learn how a new game works and take the time to situate yourself within its world. But doing it all at once? Right now? Ach. Now you’re asking. That’s the deposit. And it prevents you from playing games you’d love. You’ve already overcome the earlier obstacle, that period when you’re staring at a list of appealing games, paralysed with indecision....

But before that, a change of pace. I can’t help but feel that, after the sinus-bursting, turtle-stabbing atrocities of the last two episodes of Rowdy Pardner, you have deserved a little respite at the end of your journey. And so, in this last of our series of three short documentary films, we’re going to focus our hearts not on the business of fists, but on the matters of the mind....

There’s Jill Valentine again, saddled with the Umbrella Corporation’s mistakes again, which this time include a burly lad in a bin bag who pops up every now and then for a rumble. RE3 is actually set shortly before RE2, at a time when there are more citizens still alive - though not many. At times we play as an Umbrella merc too, but a good one. The remake gives the whole game a fresh new look, with modernised controls and some story tweaks too....

Previously, the final demo for Village was planned for a pretty short period (24 hours) but Capcom say they’ve heard players’ feedback, presumably from the other limited-time demos, and decided to make it available for an entire week. You still only get 60 minutes of play time, mind. You’ll have a much longer window to schedule yourself that free hour though. The “Village and Castle” demo will now begin on the night of May 1st—the witching hours of May 2nd for some of you—and be available through May 9th....

After a quick message about Re:Verse from producer Tsuyoshi Kanda, Capcom gave a short text announcement. “By popular demand, development has just started on additional DLC for Resident Evil Village. More info later.” What’ll it be, then? Maybe Lady Dimitrescu deserves an origin story. Maybe Ethan Winters gets a proper holiday on a beach. Hey, if development just started maybe Capcom are still taking suggestions. Who doesn’t love a beach episode?...

“RFM is a roguelite tactics game where you can play, pause and plan,” say developers Bromio." You are Morgan, dimension-diving merc, delving deeper and deeper into a dimension between worlds, at the behest of the factions looking to exploit this new reality." You can catch some of the fast-paced combat down here in RFM’s reveal trailer. The developers have recently put together a more instructive deep dive video going over some of your skills and how to effectively plan a battle....

As the two wizard managers managing wizard management mention above, they’re planning on jumping to mobile “in a way that feels intentionally built for the platform”, rather than a hasty port. They also mention the next couple of months will still see updates to Set 2, bringing “new champions and origins” as well as “some pretty key item reworks”. (If you’re new here - Origins are one of TFT’s words for unit types that share buffs when fielded together....

If you’re interested in getting into the beta, you need to sign up or login to your Riot account, link it to your Twitch account, and then start watching any stream of the game with the ‘Drops Enabled’ tag. You’ll then have a chance of receiving a randomly dropped key to access the closed beta. This is a clever way of getting a lot of people to watch streams of your game, and to get a lot of livestreamers to start broadcasting it....

You can play Valorant for free right now if you’re in Europe and the UK, just sign up for a Riot account and download it over on the website. The game’s release is being staggered globally, however, and won’t released until 8am EDT and 5am PDT for all our American pals. So, what’s in store for all you new and returning player today then? For starters, there’s a vampiric new agent named Reyna....

It’s coming a little later than planned, mind, with Risky O’Rain’s launch pushed back a month earlier this year. Back then, the devs reckoned they needed to rethink what launch meant for the game, and gave themselves a little more time to figure things out. So what does Risk Of Rain 2’s 1.0 launch look like, then? An ending, for one. We’re heading to the moon to kick the game’s final boss in the arse, bringing closure to the game’s until-now endlessly escalating rotation with an honest-to-god cutscene....

Naturally, Ace pushed things off with a new launch trailer - hurling yet more boulders, cheese-wheels, meatballs and other assorted spherical nonsense down precarious, Monty Python-esque pathways. The big difference this time ‘round is a level editor, letting you piece together your own bespoke descents in all manner of themes - including a delicious-looking spaghetti land demonstrated in the launch vid. These can then be shared online, giving you a nice bank of community-created hills to demolish once you’ve run over the base game’s tracks....

French YouTuber Gautoz first reported Quantic Wars rumours on Friday, then DualShockers reported they’d heard that too. “In a separate conversation, however, I was also speaking to an individual who provided overwhelming evidence that he had contacts at Quantic Dream and reported that the Star Wars game by the studio has been in the works for around 18 months,” Tom Henderson wrote. So it’s all second-hand and vague at best....