UHQBot
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A roguelike cyber-shooter is sitting on Steam's hot releases this weekend: Deadlink, a game where you're part of an elite anti-evil-corporation task force uses remote-piloted androids called "autonomous combat shells" to bring a brand of vicious justice "for a fraction of the cost of a hopeless court case."
It's a shooter of ever-escalating tension and speed, where slowing down is a good way to immediately die. There are lots of high-adrenaline, amped-up abilities to collect and use in conjunction with your guns—which is good, because you're going up against tanks, drones, and swarms of security goons and/or hired thugs.
During runs against the corps you build up a suite of implants to use, triggered by stuff like swapping weapons, using your grappling hook, and using your other powers. That's how you build up synergies with your weapons and figure out combos to carry you through the levels. When you inevitably die you get currency, based on how far you got, to spend on permanent upgrades.
Deadlink is currently in Early Access, so there's a limit on how much you can play right now. There are two levels, each of which is decently sized. There are also two android chassis to pilot, the thunderously aggressive Soldier and the speedier Hunter. The developers plan for it to be in Early Access for about a year.
Ways to build vary pretty greatly, from long-distance sniping and status afflictions to full-auto attacks or close-range strikes using shotguns. A few elemental effects, like fire and acid, let you customize further. Fans of it are comparing the game to fast-paced shooters like Ultrakill and Doom Eternal. "Combat is a really good mix of old-school Quake and Hades," says one Steam reviewer.
You can find Deadlink on Steam in Early Access, where it's $20, or 20% off until October 25th. It's developed by Gruby Entertainment and published by SuperGG.com.
Gruby Entertainment is a small indie based in Warsaw, Poland, and Deadlink seems to be their first game. SuperGG previously published games like Deflector and Raji: An Ancient Epic.
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THE PCG Q&A
Find all previous editions of the PCG Q&A here. Some highlights:
- What should boomer shooters be called?
- Do you check how long games take to finish before you play them?
- Have you learned a real-world skill from a game?RPG classes often feel like a bit of a personality quiz, letting us choose the fantasy we'd like to embody, but what if you got all isekai'd into one and had to make do? Most of us, if we're being honest, would be level one commoners with six hit points, but let's play around in this space and give ourselves the benefit of the doubt: our ideal selves, playing to our strengths in a fantasy world.
If you were a companion in an RPG, what class would you be?
Here are our answers, as well as some from our forum.
Lauren Morton, Associate Editor: Well speaking of isekai-adjacent stuff, I did watch a couple episodes of "I Don't Want to Get Hurt, So I'll Max Out My Defense" about the newbie VRMMO player who just stat dumps into defense and accidentally starts winning fights with her shield and thought "oh no, it's me."
I'm not sneaky or fast enough to be the cool stealth thief character I always play. I'm not strong or very good at memorizing spells. Honestly, I'm just very stubborn, which is why I've made a few similarly stupid novelty builds in RPGs that should not (and don't) work, so becoming some unlikely tank who can only absorb damage and use party support buffs is probably me.
(Image credit: Silver Link)
Jody Macgregor, AU/Weekend Editor: I am old enough that when I think of traveling to a fantasy world I think of "portal fantasy" like Narnia and the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon instead of whatever isekai manga about being hit by a truck and reborn as a slime the kids are reading today.
In which case I would be a wizard, but inevitably a rubbish one like Presto from the D&D cartoon, who casts spells by pulling objects out of a hat and is only useful when the universe takes pity on him and lets him find a use for the random birthday cake or whatever he just brought into existence. So yeah, wizard. I'll be the one party member who doesn't use Intelligence as a dump stat.
Lauren Aitken, Guides Editor: I'd be an archer who also happens to be strong in destruction and alteration magic (hello, yes, Oblivion would like it's skills back). All sneaky-beaky then boop! Arrow in the face. Or maybe I'll sneak up and set you on fire, who knows?
(Image credit: Bioware)Ted Litchfield, Associate Editor: My go-to character is a sneaky thiefy Garrett type, or else a dark mage/necro depending on the ruleset. That's not me though. In real life I'm big, strong, clumsy, and good natured, so I would absolutely be the Neutral Good human fighter you pick up in the first town who helps you tank the goblin caves. The world needs Alistairs and Carths, after all.
(Image credit: Bioware)From our forum
Crapulence1337: I'd fall into a magician class of some sort. Namely because I'll disappear when it gets heavy and show up again in time to celebrate the win.
No, but seriously, I'd go magician because most of everything else feels too human-like. It's like eating at the same joints on vacation that you can at home; give me something different, something I can't do already.(Image credit: Activision Blizzard)SleepingDog: I would like to think that I would be a Paladin but that is wishful thinking. I don't think I could endure the training and praying to get there. Then there is the bit about being holy. In reality probably a Mage.
Zloth: Bard!
What? You don't want to bring me along on the adventure? Well shucks, I guess I'll just stay back here, safe in the campsite, while you go off to get chewed on by a variety of monsters. Be sure to bring back plenty of gold!(Image credit: Larian)DXCHASE: Wizard/Magic, Necromancer, summon the dead to play with them.
Brian Boru: Archer/Ranger, playing a stealthy scout and overwatch kind of role. Hang near DXCHASE the necro, so he can resurrect me when needed
Colif: We don't need no Zombie Brian Boru around here.
Kovanen: Some sort of Dwarven Warrior, carry around a big ol' axe while drinking and complaining about everything. Would occasionally bring Zloth on adventures to reach things from the top shelf, while he serenades me of tales about the famous Brian Boru
(Image credit: Beamdog)Pifanjr: Fantasy: assuming the arcane language used for casting spells is just Latin, I'd be a wizard. Not that I remember much from the six years of Latin I had in high school, but there's probably still enough knowledge floating in my brain to get a good head start.
Science Fiction: anti-tech tech specialist. As a tech specialist, I would know exactly how unreliable most tech is and would never trust any of it. For example, I could reliably defeat any AI by posing it a paradoxical question.
Post-apocalyptic: Scientist and repair guy. I'm not actually good at either, but I just happen to find a database containing a huge selection of manuals and DIY/how-to books.McStabStab: Dogmeat. *woof*
(Image credit: Bethesda Softworks) -
From 2010 to 2014 Richard Cobbett wrote Crapshoot, a column about rolling the dice to bring random games back into the light. This week, who's presence is sorely missing from this attempt to bring the Aliens world to the small screen in adventure form? It's Ripley's, believe it or not.
Cryo. Even on a box showing a drool-dripping xenomorph out for blood, the developer's logo would still be the most sinister thing about this adventure game. I won't say they never made any decent games. For instance, there was... uh. Hmm.
Space Pranks: put a crewmate's hand in warm water as they go into cryo, have them wake with ice pants.I guess Faust wasn't too horrible, though they only published that. I hear some folks liked Megarace for some reason? They made three of them. Someone must have been buying them. And then of course... no. Well, looks like I am indeed saying they never made any decent games. They did however make a lot of them, mostly awful adventures. Wait! Dune! They made the original Dune. Dune was pretty good. So, well done there Cryo. Now rest in peace... and please, never ever wake up. In any event, Aliens did not help their reputation for creating good adventure games. Pretty ones, sure. But good? Let's just say that in space, no-one can hear you scream, but wow, can they see you suck.
This isn't actually a conversion of the movie, but a continuation of a Dark Horse spin-off comic called Aliens: Labyrinth, because obviously, this is what the world needed rather than a game built around something like RoboCop Vs. The Terminator or Judge Dredd vs. Aliens. You play a former colonial marine named Heriksen or Hericksen, spelling dependent on the scene, who is one of the crew of the USS Sheridan. You're busy sleeping away the journey from a terraforming mission back to Earth when you're diverted by a mysterious SOS on the planet B52C. At least, it's probably an SOS. This being the Aliens universe, it's no surprise that dark things are afoot on this unimaginatively named world, so it could just be the guy in charge saying "Soz!" to the universe about to be infested with hideous horror. Specifically, this game. Yes, a cheap shot. But deserved.
Aliens is the kind of adventure that wastes little time becoming unlikeable, firstly by putting tight time limits on the action. Almost everything is timed. Everything. Waking up for instance, the crew finds themselves in danger from asteroids, with about five minutes to rush around and figure out what to do—something that the characters think is best achieved by sniping at each other, setting up fights, and chasing the one female member of the team with lines like, "What's your problem, hot lips?" Not too surprisingly, her response is to make this face.
"We're in a world of facehuggers, and you, Hericksen, are still the entity I would least like down my throat."Later, you get about 15 minutes per section of the game, which is long enough to drain all the tension like fat from a George Foreman grill, but it's so full of things that need to be done and occasional barely pixel-sized objects needing to be found that your odds of getting through anything without a million failures is exactly zero. It doesn't help that very little of it makes sense, this being one of those SF adventures that just piles in any old objects on the grounds that they're futuristic, rarely bothering with clues or advice except in the most self-evident sections, like using a severed hand to open a severed-hand-shaped lock. Well, scanner.
The idea was that Aliens was going to be an adventure/roleplaying game hybrid, where things like morale and hunger would need to be managed along with the puzzle-solving. In the end though, almost none of that actually made it into the game. The most notable remnant is that forgetting to feed the crew early on means everyone will pretty much go crazy later on. In that sense, Aliens practically has permadeath—in the sense that no sane person would start over purely to see what happens next.
You don't get to fight—or even really meet—the aliens until almost the end of the game.The basic puzzle in this section is to run around and steal from everybody's rooms, because despite the USS Sheridan having a crew of exactly four, its designers still feel the need to have special passcards to get into certain areas of the ship and interact with the computer, MOM.
MOM itself turns out to be a real piece of work too. The only way to avoid the asteroids is to land on planet B52C—hereafter known as Shithole, because it deserves something more appropriate to the acidic, stormy mess that most of this game is set on—and you'd think that would be pretty easy.
Welcome to Planet Shithole. Ask about our special "Christ, you came back here?" loyalty offers.But no. While MOM can work out landing co-ordinates just fine, apparently nobody thought hooking the ship's computer up to the rest of the ship would be smart, forcing you to find a blank CD (yes, really) to download the co-ordinates onto, then literally walk about 20 steps to hand it over to a pilot who's idly watching the autopilot do its thing anyway.
Now, this is already setting up the worst technology since Windows ME. But it's nothing compared to the computer's other handy task—providing background information on the universe. You'd think you could simply ask for an update on what's going on. Nope. This is Aliens: A Comic Book Adventure. Instead, it wants you to play games of Reversi to unlock your bits of lore. That makes complete and total sense.
Reversi of course is named for the ancient game of Go Away, the only appropriate response to being ordered to play it.I shall allow the G-Man's little brother to express my feelings on this.
Why, yes. Yes it is.This guy is actually O'Connor, the team's scientist and outright xenomorph fetishist whose commitment to logic doesn't last too long. "Aliens don't kill you just because you happen to be white, black, Jewish, Hindu or simply different from them," he spits. And, sure? Except for that last part, what with their victims being killed very specifically for not being drooling aliens. "It's an instinctive drive," he adds. So that's OK!
Anyway, with the ship safe, the crew needs to get on with investigating the SOS signal. And by that, I of course mean having lunch.
Plasmatech: Because You Might Have Forgotten it's the Future.Yes, barely has the game begun than it grinds to a halt for several minutes of ordering hamburgers and hot dogs and shoving them down the crew's throats until their hunger bars are full. This takes forever thanks to one of the slowest vending machines ever created, with all four crew members needing to be satisfied to properly prepare for the mission ahead.
Somehow, even after all those carbs you don't have to handle what you might expect to be a super-important bonus objective.
In space, nobody can hear you squit.Having feasted on junk food, the team is finally prepared to head into battle. Aliens: A Comic Book Adventure wastes little time making this as unthreatening as possible, in two major ways. First, it gives them all mech suits. All of them. Fully armoured suits that obviously don't entirely negate the aliens' power, but do rather take some of the immediate edge off it. Second, it offers no good reason why they can't poke their heads into the base, realise that everything has gone completely to hell, and leave.
There really is no reason for them to stick around. After all, they're not even a team of marines or anything, but terraformers—a doctor, a scientist, a pilot, and just one soldier. Nobody would so much as mutter if they just wrote a note to phone someone about it when they got to safety and went back to cryosleep.
Wow, really good thing we just happened to have these...But no, of course that's not an option. The four dutifully leave the comfort of their ship to investigate, and are immediately attacked by a crazy person in another robot suit.
Hericksen takes him down, and everyone provides a quick reminder of how unlikeable they really are by declaring, "You killed a man for NOTHING!" The idea is to show that Hericksen might be crazy and have gunned down an innocent man. If you don't though, you die. So, so much for that.
That concludes the psychological horror, except for the fact that you have to spend the entire game navigating between seemingly randomly placed camera angles and hunting for tiny objects, making for an experience not entirely unlike the fever sweats of food poisoning. But then, this wasn't unheard of in games like this. You know. Crap ones.
I WAS WRONG THE TRUE HORROR IS THIS GUY'S FAAAAAAACE!In its place comes about 15 or so, repeated multiple times, incidents of wandering around an empty base picking up keycards and flipping switches. Nothing happens. Nothing. No aliens leap out of the darkness, no mental tricks are played, no surprises happen. Occasionally, the sound guy rustles a bit of paper and then goes home early. The most action-filled moment is fighting two maintenance robots, who put up about as much of a fight as you'd think.
Luckily, Team Hero is on hand to put the 'douche' into 'bunch of douchebags'. Here are their Top 3 Moments.
Moment 1
This may sting a little.Shoving the scientist into a force field to see if it's dangerous (which it is), despite already having the inventory item needed to just switch it off.
Moment 2
Oh, cool. I always wanted a pet chestburster.Finally finding someone alive and in excruciating agony at the point of death, the team doesn't spare this victim a single second of the pain, nor have any interest in or comment on her plight. When the chestburster launches out and runs off, it practically looks back as if to say, "Wow. You bastards."
Moment 3
Hope someone else saved his soul, because there's no saving those trousers.The team discovers the mutilated body of the man whose message brought them to this desolate hellhole. "Hope you don't mind if we borrow this," chuckles the doctor, cutting his hand off and sticking it in her pocket for later use or perhaps just a light snack.
All of these people need to be French-kissed by a xenomorph. Immediately.
And no, there is still no apparent reason why they can't just declare the mission a miserable failure, go back to their ship, and go home. I suppose there might be a line explaining it somewhere, but the game doesn't go out of its way to provide an excuse beyond, "Well, we've already put our suits on..."
Our only in-flight movie is Prometheus?! Aaargh! Wankers! I wanted to see the new Thor!The aliens having more or less completed their glorified cameos, Aliens: A Comic Book Adventure now hands its stopwatch over the Space Jockeys, courtesy of a ship in orbit that will nuke the whole game just to make sure it ends.
I am officially on their side here.
While waiting for their righteous fire, the team sets to work poking around a lab with no apparent purpose, and so inevitably ends up making drugs out of alien egg slime. Why not? It's not like they're suddenly going to become any more sloppy and inefficient if they get high.
Mostly, this is another race against time in which nothing happens beyond a few facehuggers sitting in tanks as if saying, "Dude, I'm sleeping. Get out of my face." At least, until you meet this guy. You know he's the Exposition Guy, because he can speak in brackets.
Yeah, I'm looking oddly good for an alien attack victim. Haven't even wet myself once.Incidentally, try to guess the plot. Did you guess it was 'idiots trying to turn aliens into bioweapons'? OF COURSE YOU DID THIS UNIVERSE ONLY HAS ONE SODDING PLOTLINE. So important is this character that Team Useless pump him for information and then amble away so that he can politely die off-screen without giving the animators any more work to do. It is their only civic-minded duty so far.
"If I had one of those monsters in my gut... You all promise me that if one of those things nails me, you'll end it," demands Hericksen, a complete sociopath who again didn't so much as offer one of the unlimited-ammo blasts in his laser gun to spare another human being the same agonising death just moments ago.
In fact, just for that, I decided to kill them all.
Attack, brothers! Vengeance for our shat-upon siblings! Next stop, Cryo!It might sound like I'm skipping over a lot, and in fairness, I am ignoring some stuff because it would simply be too boring to type. Most of the plot is actually off the beaten track, in conversations and CDs that it's easy to miss but even easier to ignore. But really, none of it compensates for just how dull all this is, and how often bits have to be replayed and re-trod thanks to a bad save system and astoundingly tight time limits that give little room for error even when you know what you're doing.
With the big revelation out of the way and confirmation that there's no point sticking around any longer—sadly, confirmation that comes too late to prevent the team losing their ship to their own stupidity, which the cast reacts to with as much anguish as a suicidal clown in a pie-throwing contest—the rest of the game is literally just pushing through the rest of the base to escape before the Space Jockeys nuke the planet.
This involves going through an alien hive. Some appallingly designed combat with facehuggers and full-size xenomorphs takes place, courtesy of an isometric engine whose existence is a crime against nature. Assuming all goes well, the crew find a replacement ship, get aboard, take off, and that's about it. There's a big badaboom behind them as the entire thing is turned into a red ball by the Space Jockeys, and then they leave like they should have done the second they realised Planet Shithole was infested with Giger's greatest creations and they only had one gun between them.
The true horror is that in the future, this will be stylish decoration.BUT WAIT!
"I hope we don't have any stowaways!" laughs the doctor, sealing their fate.
One. Two. Three.
A scream! "There's something behind the glass!"
AAAAAAAAAAARGH!
Ha, no, wait. It's just a hilarious practical joke! And so Aliens: A Comic Book Adventure ends on the equivalent of one of those sitcom freeze-frames where everyone pauses mid chuckle so the credits can roll. Technically, at least. As is often the way, it's really more like a wall of unending shame.
Wow.
This is a contender for the emptiest, most pointless movie license I've ever encountered. It doesn't so much tell a new story in this universe as tell an existing one to a new cast, completely wastes one of science fiction's most iconic aliens by making them bit-part players in a dull scavenger hunt, and the few dangling elements of vague interest are all the more frustrating for their inclusion.
For example, your team has both the hunger meter mentioned earlier and assorted other bars like morale, and if you're wondering why they're only being mentioned in passing, it's because they do nothing. They were clearly intended to add more of an RPG survival horror element, but barely even count as decoration in the finished release—oddly, not entirely unlike the game version of The Thing.
Still, a few novelties wouldn't have saved this trainwreck. It's a story that had no need to be told—following a Dark Horse comic story, though no word on whether said Dark Horse was ridden by the Space Jockeys—that mistakenly thinks people know it well enough to need a continuation, with absolutely no idea of how to build tension or use the elements for anything worthwhile. The cast is hateful at best, and their lines poorly written and translated. The closest anything here gets to horror is the very, very occasional jump-scare to show the timer ticking down. Even then, it's just a quick flash of an alien at most, as if they're more embarrassed than anyone else to be here. Can't blame them. After all, it's their rep on the line here. Nobody's going to remember Herickson and friends.
Still it was better than Aliens: Colonial Marines, mind.
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Delightfully relaxed tile-placing game Dorfromantik has a new update out on Steam that adds a new biome, one of pink cherry blossom trees and boxy little houses, for your pleasure.
The biome was made for the Nintendo Switch release of Dorfromantik, but it's now in the PC version as well as a few optimizations and world options. The update is free.
The biggest change in this update is full controller support, which was implemented for the Switch release but now comes to PC as well. That also means that Dorfromantik should run quite well on your Steam Deck, and developer Toukana Interactive thinks that Valve will mark it as fully compatible some time soon.
The update also has lots of performance optimizations. "In order to port Dorfromantik to the Nintendo Switch, we had to perform a lot of performance optimizations, which will now of course also benefit the PC version. We will fine-tune a few more parts so that we can meet the wide range of different hardware requirements for PC," said the devs.
One of those is actually a constraint added for the Switch hardware that adds borders to the normally-infinite world you place tiles in. Since it's sometimes a cool way to play you can now add the rule to your Custom Mode games.
Dorfromantik is a tile-placing puzzle game with the vibe of a relaxed city builder. I'd call it more of a landscape builder, myself, but either way it's adorable. "Dorfromantik is a soothing puzzle game that only very occasionally makes me want to punch a train," said our Chris Livingston last year. For my part, I find it to be so absorbingly relaxed that I can lose hours just ploppin tiles into nice little landscapes.
You can find the announcement and the full patch notes for Dorfromantik on Steam.
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Pasokon Retro is our regular look back at the early years of Japanese PC gaming, encompassing everything from specialist '80s computers to the happy days of Windows XP.
I have never seen a game ratchet up the supernatural tension quite as effectively as Onryō Senki, an adventure game from 1988. Not Fatal Frame, not Devotion, not even my first trip to Silent Hill—none of them come close to matching the level of "I'm not scared I just want to sleep with the lights on for a week" horror found here. This is a game content to treat players like prey, something to be patiently stalked while it waits for the perfect time to strike.
Developer: Soft Studio Wing Released: 1988 Japanese PCs: PC-88/98, MSX (Image credit: Soft Studio Wing / Generation-MSX)I've also never seen another game ship with a protective ofuda designed to ward off evil spirits like Onyro Senki; this clever packaging gives the PC-88 version's warning about malicious ghosts being summoned forth if played without protection just a bit more weight. This small rectangle of printed paper is exactly the sort of straight-faced "No, really" caution a scary tale should start with: it's a physical suggestion this story might not be quite as fictional as anyone playing expects it to be.
Onryō Senki begins with lead character Hiroyuki Kitahara—just some regular programmer working for a large national bank—attacked by demons while out walking on a peaceful moonlit night in the very ordinary city he calls home. The hospital insists his memories are just an unfortunate side effect of the shock caused by being attacked by stray dogs, a reasonable if dismissive attitude that ignites a desire in Kitahara to gather more evidence and uncover the truth behind his spooky encounter.
Onryō Senki takes the time to establish this baseline level of plausible deniability only so it can masterfully erode it over the following in-game days: An artist suddenly driven to painting disturbing pictures, a series of unnatural murders and mysterious "accidents," a demon in the park that's mildly surprised Kitahara can see it as it dines on dead dog.
This is all happening in an adventure game stored on just a few floppy discs, controlled by simple commands picked from a text-based sidebar while a static picture of the scene sits in a neat little rectangle. The artwork is almost always heavily dithered and coloured using a striking combination of a midnight blue and stark black—detailed enough to resemble a specific place or scene, but always dreamlike and indistinct. It's in many ways an early form of the shadows, fog, and film grain found in later horror games Visual noise is a natural hiding place for ghosts and ghouls.
Sound on
Kitahara's desire to investigate the city's burgeoning occult phenomena leads to him creating a program for the online-enabled computer terminal he has at home, which would've been seriously high-tech in the late '80s. This seemingly benign bit of assistance is actually the perfect dread-enhancing tool, giving him (and me) access to a steady stream of reports about people who were officially attacked by "dogs" and "monkeys" as well as a map showing where the current ghostly hotspots are. Thanks to this information it's easy to see the danger shifting and growing as the game progresses. More and more districts change from an uneventful blue to an ominous red as the ghostly threat spreads across the city.
The annotated map included in the manual helps to make sense of the short lists of place names available to choose from at each location. Kitahara's fact-finding mission is split across both the day and night, with the daylight hours broadly intended for gathering information and the moonlit ones for acting on it. In the beginning ghosts appear at random during these wanderings only at night, a silent flicker of something so swift it's hard to be sure there was ever anything there at all.
The initial subtlety of these hauntings is what makes them so effective—they're not jump scares designed to make me scream but an independent otherworldly presence, a face in the background that definitely wasn't there last time and refuses to appear again even if I try to force it to. The first time it happened I went back to the same area and… nothing. I checked my screenshots folder and… nope, I wasn't fast enough to catch it, whatever "it" was. There's not much as unsettling as a game making you question your own senses.
After a while it becomes clear these manifestations don't "do" anything other than show up and then go away, and a brave player might start to look out for them just for fun… and it's around about that point those "harmless" ghosts start hanging around—just present on the screen, watching—every one drawn in such a way it could be making direct eye contact with me.
Image 1 of 5(Image credit: Soft Studio Wing)Image 2 of 5(Image credit: Soft Studio Wing)Image 3 of 5(Image credit: Soft Studio Wing)Image 4 of 5(Image credit: Soft Studio Wing)Image 5 of 5(Image credit: Soft Studio Wing)A disembodied head just sometimes manifests on the street right outside Kitahara's home, staring straight out of the screen. There weren't any ghosts that close to home before. Something's changed. In these quiet moments in the dark it doesn't feel like Kitahara's alone: it feels like he's vulnerable, and the dead are closely following his every move.
I catch myself wishing the world would unravel faster rather than putting me through any more of this excruciating slow-burn torment. The entire city is clearly teetering on the edge of a huge supernatural event but still not quite ready to topple over into the abyss.
The collapse of normality that does inevitably come is well worth the wait, and when Onryō Senki's ghostly goings-on finally crosses the point of no return the spooky tapestry it has spent hours weaving unravels in a spectacular fashion. Ordinary people are attacked by ghosts in the street and sightings are no longer dismissed as angry wildlife, and it becomes so intense and undeniable that the police and the mayor officially get involved. Regular citizens rush to leave the city in fear. Skilled priests try to fight back and are decapitated on live TV in broad daylight. The good old days of creepy little sightings in the night and being afraid of the odd talkative demon feel quaint in comparison.
Kitahara can ward off evil spirits using special mantras and mudras, which are religious chants and hand gestures, but he's nowhere near an all-powerful videogame protagonist. By the time he gets the hang of it the dead are able to violently manifest at will, turning the screen a threatening blood-red in the process. I'm not using these skills to bravely fight back against the afterlife, I'm giving myself just enough breathing room to safely get from one place to another as I scurry around the city looking for answers—and it's clear I'm running out of time.
Image 1 of 3(Image credit: Soft Studio Wing)Image 2 of 3(Image credit: Soft Studio Wing)Image 3 of 3(Image credit: Soft Studio Wing)Yet for all this apparent danger there are only a few places Kitahara can actually die in Onryō Senki, and they're mostly avoidable with just a little thought and common sense. You'd think this relative safety would lessen the impact of the horror—so many horror games are based around monsters that can tear you apart in seconds. But Onryō Senki works differently.If anything Kitahara' virtually guaranteed survival only intensifies everything happening around him.
There's no easy way out for the player, no convenient excuse to put the game down for the day, no chance to become comfortably familiar with (or bored of) a scary scene through repetitive reloads. Instead there is only more and worse right to the end. Onryō Senki keeps on turning every shadow into a lurking spectre, every silence into a monster patiently holding its breath, making every event just that little bit more demonically shocking than the one before—until the credits roll.
Now where did I put that ofuda…?
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A French organization is developing technology to give visually impaired people more ability to perceive their environment—and they're using videogames to test and expand it. In the process they've managed to make Trackmania accessible to even those who are totally blind.
Thanks to @artha_france, Trackmania is accessible to blind and visually impaired people. Join us at the #ParisGamesWeek on @JeuxMadeInFR booth from November 2nd to 6th to try Trackmania with @artha_france. pic.twitter.com/PYrTFQPmcrOctober 21, 2022
See moreArtha France has developed a haptic feedback belt that transmits information from an input like a camera or screen into sensations on the skin. Using a virutal environment to test the technology was at first a low-stakes way to test it, but seems to have become an end unto itself as the hardware developed.
Trackmania was clearly a choice not just because it's consistent and fairly simple, but because it mimics many real-world challenges, requiring players to have fairly fast insight in consistent environments. Learning to use the tech while playing Trackmania meant that quick reaction was useful.
When testing on the device first started, it would take six to 20 hours for users to learn. By this year new players can pick up and go in an hour. Early video of the tech in action shows off how its first adaptation to a digital environment was a test using a maze built in Minecraft. The next step? Obviously it was putting someone using the haptic rig in an actual underground mine.
Artha's english Youtube channel has more details on the process, breaking down the technology's development over the past few years. It's about eight minutes long and a really fascinating watch if this whole process intrigues you.
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No matter what sort of Wordle advice you're after, from general hints and tips to a clue designed to nudge you in the right direction, or even the answer to the October 22 (490) puzzle on a plate, you'll find all that and plenty more on this very page.
Somehow everything fell perfectly into place for today's Wordle. I just happened to have the right combination of confirmed greens and ignorable greys to make the right answer the one word that really popped out at me.
Wordle hint
Today's Wordle: A hint for Saturday, October 22
The word you're looking for today is another way of describing a pitch or any other sort of lengthy but swiftly delivered speech designed to win someone over or persuade the listener.
Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle every day
If there's one thing better than playing Wordle, it's playing Wordle well, which is why I'm going to share a few quick tips to help set you on the path to success:
- A good opener contains a balanced mix of unique vowels and consonants.
- A tactical second guess helps to narrow down the pool of letters quickly.
- The solution may contain repeat letters.
There's no time pressure beyond making sure it's done by midnight. So there's no reason to not treat the game like a casual newspaper crossword and come back to it later if you're coming up blank.
Wordle answer
(Image credit: Josh Wardle)What is the Wordle 490 answer?
Weekends should start with wins. The answer to the October 22 (490) Wordle is SPIEL.
Previous answers
Wordle archive: Which words have been used
The more past Wordle answers you can cram into your memory banks, the better your chances of guessing today's Wordle answer without accidentally picking a solution that's already been used. Past Wordle answers can also give you some excellent ideas for fun starting words that keep your daily puzzle solving fresh.
Here are some recent Wordle solutions:
- October 21: GROVE
- October 20: DENIM
- October 19: QUIRK
- October 18: EXIST
- October 17: STEIN
- October 16: SPADE
- October 15: CATCH
- October 14: FLOOR
- October 13: EQUAL
- October 12: IONIC
Learn more about Wordle
Every day Wordle presents you with six rows of five boxes, and it's up to you to work out which secret five-letter word is hiding inside them.
You'll want to start with a strong word like ALERT—something containing multiple vowels, common consonants, and no repeat letters. Hit Enter and the boxes will show you which letters you've got right or wrong. If a box turns
️, it means that letter isn't in the secret word at all. 
means the letter is in the word, but not in that position. 
means you've got the right letter in the right spot.You'll want your second go to compliment the first, using another "good" word to cover any common letters you missed last time while also trying to avoid any letter you now know for a fact isn't present in today's answer.
After that it's just a case of using what you've learned to narrow your guesses down to the right word. You have six tries in total and can only use real words (so no filling the boxes with EEEEE to see if there's an E). Don't forget letters can repeat too (ex: BOOKS).
If you need any further advice feel free to check out our Wordle tips, and if you'd like to find out which words have already been used you'll find those below.
Originally, Wordle was dreamed up by software engineer Josh Wardle, as a surprise for his partner who loves word games. From there it spread to his family, and finally got released to the public. The word puzzle game has since inspired tons of games like Wordle, refocusing the daily gimmick around music or math or geography. It wasn't long before Wordle became so popular it was sold to the New York Times for seven figures. Surely it's only a matter of time before we all solely communicate in tricolor boxes.
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YouTuber 3kliksphilip, apparently mad with power, has bent one of the most absurd PC gaming components ever devised to a suitably deranged goal: ratcheting the framerate of the notoriously easy-to-run Counter-Strike: Global Offensive so high, the Source engine buckles under the weight.
CS:GO is built on practically the same 18-year-old tech as Half-Life 2. Its lightweight nature allows gamers to eke out maximal frame rates with minimal hardware, pushing past the classic 60 to achieve heights of 120, 144, or even 200 fps, all for maximal competitive advantage, however slight. Counter-Strike's built-in limit is an already absurdly high 400 fps.
In a time of skyrocketing energy costs and something not-great maybe happening to global ocean temperatures, Nvidia released an absolute monster brick of a graphics card in the 450 watt max TDP, $1,600 RTX 4090. 3kliksphilip commendably acknowledges the absurdity of such a product, while also pointing out some potentially more sane use cases for it, all before plunging into the abyss.
3kliksphilip started by removing every impediment to performance, including AI bot players and even the HUD and view models to steal precious frames. At this juncture, even the mighty Intel Core i9 13900K processor gets bottlenecked, with average frame rates of around 980 from 4k down to 720p. Pushing things to their absolute limit, just staring at a wall on a particularly uncomplicated map, 3kliksphilip was able to top out at over 4,400 fps, a truly ludicrous achievement.
Perhaps one day, an esports-centric society of future humans will develop monitors to render such performance, eyes to perceive it, and yes, even games to support it. But does 4,400fps produce a better K/D ratio? Turns out, once you surpass around 1,000 fps, Counter-Strike starts to bug out. Characters start to move slightly faster. This isn't unheard of in games: some older ones can't go past 60 or even 30 fps without glitches due to their internal logic being tied to a certain framerate, though it's funny to make them try.
A 4090 speed boost won't actually offer a tangible benefit in-game, as online servers will forcibly correct you to move at a normal play speed, which renders player-side as a jarring, constant stutter. Ultimately, 3kliksphilip readily acknowledges how silly an endeavor this was, even if it is very, very funny.
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Hello AteBit,
Welcome to UnityHQ Nolfseries Community. Please feel free to browse around and get to know the others. If you have any questions please don't hesitate to ask.
AteBit joined on the 10/20/2022.
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Hello elmagta09,
Welcome to UnityHQ Nolfseries Community. Please feel free to browse around and get to know the others. If you have any questions please don't hesitate to ask.
elmagta09 joined on the 10/22/2022.
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We're only a week away from the 2022 World Series, and as the final four teams duke it out for a coveted spot you can enjoy a brand-new baseball game on Steam—provided you're willing to put up with some small rule changes. Like, instead of human players the teams are completely made up of wild animals. You're cool with that, right?
In Yerr Out, which is free on Steam, there are all sorts of different animals to choose from. Each game begins with you drafting the animals you want onto your team, and you can pick between a bear, moose, racoon, crow, mouse, giraffe, snake, hippo, and plenty more. There are 30 different animals to pick from, with a dozen more unlockable as you play. Even the tiniest of creatures are represented, like the ant, spider, and dragonfly. You've heard of Wade Boggs? Meet Wade Bugs.
Each creature has stats that affect how well they play. A hippo is slow but has a lot of strength, a crow is weaker but is very quick, a frog is both slow and weak but has plenty of agility to compensate. A panther, meanwhile, is strong, fast, and agile, making it the Ken Griffey, Jr. of your wildlife team. There's only one of each animal available, so you can't field a team of just bears or wolves, as dope as that would be.
Some more minor rule changes in Yerr Out: Since we're playing in the woods with wild animals, foul lines haven't been established. You can just sorta hit the ball wherever and it'll be in play, which is nice. In keeping with the theme of letting animals be animals, you can go ahead and smash into other players while running the bases in hopes of them dropping the ball, something mostly frowned upon in the major leagues.
If this all sounds like a joke, it's not. I mean, mostly it's not. You can watch a raccoon pitching to an ant. You can see a snake hit a triple to drive in a cat and a boar. A rooster can ground into a 6-4-3 double play. It is silly.
But it's also a real baseball game, with all the controls you'd expect from a game with human players. You can advance and retreat runners, you can charge your swings, throws, and pitches for power, you can dive, slide, jump, and even pick off baserunners. It's a real baseball game! It just happens to be filled with wolves, foxes, beetles, and crocodiles.
(Image credit: Green Valley Games)Those critters are all nicely animated, too. Before an at-bat the cat will groom itself for a moment, the wolf will scratch its ear with a back paw, and the ant will clean its antennas with its forelegs. While most animals swipe at a pitch with their paws or claws, the horse will stand facing backwards and kick the ball into play with its hind hooves. There are nice little details for each creature.
As Yerr Out continues being developed in early access, the plan is to add even more animals and include online play (currently only local splitscreen is available). There may also be a home run derby and other minigames added in the future, according to developer Green Valley Games. And when it leaves early access, it'll probably also get a price tag. For now, it's completely free, so go ahead and step up to the plate.
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There is something oddly nostalgic about Dragon Ball: The Breakers. If you too were nurtured on Toonami marathons during listless, amber-shaded elementary school afternoons, then there is a good chance your nascent video game diet consisted of a whole lot of middling, budget anime games. Reams of forgettable Naruto and Dragon Ball flotsam tiled my local Blockbuster—Budokai, Ultimate Ninja Storm, I could go on and on. So please do not take my warm feelings for The Breakers as a recommendation; this is not a very good video game, but the way it falters might bring you some joy if you are of a certain age and disposition.
There have been Dragon Ball RPGs, Dragon Ball Kinect adventures, and Dragon Ball card battlers across the last 30 years, but The Breakers, published by Bandai Namco, brings all of Saiyanhood to some uncharted territory. This is an asymmetrical, one-versus-all multiplayer game crafted in the tradition of Dead By Daylight and Friday the 13th. One player takes control of a marauding villain plucked out of the greater Dragon Ball canon—Cell, Buu, and Frieza. They will be trying to track down and eradicate the rest of us playing as innocent bystanders. The eight civilians in a match have no chance against whatever nefarious, intergalactic god is scorching across the sky; our only offense is to run, hide, and power up a macguffin at the center of the map which will send everyone home safely.
The Breakers comes on the tail of an unexpected cat-and-mouse multiplayer renaissance. The Evil Dead adaptation, which arrived in May, was a surprisingly strong package, and a promising Texas Chainsaw Massacre tribute is on the horizon. Dragon Ball Z might lack the grisly horror of its licensed compatriots, but hiding out on Frieza's periphery could be a lot of silly fun, especially with the right group. Unfortunately, The Breakers is completely sabotaged by its camera and controls.
(Image credit: Bandai Namco)These maps are huge, and players seem to glide around the terrain without any ambulatory traction. The movement possesses the same uncanny floatiness of a vintage MMO, which simply does not gel with the airtight bob-and-weaving that makes a dramatic Dead By Daylight pursuit so much fun. If Cell did catch sight of me, I usually escaped by using one of my abilities that sent me flying at a terminal velocity into a neighboring section of the map.
The game is better from the villain's perspective—if only because it's fun to make these earthlings run for their lives—but it doesn't hold a candle to the mastermind intrigue of other great one-versus-all experiences. There are no mind-games, no misdirection, no opportunities for vexing creativity. Breakers understands the format of the genre it's aping, but it's missing its essence.
That said, if you are a Dragon Ball Z lifer, there is enough cute ephemera here to distract you from how sloppy it feels. The development team has left no stone unturned: You'll be able to loot Senzu beans that grant players an extra life, or a glove that grants your hapless onlooker Vegeta's Galick Gun. (It has exactly one round of ammunition before it's toast.) More memorably, the survivors are all equipped with a meter that charges through several different tiers the closer the team gets to the climax. When it's primed, you'll be able to briefly inhabit the "spirit" of one of your chosen Dragon Ball Z protagonists, which lets you take the fight directly to the predator skulking in the ether. It's kind of like when Pac-Man eats a power pellet and gobbles up the ghosts—you've been running for your life all game, but now Majin Buu must contend with a juiced-up Piccolo.
Unfortunately, the combat in The Breakers is atrocious, to the point that I don't know if I can adequately describe it. A targeting reticle is automatically placed over the foe in your field of view, which certainly makes it seem like you have your opponent dead to rights. Then whenever you unleash a cooldown-budgeted Kamehameha, you're pulled into a disorienting cutscene before delivering the payload—giving whoever is in the reticle ample time to dodge. It is a genuinely bizarre system. I could not figure out how to reliably hit opponents with my offense, because The Breakers doesn't seem to give me the options to do so.
It's made even worse by the fact that all of the fights take place in these wide-open multiplayer arenas, giving everyone plenty of maneuverability to slither away. The idea of your team jacking into Dragon Ball lore like Neo in the Matrix to turn the tide on Perfect Cell sounds incredible, but for the most part, The Breakers is too confusing and messy to cash in on the drama.
Image 1 of 8(Image credit: Bandai Namco)Image 2 of 8(Image credit: Bandai Namco)Image 3 of 8(Image credit: Bandai Namco)Image 4 of 8(Image credit: Bandai Namco)Image 5 of 8(Image credit: Bandai Namco)Image 6 of 8(Image credit: Bandai Namco)Image 7 of 8(Image credit: Bandai Namco)Image 8 of 8(Image credit: Bandai Namco)Like so many other Dragon Ball games before it, The Breakers does make a futile effort to justify its place within the overarching Toriyama storyline. We are, apparently, lost in some sort of spacetime glitch, which is why scoundrels like Cell—who are very much dead and gone, at least before Super—are managing to torment us once again. This is why you can magically transform from a rando earthling into Piccolo by filling up a meter. Compared to Dead By Daylight, which does not ache nearly as hard to explain how we're being hunted by both Freddy Kreuger and Nemesis from Resident Evil 3, and I did find some charm in how hard the story strains.
Naturally, Breakers uses this epochal excuse to stuff as many Dragon Ball characters as it possibly can into its source code. This goes from the standard cast of heroes—Goku, Krillin, Bulma—to figures only the most damaged DBZ sickos know by name (that little pig guy from Kame Island is in the mix.)
(Okay, I'm that sicko: his name is Oolong.)
Despite the baffling combat and uninspiring mechanical depth, there is something stubbornly appealing about The Breakers. Maybe it's the fact that the character creator lets everyone build their own ersatz Gokus—spikey-haired, wide-eyed dunces put on this earth to run away from whoever is trying to kill them. Maybe it's the faithfulness of the animations; when Buu executes his coup d'etat, he'll transform you into candy and swallow you whole.
The sheer adoration that The Breakers has for the Dragon Ball universe was never a question; it's just been let down by janky mechanics and a dull, repetitive game of hide-and-seek that never gives you much to sink your teeth into. It's like being stuck in a filler episode for all eternity.
In other words, this is a Dragon Ball game, warts and all.
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"What I am about to do has not been approved by the Vatican." So utters Faith: The Unholy Trinity's protagonist on his descent into the supernatural. Developed by Airdorf Games and published by boomer shooter boy band New Blood, Faith: The Unholy Trinity is an 8-bit horror game where you play a priest investigating a Satanic possession.
Faith has an immediately arresting art style, with graphics reminiscent of PC games from the 1980s—I immediately think of Castle Wolfenstein by Muse Software, released in 1981 (can you believe that id's seminal FPS was actually a reboot?). Everything's presented on a black background, with characters and details represented in simple, primary color sprites.
For cutscenes, Faith pairs those stark colors with shockingly good rotoscope animation like the kind used in Prince of Persia or Another World. Faith's uber-retro style and the uncanny effect of rotoscoping contribute to a supremely unique atmosphere—there's not really anything out there exactly like Faith.
The game's first chapter was released for free all the way back in 2017, and since then Airdorf has expanded on the concept with support from New Blood. The full Faith experience seems like just the thing to help get into the Halloween spirit, and you can get it for $15 on itch.io or snag it for an early bird $13.50 on Steam until it goes full price on October 28.
Faith isn't New Blood's only foray into 8-bit PC gaming. The fantastic retro shooter Dusk got an even more throwback prequel with Dusk '82, also available on Steam. If you're looking for something else suitably Halloweeny from the indie label, I might turn your attention to the horror stealther Gloomwood, as long as you don't mind early access.
Image 1 of 6(Image credit: New Blood, Airdorf Games)Image 2 of 6(Image credit: New Blood, Airdorf Games)Image 3 of 6(Image credit: New Blood, Airdorf Games)Image 4 of 6(Image credit: New Blood, Airdorf Games)Image 5 of 6(Image credit: New Blood, Airdorf Games)Image 6 of 6(Image credit: New Blood, Airdorf Games) -
Games has paid its respects to a young Valorant fan who died of cancer earlier this year with a new gun charm called Corbin's Light that's available for free in the current battle pass.
Corbin was a teenage Valorant fan who submitted a request to work with Riot on a design for a Valorant gun skin through the Make-A-Wish Foundation. Sadly, he died a few days after making his request, but his family shared his wish on social media, and it eventually caught the attention of Riot fans and developers. Valorant designers got in touch with Corbin's older brother, who shared Corbin's ideas with them.
Riot said the design of Corbin's Light is inspired by his love of stars and space, and includes the coordinates of a star that was named after him by the Make-A-Wish Foundation.
"Corbin’s Light holds deep personal meaning," said Catalina Faerman, an associate integration artist at Riot games who worked on Corbin's Light (via Instagram). "It was made for one of our players who sadly passed away during his battle with cancer. The Make-a-Wish Foundation named a star after Corbin, so we decided to honor him by creating a Gun Buddy inspired by his star, and additional design notes from his brother.
"I wanted to make something that he would’ve been proud of but also represented him. Thankfully I had help from our awesome concept artists to come up with the design. We chose blue for the crystal as it was Corbin’s favorite color, and I added the coordinates to the Make-a-Wish star as an engraving on the frame. I haven’t been on the Valorant team for long, so I’m honored and grateful beyond words to the team who entrusted me and supported me with this task. Most of all, I’m indebted to Corbin and our players for inspiring us and giving me the opportunity to make art for them. I’m incredibly proud of Corbin’s Light and I will carry this experience with me always."
Shine on, Corbin. Featured as a free item in the EP5//Act3 Battlepass, the “Corbin’s Light” Gun Buddy was created to celebrate Corbin, a member of our VALORANT community.Read about Corbin’s Light and his continued impact through his family’s Foundation:https://t.co/7jwVJLn8GE pic.twitter.com/STYgeSshcuOctober 19, 2022
See moreCorbin's Light will be free to all players in Valorant's episode 5 act 3 battle pass. Riot Games is also making a donation through its Social Impact Fund to the C-Squad Foundation, a charitable organization founded by Corbin's family that aims to ease the financial burden faced by families seeking treatment at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.
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UFOs seemed like a big deal when I was a kid. Everyone seemed to have a story about a UFO sighting, or at least knew someone who did. The way we yammered on about aliens in the 1980s, you'd think you were more likely to look up and spot a flying saucer than a passenger jet.
In the decades since that's pretty much tapered off, probably due to almost everyone in the world now carrying a camera in their pocket and yet capturing precious few photos of UFOs. Go figure. But recently it feels like UFOs are creeping back into the mainstream, what with the Pentagon hearings and military footage showing strange stuff in the sky. There's even a new name for UFOs these days: UAP, or unidentified aerial phenomena.
Now NASA is getting serious about saucers by forming a real-life XCOM squad to handle this potential alien incursion. Barely a month after beating up an asteroid as a show of force for any E.T.s watching (officially, it was to alter the asteroid's course with a collision) NASA has announced it has formed an elite team to kill any aliens that dare step foot (or tentacle) on our planet.
They didn't really say it like that, but they should have.
"NASA has selected 16 individuals to participate in its independent study team on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP)," said NASA. "Over the course of nine months, the independent study team will lay the groundwork for future study on the nature of UAPs for NASA and other organizations."
We all know what "future study" means, right? It's code for "figure out the best way to kill those gross gray-skinned invaders from beyond the moon."
NASA also announced the names of the 16-member team, which I assume, as in XCOM 2, were randomly generated. Just look at the list. David Grinspoon. Matt Mountain. Karlin Toner. Those are some randomized NPC names if I've ever heard them.
The team will "identify how data gathered by civilian government entities, commercial data, and data from other sources can potentially be analyzed to shed light on UAPs," NASA said, with a report on their findings to be released to the public in mid-2023. Hopefully, that's not too late to save the planet.
What's unclear is what happens after that report is finished. Presumably when a UAP sighting occurs, a squad will be formed from the available team members and issued orders, and one-by-one they'll strategically move around cover until they're six inches from an alien. Then they'll pull the trigger of their mag cannons and miss despite having a 97% chance of success. I wish them good luck. For all our sakes.
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One of the original tank heroes in Overwatch is now an unstoppable force in Overwatch 2.
Zarya, the cannon-wielding Russian weightlifter, is the most played tank by the game's highest ranked competitive players. Reddit user TheForrestFire found that 83.3% of the top tank players in North America almost exclusively play Zarya, and that all of the top 30 have her in their top three most played heroes. And if you look at the hour counts on many of those players, their time on Zarya far outweighs the other tanks.
Overwatch 2's top 500 leaderboard shifts around a little bit as players win and lose games, but TheForrestFire's results reveal how successful the most skilled players are with her. The top 30 EU and Asia tanks players mostly main her too—although there's a little more variety in those regions, especially in the lower ranks.
It's worth noting that there are a number of professional esports players in the rankings that skews it. They often play ranked to practice and get grouped up with other esports players, which can make those games more coordinated than others.
Zarya's power largely comes from a significant change Blizzard had to make to her so that she could survive in Overwatch 2's five versus five format. With each team losing one of its two tanks, Zarya received increased health and the ability to double up on her damage-absorbing bubbles, or Particle Barriers. Before, she had an ability that let her bubble herself and another one for an ally. Now, he has one universal bubble ability that uses a two-charge system, which lets her stack them on whoever she wants.
When you deal damage to her bubbles, Zarya gains charge that increases the damage of her gun. Careful bubble usage as you close in on a target or as a teammate charges in, sets her up to compete with DPS heroes in damage output. Even in my average-skilled matches, Zaryas get charged up quickly and then melt through teams. Any time you think you can catch her without a protective barrier, she has another one available and you've only just made her stronger. And if you let her go off for too long, she'll build her Graviton Surge ultimate and wipe out your team all at once. She's the worst tank in the game to play against, but a lot of fun to have on your team.
(Image credit: Tyler C. / Activision Blizzard)In top 500 play, Zaryas are often backed by the two most played support heroes: Lucio and Ana. Lucio can speed boost her around the map, and Ana can snipe massive amounts of healing into her. And with Genji and Sojourn's high pick rates in the damage role, Zarya can enable their aggression in team fights and maintain her charge for the whole match.
Zarya's reign might not last much longer though. She, along with a few other heroes, will receive balance changes in an upcoming patch, according to a tweet by Overwatch 2 game director Aaron Keller. It's likely that the patch will come out next week to give Overwatch League players time to practice before the playoffs on October 30. It might arrive on Tuesday, the same day the game will start its Halloween Terror event, restore the Junkertown map after an fps-dropping bug, re-enable Torbjorn in competitive, and finally bring back Bastion—a high-damage hero that might have helped against Zarya—to the game.
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There's a point in most management games where my brain loses traction: I can only skim over +5% profit margins and -30% completion times for so long until my head overheats. Witch shop sim Potionomics has plenty of its own management ingredients, including brewing, bartering, buying, and investing, but they've all been so reduced to the essentials that I never totally boil over. It's the most chill shop sim I've ever played, which the developers at Voracious Games tell me was a trick to get just right.
I've been anticipating Potionomics for several years at this point, since I first talked to Voracious in 2017 about the bouncy, cartoonish 3D animations it had been showing off—which, these days, I'd probably compare to the exaggerated movements of Tiktok acting. Now that I've played it, the real magic is how it's managed to keep each of its systems breezy, and especially distill haggling into a card game I don't despise.
Dealing the hand
Originally Potionomics didn't have a deck-building element, Voracious Games co-founder Aryo Darmawan tells me. Early on in development, players were meant to guess a price that the customer would be willing to pay, more like the haggling system in the indie item shop classic Recettear, one of Potionomics' main inspirations.
"While this was a lot of fun in Recettear, it felt pretty repetitive and limiting in our own game because Potionomics doesn’t have dungeoning in the core loop to balance it out," Darmawan says. Voracious was a lot more interested in the shop management side of things than, say, Moonlighter, which also felt inspired by Recettear but focused on roguelike combat instead of shop tending.
(Image credit: Voracious Games)In Potionomics, haggling is a turn-based game where you're not so much playing against the customer as the clock. Each card consumes some of the customer's limited patience (use it up and they'll walk out with no deal) but helps you increase their interest in the product. As you pump their interest higher, they'll be willing to pay more, leading you to close out the deal before they get bored.
Potionomics keeps things simple enough that I can play a turn in under ten seconds without ever getting mired in percentages.
In the way that Magic: The Gathering cards represent spells you've memorized, Darmawan says "we thought it would be really cool if the cards represented the thoughts that you’re having while trying to string together a coherent argument with a customer."
When first teaching you to haggle in Potionomics, Voracious really leaned into that concept. Main character and total entrepreneur newbie Sylvia has her first attempt at a sale sprung on her and, appropriately, you're dealt a hand of cards with such brave tactics as "blunder," and "flail," and "blank out." It's one of those situations where you're supposed to whiff the first battle.
Soon after though, Sylvia manages to assemble some self confidence and my deck of haggling tactics grows with cards like "Set 'em up," which raises a customer's interest by four, and applies a buff that specifically increases the interest gains of another card, "Reel 'em in." Other characters Sylvia befriends can teach her their tactics as well. Baptiste, the charming Adventurer's Guildmaster, teaches her to "Captivate" and preserve a customer's patience for extended haggling while local ingredient-slinger Quinn offers "Plant the seed" to automatically raise a customer's interest each turn.
(Image credit: Voracious Games)I often groan about deck-building as an analog for skills and especially dislike the drudgery of card minigames, but Potionomics keeps things simple enough that I can play a turn in under ten seconds without ever getting mired in percentages. I'll often throw down a sequence of cards out of habit that I know work well together, smash the end turn button, and then use my next turn to grab some extra interest without wasting too much patience and seal it up with Sylvia's "Close it out" card.
Brewed strength
Part of Potionomics' easy breezy style is the simplicity of the haggling card game itself, but it's also down to how smoothly Voracious introduces every other bit of management after it.
"It really felt like we were trying to teach a player three different games at any given time," Darmawan says when I ask how they managed such a well-paced tutorial. So often I've felt that management games dump the entire Lego set on my head at once, effectively telling me to sort it myself. But Potionomics smoothly introduces everything you'll be doing around the shop.
(Image credit: Voracious Games)First it's that harrowing first haggling attempt, then arranging potions on shelves before learning to brew my own. Later it's customizing my skill deck, buying ingredients and investing in the guild, all added to my sidebar only after I've been walked through them in Sylvia's first few days. Each is as no-fuss and stats-lite as the card game.
Darmawan says that Potionomics went through a lot of iteration before introducing players to one concept per day. "It gave them enough time to explore it a little, and then get ready for the next set of fun stuff to come their way."
Potionomics does eventually get a bit more difficult. Sylvia's loan payment looms over her head as does the first potion brewing competition against her rival Roxanne. Yet no part of it ever lets me get deep in the weeds before sending me off to some new part of Sylvia's day, be it queuing Mint up for a quest or double-checking Quinn's stock to load up on a specialty ingredient.
Now that Potionomics has finally arrived, of course I'm delighted that it earned an 87% review, in which we called it "more than the sum of its ingredients." Its haggling or brewing or adventure management may have been too simplistic to stick on their own, but together Potionomics nailed the one-more-day-ism of a shop sim by concocting a suite of managerial duties that sing in harmony.
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Do you know what's inside your Steam Deck? Now you can find out without having to bust the thing open and risk voiding your warranty if things go south. Valve's latest client update adds a new section to the system settings that displays the exact model and manufacturer of every major component inside your unit.
"We are making this information available to provide further clarity and transparency about the components and their sources for your specific Steam Deck, as it’s something we’ve seen customers are interested in," Valve said. "This information will also be useful for customers who are looking to repair or replace components via iFixit – in certain cases (like thumbsticks) you will want to know which specific part to get for repair/replacement."
The update seems specifically geared towards Steam Deck owners curious about which model fan they have: Valve has shipped units with fans manufactured by both Delta and Huaying, though one has been criticized for its higher pitch.
Unfortunately this update will not provide a live look at the guts of your Steam Deck, but is instead a "snapshot" of what was in there when it was assembled. "Any updates/swaps/repairs that happened after the customer receives their Steam Deck will not be reflected in this view," Valve said.
That limits the value of the component lookup somewhat, although I'd guess that most people who have opened up their Decks already know what's in there, or don't mind going back in to find out. The bulk of owners will most likely rely on the official repair centers for any internal work they need done, and so for them any post-fix-up inaccuracies in the component lookup won't matter (and probably won't even be noticed).
Valve also provided an update on those loud fans, saying that after investigating complaints, it has developed "an engineered foam solution" for the Steam backplate that will reduce the noise. The fix is being applied to both models of fans used in Decks, both of which will continue to be used. That certainly sounds better than stuffing a big-'donkey' wad of electrical tape inside your unit.
The new client update is currently available via the Steam Deck beta channel. To opt in, enter your Steam Deck settings, enter the System menu, and select Steam Update Channel. The update makes a number of other changes and fixes as well—the full changelog is below.
General:
- Added the ability to view the components that are in your Steam Deck (click the "Model/Serial Numbers" button under Settings => System).
- Added the ability to skip startup movie by pressing B
- Added support for the Games to Play Together feature
- Enabled automatic spelling correction for Store and Library search results
- Fixed a case where audio would play quietly even though the volume was set to high
- Improved responsiveness to changes in the local network connection
- Removed “Connecting to Steam…” delay when starting a game without any local network connection
Steam Input:
- Added support for user created virtual menu icons by placing them in the ~/.steam/steam/tenfoot/resource/images/library/controller/binding_icons folder
- Added support for the HORI Fighting Commander OCTA (Xbox Series X and PS versions)
- Added support for the Qanba Drone Arcade Stick
- Improved support for third-party PS3/PS4/PS5 controllers
Remote Play:
- Fixed crash when the performance graph is enabled with some languages
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It's been awhile since we last heard from Will Wright, the famed designer behind SimCity, The Sims, and (for the oldsters out there) Raid on Bungeling Bay. And it brings me no pleasure to say that he recently revealed what he's up to these days, and it's a blockchain game called Voxverse.
Voxverse is being developed by Gallium Studios, a developer co-founded by Wright and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? co-creator Lauren Elliott. Gallium is also working on an AI simulation game for mobile called Proxi, but that's been kicking around for several years now—we first heard about iy back in 2018. Voxverse, though, is something new.
"Almost everything in this world is actually going to be constructed by the players," Wright said in a video introducing the game. "We're going to have very simple tools for the players to construct buildings, objects, vehicles, etc. There'll be a whole economy, resources you can mine, plots that you can own, plus a social side of the game where you build a social network [with] the other Voxes that you meet."
"There will also be jobs," Wright notes later in the video. "We'll allow people to actually create business, employ other Voxes, or work in a job. One of the interesting things here is that even when you're offline your Vox is still going to be online as an NPC, so when I'm offline my Vox can still be working at a job and earning me money."
That doesn't sound like the most compelling videogame experience ever—if anything, it strikes me as a wholly generic description that could be applied to just about every other blockchain game I've ever heard of. Ownership and economics are clearly at the core of the experience, but Wright told Axios that he's "much more interested in attracting a million free-to-play players than, you know, 10,000 rich whales, although we could use those rich whales." (In free-to-play terminology, "whales" are players who spend significant amounts of money on a game.)
Voxverse is being developed in partnership with Gala Games, which sells "Vox" NFTs based on various licensed properties (it recently announced a deal to make Vox NFTs based on Dreamworks' Trolls) and operates several blockchain-based games, including Peter Molyneux's NFT project Legacy. Voxes will be incorporated as characters in Voxverse, and it will also be "a place for other games to live," with portals to other Gala games, all of which will be interoperable with your Vox NFTs. Despite all that, Wright said that he doesn't want to be "in the business of selling NFTs."
"I don't care how you do it," he said. "I want to have secure transactions for content creators."
Downplaying the role of NFTs in Voxverse while emphasizing the need for "secure transactions" are kind of inherently conflicting positions, and while Wright may be someone with some actually interesting ideas for a metaverse, a lot of what he's describing here sounds like The Sims with a real-world nine-to-five grind attached to it. Maybe Will Wright is the man who can make blockchain gaming work, but it's been a long time since I've looked at him as a "can't miss" game maker, and this announcement is not doing anything to change my mind on that front.
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Last night Philips revealed Evnia to the world, its official line of gaming monitors and accessories. The two words I heard a lot from Philips last night at the reveal event were 'elegance' and 'freshness.' And spending some time with the gear, I can see that Philips is counting on a couple of important facts. PC gamers are getting older, are making more money, and like nice-looking things in their living rooms and offices.
We had a chance to chat with the product manager of gaming monitors at Phillips, Cesar Acosta, to explain the design philosophy behind the Evnia product designs, especially the gaming monitors and the conscious effort to step away from what he called the "typical hardcore gamer aesthetic".
TPV owns Philips and also owns AOC, one of the biggest gaming monitor brands in the world. So, of course, you wonder if having multiple gaming hardware brands under one umbrella hurts or helps the cause. Cesar said, "AOC is one of the top three brands in the European market, and they cover everything. From different sizes and budgets, they have everything. They are for the hardcore gamers." Where Philips saw an opportunity, according to Cesar, had to do with data they gathered during the last few years regarding a shifting demographic of some gamers.
Cesar told PC Gamer, "the customer has changed; they've matured a bit, have a nice income, maybe in their 30s, and want a nice monitor that's not so aggressive." He continued by saying, "they want a monitor that feeds his environment that fits their style; they are not kids anymore."
According to the data, gamers on the older end of the spectrum are shying away from the designs we are used to seeing: hard edges, blacks, reds, giant logos, and too much RGB. They still want the performance, though. These two things are too often mutually exclusive when it comes to the best PC gaming peripherals. Cesar explained, "It's not that these gamers want something plain, but something modern and tidy they can still work and play on and be competitive."
"The customer has changed; they've matured a bit, have a nice income, maybe in their 30s, and want a nice monitor that's not so aggressive."
This helps explain why, Philips went for a softer, cleaner look. Instead of RGB strips, the monitors have a series of RGB cubes in the back, while the headsets and keyboards adorn a single RGB strip down the center. Everything is in an almost eggshell white, giving everything a more premium vibe to it. Someone at the event joked and said all the products look like something Apple would make if they got into gaming hardware.
Cesar acknowledges that they aren't the first gaming hardware company to introduce the idea of an entire gaming ecosystem. So we asked why gamers should consider choosing Evnia against other well-established brands like Razer or HyperX? Cesar's answer leaned towards something I didn't expect. Software.
"Our product software (Philips Precision Center) is non-intrusive and easy to use. It sync's with all your [Evnia] gaming hardware gear with no more than a single click to set your settings and Ambiglow RGB, especially on the monitors." Without naming names, Cesar acknowledges some of the worst experiences of installing new peripherals from competitors are dealing with obnoxious management software that you constantly have to battle.
Speaking of RGB, since it is Philips, we asked about the likelihood of incorporating the lighting on its Evnia line to work with its smart home lighting software, Philips Hue. His answer was "not for now," but he did mention that looking to combine their gaming ecosystem with its smart home ecosystem they are looking at for the future. I joked that it would be kinda cool to just walk into a room and have your office lights and gaming gear all light up in sync like it were the intro to a wrestling match.
Image 1 of 8(Image credit: Future - Jorge Jimenez)Image 2 of 8(Image credit: Future - Jorge Jimenez)Image 3 of 8(Image credit: Future - Jorge Jimenez)Image 4 of 8(Image credit: Future - Jorge Jimenez)Image 5 of 8(Image credit: Future - Jorge Jimenez)Image 6 of 8(Image credit: Philips Evnia)Image 7 of 8(Image credit: Philips Evnia)Image 8 of 8(Image credit: Philips Evnia)Philips says they are all in with the Evnia brand."If we launch a gaming brand, we go full speed," he added."
The Evnia monitors are expected to release in December, with the 34M2C8600 hitting the shelves with the 42M2N8900, 34M2C8600, and 27M2C5500W monitors scheduled to drop mid-January of next year.
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It's 11:59pm and I'm cry-laughing as my friend bets his theoretical life savings to try and claw his way back into a game of poker. None of us can believe that he doesn't even have one pair, and as we're giggling so hard none of us can make a full sentence as he's chucked out of the game. I wipe away tears as I try to even my breathing, pressing check on the next round. Discord's delve into party games is so far a success.
Discord is extending its reach. I'm not sure what to call the app these days as it's like a social media, forums, chatroom, business thing that just exists as a catchall for any sort of communication you need. I use it for business and pleasure, and that change happened for many during lockdown. Many gathered on Discord as a place to socialise and all loaded up Among Us, Jackbox, or Pico Park individually making lobbies, sharing room passwords, and hoping the servers didn't break under the weight of people stuck indoors. Discord has obviously taken note of so many people playing these fun relatively small games and developed some of their own. And actually they might just be the worth the cost of entry.
Discord Nitro isn't a service I know a lot of people pay for. Actually, I mostly see people mention Nitro as a joke on TikTok about what Discord server mods pay for it for Discord 'kittens'. Don't ask—if you know, you know. I come up against Nitro annoyingly when I want to send screenshots and my images are too big for free Discord. To send my memes I have to pay Discord a little money which I've never gotten around to doing.
(Image credit: Imogen Mellor)Park life
You can pay a monthly fee of $3 for basic Nitro, or $10 for the regular. The former allows you to use custom emojis and means you can upload things up to 20 mb. The latter gives you 500 mb uploads, custom emoji freedom, HD video stream, server boosts, custom profiles, and the new Activities feature.
These Activities are mostly on games you can play in Discord without having to load up anything else. Ideally this would have appeared during the height of lockdown but right now it's still pretty neat. Though mainly for games right now, there is also an option to watch YouTube together. I expect Discord is trying to work out a way to use this service with other streaming platforms in the future, like who Twitch has a watch-along feature for those with Amazon Prime.
The games in Activities are currently as follows Putt Party (mini golf), Poker Night, Sketch Heads (a drawing game), Chess in the Park, Land-io (a sort of Slither.io-like), Blazing 8s (Uno), Letter League (Scrabble), and Checkers in the Park. Poker Night's background image is also in a park. Discord really likes parks.
(Image credit: Imogen Mellor)Here I am, hovering over that subscribe button like a bug over a venus fly trap
I played a few last night and I could only do so because my friend had a Nitro subscription. Conveniently, only one person needs a subscription to allow others to play the game too. And suddenly while playing with friends, Nitro made sense to me. I've paid for games I can play with friends on Steam, why wouldn't I do the same on Discord? With an outlook of Discord adding more games to the party down the line, it doesn't seem like a terrible idea.
Of course, it's a monthly payment rather than a one time purchase, but I'm impressed that Discord has finally made me think about paying for its services. It's taken years of advertisements but here I am, hovering over that subscribe button like a bug over a venus fly trap.
"But Imogen!" I hear you cry. "You could just play chess or Uno online without Nitro". True, very true. The internet is right there and some of those games are free elsewhere. However having games built into Discord feels like that little bit easier to get everyone involved. Join the call, see a game, press it, and everyone piles in with ease whether they want to play or spectate. Not only that but we were coming and going, with Discord's natural expectation that people have real lives to attend to. We may need to hop out of a call to answer the door, answer another call, or just get bored. Life happens, and Discord's activities acknowledge that by making it easy to dip in or out of the play sessions.
(Image credit: Imogen Mellor)I played a little of the mini golf, the poker, and a brief little bit of the Sliterh.io-like and watched a round of two of the off-brand Uno, and all of Nitro's offerings so far look well made, well presented, and genuinely fun. What my friends and I agreed was it was actually strange to get used to Discord's streaming window be interactable. You're playing games in Discord. Quite the novelty! And yet it felt pretty brilliant.
My group and I spent an hour or two messing about in poker. Messing with the modes, changing the dealer from a wholesome robot to a mischievous cat, and spamming emotes to annoy one another. What started as us playing poker just to see if the new features worked, ended with a proper three buy-ins and then you're out sort of game. I'm very happy to report I lost all but $200 of my money, before turning it all around on a four-of-a-kind round, eventually winning $15,000, dwarfing the banks of everyone else.
(Image credit: Imogen Mellor)The rules got messy as we goaded each other, told each other our hands, bet low to keep each other in the game, and lost and gained value at a rate that makes the British Pound look pretty stable. The boards and the interface felt intuitive as long as you knew the basics of poker. I only knew the type of poker Super Mario mini games taught me as a kid on the Nintendo DS, and hey, I won out, so take that for what you will.
Essentially, I'm pleased that I want to pay for something from Discord. That particular service became a lifeline for me for about two years, and I still spend most evenings there. Nitro never felt worth it, and while I shouted in annoyance at folding too early on what would have been a straight, or laughed at bluffs of others, Nitro finally seemed like it was going somewhere. So find your friend with a Nitro membership and get them in a game, see what you think. I feel like there is a great basis for something wonderful there.
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It's been a mighty long wait, but the green bean-flinging Kerbal Space Program 2 finally has a release date… for early access, anyway. After three years and four delays, the rocket-building sim is arriving on Steam and Epic on February 24, 2023.
After its announcement at Gamescom 2019, it was originally supposed to release in early 2020. You know, the before times. Understandably it was delayed, and then moved from developer Star Theory Games over to Intercept Games shortly after. It was delayed into 2021 and then again into the latter half of 2022. It was pushed back again in May this year, albeit only by a few months. It's nice to have a firm release date now, even if it's not quite a full release just yet.
The game's early access will come with over 350 "new and improved parts to build with," plus the option to customise and paint all your various wee space vehicles. Players can also go through the whole Kerbolar system, with "classic locations" like Kerbin, Mun and Jool making their return.
Intercept also has some future additions in the works. Some things that have already been promised—like multiplayer and mod support—should be making their way into the game "throughout the proceeding months," plus additional features like interstellar travel and colonies that can be plonked across the galaxy.
Intercept creative director Nate Simpson said he was "so excited" to see Kerbal Space Program 2 releasing in early access. "It will allow Kerbal fans to see for themselves all the amazing progress we've made as we reach the final stages of development. At its heart, KSP2 is about exploration, discovery and conquering the force of gravity by adding more boosters." Lead producer Nestor Gomez said the team will be "listening and seeing the reactions" to the sequel, adding "much like the original game, this journey will help us leverage a massively powerful tool: our passionate community."
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Boy o' boy this one really hurts to report. Miniclip is dead. The website we all knew and loved as being the ultimate home of entertainment as kids and teens is mostly gone. It's now a hollow shell of what it once was, although Miniclip, the company, lives on. The web browser game website will be remembered as the IT lesson disrupter and the foundation for a love of gaming for many. Rest in peace.
The news circulated Twitter and I, like many others, rushed to see if it was true. And sadly, when you go to Miniclip today, it looks like a random gambling website more than it does a hub of joy and excitement. Only two games remain: 8 Ball Pool and Agar.io. Slim pickings compared to what it once was.
Two factors probably led to this. The first is that Adobe Flash shut down at the end of 2020. Flash Player is what many games lived on back in the day and if there wasn't active support on games that could move them to HTML 5, well, they died. Tragic, but people move on and forget about small browser games they've made, I expect.
(Image credit: Miniclip)The other factor would obviously be that younger audiences just have so much more media these days. It used to be rare for a kid to have a dedicated device to access the internet but now it's commonplace. They have phones, iPads, and other gaming devices which preoccupy time more succinctly than going to places like Newgrounds, Nitrome, and well, Miniclip. And Miniclip has followed its audience to these new gaming platforms.
The blow is heavy. I miss those days, where everything was so simple. But Miniclip the company seems to be doing fairly well for itself in other areas. It's now mainly a mobile publishing company with offices all around the world. It even bought the publisher of the highly successful mobile game Subway Surfers in June of this year, so it's safe to say the brand is doing just fine. However I'll always know the name as that website I spent so many hours on as a kid. You can join me in pouring one out for Raft Wars tonight.
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While no hero will ever come close to my hours spent on D.Va, I've taken a bit of a shine to support characters since Overwatch 2 launched. While part of that is born out of necessity—queueing flex these days saddles you with support 95% of the time—part of it also comes from my love for orb-sniping omnic Zenyatta. Sure he's awfully squishy for a hunk of metal, but he's a mighty powerful healer and damage dealer in the correct hands. It's such a bummer, then, that this game makes playing support so damn sucky.
With the removal of a tank and a new smaller team size, it's changed the way support has to think. The thing is, I actually like what 5v5 has done for support. Positioning is more vital now. With no off-tank for me to cower behind, I have to actually use my brain and a drop of spacial awareness. The shift away from the ol' double shield and hunker-down method of Overwatch makes the role feel more impactful and engaging, constantly darting around the map to heal up flankers before returning to the safety of the tank. It feels like the most important role in the game right now, but that's also its undoing.
I don't claim to be the best Overwatch player—my skillset lies firmly with JRPGs and MMOs—but Overwatch 2 generates a sense of 'every player for themselves' that makes being a support main—especially a Zenyatta main—so bloody frustrating. On multiple instances I've been on my way back to the point, doing my best to keep my wits about me before a Sombra appears out of nowhere behind me, gunning me down and disappearing into the night. Meanwhile, tanks are clueless and damage heroes are overextending, wondering why they're not being healed. I've had tanks literally walk or fly past me as I desperately try and keep up while fighting off flankers, frantically flinging my orbs as my panicked aim causes them to whizz all over the place.
anyone_else_not_enjoying_support_anymore from r/Overwatch
The issue doesn't feel as dire on supports like Kiriko or Moira who can quickly zip away from incoming trouble. But it's still been a problem since the first closed beta, especially back when Zenyatta didn't have his stun kick to help him out. I'm not the only one who feels this way, either. A peek at the Overwatch subreddit and you'll see dozens of other players who share the same sentiment as me: it's just not very fun right now. I do think some of that comes down to general fatigue with the role. When I'm queueing for all roles and getting support for 10 games in a row, my motivation and attention are going to diminish. But it's also clear that—particularly in lower-ranked casual games—support heroes are struggling to keep up in a game that favours diving and a degree of selfishness.
Overwatch 2 is still in its infancy, and both new and old players are having to adjust to a smaller team, more frantic gunplay, and more deaths. I'm sure it will level out somewhat as everyone becomes accustomed and those who no longer care saunter off to other games. It's a largely thankless role, one that goes unnoticed when performing well and is the first to receive the blame when things go awry. I'll still play as and sort of enjoy Zenyatta and other support heroes, but until flankers are reigned in and healers are given better opportunities to stick close to tanks and damage, it won't be nearly as fun as it used to be.
Resident Evil Re:Verse is about to have an early access beta ahead of its Oct 28 launch
in Gaming News
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The Resident Evil showcase answered some of our questions about Resident Evil Village's DLC and the Resident Evil 4 Remake, but also squeezed in a gung-ho launch trailer for the long-delayed online multiplayer add-on for Resident Evil Village called Re:Verse, which will be out on October 28.
Re:Verse is a two-to-six-player third-person shooter in which players take on the role of various characters from across the Resident Evil series, racking up points for kills in five-minute deathmatches. When you die you have the option of coming back as one of the series' monstrous villains. There's an offline practice mode with bots as well.
Inevitably it'll have a battle pass and add more characters and levels post-launch. At release you'll be able to play as Jill Valentine, Chris Redfield, Leon S. Kennedy, Claire Redfield, Ada Wong, and HUNK, Umbrella's most competent operative. Collecting virus samples across the map—the Raccoon City Police Department and Baker House will be in at launch—lets you transform into better monsters when you die, from RE7's bloated Fat Molded up to Hunter Gamma, Jack Baker, Nemesis, and a Super Tyrant.
According to the roadmap, Re:Verse's first post-launch update will add another survivor, a new map, eight costumes, a challenge mission, and 30 more levels to its battle pass. Subsequent updates will each add another survivor and challenge level as well as more costumes, with the third update also adding an extra creature and another 30 levels to the battle pass.
Re:Verse is available to everyone who owns Resident Evil Village, and will have crossplay across all platforms. The early access period begins on October 23 at 7pm PT and ends on October 25 at 11pm PT. That means in the UK and Australia it begins on October 24 at 3am BST / 1pm AEST and ends on October 26 at 7am BST / 5pm AEST.
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