It’s been a long road for Life is Strange and after almost one and a half years the story of Sean and Daniel finally draws to a close. Will they reach Mexico? Or will Daniel’s powers prove to be their undoing? We can finally find out on Steam, Xbox, and PlayStation 4.
Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, the latest creation of Respawn Entertainment, is now out! The setup is fairly standard for a Star Wars game, but the story is likely to have numerous twists and turns. The lead narrative designer is Aaron Contreras, who previously worked on Mafia 3, and the game was co-written by Chris Avellone, who worked on Knights of the Old Republic II to life.
With every other game seemingly set in New York City, Los Angeles, or one of the five other cities that exist on Earth, games that don’t opt for the default locations are precious gems. Dusk Diver is one of those, placing you on the streets of modern day Taipei in Taiwan, ready to take on the world in the boots of a most appropriate warrior: A high school student by the name of Yang Yumo.
When it comes to survival games, most of them require you to make a sizable investment of time and effort into mastering their mechanics and staying alive. They will also feature a dark, gritty art style and more often than not keep you in first person, experiencing the horrors they visit upon you first hand. Stranded Sails is the opposite: A game with a relaxed, casual survival gameplay, married to a colorful art style, and an actual endgame.
The only extraterrestrial body visited by humans personally continues to excite the imagination and for good reason: Not only is it the closest celestial body to our home, it also promises to be a rich source of Helium-3, a potential fuel for nuclear fusion reactors. Deliver Us the Moon, now available on Steam again in a complete, overhauled version, is set in a future where humanity colonized the Moon, exploited its helium bounty… Then everything went terribly, terribly wrong.
We know, we know, there is no shortage of roguelites these days, especially ones with pixel-art and procedurally generated worlds. However, some games stand out from among the hundreds and Noita is one of those quirky games that manages to stand out from the crowd. How about a game where every single pixel is simulated and destructible – and death is only a stepping stone on the road to greatness? It's up on Steam in Early Access!
Stones and spears might be the expected weapons for World War IV, but they’re also the tools that helped humankind survive the first couple hundred generations. Now, with the help of Panache Digital Games, you can experience being one of humanity’s ancestral species ten million years ago, trying to survive long enough to lead to the emergence of the modern homo sapiens (whether it’s a good thing remains debatable) in Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey.
Life continues to get stranger with each episode of Life is Strange 2. Part four of five, titled Faith has just been released on Steam, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4. Sean and Daniel continue their perilous travel to Mexico, to Puerto Lobos and freedom after their life took a turn for the worse – and strange.
Because if you are, RAD, Double Fine Studio’s latest game has hit the ruined streets on PC, Playstation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. Eschewing the usual brown/gray aesthetic of post-apocalyptic games, RAD pulls no stops in riding the wave of nostalgia for a future that thankfully never happened (otherwise civilization would end the moment we ran out of neon dyes).
Rebel Galaxy Outlaw has just hit the market, giving everyone and their moms a chance to step into the shoes of Juno Markev, a down-on-her luck pilot on the fringes of space civilization. Saddled with debt, she has to brave the worst civilization has to offer, track down a killer, and maybe, just maybe, get out with all of her parts intact.
Planetfall is the fifth in the long-running Age of Wonders series and is currently available for $49.99 on GOG.com and Steam. You’ll explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate (or get exterminated, your mileage may vary) in a game that feels new and familiar at the same time.
When it comes to board games, few titles got geeks as excited in the past decade as Gloomhaven. A Kickstarter-funded cooperative players vs. environment game, Gloomhaven’s development history is almost as interesting as the game itself and has the distinction of being one of the few games to have two Kickstarter campaigns, which raised a total of $4.5 million dollars to create one of 2017’s greatest board game hits.
Now it’s on Steam, in Early Access.
One of the more psychedelic, eccentric titles on the mobile market has finally received a proper PC release. Muse Dash is now available on Steam, to the joy of many and head scratching of others: Just what is this game? The game is definitely not for those gamers who prefer their games realistically colored (i.e. brown with a shade of khaki) or who can't stand C-Pop, J-Pop and other kinds of music this side of dirges.
Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night has just been released (Steam and GOG for PC users), following one of the most successful funding campaigns on Kickstarter. Bloodstained managed to raise over 5.5 million USD on the platforms, displacing Torment: Tides of Numenera as the most-funded game on the platform by a good 1.5 million. Although its reign as champion lasted only a brief two months, until Shenmue III was announced, Bloodstained remains a monument to the popularity of the Metroidvania genre.
Despite a rocky start and growing pains, The Elder Scrolls Online - ESO - is in its sixth year already, with a dozen DLCs, three expansions (one of which, Morrowind, is now included in ESO+ by default), and enough changes to make it an almost entirely different game. If you're returning to the game after an extended break or simply want to smooth out the learning curve, this guide is for you.
Warhammer: Chaosbane, the latest title in the expansive Warhammer franchise, has just launched (unless you have the top two editions, then it launched for you on May 31st already), allowing players to jump headfirst and gaze into the horror that spreads through the underbelly of the empire. In between trying to stop themselves from clawing their eyes out, the would-be heroes will be delighted to know that it isn't the end of their arduous road to glory (or violent death at the hands of Chaos monsters that enjoy a bit of hero tartare).
With the launch of PixARK, the already impressive ARK universe expands to include a game that's as complex as it is colorful. The Minecraft-style graphics represent a distinctly ARK-like experience, where survival is very much not assured and figuring out how to survive into the late game requires a good amount of skill and effort. We've put this little guy to try and smooth out the learning curve.
To say that violence in video games is popular would be both an euphemism and a tautology. Some of the most wildly popular games on the market, both present and past, focus on creatively disassembling your foes and splattering every possible surface in fluids generally considered essential to survival. Games where you focus on the opposite, putting people together and filling them back up with the aforementioned fluids are far more rare, and all the more precious... Rescue HQ - The Tycoon, from the German studio Aerosoft, is one of those games.
When it comes to medieval times, there's no shortage of titles on the market, whether they're fantasy loosely based on the period or more historically authentic. It seems that there's something about the odor of unwashed bodies, abject poverty, and brutal disembowelment that attracts people.
However, while most games put you in the sweaty leather boots of a warrior swinging various implements about, A Plague Tale puts you in the somewhat less sweaty and decidedly less enviable position of a teenage girl having to take care of her little brother and make it through France in one of its many darkest hours.
