It's well and truly not summer now. I'm writing this with the lights on because the screen's backlight is suddenly too bright for these eyes grown weak and lazy by the abundance of natural illumination.
Control Resonant, much like the inside-out, interdimensional cryptids it has you bashing with a shapeshifting stick, probably shouldn’t exist. At least not in the risk-averse, pennypinching reality that sometimes seems to have enveloped the art of gamesmaking, and that may have installed some scepticism into my own head. The sequel to a liked yet slow-selling shooter, which replaces both the original’s player character and its instantly recognisable, bureauca-brutalist setting, while violently pirouetting into open-world RPG melee brawling. Five words that Remedy, in all their thirty years of existence, have never previously let pass their lips.
Heart Machine, the US-based makers of Hyper Light Drifter, its multiplayer spinoff Hyper Light Breaker, and last year’s Possessor(s), have laid off "nearly everyone" on staff after an unnamed publisher pulled funding for their next, unannounced game.
Well, that report earlier this year was bang on the banana. A new StarCraft shooter, creatively dubbed StarCraft, has been announced for a 2030 release at this year's BlizzCon. Joining it among the headliners were Diablo 5 - which is due out in 2029 - and a new World of Warcraft branch dubbed WOW: Forever. Brave of them to name a Warcraft fork after the inevitable response which follows a WOW player revealing how long they've been playing the MMO.
Update: Ubisoft have confirmed the Steam announcement post about them starting to test a new Ubisoft Connect Services Steam tool is genuine, and they've now stuck it in Prince of Persia The Lost Crown's regular Steam news feed so everyone can have a read.
Original story follows:
Ubisoft are planning to start testing a new tool that'll allow Prince of Persia The Lost Crown Steam players to access features only usually available via the publishers' Connect launcher without actually having to have said launcher installed. That's according to a Steam announcement post which only appears to be visible to folks who already own a copy of The Lost Crown on Valve's storefront.
"You're not the last Belmont anymore", Trevor reminds his daughter Rose, as they gently sail into a Paris ablaze and ripped apart by monsters. Rose knows it well, as do indie developers Evil Empire. Following their success with roguelike Dead Cells (and its own Castlevania DLC), Konami gave them the keys to Dracula's kingdom, trusting the French team to bring the series back to life after a ten year slumber. It's a heavy holy cross to bear, but Castlevania: Belmont's Curse holds it up confidently.
Unionised Blizzard workers have voted to ratify a new contract with their employer that will "require" Blizzard to negotiate with workers over any usage of generative AI tools in their workplace, in addition to giving laid-off workers the right to be "recalled" into open positions across Blizzard for 14 months after the date of their layoff announcement.
Uh oh. Steam achievement lists for a smorgasbord of unreleased and unannounced PC games appear to have leaked via trophy tracking site Exophase. Atlus RPG Persona 6, RGG brawler Stranger Than Heaven, and Thief: The Dark Project Remastered have all seemingly had their trophies blabbed by the leak, with more imminent releases like Control Resonant, Silent Hill: Townfall, and Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve also affected.
The Moonlighter games cast you as Will, a dungeoneer-merchant hybrid, delving into randomly shifting combat arenas by night and selling the treasures you unearth there by day. In the dungeons, you fight various monsters and beasties and are then offered upgrades to your combat build or a handful of relics you must fit in your bag. In the shop, you figure out how to get the best price for these items. And then you spend that money on upgrades that help you to dungeon delve better and start all over again.
All this time, you will be thinking about multipliers.
I've been hungry for an action adventure game recently. In this modern era of live service and infinite roguelikes and deckbuilders (seriously, I know they're popular genres, maybe try a different highly replayable genre), the humble action adventure game has fallen by the wayside a tad. So I've been quite curious about Usual June, a quite classic one of those that might end up being a Halloween regular (quick disclaimer: Cara Ellison, who many moons ago did some writing for RPS, is a writer on this one).
Today, August 25th, Nvidia have released Ray Reconstruction for DLSS 4.5, with the aim of more swankily rendering ray-traced/path-traced shadows and lighting than was possible with previous Ray Reconstruction versions.
Among Shadows is the kind of videogame genre arithmetic that often proves less than the sum of its parts, but I'm cautiously enthused by its talk of disease, betrayal and Elden Ring: Nightreign-flavoured swordwizarding. The gist: this is a fantasy action-RPG with an Among Us-style social deduction element. You are a member of the Order of the Secret Fire, sent into a supernaturally blighted region to track down sources of corruption, while looting gear and levelling yourself up.
Game Science have put out a fresh trailer showing off Black Myth: Zhong Kui, their follow-up to Chinese mythology-stuffed action-RPG Black Myth: Wukong, in action. A year on from its reveal at 2025's Gamescom, Zhong Kui's looking as slicey and rolly as its predecessor, despite a switch in protagonist.
I'll be honest, having just watched the latest trailer for Kingdom Hearts 4, I'm less confident I know what's going on in the game. Protagonist Sora's in a realm visually inspired by Mexican Día de Muertos celebrations, while Donald Duck and Goofy ship of the Greek underworld, then end up as force ghosts before rocking up in the Mexican realm without Sora. At least the game's freshly announced release window is less confusing to non-hearts heads. It's due out in late 2027.
Smilegate, the developer of South Korean MMO Lost Ark will be taking control of the Western servers that were previously run by Amazon Game Studios. Likewise, FireSpark will be taking control of Throne and Liberty's servers. Though, the transition will cause some disruption and data loss for players.
While Amazon have poured money into in-house game development, they have also acted as a global publisher on several MMOs, such as Lost Ark, and found considerably more success than with their own projects. That said, as Amazon slowly backs out of the MMO room, shutting down development on New World and canning their in-development Lord of the Rings MMO, the future for these arms-length games has been uncertain.
Mistfall Hunter launched last week, and so far it seems to be doing quite well for itself! Apparently there's a million of you now running around its very Elden Ring looking lands and extraction fantasy lands (though these don't sound like one million sales, to be clear). With a healthy, if currently fairly critical, community under the game's belt, developer Bellring Games have shared a roadmap for its first and second season outlining what you can expect next.
The concept behind Moonlighter, i.e. you are a shopkeeper except to get your wares you need to venture forth into dangerous dungeons and make it out alive, is always one that appealed to me, but has just managed to slip me by all these years. My problem now is that I have two new reasons not to ignore both it and its sequel The Endless Vault, as the follow-up now has a 1.0 release date, and the original is free for the next few days.
I don't need to tell you how badly the games industry is doing, right? Badly in the sense of a handful of people desperate to continue making millions are laying off workers by the tens of thousands, with a new layoff story seemingly every week, of course. There's money to be found, just not for those putting in the work. With so many out of work, Necrosoft, the studio behind Demonschool, have decided to do their bit to help out by putting together a bundle of almost 150 games where the proceeds will go towards the game industry hardship fund.
Photojournalist Frank West is heli-dropped into the Willamette Parkview mall, following a tip-off that there’s something sinister going down in the sleepy Colorado town. Impressively undeterred by the sight of people eating each other by a school bus during his fly-by, he instructs his pilot to drop him off on the mall roof and return for him in exactly three days.
The rest, more or less, is up to you. If you decide to do absolutely nothing but lounge around in the security room for 72 in-game hours, Dead Rising doesn’t care. The chopper turns up on schedule, you get in and leave. Thanks for the £40, here’s the credits.
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