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“What once seemed like mundane dwellings have become an expansive obstacle course, and now you’ll have to chart your path through the dingy nooks and crannies that exist within the cracks of civilization,” say Ovid Works of the transformative adventure. You’ll have to parkour and wall-climb your way through underground bug civilisation to save your pal Joseph from his mysterious arrest. I’ve not read any Kafka myself so you’ll have to take Sin’s word for it when she says that it’s a surprisingly good spinoff in her Metamorphosis preview....

The game sees you play as Kena, a young spirit guide who’s on a quest to restore an ancient village. It has a Zelda-esque mixture of combat and puzzles, and Kena will also have the help of some little spirit pals called Rot - which you can see a load of in the trailer. They’re adorable and I want one. It was originally announced at Sony’s notE3 stream last year, and was supposed to launch around the holidays....

The first game by animation studio Ember Lab, Kena: Bridge Of Spirits is an action-adventure set in a mystical village troubled by spirits with unfinished business. These souls, traumatized by events in their lives, are now unable to pass on. Kena, a spirit guide, is responsible for helping them find their way to the afterlife, while on her own journey to a sacred mountain shrine. During her travels, Kena encounters an elusive species called the Rot - spirits reminiscent of the soot sprites in Spirited Away - who help her clear the ‘corruption’ that’s spreading throughout their forest home....

It’s a release that’s apt to inspire equal parts excitement and bemused laughter among PC fans. Excitement because Mickey, Donald, and Goofy in 4K is pretty neat; bemused laughter because Kingdom Hearts is just that weird. If director Tetsuya Nomura has a bit of a reputation in RPG circles, it’s because Kingdom Hearts absolutely glories in every Nomura cliche imaginable: nonsensical naming conventions, wild psychodrama, and belts, belts, belts (and zippers)....

It hits all the expected Little Nightmares notes - whether for good or ill. The sometimes-unfair chase scenes, where you’re pursued by a rampaging, lumpen adult scuttling across the ceiling or a horde of monstrous somethings falling over each other like a wave, make a return. But the satisfying platforming puzzles return too, and some of those monsters, and the warped settings you encounter them in, are fabulous. This time you play as Mono, a little barefooted boy in a trenchcoat who wears a paper bag on his head (though you can find other hats as optional extras throughout the game)....

First I needed a nice spot to build in, and before long, I came across this nice little flat-topped hill by the sea. There was even a bee bumbling around in search of flowers, which seemed a good omen, so I settled in. Immediately, I imprisoned the bee. It would be forced to watch, in mute horror, as I constructed my weird nether shrine. The big new stone type introduced in 1....

There’s a new trailer below that breaks down how those battles work, and it looks great - particularly considering it’s the work of just one person. Battles can feature hundreds of people fighting at once. The trailer shows the ways in which you can order your soldiers into different formations, and kit them out with different equipment. There’s a slider, for example, where you can decide how many of your people you want to give helmets to (and how many people you hate and hope get beaned to death, I guess)....

According to Deadline, Isaac has been chosen to play Solid Snake in the Metal Gear Solid movie being directed by Jordan Vogt-Roberts. I’m not fluent in emoji, but it looks like Vogt-Roberts has confirmed the news over on Twitter too. There’s been talk of a Metal Gear Solid movie for quite a lot of years at this point, since Konami announced in 2012 that it would be created by Sony Pictures and produced by Avi Arad....

In the trailer description for this improved version of the game, the devs say the upgrade is such a beast that you can’t just install a patch to get it. Instead, owners of Metro Exodus will have to download an entirely new file to get access to all the beefy enhancements on offer. Take a peak at the full specs for yourself on 4A’s announcement post. “We have built an all-new Fully Ray Traced Lighting Pipeline that brings a number of optimizations, upgrades, and new features to the Ray Traced Global Illumination and Emissive Lighting that we pioneered with the original release of Metro Exodus, as well as an upgraded implementation of our powerful Temporal Reconstruction technology to further boost resolution, visual detail, and performance,” the devs say....

The list of developers and tech companies dropping out of GDC is growing, as Microsoft, Epic Games and Unity confirm they’re pulling out due to health risks presented by coronavirus (COVID-19). This is a big blow for the physical conference, but both Microsoft and Unity have mentioned sharing their GDC presentations digitally, so we’ll still have a chance to see the behind-the-scenes info they had prepared. GDC organisers recently released a statement saying things are “moving ahead as planned”, after the city of San Francisco declared a local emergency in response to coronavirus (though there have been no confirmed cases in the city yet)....

All the other details were spot on, too. The show’s called Developer_Direct, and will also include a peek at new regions in The Elder Scrolls Online, along with fresh footage from Forza Motorsport and Minecraft Legends. Here’s how Redfall’s appearance is billed in the show’s announcment: This isn’t our first glimpse at gameplay, but it will be Redfall’s first extensive public showing. Last week Arkane told Games Radar that it’ll be “more like loading into Far Cry” than Left 4 Dead, despite the whole 4-player co-op zombie shooting thing....

In an interview with Gamereactor, Phil Spencer said that back in the late days of Xbox 360 and early Xbone, Microsoft “didn’t invest enough in our creative capabilities with our studios, and it showed.” So he says after he got the head job, they “built a business model that prioritised investing in content knowing that we would have to invest early and wait a while for those investments to pay off....

Celebrating the big day in a blog post today, Paul Jensen, the studio head of Microsoft Casual Games, revealed that now they have merch. It is… No. This is a terrible missed opportunity. Solitaire contains a deeply cool and thrilling sight that would be mighty bold on a shirt: the post-victory cascade of cards. I have hastily and sloppily mocked up some vague sense of what I mean, using custom print-on-demand store Printful (idk it was the first Google result w/e) and the Wining Solitaire browser toy by, ahem, “Mr....

This guide will walk you through everything you need to know to make and use a Beacon in Minecraft, including how to get a Nether Star, which is one of the ingredients you will need. On this page: How to make a Beacon in Minecraft How to build a Pyramid for the Beacon in Minecraft How to activate a Beacon in Minecraft What status effects do you get from the Beacon in Minecraft?...

You can spot the change in an update listed on SteamDB. Steam Family Sharing allows “family members and their guests to play one another’s games while earning their own Steam achievements and saving their own game progress to the Steam Cloud.” It’s a relatively generous system, although there are equivalent processes available for families playing the same game on console, too. Players are, predictably, not wild about the feature being initially active in Modern Warfare 2 and now removed after they’ve bought the game....

“Hatch, raise, and live alongside monsters as a Monster Rider in this fun-filled RPG set in the Monster Hunter universe,” Capcom say. “Our epic tale begins with the mass disappearance of Rathalos from around the world. At the start of the story, you meet a Wyverian girl who knew your illustrious grandfather, Red. She has been entrusted with an egg, but what’s inside it?” No points for guessing that it’s a Rathalos egg before you watch the new trailer right here....

Oooh but what can we decipher this time? Well, I already said it about the first teaser image, but I reckon these new ones even further suggest that Mass Effect 5 will be a sequel to Andromeda. Posted to Tumblr yesterday (thanks, Eurogamer), these three pieces of artwork are from a new coffee table book, BioWare: Stories And Secrets From 25 Years Of Game Development (published today in the US for $46)....

Yeah, it’s nice out here. But getting into the village by car is a challenge. The roads are wobbly and narrow, with little patience for noisy machines. This means I’ve had to stop and let other cars pass a lot. At first it was irritating, but now I’ve come to enjoy it. Getting a wave or a flash of the lights warms the heart and can turn a bad day into a good one....

Yes, I will spend a lot of time playing dress-up with my wacky warband, thank you. Beyond that, yeah, that’s some turn-based tactical action, it’s hard to get a good sense of it by watching. Our Mordheim review did not like developer Rogue Factor’s last game but I know a lot of folks dug it - what think you of this one? Necromunda: Underhive Wars is coming to Steam next Monday, the 7th of September....

Looking out of an aeroplane window with a migraine, that is. Because for all its wonders, NewCity is, as it stands, a fairly ugly game. It stutters a bit, at least on my PC, when speeding up time in a decent-sized city, and it feels very feature-sparse, to an extent where in the early game I wondered if I was missing some menus. Its UI is bleak, and its music is - with profound apologies to the composer, who I’m sure has done much better work in other genres - horrendous....