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Good Saturday, friends! It's finally hitting Autumn, isn't that lovely? The leaves are doing that cool visual glitch where they look nice for once. All pretty and crunchy and satisfying. It's just a shame it only lasts a week or two before turning into mulch on the pavement. Reminds me of a Regina Spektor lyric: "Leaves become most beautiful when they're about to die". And now, inevitably whatever I write below this will be a lie, because I'll actually spend my weekend listening to old Regina Spektor songs, because she's just the best.

But for now at least, let's keep up the pretense that we're not all lying through our teeth every weekend with these posts. Here's what we're all (allegedly) clicking on this weekend!

In V Rising, you're a fledgling vampire on a mission to become absolute bossferatu of a Gothic open world. You get a Diablo-ish combat system, the ability to shapeshift into a spider, and a whole castle to prance around in, crooning at the moon. I like this premise almost as much as I dislike the fact that V Rising is also a survival game, in which you must fell trees and master a crafting system like a common turnip farmer.

What do we hope for when our interest in a game is almost perfectly balanced by our disinterest? We hope that the developers will treat us to a free-to-play weekend, in which our perhaps-unfounded reservations might be strategically offset by the endorphin rush of not having paid any goddamn money. This, V Rising creators Stunlock have now done. The game is free to download and play on Steam from right now until Monday, 16th September at 5pm UK or 10am PST.

Released last year, Mosa Lina is a chaotic 2D platform puzzler full of bombs and frogs and spikeballs and tentacles, all subject to real-time physics. It's an "aggressively random" response to what the developers call the "lock-and-key" philosophy of certain immersive sims. It's also just been Major Updated, with new two player cooperative local and online multiplayer, various quality-of-life tweaks, new recording functionality, and a suite of gameplay changes or fixes to make Larian's eyes water. If you've been holding out for a sim in which "frogs can jump off of other frogs" and "delete that's deleted by delete triggers the delete's deletion as it gets deleted", well, I encourage you to get involved.

As you can perhaps tell from the slightly disdainful quotation marks, I am not a "shipping" person. I find it kind of annoying, in fact, if anything tending to un-ship fictional couples who clearly have no chemistry and are just doing it for the script.

It's fair to say then that Love, Ghostie isn't made for me. It's so specific that shipping might even be its genre, since it doesn't really fit into puzzle or interactive fiction. You're a ghostie, and you run a shared house full of humans unaware that ghosts exist, and that their culture is apparently based on pairing up the living. I guess... circle of life?

“When the plebeian kneels to the monarch, he is offering his neck,” writes Gene Wolfe in The Sword Of The Lictor. I read that this morning over coffee. Thanks Gene! I was literally just thinking about bowing - and more specifically, thinking about just how many stories that centre the monarch would be made more interesting from the perspective of those forced to bow.

When James, Edwin and myself played the preview level of Space Marine 2 together, I remarked on how the Imperial Guard worked as a good reference point for just how massive the space marines themselves are. Having played around three hours of the full game now - and having it found it wear very thin in about half that time - I’m realising that putting the player on the other side of that power imbalance would have made for a far more interesting game.

After PowerWash Simulator's jet to success, it was inevitable, really. Whitethorn Games and North Star Video Games have only come out with a rival: Spray Paint Simulator. In it, you get out your spray painter and "shshshshshs" different colours of paint onto various surfaces. For whatever reason, the universe this takes place in doesn't seem to value brushes or those rolly mops. "No", it says, kicking your brush into the sun. "Spray or nay".

A European consumer advocacy group have published an open letter to the European Union Commission expressing their concerns about video games that make use of premium in-game currencies - aka, make-believe money you can buy with real money, such as Minecoins in Minecraft's Bedrock Edition.

The group in question are the Bureau Européen des Unions de Consommateurs, or BEUC, who represent 44 non-governmental consumer organisations from 31 countries, and have been around since 1962. They're accusing the publishers of Fortnite, EA Sports FC 24, Minecraft, Clash of Clans and others of misleading people - specifically children - with their in-game premium currencies, and breaching European Union consumer protection laws. On a press site that summarises the results of various longer studies, they offer the below broad complaints about the practice.

I could have described the multiplayer racing game Faaast Penguin a lot of ways. It is Fall Guys meets Snowboard Kids. It is Diddy Kong Racing but all the courses are water slides. It's Cool Runnings but there are 40 penguins instead of four Jamaicans. Okay, that last one is a bit of a stretch. But basically, yes, this brightly coloured free-to-play knockout racer feels like that one Super Mario 64 level where you race the big penguin down a slide, only this time there are a ton of other players trying to beat you to the secret shortcut. It's coming out next week.

We're having a bit of an indie freebie morning, it seems. My humble contribution is 50/50, a downloadable or browser-based game which I suspect will fill some of you with the deepest aggravation. As the name suggests, it's about cutting things in half - specifically food items, such as fried eggs (easy enough) and candy canes (WTF). You draw a line down each object with your mouse, then click or hit space bar to perform a slice. Then, the game calculates a percentage. If it's bang-on or very close to 50/50, you'll pass. If not, you'll have to start over. I know: this is how entire days are wasted. Sorry.

Haha. Hoho. Yes. Hehe. Yes. This rules. This rules so hard. Portal To The Cosmobeat is a rhythm dance battler where you copy the moves of your opponents by controlling each of your limbs, and your head, with a separate key. If you look down at your keyboard right now, you’ll notice your W, A, D, Z and X form a five pointed star - with the W key a bit off, granted. That’s you, that is. You hold down the limbs you want to wiggle, then control them with your mouse. It’s simple, silly, and very fun. Here’s a tray-tray:

Annapurna Interactive - the publisher behind games such as Cocoon, Stray, and Neon White - have seen their entire staff resign after an internal dispute this month, via Bloomberg.

The resignations came in the wake of a dispute between Annapurna Interactive president Nathan Gary and Annapurna studio head Megan Ellison. As Bloomberg report, negotiations were taking place to "spin off the video-game division as an independent entity." After failing to reach an agreement, Ellison pulled out of the negotiations, resulting in the resignation of Gary and “other executives.” Further resignations followed, with a reported two dozen other staff leaving the company.

There's no greater tool in video games than a grappling hook. 2022's Grapple Dog knew that, making it the core ability of its platforming. The ability returns in sequel Grapple Dogs: Cosmic Canines, out today, although there's now a second character to play as for those fools who favour shooting over hooking.

There seem to be an infinite number of video game showcase streams these days, each one promising to be full of exciting indie games. Whatever my feelings about the entertainment value of these streams, I can't deny I watch all of them, or that they introduce me to games I might have otherwise missed.

Next on the calendar is the Convegence games showcase on September 26th, which is a new event that - hey, what a twist - promises to feature exciting indie games. It does have some recognisable publishers onboard, including Secret Mode, Thunderful, and Kepler, among others.

Earlier today, Nic covered the full release of Steam Families, a feature which makes it easier for families to share a game library and for parents to manage kids' purchases and playtime on the digital storefront. It's a neat improvement over the old system.

Unfortunately I can't think about anything other than the Steam Families logo, which is pictured above and is clearly a shocked, possibly aghast face. Or so I thought at first. The more I stare at it, the more it seems to reveal.

Unity is scrapping their controversial "runtime fees", effective immediately. They're reverting to the "seat-based subscription model" that funded the game creation tool previously.

There are many reasons to play and write about Arco. The Mesoamerican pixelart landscapes, for example - radiant, cloud-hung platters of land with people and buildings reduced to daubs of paint in the foreground. The fact that it's about witnessing and surviving colonial invasion, rather than the more familiar European or North American video game fantasy of searching a New World for plunder.

The ensemble storytelling, with four, successively playable characters setting their own lenses to thickly entangled themes of sorrow, vengeance and growing understanding. The sparse, expressive dialogue, each phrase carefully tucked inside its speech bubble. The music. And the little things at the level of how you move, what you do. When you pick a faraway destination on your map, your character makes the journey screen by screen, which gives you a second to lean back and be a passenger, watching the horizon, at least until you're ambushed by a giant beetle.

Oh, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl. Mere weeks from release after years of delays, plopped in front of me at a cramped, lightly vibrating Gamescom booth, and you still won’t reveal your secrets. I did get to play a brief whizz through GSC Game World’s eerie FPS – enough to feel encouraged, even – but be it time constraints or the darkness of my nighttime raid into the radioactive Zone, I would have liked to have quite literally seen more.

Then again, keeping the mystery intact may have been the point all along. "As a game director, I want to hide everything from the player", GSC’s CEO Ievgen Grygorovych had told me minutes earlier. "I'm fighting with the marketing team because they want to show as much as possible!"

If roller coasters are humanity's way of injecting ourselves with a dose of fear just to stay on our toes, then water parks are our way of turning our old enemy, the sea, into a captive entertainer (or is that aquariums?) Either way, Frontier are hoping to cater for all humankind's quirky day-out desires with Planet Coaster 2, by adding water slides and wave pools to the teacups and train rides of their management sim. I had a short go on it, and while there's no chance two hours of hands-on time could give me a full impression of the building game's suite of creative tools, I was quietly pleased with the jungle-themed pool I nestled into the earth. And with the little shark mascot I hired to patrol it.

Hollowbody’s introduction is masterful, and not just for a sallow skyline that captures the life-sapping dreariness of British coastlines. The horror nous required to impart unease in the middle of the day are somewhat eased up on when you’ve got all that serotonin-begone drizzle to work with, sure. But this feels more poignant than that. There’s a soulful drearines and utterly heartbreaking inevitability to the vibe here, as your character and rubber suited activist pals try to get the bottom of a horrific incident. It’s got best British indie horror film of the year written all over it.

An upcoming "survival experience" from the makers of Eve Online got its first trailer today, teasing spaceships against stellar backdrops. Eve Frontier was previously known as Project Awakening and is set in a faraway sector of the Eve universe. The developer calls it "a sandbox which focuses on self-reliance, skill-based tactical gameplay and third-party development". Huh? Third party development? Oh, I see. It has a bunch of blockchain cryptocurrency horseshit attached to it. Great.

Not enough Microsoft jobs have been splayed and flayed atop the Altar of Growth, so High Priest Spencer must once again perform the Rite of Strategic Repositioning. According to a leaked memo, Microsoft are laying off around 650 people "to organize our business for long term success". This is the same Microsoft that parted with around 1900 employees in January, and the same Microsoft that washed their hands of around 10,000 staff in January 2023, all in the name of shoring up the business for future prosperity. That "long term success" is certainly taking its sweet time. Or at least, it is if you're one of the poor saps in the trenches of, in this case, "corporate and supporting functions".

Sometimes we play video games to plunder the silty depths of our emotions, sometimes we play them to sharpen our wits and try the alchemy of engrossing systems, sometimes we play them to mud-wrestle with questions of power and responsibility, and sometimes we just want to wear cool sunglasses, have big arms, and fly around hitting stuff very hard.

Every man has his breaking point, and mine is the DP motion, aka the D-pad input used to perform Ken's Shoryuken uppercut in Street Fighter, and moves like it in other fighting games. I've never been able to perform it consistently. It's one of many moderately fiddly special attacks - written down for posterity in a tear-stained journal I keep sorrowfully beneath my pillow - which have walled me out of enjoying fighting games, much as I love thinking about them.

That wall grows ever higher as I age and my digits turn to dust and my dreams of launching Ryu like a sack of potatoes fade into the twilight. Still, at least I can still play and have fun with shooters, right? All you have to do in shooters is press a button once to make stuff go boom. Wait, Nightmare Operator, what are you doing? Nightmare Operator, no!

Better check those desert dunes again Caravan SandWitch, someone’s buried the lede. An open world you can explore in a few relaxed evenings? One that favours the joyous freeform sightseeing of an Elden Ring or Breath Of The Wild; where you’ll scramble up vast industrial concrete ruins on scavenging missions for inquisitive frogs, instead of being nagged by bothersome checklists?

Ok, rain check on that last point. SandWitch can’t help but eventually funnel the freedom of ambling around in your chuffy yellow van into restrictive collect-a-thons. Still, for much of its breezy runtime, this one’s a real panacea for gaming’s more bloated map-scourers. Plus, even when you are sent off to hamster-cheek scavenged components before making progress, there’s very little in this world that doesn’t feel intentional. Sidequests and storytelling crumbs are deliberately scattered throughout, and each building is a thoughtful concrete puzzle box. It is, in brief, a nice time.

You play as Sauge, a spacefarer returned to her planet of Cigalo after receiving a distress signal from her missing sister. Cigalo’s a cheery place, though economically and environmentally devastated after being exploited by an evil spacecorp named The Consortium. It’s populated by small settlements of people, some large talking frogs named the Reinetos, and the occasional friendly robot. Everything’s friendly, as it goes - even gravity itself. There’s no danger, no death, no damage from flinging yourself off the tallest building you can find. Just helping out your desert buds, upgrading your van with more gadgets to solve puzzles, or working on finding exactly where Sauge’s sister has go to.

Mummy and Daddy have not abandoned you, they have just gone to work again. They cannot hear you howling, but I can. I can.

I am torn between being deeply annoyed at the fact roguelike deckbuilder Bramble Royale: A Meteorfall Story allows me to poison skeletons, and actually finding it very funny. I suppose it would take an unnecessary amount of setup to lampshade that my dexterity brawler, Mischief, actually switches out her regular poison for bone-hurting juice when fighting skeletal undead. So, you get a pass for now, game. Here’s a trailer:

Steam’s family sharing feature Steam Families is now available to everyone on the platform, letting up to six total people share games from a single library, with each individual having access to their own saved games, achievements, and workshop files.

This means that, yes, when you all sit down together in the evening, you can enjoy a hearty family meal in the knowledge that between you, you technically own six copies of the Cities Skylines Big Butt Skinner Balloon.

Each person on the account will have one of two roles: adult or child. Adults can manage parental controls, set hourly or daily playtime limits, approve purchase requests, and control store access. Valve appear very proud of making it easier for parents to spend money, streamlining the “time-consuming” task of buying games for their kids.

There are cold opens and there are freezing ones. Sci-fi roguelike shooter Wild Bastards doesn't start on its strongest cowboy boot. You are dumped into the middle of an interstellar chase and summarily shown the ropes. The guns feel simplistic, the arenas bare, the loot vanilla, and the entire loop of beaming down to a planet and getting into small-scale "showdowns" threatens to become stale within the first hour or so. But then you find an outlaw buddy who offers a new way to shoot human dirtbags. Then another fellow bandit. And another. By the time your spaceship is half-filled with scoundrels and weirdoes shouting at each other, the game has warmed up enough to reveal its central idea. This ain't no grand FPS campaign, nor is it quick as roguelikes go. It's a snacky shootout sim with tumbleweed towns that feels best when you savour the pre-fight suspense.

Post-apocalyptic roguelike Neo Scavenger is one of my favourite games, but its spacefaring followup Ostranauts, currently in Early Access, is currently too fiddly and complicated for me. Here's some good news, then: Kitfox, masters of making impenetrable roguelikes more welcoming, have joined the project as publisher ahead of a planned 1.0 release in 2025.

Tomorrow will see the release of Nightingale's Realms Rebuilt update, which hopes to revive the ailing Early Access gaslamp survival craft 'em up. It's aiming to do that with a new handcrafted campaign, which now sits alongside the procedural worlds already present, along with new weapons, spells, boss battles, dungeons and much more, as the developers outlined yesterday in a new blog post.