The Maw: what’s new in PC games this week?

Keep Driving is a road trip RPG from the devs of the excellent Post Void.

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A “spiritual successor” to Disco Elysium is in the works at a new studio, and some folk from the cancelled sequel are involved.

stellarNULL have just announced Mentari, in which you are a magical girl trying to restore a petrified world through the power of non-lethal dance. “As a young dancer, our heroine starts with a limited number of dances,” the blurb explains. “As she travels and grows, so does her knowledge, allowing you to create your own choreography, with hundreds of possible combinations!” I can’t find a Youtube trailer for this, so instead, here’s Moe Szyslak.

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Spirit X Strike also has a demo. This one’s a frantic 3D beat ’em up that reminds me a tiny bit of Godhand.

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Everholm is an isometric open-ended RPG which mixes a bit of gardening and home improvement with a missing person storyline, procedurally generated dungeons, and a promise to not be “too cosy”. It’s out 11th November – there’s a demo.

SeekerX says: Aah– the Case of the Golden Idol Redux update launch today was also an occasion for them to give a release date for Rise of the Golden Idol — just one month out, coming November 12th. And there’s a new trailer!

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Fachewachewa says: Diceomancer came out today, I loved that demo in the feb. Steam Fest. It’s a wild deckbuilder where you have the power to roll a dice that can change values on cards, or even enemies’ health bar.

This does look good. It’s still got a demo, too.

Last Time I Saw You launched this week. It’s a magic realist coming-of-age adventure set in late 80s Japan, featuring action-platformer bits and a haunted wood.

Via PCGamer, Satisfactory’s community mod manager has been updated to support the 1.0 version.

The early access release of Brighter Shores has been pushed back by exactly one day, because you cavalier Yankees had to go and elect a new president.

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FRIODAY AT LAST

Start with a moon, end with a moon, is my motto. FEED THE MAW.

This one actually came out last October, but it’s my first time encountering it. Just pretend it got stuck between the Maw’s gnashers for a year, decomposing in the briney depths before the delicious fermented scent finally caught the beast’s attention. The Sirena Expedition is a short PSX style horror about a dude in an old timey diving suit i.e one the best genres. It’s still got a demo available.

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Goat Simulator Remastered has had its first real public showing. I had a little play of it at Gamescom, and it’s an unexpectedly straight-faced rework by Goat Sim standards, with only modestly updated visuals.

You can also throw things in Stratagem Lost, a “twilight punk” 2D tactics game.

Overthrown is both a city-builder and the action genre’s vengeance on city-builders, in that you can pick whole sawmills up, speed through the woods with them Naruto-style, and hurl them at a chicken.

Steel City’s licensed boxing game Undisputed has left early access. It’s been a million years since I last played a boxing game, so I’m including this mostly out of punchdrunk nostalgia. Does Gang Beasts count as a boxing game?

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Shady Knight is out. Look at ‘im go!

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A blog from the Nivalis crew about some of the people you’ll meet touring this cyberpunk slice-of-life sim. It’s a slice-of-life because they cut it with a blade (runner).

The Call Of Duty people have been blogging about Black Ops 6’s campaign. It’s got another one of those upgradeable safehouses in it, with an evidence board. I think that setup dates back to… Cold War?

JUPITHURSDAY

Thursday was genuinely Jupiter’s day according to the Roman calendar back in 4th AD, though most of us now know it as Thor’s Day. Thor didn’t manage to get a planet named after him, though, so he can get stuffed. FEED THE MAW.

The Steam page for Red Dead Redemption is live with the PC port’s system requirements.

Several former Humble Games staff have founded a new publisher, Good Games Group, as reported by Eurogamer. This follows the dismissal of the entire Humble Games publishing team in July.

Criminally good platter of bloodied vol-au-vents Anthology Of The Killer is now available on Steam, says master word summoner Stephen “thecatamites” Gillmurphy. Will the killer ever be found, you ask? Stop asking stupid questions!

Jazz Bar Souls is, seemingly, about going to a jazz bar, playing neat records, drinking too much, and getting kicked out. The barkeep is already a modern icon, imo. It’s the work of Bren Sutton, a creative tech artist at 2K Games. No release or platform info yet.

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Eldritch post-apocalyptic 4X Zephon has a release date – November 8th. It’s from the developers of Warhammer 40,000: Gladius.

I randomly watched some pre-release streams for Beautiful Light last night. It’s an extraction shooter where several teams of three players compete to retrieve horrible artefacts from near-future quarantine zones. Hunt Showdown but more Jeff Vandemeer, I guess, though the obvious comparison is STALKER. I’m not massively drawn to the premise but it’s certainly pretty.

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As passed on by charming RPS asset flip PCGamer, Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza In Hawaii was almost about Kazuma Kiryu being a tuna fisherman. “Long story short, it never came to fruition, but keywords like “ship,” “sea,” and “fighting,” which had since then been engraved in my head, evolved into the concept of pirates,” RGG studio director Masayoshi Yokoyama told the PSblog.

Financial research group Hindenberg Research have published a withering report on Roblox, accusing the platform of being a “pedophile hellscape” and of “inflating key metrics for Wall Street”. There’s a lot in there. It’s worth noting that by their own admission, Hindenberg “have taken a short position in shares of Roblox Corporation” after “extensive research”. As such they stand to profit from any impact their report makes on Roblox’s share price.

MiniMatt says: the verge have a story up about itch.io (and other .io) domains being at risk after the agreement to hand the chagos islands – home of the .io domain – to mauritius (/ht the fontgeek.io forum where rps forum dwellers largely landed after daddy reedpop handed our forum home over to the maw and oblivion)

We’ve been looking at the report in question, and I’m going to ask Itch.io for comment today.

WEDURANUSDAY DAWNS

The Maw is attempting to flank us through various parallel dimensions. Take up shields and form a Freemish crate! FEED IT.

Rime developers Tequila have cancelled an unannounced game and made a “small” number of layoffs, as revealed on LinkedIn.

Ooh, I like the cut of Beaming Stingray’s gib. It’s a beginner-friendly top-down shooter in which fight alongside past versions of yourself care of a time-rewind mechanic. It’s hecking abstract, with levels that look like sliding block puzzles, and it’s set inside somebody’s mind. There’s also a save-the-animals element tethered to a secret level. A fancy mocktail indeed!

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Cleared Hot is a Microprose-published comedy homage to EA’s old Desert Strike, featuring real-time physics.

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Blood Of Mehran is a stealthy-hacky action-adventure set in ancient Mesopotamia, from Turkish developers Permanent Way Games. The cinematic reveal trailer doesn’t include any in-game action, from what I can tell, but it seems reminiscent of Assassin’s Creed.

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SeekerX says: Tomorrow 10/8 also sees the Pro Philosopher 2: Governments and Grievances finally release, a decade after its predecessor. More Ace Attorney-style debates with famous dead philosophers! It sounds fun, but I’m not too thrilled with the way they’re taking a line from Matt’s 2023 preview and using it on the Steam page as a review without the context that he was saying “it sounds like it could be…”

still pointing upward emote

SeekerX says: A couple weird indies off my wishlist: Tomorrow 10/8, Anthology of the Killer is getting a Steam release containing all 9 entries. Brendan had some bemused but positive things to say about it back when it released on Itch:

pointing upward emote

Traveller’s Hymn is a free open-world grid-based RPG with a gorgeous tileset. Why is it free? “This is only our first attempt at gamedev, and we’ve only spent 4 months on it because it started as an experimental project,” the devs explain on Tw@tter. “We felt the results were good enough to publish, though the contents are a bit lacking (only ~4-5hrs), and no where near what we’re fully capable of.”

Kind Words 2 is out, if you need an “anti-social network” to console you in these times of Zuckerbergian squalor and Musky enshittification.

The Breachway developers are overhauling the game’s save system following cases of data corruption. They’re also “updating the tutorial, tooltips, and UI to enhance clarity while also simplifying specific mechanics that just added complexity without adding depth”. Expect the patch in the next few days.

A new story trailer for Blops 6.

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Thunderful are having a sale, with chunky discounts on Viewfinder, various Steamworld games, Moonglow Bay, Somerville, Cursed To Golf, Phogs and Planet Of Lana.

Some additional music to the start the day – a collab between Alien: Isolation and Lofi Girl to celebrate the good news.

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Silent Hill 2’s original director Masashi Tsuboyama has expressed enthusiasm for Bloober’s remake, and especially its newly manual third-person camera. “To be honest, I’m not satisfied with the playable camera from 23 years ago,” he wrote in a TwiX thread. “Depth and angle were limited by the processing load. It was a continuous process of hard work that was not rewarded. But that was the limit. The [remake’s] over-the-shoulder view definitely adds to the sense of realism. In other words, it makes me want to try playing the even more immersive remake of Silent Hill 2.”

Some music to start the day: a giddy Japanese orchestral number from The Liar Princess And The Blind Prince.

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IT IS NEPTUNESDAY

A shiny doubloon to whoever can name some planets in video games that work as weekday puns! FEED THE MAW.

Alien Isolation sequel, anyone?

Diplomacy Is Not An Option – an RTS castle-builder with an emphasis on humongous enemy waves – has reached the big 1.0, adding a new branching campaign. We said nice things about the early access build, though I note with outrage that they’re calling us “Rock, Paper And Shotgun” on the Steam page. You can’t just choose all three, that’s not how roshambo derivatives work!

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That there Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic, has been talking to The Verge about plans for Unreal Engine 6, which he envisages as an “interoperable” metaverse operation that lets developers and players easily switch and transfer assets between sprawling gameworlds like Roblox, Minecraft and whatever Epic are currently building with Disney.

While we’re talking Halo, Halo Infinite is getting an official third-person mode in November.

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343 Industries have rebranded as Halo Studios, and all new Halo games will be made in Unreal Engine 5. Here’s the Xbox blog with more.

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That sausage museum game is “an ontological exploration of verticality, as embodied by the oblong protagonist”, according to the venerable critic Frankfurter von Wurstheim – and who am I to disagree with Professor Wurstheim, whose momentous work “The Ontology of the Encased: A Treatise on Cylindrical Forms and Their Transcendence” has been such an influence on my taste in wonky physics platformers.

FEAR THE MOONDAY

And FEED THE MAW