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Thursday, August 24th, 2023
| Time | Event |
| 9:49a | Hyenas' space-pirating actually makes for a refreshingly speedy extraction shooter  I saw Creative Assembly's live service heist 'em up Hyenas at last year's Gamescom and came away unimpressed. I thought it was obnoxious and underwhelming, in all the ways you'd expect from a colourful hero shooter whose hook is stealing Sonic merch. But this year I got to spend a good 30-minutes in a match against other players and have come away… pleasantly surprised. I like the way it eschews the sometimes slow, methodical pace of other extraction shooters in favour of a faster-paced team deathmatch. While it's way too early to make big judgement calls like, "the entire game will be good", it might have more of a chance at launch survival than I thought. |
| 11:10a | Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon Steam Deck performance and settings guide  Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon launches tomorrow with the distinction of being a FromSoftware game that isn’t missing a bunch of PC tech basics, with ultrawide and 120fps support welded on as standard. As I’ve been finding out, it’s also a fine fit for the Steam Deck: performance issues are few, controls translate comfortably, and it won’t hog too much space on a microSD card. Handheld life is good for Fires of Rubicon, even if it likes to keep yours brutish and short. |
| 11:18a | BioWare lays off around 50 employees as work on Mass Effect and Dragon Age: Dreadwolf continues  Dragon Age and Mass Effect’s storied developer BioWare have laid off around 50 employees, including veteran devs who had been with the company for 20 years, in what they call a “shift towards a more agile and more focused studio.” The reasoning behind the job cuts has a now-rote focus on efficiency that sadly echoes other redundancy announcements from this year - including ones from other widely admired studios like Firaxis and CD Projekt Red. |
| 12:14p | The Lord Of The Rings: Return To Moria comes out in October for some drunken dwarf looting  The Best Pitch I’ve Ever Heard award has to go to The Lord Of The Rings: Return To Moria, which sounds like it’s taking Deep Rock Galactic’s procedurally generated cave looting and squashing it into Middle-Earth’s fantasy world. Chef’s kiss, no notes. The only downside is that the co-op craft-y-survive-a-thon is coming out on October 24th, the same week as - sweatily checks calendar - everything else. I’ll find the time to raid mines with big-bellied friends anyway, though. |
| 1:52p | Western townbuilding spin-off SteamWorld Build digs into release this December  The beeping booping SteamBots are back for the first time in four years, but the next outing takes them into a drastically different genre, as is now a tradition for the series. Publisher Thunderful have announced that their robo western citybuilder SteamWorld Build is coming out on December 1st. Here, take a look at the cuteness. |
| 4:00p | Summer holiday turns treacherous in horror visual novel Mediterranea Inferno, out today  Even cursed years such as 2020 can occasionally hide small nuggets of greatness. One such nugget was the curious visual novel Milky Way Prince, which beautifully mixed surreal 2D images with even more surreal 3D backgrounds, all wrapped up in a toxic love story. Just when you thought a visual novel couldn’t get any more stylish, developer Lorenzo “Eyeguys” Redaelli comes back to one-up themself with Mediterranea Inferno, a rare game that makes you want to gobble its colours up with your eyeballs. Oh, and it’s out right now. |
| 4:00p | Have you played... Below? 
I’m not really one for patience in games. I’m definitely the hack and slash ‘em to bits kind of player rather than a slick stealthy player. My approach to games is pretty unruly is what I’m trying to say, but there has been one game that tamed my rampaging ways and that was Cappybara Games’ Below. Below is a game that’s best played slowly. You’re tasked with reaching the bottom of an island’s subterranean caverns, trying to survive against monsters, traps, starvation, and dehydration. Each layer is shrouded in darkness meaning that you only have the small ring of light from your torch to watch carefully where you step. Charging through these levels is the quickest way of getting sliced and diced, and when you die, you begin back on the beach right next to the boat you arrived on. |
| 5:00p | Rejoice, Citizen Sleeper 2 is heading to Game Pass  After formally unveiling Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector during this year's notE3 season, solo developer Jump Over The Age have confirmed that it will also be launching day one on PC Game Pass (and the cloud) when it eventually comes out. Announced during today's Xbox Gamescom showcase, the original game will be "sticking around on the service" after the release of the sequel, too - which is very good news for my still-mid-DLC Game Pass save file. And if you're as pumped about Starward Vector as I am, Jump Over The Age have also given us a sneak peek at one of the locations we'll be visiting during our escape across its Starward Belt system. Come and get the low-down on Citizen Sleeper 2's Hexport in the trailer below. |
| 6:38p | Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty livestream offers a longer glimpse of five-star chaos  Cyberpunk 2077's Phantom Liberty expansion got a new trailer a couple of days ago, alongside news that many of its system overhauls will come to the base game for free. Now developers CD Projekt Red have gone into more detail about the changes in a new Phantom Liberty livestream which showed the expanded skill tree, some new perks, the overhauled vehicle combat, among other things. |
| 7:01p | No Man's Sky's Echoes update is out, with new robots, quests and revised space combat  No Man's Sky developers recently teased its next update, titled Echoes. It's out now and it adds a new race of robots, expanded space combat, and a series of story quests that tie many of its new features together. |
| 7:18p | Blasphemous 2 and its Goya-inspired brutal action-platforming is out now  There are a lot of brutal action-platformers, but Blasphemous set itself apart with its pointy-helmeted protagonist and gory Catholic imagery. The sequel, Blashphemous 2, again puts you inside the barbed traffic cone of The Penitent One, this time in a new, no-less-grotesque world. It's out now. |
| 7:46p | Climbing puzzler Jusant will grip and release this October  Jusant had one of the best demos I've played this year. It's a climbing game where you reach and grab with each arm independently and need to carefully manage your stamina while scaling a huge, vertical fantasy world. It's now has a new trailer and a release date, October 31st. |
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