Those Eidos and Square Enix bastards have been drip feeding us constant nibbles of Deus Ex 3 goodness in the form of screenshots, videos, and fictional web sites ever since it was announced, but now the drips are getting bigger, tastier, and even a little crunchier (the good kind of crunch, where you realize that chocolate you bought has biscuit in it). I couldn’t be looking forward to Deus Ex 3 more than I am, and seeing this video makes me wish I could fall into a sleep-induced coma for the next 44 days (though this would involve missing my birthday – a worthy sacrifice), wake up on release day, and get stuck in.
The knowledge of these videos comes courtesy of Rock, Paper, Shotgun and the videos themselves are of course courtesy of IGN. Now that I’ve plugged, enjoy the stealthy awesomeness:
Dome Keeper is an excellent little spin on the tower defense game, in which you play the role of a jetpacking miner defending his base from swarms of aliens, whilst searching for a hidden relic buried somewhere beneath him. And now, with this huge free update, you can play it with friends.
I want to talk about Cloudpunk, a game where you get to be a flying-car delivery driver in a futuristic cyberpunk city. Its world is an incredible achievement of environmental design, and while the gameplay itself may be basic, the city of Nivalis is a thing of beauty to behold. Nivalis is built out of hundreds of hand-modelled cuboid buildings; there’s nothing procedural about it. Apparently it took 3 years for the devs to design the city, and it really shows.
I do love me some quality pixel art, and it doesn’t get much better than this. Cast n Chill is a cozy side-scrolling fishing game by small indie dev team Wombat Brawler, with absolutely gorgeous visuals. It’s simple to play, and you you can dip in and out of it at your leisure, making it a fine addition to our collection of coffee break games.
The Trials franchise is surely the most successful game to ever start out life as a Flash browser game. I remember playing the original game on Miniclip back in the day, and I have played every single iteration since. The game’s core concept is simple – you control a trials bike, and must navigate it across a series of increasingly difficult obstacle courses on a 2D pane. It’s the perfect pick-up-and-play game, because it’s easy to get the basics, but insanely difficult to master.
Doki Doki Literature Club has dug its way into my chest and ripped me apart over the last couple of nights. It’s a free visual novel game where you get to know a bunch of girls in an afterschool book club… except not really. It looks exactly like any other tropey Japanese dating sim type game, but what lurks underneath this cutesy exterior is something really quite sinister and thought-provoking. The game’s tagline does a good job of reminding you that all is not what it seems: “This game is not suitable for children or those who are easily disturbed.”
I don’t get on with the Souls games at all, but I really wish that I did. For me, the combat was just a little too clunky and, oh, you know, fucking difficult.