New week, new PC games! It's another mercifully brief four day week in the UK due to reasons of religion, so let's roll with an appropriately snappy intro that avoids any extended digressionary preambles about, oh, I don't know, magpies fighting outside my flat this morning. Did you know that European magpies are great mimics? Second only to the Northern Mockingbird, apparently, though many ornithologists contend that the Brown Thrasher is sorely overlooked. You certainly hear their vocal range when they squabble - I reckon somebody should train up a ChatGPT AI on their calls and no, stop it, I'm doing an anecdote!
Those new PC game releases, without any further ado about birds: Minish Cap-esque shmup Minishoot Adventures (2nd April); Cuban fantasy metroidvania Saviorless (2nd April); culinary defence game Kitchen Crisis (3rd April); Dorfromantikal world builder Planetiles (3rd April); rhythmic robo-dystopian roguelike Beat Slayer (4th April); 90s biker's delight BMX Streets (5th April).
As ever, this is an incomplete list of new games, and you can - read: should - proceed to the comments to complain loudly about any important releases we've left out because we have all the taste and insight of, oh, let's say an Australian parakeet (10th on the much-cited BirdNature list of the best bird mimics). Also as ever, you can keep track of our efforts to Report The News in the Maw liveblog below - the Maw being an abhorrent, extra-dimensional gobbler of stories and secrets that we strive eternally to satisfy with regular morsels of freshly-baked journalism. Try not to let that prospect worry you too much. Have a good week!
Our live coverage of this event has finished.
Key points- 07:32 am April 05 2024 FRIDAY THEN
- 08:01 am April 04 2024 NOW FOR THURSDAY
- 07:58 am April 03 2024 HELLO WEDNESDAY
- 08:52 am April 02 2024 IT'S... TUESDAY ALREADY?
IT'S... TUESDAY ALREADY?
It is! It is! Thank the maker for bank holidays. FEED THE MAW.– Edwin Evans-Thirlwell
09:00 am UTCYesterday was April Fool's Day, a time of much wailing and gnashing of teeth for online news writers. Some of the "announcements" and "surprise releases" appear to have been genuine, however. Here's one Alice0 spotted - a very short game about cars.
📢 BEEP BEEP!! Our new game CARS is out! https://t.co/k2LS2lnJf7 🚗💨 pic.twitter.com/afMJ0jMPAB
— Playables (@playabls) April 1, 2024 To see this content please enable targeting cookies. Manage cookie settings– Edwin Evans-Thirlwell
09:03 am UTCAlso from Alice0: new horror game Content Warning is free on Steam today only. It's a co-op experience "where you film spooky stuff with your friends to try and go viral".
Content Warning: Trailer Watch on YouTube– Edwin Evans-Thirlwell
09:07 am UTCHere's a new Helldivers 2 patch. This one adds blizzards and sandstorms while rebalancing various weapons, missions and enemies.
– Edwin Evans-Thirlwell
09:10 am UTCGrinding Gear launched new Path Of Exile expansion Path Of Exile: Necropolis over the weekend and have already posted a list of things they plan to flesh out or fix.
– Edwin Evans-Thirlwell
09:12 am UTC Here's the Steam page for Platform 8, sequel to much-liked commuting horror game The Exit 8. The new game is slated to launch around end of April. 8番出口の続編「8番のりば」トレーラー Watch on YouTube– Edwin Evans-Thirlwell
09:20 am UTCVia Eurogamer, Halo and Call of Duty support studio Certain Affinity are letting 25 people go due to "multiple factors" including an "industry-wide slowdown", in the words of CEO Max Hoberman. Best of luck to everybody affected.
– Edwin Evans-Thirlwell
09:20 am UTCFans got some juicy Hollow Knight: Silksong info over the long weekend. The long-awaited metroidvania was given an official listing in the form of an Xbox Store Page. Cheers Ian! (of the Ian Games Network)
– Nic Reuben
09:25 am UTCA Steam page went up over the long weekend, alongside an announcement trailer for System Shock Remake studio Nightdive's remaster of brilliantly bizzare 90's shooter PO'ed. Chicken butt and frying pan enjoyers, rejoice!
– Nic Reuben
14:51 pm UTCThe Guardian has a gaming-adjacent piece about research demonstrating that some people effectively perceive more frames per second.
– Edwin Evans-Thirlwell
21:51 pm UTCBlizzard say they're open to more Warcraft movies if they can find the right filmmaker to partner with.
– Graham Smith
21:52 pm UTCFormer Dragon Age director Mike Laidlaw has revealed his much-teased fantasy game. Eternal Strands is a third-person action adventure coming in 2025 in which you can clamber about on giant boss enemies, Shadow Of The Colossus-style, and also wield Tears Of The Kingdom-style physics powers.
– Graham Smith
21:52 pm UTCGame Pass is getting six more games for PC in April, including the delightful Lil Gator Game.
– Graham Smith
21:53 pm UTCFor April Fools', Arma developers Bohemia announced Tiny Wars, a mode in which you control toy soldiers battling between Duplo blocks and household bric-a-brac. April 1st or not, you can now actually play it for real.
– Graham Smith
21:54 pm UTCI like the look of Falling Frontier, a space RTS with blocky spaceships and a big zoom:
Falling Frontier - Gameplay Trailer | Space RTS Game Watch on YouTube– Graham Smith
21:55 pm UTCVampire survival sim V Rising leaves Early Access on May 8th. Ahead of hitting 1.0, its (v) rising its price to $35 from $20 on April 5th. That gives you three more days to pick it up at the cheaper price, if you're interested.
– Graham Smith
21:58 pm UTCGearbox confirmed to Eurogamer that there are layoffs at the company following its sale by Embracer to Take-Two. It's unknown how many staff are affected.
Is it just because I'm British that all of Gearbox's recent public statements seem to be dripping with passive-aggressive niceness? "We are grateful that our talent and capability are of interest to you and your audience"?
– Graham Smith
22:00 pm UTCEdwin wrote about recently-released horror game Content Warning and its being free to keep for a short while earlier today. It now has over 200,000 concurrent players on Steam.
– Graham Smith
07:58 am UTCHELLO WEDNESDAY
Ford the rivers! Forward the emails! Force the metaphors! FEED THE MAW.– Edwin Evans-Thirlwell
08:05 am UTC A new roguelike Prince of Persia game from Dead Cells developer Evil Empire is slated to released in Steam early access sometime this year. It's been in development for the past four years, and came about after discussions between Evil Empire and Ubisoft, reckoned to have happened around GDC 2019. Thanks, Insider Gaming!– Nic Reuben
08:10 am UTC Fancy trying Vicky 3, Humankind, dreary Dead Space succesor Callisto Protocol and "emotive and doomy folk horror adventure" Hob's Barrow for the price of a (quite large, admittedly) Greggs order? This month's Humble Choice is looking quite stacked indeed.– Nic Reuben
08:17 am UTC The KOTOR remake is 'Alive and Well', according to the CEO of Saber Interactive. This comes from an interview with IGN, who write: "CEO Matthew Karch confirmed that the company took KOTOR with it during its split from Embracer Group, and that the game is still in active development."– Nic Reuben
08:28 am UTC Great free action-adventure game Grimhook has received its "one and only" update, after an overwhelmingly positive Steam reviewer response over Xmas.– Edwin Evans-Thirlwell
08:32 am UTCFormer GTA dev Obbe Vermeij has been tweeting about the finer points of GTA. Here's some insight on the mechanics of plane collisions and near collisions in San Andreas.
In GTA San Andreas, small planes are periodically created near the player to perform a fly-by.
Sometimes they crash.
Before creating the plane, my code looks for obstacles in its path.
It scans a number of lines in the forward direction of the plane. These scans are slow so I… pic.twitter.com/8uUQcmU958
– Edwin Evans-Thirlwell
11:12 am UTCFachewachewa says: Hello your Mawness. Frogmonster, a "Metroidvania FPS adventure", released yesterday. From what I've seen it's a wild one.
Unless my eyes deceive me this is, in fact, a first-person tonguer.
Frogmonster Trailer Watch on YouTube– Edwin Evans-Thirlwell
13:58 pm UTCThe mad scientists of NASA are going to stream the next solar eclipse on 8th April between 7pm-9pm BST for the benefit of UK people who might otherwise miss it. They're also partnering with Twitch, Microsoft, Epic and the National Esports Association to commission "eclipse-themed versions" of Fortnite and Minecraft created by students, which will be streamed alongside the eclipse footage. What direful corpo-lunar cash-in wizardry is all this? I'm off to burn some protective incense.
– Edwin Evans-Thirlwell
16:37 pm UTCPSA: You’ve got a couple more days to grab vampire survival game V Rising for $20 before its price nearly doubles, ahead of its incoming 1.0 exit from early access.
– Matt Jarvis
17:13 pm UTCBorderlands makers Gearbox didn’t quite escape the ongoing Embracer layoffs despite their recent sale to Take-Two, as the studio confirm a number of job cuts.
– Matt Jarvis
17:40 pm UTCKnights of the Old Republic remake devs Saber have insisted the game is “alive and well” after their recent split from Embracer.
– Matt Jarvis
18:08 pm UTCAtari are now publishers for the whole RollerCoaster Tycoon series, after buying missing 2004 sequel for $7m.
– Matt Jarvis
18:32 pm UTCFinally, a game which lets me pass on love letters using a vacuum cleaner.
⚡️it's time to put an end to the A-POCKY-LIPS!!!⚡️
officially revealing our newest game: GREAT GOD GROVE
suck up dialogue boxes n’ use them like items to befriend gods & humans alike, and save the whole dang world!! pic.twitter.com/oSwLJWfvtx
– Edwin Evans-Thirlwell
08:01 am UTCNOW FOR THURSDAY
The Merlin Matrix has overloaded! Hose it down for a few minutes while I fetch another bucket of pixies. FEED THE MAW.
– Edwin Evans-Thirlwell
08:03 am UTCHere's a game update for this week's surprise hit Content Warning, which adds a party popper item, a garden projector and a reporter mic, amongst other things.
‼️Breaking news ‼️
Content Warning bug patch and new items! pic.twitter.com/vvjrMgXymX
– Edwin Evans-Thirlwell
08:04 am UTC Maw-ning dear readers! Here's a big bowl of indie to start your day off right. The world of Skaramazuzu is a monochrome, shadow puppet-esque puzzle adventure, set among ancient gothic buildings. It's got the perfect balance of whimsy and melancholy that I personally love, and you play as a leshen-looking ghost creature.– Nic Reuben
08:04 am UTCAs passed on by PCGamer, Arrowhead have nerfed Helldivers 2's Slugger shotgun because people were treating it like a sniper rifle.
– Edwin Evans-Thirlwell
08:07 am UTCThere's a new Palworld update, too, which adds the game's first Raid Boss, Bellanoir, alongside a host of fixes and smaller changes.
– Edwin Evans-Thirlwell
08:10 am UTC The trailer of the Mechwarrior 5: Clans demo that Pirahna games showed off to the press at GDC is now available for your perusal. It's a got one of those fun riffs on Full Metal Jacket games have been doing for years now in it. Very creative with the insults.– Nic Reuben
08:35 am UTCThe Last Epoch devs have penned a rather severe blog about two, now-fixed exploits that allowed people to duplicate items and generate gold. Excerpt: "We don’t think it’s a very controversial statement to say that abusing an exploit, ruining the game for all players is not acceptable, and that doing so should result in a ban."
– Edwin Evans-Thirlwell
08:36 am UTCPolygonClassicist says: Is the Key Points section new? It's a welcome addition for easier reference!
Sort of! We could use it before but it auto-promoted the liveblog to the top of the site, which seemed a bit excessive. There's now a magic tickbox that stops this happening. And yes, it hopefully makes the feed more digestible, pun intended.
– Edwin Evans-Thirlwell
08:53 am UTCAccording to Polygon, Ninja Theory’s founder and Hellblade writer-director Tameem Antoniades has left the studio, for reasons yet to be shared.
– Edwin Evans-Thirlwell
14:44 pm UTC Creative Assembly are splitting Thrones of Decay, the upcoming expansion for Total War: Warhammer 3, into three parts, purchasable either separately or as a discounted bundle. This means if you just want to buy say, the new dwarfs, you can. “We recognise that these large sized, higher priced packs aren’t always what you’re looking for,” reads the blog post “So, we’ve decided to do something different just for Thrones.”– Nic Reuben
15:45 pm UTCMomentous news in the indie scene - Rami Ismail has sold his share of Vlambeer to co-founder Jan Willem Nijman.
🚨 VIDEOGAME COMPANY ACQUISITION ALERT 🚨
Big news: I now own 100% of @Vlambeer, the studio I co-founded with @tha_rami back in 2010. Here’s what this means: pic.twitter.com/7pFjwwYfCG
– Edwin Evans-Thirlwell
16:06 pm UTCSaber's Matthew Karch has been talking to GamesIndustry.biz about life at Embracer Group, of which Saber are no longer a subsidiary. He mounts an extended defence of Embracer CEO Lars Wingefors, whom Karch says has been "very maligned" because look, Embracer haven't laid off absolutely everybody and besides, other big publishers have done worse. The article includes Karch's account of the role of interest rates and skittish/calculating investors in precipitating last year's mass cost-cutting. It also touches on the infamous failed Savvy Games deal.
– Edwin Evans-Thirlwell
23:19 pm UTCStop Killing Games is a campaign to pressure regulators to look at developers who turn off the products they sell, prompted in part by Ubisoft's closure of The Crew on March 31st.
– Graham Smith
23:20 pm UTCRoblox Studio's head says, sure, you could call their platform child explotation, but what of the 15-year-old Indonesian slum dweller who is set free by generating value for Roblox shareholders? Makes you think.
– Graham Smith
23:20 pm UTCAs Edwin noted earlier, Nuclear Throne makers Vlambeer return, now as a dynamic solo rather than a duo. Here's more on the whys and hows.
– Graham Smith
23:21 pm UTCGoblin Stone is about building a colony for, well, goblins, then biffing other fantasy races (and humans) with turn-based RPG combat and cards.
– Graham Smith
23:23 pm UTCThere's a proper 3D camera mod for SimCity 4, which is truly baffling to me because I thought its buildings were 2D sprites generated from 3D models not included in the actual game. Is this magic? It seems like magic. I want to try it out.
– Graham Smith
23:24 pm UTCSpeaking of games that exist, No Plan B came out this week. It's a topdown tactics game about plotting synchronous breaches, takedowns, and grenade tosses. It looks like it might be slicker (and less ick?) than Doorkickers.
– Graham Smith
23:26 pm UTCRight, I'm out. To keep you company during these wee hours, here's By Your Side from the wonderful Omori soundtrack:
To see this content please enable targeting cookies. Manage cookie settings– Graham Smith
07:32 am UTCFRIDAY THEN
How long is a piece of string? Is it long enough to FEED THE MAW?– Edwin Evans-Thirlwell
07:35 am UTC Relic Entertainment have laid off 41 people, a week after being sold by Sega and going independent. Best of luck to everybody affected.– Edwin Evans-Thirlwell
07:39 am UTC The developers of factory sim Shapez 2, which Ollie really rates, have written an extensive Steam post about what they're doing between now and the Early Access release. They note that "it’s unrealistic we’ll be ready for Early Access before September" but that "our bottomline is to release the game this year still."– Edwin Evans-Thirlwell
07:43 am UTCNightdive have a massive patch in the works for their System Shock remake - topline additions include a female hacker protagonist and a reworked final fight. It's out 11th April.
– Edwin Evans-Thirlwell
07:47 am UTCBlizzard have been talking to PCGamer about not doing advance community testing (aka, Public Test Realms) for Warcraft Classic Season of Discovery, which launches today. According to associate production tester Clayton Stone, having more bugs is an OK price to pay for not spoiling much of the season in advance. "Keeping that level of mystery and of discovery for Season of Discovery, with each phase that we roll out, has really created a moment every time for the whole player base to come together and experience something fresh together at the same time."
– Edwin Evans-Thirlwell
07:51 am UTCCastaway is a pint-sized The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening. I saw this go past earlier in the week and forgot about it - thanks Gamesradar for the reminder.
Castaway - Reveal Trailer Watch on YouTube– Edwin Evans-Thirlwell
07:53 am UTCThere are distant rumblings of the Splinter Celery variety over on Ubisoft Toronto's Facebook page. Seems likely we'll hear more at the Ubisoft Forward event on June 11th.
Maaaybe some news on Splinter Cell Remake.
Ubisoft Toronto changed their Facebook header and profile picture just yesterday. https://t.co/6KUXYmGjjs pic.twitter.com/bSwYCjbtkF
– Edwin Evans-Thirlwell
08:01 am UTC Yu Miyake, the long standing producer of the Dragon Quest series, has stepped down from his role. The news comes from Bloomberg, who say the news comes as part of shuffle-up at Square Enix under new President Takashi Kiryu, who recently told investors that the studio's new structure is intended to be less reliant on external resources, more focused on making big titles in-house.– Nic Reuben
08:07 am UTC first-person point & clicker Desolatium is out on Steam today as part of the platform's Lovecraftian Days event, a tribute to pop culture's favourite bigoted uncle. It's from Sanatorium developer Superlumen, and the art looks proper good. Please, Howard. Just pass the gravy and be quiet. No-one is stealing your pension.– Nic Reuben
08:09 am UTCEremite are bringing species hubs to Against The Storm in update 1.3, amongst many other bits and pieces. It's due some time in May.
– Edwin Evans-Thirlwell
08:15 am UTC Spider Fox, a horrible looking game where you play an unholy mashup of spider and fox, is not part of Steam's Lovecraftian Days event, but it bloody well should be. This is purely informational. Don't encourage them– Nic Reuben
08:46 am UTCPlayer Non Player is out now, and has the smack of something special. Explore a sad island full of brutalist structures, musical sculptures and lost souls, stroking and embracing characters to help them Move On. You can also chuck them around like dolls.
Player Non Player - Gameplay trailer Watch on YouTube– Edwin Evans-Thirlwell
17:15 pm UTCAs Edwin mentioned earlier, Company of Heroes and Dawn of War developers Relic have confirmed a round of layoffs one week after reclaiming their independence from Sega. Here's the full story.
– Matt Jarvis
18:05 pm UTCIGN have an inside report on claims of toxicity, hate speech and crunch at Life Is Strange: True Colors developers Deck Nine.
– Edwin Evans-Thirlwell
18:41 pm UTCMore details on the allegations of toxic working culture at Life is Strange devs Deck Nine, as Edwin recently shared.
– Matt Jarvis
19:03 pm UTCHelldivers 2 is adding an explosive crossbow, grenade pistol and other ways to blow up your friends by "accident" next week, in next premium warbond Democratic Detonation.
– Matt Jarvis
19:28 pm UTCThere’s now a cure for Dragon’s Dogma 2’s dreaded pawn pox Dragonsplague: mods!
– Matt Jarvis
22:22 pm UTCReports say that Gears 6 will be announced during an Xbox showcase on June 9th, alongside release dates for Avowed and Indiana Jones And The Great Circle.
– Graham Smith
22:22 pm UTCCosy free-to-play life sim Palia released on Steam just a couple of weeks ago, but its developers have now laid off a third of their staff.
– Graham Smith
22:23 pm UTCFrostpunk 2's closed beta kicks off on April 15th and will run for a week, but it's only available if you're willing to pre-order the digital deluxe edition, and it ain't cheap.
– Graham Smith
22:24 pm UTCNo Plan B is a close combat tactics 'em up in the Door Kickers style, in which you command troops to breach and clear on a timeline. It's out now. I mentioned this in The Maw previously but hey, now it has its own post.
– Graham Smith
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