For anyone not familiar with this game, or anyone who’s only familiarity is through the trailers (which really focus on tone and visuals), I really want to recommend the videos by YouTuber Riloe, who has been playing early builds with the devs and chatting to them extensively about the game. They’re really well produced videos, and they really help to explain the tone of the game, the interesting mechanical ideas behind it, and what exactly this company is trying to achieve. Obviously, take with a grain of salt, the guy is clearly a fan and these videos aren’t really trying to be critical, so this should all be read as basically press releases;

This antishooter game is beautiful and horrifying

The living war ecosystem where you don’t matter

The beautifully dark warscape of the antishooter

I’m really excited for this game. Not just for the visuals, but for everything they’re doing with the mechanical design. The idea of playing as scavengers trapped between two warring factions is incredibly cool, and based on early previews it sounds like there are a lot of very clever design elements, especially in the AI, all built to back up that core idea. For example enemies intelligently prioritize targets; a tank won’t focus on infantry if there’s an enemy tank present, and even when it does target the infantry it’ll use its machine guns, not the main cannon. Enemies will focus on you if you make yourself the biggest threat, but if you’re smart and follow the flow of battle you can keep their focus elsewhere.

That’s really smart stuff, and by all accounts it works very well. I also really like what the studio is doing more broadly. They’re really trying to push back on a lot of the toxic practices in the gaming industry. I’ll be getting the game day one, mostly just to reward them for trying to do something different.

If the intent here is to discuss games that are actually doing something new and different, Space Marine 2 really needs to be in this conversation.

At first glance it’s just a very, very polished third person action game, but the more you pay attention the more you’ll notice the excellent mechanical design of the combat. There are some very smart, very subtle choices that have been made in the gameplay mechanics that affect the dramatic flow and tension of combat in surprising ways. Someone designing this game actually thought about the pacing of fights, and that’s something you just don’t see in games all that often.

Also on a purely technical level there’s the extremely smart bit of coding that allows them to render ungodly numbers of enemies in screen at once, behaving as coherent swarms that move and flow together, and dear God is it incredible to watch.

The first game was a great Warhammer game (for the time). This one is just a great game, no qualification needed.

So you primary in Dems who will support ranked choice. This is .ml, surely you’ve all heard of entryism?

So noble. So majestic. SO STUBBY.

Yeah, hit up YouTube, look for tutorials. There are some great guides to things you really should know (the game’s tutorial is minimal at best) and handy tips for crime solving. Some of this stuff you can figure out in game with some intuitive leaps, like looking for security footage, or checking sales ledgers in stores to find out who bought a murder weapon. Other stuff is a little more obscure.

The game is still early access (or only just recently left it) so you also probably ran into some bugs. There are/were some missions that just spawned wrong and couldn’t be completed.

Disco Elysium: The Final Cut adds full voice over, so no reading required. Also the voice work for the inner thoughts is done by Lenval Brown and it is incredible. Like, seriously, go look up some gameplay footage on this. That man has a voice that you can listen to all day.

Also, Mike Goodman now voices the Horrific Necktie in the final cut and its the best thing ever.

If you’re liking the feeling of solving a mystery with no handholding, give Shadows of Doubt a look. 1920s detective noir set in an alt-history retro cyberpunk 1970s where the Coca-Cola corporation is the president of the USA. Yeah, that’s a mouthful, but what you get is a proper hard-boiled detective story where you are in total control of how you pursue every case. The game gives you an honest to God murder board with string and sticky notes. There’s no “detective mode” bullshit where you scan for clues and then the game solves the mystery for you. It’s completely on you to find the evidence, follow leads, canvas witnesses, scrub through security footage, stake out a suspect’s apartment or place of work, and finally make an arrest (and hope like hell you didn’t finger the wrong person). This all plays out in a fully simulated city district. Every room in every building can be entered. Every NPC has a complete life; a partner (maybe), a home (usually), a job, a medical history, a shoe size, fingerprints, the works.

The voxel graphics aren’t for everyone, and there’s some areas where it’s less complete than others, but those only really stand out because of how shockingly complete the world is in so many other ways. All in all, it’s a brilliant game, and like nothing else out there.

This. Go into Outer Wilds knowing as little as possible. It’s an incredible experience if you go in blind.

To paraphrase a description I gave in another thread about this game, at first it will feel like you’re just fumbling around with no clear idea of what you’re doing and why. The game presents itself as just this sort of open ended sandbox with no real purpose. That’s OK, just explore and have fun for about the first half hour or so.

Because about half an hour in, more or less, is when The Event will happen. Do not ask what The Event is. You will know when it happens. It will be, clearly and unambiguously, The Event. And once it happens everything will click, and you’ll go “Oh, that’s what this game is about.”

After The Event, go look at the computer in the back of your space ship. That will become your most important tool throughout the rest of the game.

A failure this monumental will almost certainly result in Sony taking the entire studio out back and shooting it, just to placate investors.

Edit: For context, Sony owns Firewalk - the studio - outright, they’re not just the publisher.

Yeah, Saber basically bought themselves back from Embracer (Embracer are desperate for money after they absolutely fucked an investment deal), and in the process bought back a bunch of other companies, including New World Interactive (Insurgency devs) and 3D Realms. They also have an outstanding option to buy 4A and Zen Studios.

No microtransactions

Saber off to a good start after getting themselves out of Embracer. I hope this pays off for them. The game looks great and I’m excited to play it.

Yeah, the immediate problem with comparing gun to non-gun kills is that anything involving a gun is automatically more likely to result in someone dead. So it doesn’t really give you a picture of how Indy likes to approach problems. And once a gun does become the tool of choice in a scene, the body count is likely to rack up a lot faster. You can show five people getting gunned down much faster than you can show one Nazi getting his head propellered off. Guns tend to be how disposable mooks die, but signature enemies get the more elaborate deaths.

Super excited to try this out. Darktide has taken over from Vermintide for my normal play, but getting to play as a Skaven sounds fucking awesome.

Should have cut that song one word earlier.

How can you even read that? Whole damn card is like 4 pixels.

I think you might be seriously underestimating how big a deal wrestling still is in America. We’re not in the glory days of the eighties anymore but it’s still capable of catapulting people like John Cena to mega stardom. Cody Rhodes has barely been back in WWE for a year, and he’s already been added to Call of Duty: Warzone. AEW is the baby brother to WWE and they’re now regularly selling out Wembley Stadium. None of that is small time.

I mean, Hulk isn’t exactly a d-lister. The guy still gets huge pops at wrestling shows. It’s more that he’s absolutely trashed his rep with younger people by constantly being a disgusting piece of shit.

Name the restaurant and give them more business. They deserve it.

Yeah it’ll do that. The little rascal.