There are few studios out there on top of their respective games like Mimimi are. From Shadow Tactics to Desperadoes 3, they’ve proven themselves the master of the modern stealth tactics game, and in 2023 they’re back with an all-new game, this time about pirates.
This is Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew, which is due out towards the end of the year. It won’t take long in the trailers below to see some familiar sights: the mix of real-time action combined with stealth tactics and special powers is one Mimimi have been perfecting over the past decade, and after dabbling with some magic in their last game they’re fully committed to it now.
Here’s the game’s reveal trailer:
Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew – Cinematic Reveal Trailer
And, more helpfully, here’s the game’s debut gameplay trailer:
Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew – First Gameplay Trailer
Aside from the obvious thematic shift, from one colourful era of history to another, this will all look very familiar to fans of Shadow Tactics and Desperadoes 3. Which, let’s be clear, is a very good thing. Those two games have come about as close as games can come to perfecting a genre, so Shadow Gambit will be messing with things around the edges of the Mimimi experience, not making wholesale changes.
Shadow Gambit will be out at the end of 2023 on PC, Xbox and PlayStation. And if you think I’ve been more hyperbolic than usual in talking about these games, know that I have good reason. Here’s how I wrapped up my impressions of Desperadoes 3:
I can’t speak highly enough of Desperados 3. It’s almost the perfect stealth experience, tense but not terrifying, empowering but not easy (it actually gets really tough in parts), and if this is the pedigree that Mimimi are building for themselves in this space, I can’t wait to see what comes next.
Critically-acclaimed base-building hit Factoriois an odd duck. Since its 2016 Steam release, the game has never gone on sale. And now, the developer behind Factorio is changing the price of its popular game, but it ain’t getting a discount. Instead, the price is jumping up $5 next week. The devs blamed inflation for the sudden price increase, and interestingly enough, the general reaction from the community has been mostly positive.
Since its release seven years ago on Steam, Factorio has been a popular game, even though it never, ever goes on sale. On the game’s Steam page, it straight up has a disclaimer letting folks know that its devs have no plans to “take part in a sale or to reduce the price for the foreseeable future.” That’ll still be the case after it goes from $30 to $35 on January 26.
“This is an adjustment to account for the level of inflation since the Steam release in 2016,” the official Factorio Twitter account tweeted. You might expect a flood of angry responses from players, but it appears that the devs have done a good job of being transparent with their community, for example by giving them plenty of heads up about the upcoming price change. Factoriohas also avoided microtransactions and other exploitative or expensive DLC. The end result is that not only are people fine with this price increase, but many are suggesting the studio offer more ways for players to help financially support the game.
“Fine, but now give me an add-on to spend more money [on] this game!” tweeted one player. “Honestly, I would love to see other ways to support the game as I already own it,” tweeted another fan.
Wube Software
You might be wondering why a studio would never let its game be a part of any Steam sale for nearly a decade. According to the makers of Factorio in a 2016 forum post, it’s about respecting players who bought the game and not rewarding people who “hold off” on buying it at a lower price.
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“If you think [Factorio is] priced too high, then it is your choice to not purchase, and we hope that with enough time, and extra development, we will be able to convince you of its value.
Factorio isn’t the only game on Steam making changes to make more money as the economy continues to spiral down the drain. Military shooter Squad is going back on a promise its devs made about never doing paid DLC or cosmetics. In an upcoming update, Squad will get its first paid DLC in the form of new in-game emotes.
Here’s what the team behind the online milsim shooter had to say on Steam about the new, upcoming paid cosmetics:
As we look into the future we see a long and healthy life for Squad. It has a large and dedicated playerbase. We have plans for more updates and to support the game beyond 2023. While many of these planned updates will be free, we also realize that we need a way to continue to fund the development of Squad. Paid content like emotes is one such way to help fund that development and continue our work on improving the game.
Compared to how people reacted to Factorio’sprice increase, the response from Squad’s player community has been far less positive, with some feeling betrayed after being promised that this wouldn’t happen. However, some were more open to the new option, understanding that developing a game isn’t easy or free and that at some point, studios need a way to bring in more income to help keep the lights on. That’s especially true as inflation continues to be a problem around the globe.
Remember those early days of Humble Bundles? When every newly-announced deal felt so essential, and literally millions of dollars would be raised for charity each time? It still happens occasionally, like last year’s Stand With Ukraine bundle that raised an incredible $20 million for charities working in the country, but over the decade the thrill has certainly worn off. But seeing one of my favorite developer/publishers, Wadjet Eye Games, having a deal on the site, reminded me of those times.
Wadjet Eye, the New York-based indie publisher and developer that’s mostly made of Dave Gilbert, is responsible for many of the best adventure games in the last sixteen years. From its self-developed projects like the incredible Unavowed and The Blackwell series, to those it’s published like Gemini Rue and Shardlight, the name has generally been a byword for super adventures presented with a ‘90s vibe. As it happens, all of those mentioned games, along with nine more, are included in the bundle, all for $10.
That’s a crazy ol’ bargain, and if you’ve wandered away from point-and-click adventures in recent years, it’s an excellent way back in. You wouldn’t believe what good stuff there is to find being made in the Adventure Game Studio engine, and Wadjet Eye’s are generally the best of them. The other games featured are Strangeland, Primordia, Technobabylon, Resonance, all six Blackwell games, and Gilbert’s first game, The Shivah. The chosen charity is JDRF, which raises money for type-1 diabetes research.
It’s interesting, and sad, to note how much of Humble’s sheen has come off, given that despite being live for five days, this bundle has sold just shy of 9,000 copies, with $11,800 raised for JDRF at the time of writing. It’s obviously still great to see that money going somewhere good, but it’s a trickle compared to the company’s previous waterfalls.
Of course, in the years since Humble’s heyday as a bundle seller (the company is owned by IGN now, and is a very successful indie publisher), a fair amount of good faith was lost. A very misguided decision to limit the amount of your chosen payment that could go to charity was announced, backtracked on, then re-instituted anyway.
Thankfully, right now, you can redirect your money where you see fit, albeit with an obligatory 15% going to Humble. (Meanwhile, there’s no minimum amount for developers or good cause—astonishingly you can adjust the sliders to give every penny to Humble, with none going to the people who made the games!) Also, the real selling points of genuine “pay what you want” disappeared a long while back, with minimum costs now often totalling enough that some deals don’t feel like bargains.
A trove of Counter-Strike maps recently leaked on the internet, including a mod that was the predecessor to the survival co-op game Left 4 Dead. The mod is even fully playable, as long as you know how to set up your own server.
According to gaming leaks streamer Tyler McVicker, the prototype originated as a game mode in Counter-Strike: Condition Zero. Players would assemble in groups of up to four people and play as the terrorists. The goal was to plant a bomb while defending against waves of infinitely respawning hordes of counter-terrorists. These enemies only used melee attacks, which made them the perfect predecessor to L4D zombies.
Valve’s Earliest Left 4 Dead Prototypes Leaked. WOW.
The developers at Turtle Rock Studios clearly thought that the mode had a lot of potential. They polished it further during the development of Counter-Strike: Source, where it was renamed “Terror Strike.” L4D director and Turtle Rock co-founder Mike Booth confirmed the mod’s existence over Twitter. “It was our lunchtime go-to game,” he wrote. “We wanted Valve to release it but never got traction for some reason.” Turtle Rock was known as “Valve South” after Valve acquired it in 2008. They had already started development on the survival co-op, but they didn’t have an advocate within the parent company.
Former Valve writer Chet Faliszek told Kotaku that Turtle Rock had already started working on L4D before he became involved. The game caught his attention, and he became its “champion.” “I was one of the people who checked it out and told Gabe about it at lunch,” said. “I went on so much about it, he said I should just go work on it.” As a result of his involvement, he was able to increase the scope of its production. Faliszek recruited over a hundred Valve developers for L4D after the company had acquired Turtle Rock.
Valve published the zombie survival co-op in 2008. A sequel followed in the very next year Turtle Rock eventually separated from the publisher and became an independent studio in 2011.
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It’s pretty neat that such a prolific game originated as a mod that its creators had been personally passionate about, rather than a carefully planned product. If you want to see what L4D looked like back in its ideation stage, you can download the mod here.
Thirsty Suitors is a cross between Scott Pilgrim’s battles with evil exes, stylish arcade skateboarding, and cooking segments all portrayed through a South Asian cultural lens. Outerloop Games’ RPG stars Jala as she returns to an old town with old flames, and frames their reconciliation through turn-based battles where the simple act of talking to each other is pumped up to ridiculous levels. There’s even a stage in which Jala enters a dream world where her exes appear as powerful, distorted versions of their own self-concept. Think Persona 5 but with fewer criminals. Jala explores her old town on a skateboard (more Jet Set Radio than Tony Hawk), and when she’s home with her family, she cooks with her mother in over-the-top, campy fashion. Thirsty Suitors portrays all of its storylines in this way, but there’s a grounded humanity at its core that will be exciting to see when the game launches on PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and Switch.
In really stepping things up news, it’s just been announced that Amazon Games is set to publish the next Tomb Raider game. Following Square Enix’s retreat from the Western front, and the sale of both developer Crystal Dynamics and the Tomb Raider license itself, it was unclear what might happen to Lara’s ongoing adventures, coming up on five years since her last outing. Now we know, although we don’t know very much.
In a press release from both Amazon Games and Crystal Dynamics, the newlyweds announced an agreement for a multi-platform game to be globally published by Mr. Bezos and company.
Now, it’s not news that there’s to be a new Tomb Raider, not least because of course there is. But also because we learned earlier this year that Crystal Dynamics (CD) are planning to develop it using Unreal Engine 5. However, that was revealed a month before Square Enix’s surprise decision to sell off most of its non-Japanese assets to the Embracer Group, assets which included Crystal Dynamics itself, leaving everything mysterious for anyone outside of what must have been tumultuous circumstances.
It seems that as the dust has settled, Amazon has swooped in to claim a pretty enormous prize, and finally have a title in its gaming collection that everyone will have heard of. It’s also an opportunity for Crystal Dynamics to try to reclaim some lost ground, following the ongoingslo-mosightoftheveryblandMarvel’sAvengersbeingdriven into a bridge.
In a very press-releasy press release, everyone involved says how terribly excited they are to be working on such a wonderful property of such majestic joyfulness, but I imagine in the offices of both companies it was mostly enormous “PHEW!” sounds. While Amazon Games has delivered a couple of interesting MMOs, until now they’ve only had Bandai Namco’s Blue Protocol to boast about for next year, and that’s not a name that your aunt’s heard of. Tomb Raider will finally put the publisher on the map.
We know nothing whatsoever about the new Tomb Raider, not even its name. Today’s announcement calls it a “single-player, narrative-driven adventure,” which tells us not a bit, but does rather peculiarly describe Lara Croft as “multidimensional.” This is a power I’ve not seen her use before, if you don’t count coming back from the dead.
It’s been four years since Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and given how early this new game clearly is (we’ve still not seen so much as a piece of concept art), it looks like this follow-up could break the record for gaps between entries in the franchise. The last longest was between the close of the series’ best trilogy (fight me), 2008’s Underworld, and one of its worst entries, the awful, stupidly named 2013 reboot, Tomb Raider. I predict we’ll see this announced for March 2024, and it’ll release in November that year.
Idle games are one of the most surprising break-out niches of the last few years, although the genre’s name is something of a misnomer. For the first while, these games are typically anything but idle, as you frantically click until you reach a point where the game starts to play itself. Now, Placid Plastic Duck Simulator truly is an idle game: you do absolutely nothing, but watch some plastic ducks float in a pool. And I’m here to tell you it’s one of the most highly rated games on Steam.
As first reported by the excellent GameDiscoverCo newsletter, PPDS’s popularity on Steam isn’t a sudden spike. It is, to be more reasonable, a succession of spikes since its original release in July this year. Since then, the barely interactive game has received over 3,500 “Overwhelmingly Positive” reviews on Steam, currently registering at the almost unheard of 98% positive ratings. And why? Um…
On one level, this genuinely is nothing other than watching rubber duckies floating in a blandly rendered backyard pool. At first you have one yellow duck, but as an on-screen duck-o-meter fills, new ducks fall from the sky. These come with their own designs, perhaps sporting a headband or a top hat and pipe, or they may be cleverly disguised as a sprinkled donut.
Screenshot: Turbolento Games / Kotaku
Your interaction is limited to awkwardly moving the camera around, pivoted on a selected ducky. The view gently bobs up and down with the water, while serene background noises of birds chirping and wind blowing soundtrack the banality. (Or you can turn the awful music on, which you shouldn’t.)
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The thing is, far more effort has been put into it than it deserves, and as much as I was ready to roll my eyes and switch off, it’s been running on my desktop for a couple of hours now. There’s a day/night cycle, with features of the two-level pool lighting up at night, and the natural soundtrack shifting to cicadas. Out beyond the pool is the ocean, and if you watch you might see a pod of dolphin swim past. Oh, and of course there’s DLC that adds more patterns on the ever-growing number of ducks.
This was all created by Italian developers Tunnel Vision Studio as a silly break from developing their proper game, open-world survival sim Starsand. It was part of an internal game jam at the studio, GameDiscoverCo reports, for which they did “zero marketing.” Due to some attention from some big Japanese and Korean Twitter accounts, and then a few weeks ago from 2.75 million-subscriber YouTube account RTGame, it keeps catching people’s attention and imagination.
Screenshot: Turbolento Games / Kotaku
That it only costs $2 is likely a big part of its review success. It’s hard to begrudge something so sweetly stupid when it costs so little, and as much as I want to be cynical, I can’t stop checking back in to see which ducks have arrived, and I became inexplicably excited when a small plane flew over that one time. Also, one time, for reasons I don’t understand, one of my ducks escaped via a propeller on its head and floated out to sea.
The duckies genuinely have different behaviors, even if that really amounts to floating about slightly differently. I wonder if simply sparing the player of almost absolutely everything about a game makes the tiny elements that remain feel so much more significant. Either way, I find I just can’t argue with the reviews it’s getting. It’s ridiculous, and it deserves that 98% positivity that’s usually reserved for the likes of Half-Life 2 or Stardew Valley.
The year is 1994. You’re playing SimCity 2000 and you’re thinking, man, wouldn’t it be amazing if I could somehow get down into the game and walk these streets.
The year is 1997. You’re playing SimCopter, which says on the box that you can explore the streets of the city you’re created, but it sucks and looks like shit. You keep dreaming of a seemingly unattainable future.
The year is 2022 and, finally, you can do it. You can take the SimCity 2000 save that you have lugged around nearly 30 years, convert it into a modern video game and walk its streets as though you were born there and were on your way to work. The only catches are that it’s very hard to do it. And that you are actually playing Minecraft, not SimCity.
Jernej Gosar, a software developer from Slovenia, is the man to thank for this mod, which reads a SimCity 2000 save file and recreates it as best it can in Minecraft. “The main reason why I decided to create this project was that I thought it would be really cool”, he tells me. “SimCity 2000 has been one of my favourite games since I was a child and one day I thought that it would be extremely cool to go down into the streets and explore them.”
In 2014, having gained enough experience coding through his education and various IT jobs, he got to work fulfilling this childhood dream. Having also got very into Minecraft, he saw a few mods where folks had worked out ways to import SimCity 2000 terrain maps into Minecraft, but not the buildings and city itself.
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“So then I decided to make it myself”, he says. “If I remember correctly the core idea was implemented in a few weeks. I was really lucky that somebody wrote a detailed specification of the SimCity 2000 file format, otherwise this project couldn’t even get started.”
“The biggest challenge was probably digging through the bytes of both file formats and finally creating something that could actually be opened in Minecraft”, he says. The next big obstacle was simply the amount of time it took to recreate the buildings, as even the simplest could take hours, though with the added bonus that because this was a first-person adventure, Gosar’s work was generating an interior (and sometimes even basic furniture) to go along with the building’s exterior.
“I still haven’t finished all of the buildings, and doing the most complicated ones (such as the Arcologies) would be a huge effort”, he says. “In general the smallest buildings take just a few hours to complete, including some interior furniture that makes sense for the building type. And the biggest ones can take a few days. The most complex building I have done so far was the big corporate tower which was quite a big effort.
While the actual workings of the mod are incredibly complex—Gosar says “right now it’s not usable at all for people who are not software developers”—when you break it down, what it’s doing in principle is actually pretty simple. It’s essentially taking a SimCity 2000 map and matching each pixel to a Minecraft block. That helps the mod communicate between both games, and also helps keep everything to scale.
That’s not to say the conversion process is always smooth sailing. In addition to the complexity issues above, Gosar says “in some cases I have encountered 2D building structures that weren’t actually possible to recreate in 3D”, with one example being that some buildings were actually drawn like Penrose stairs instead of functional 3D spaces.
“Another problem is that Minecraft is limited to 256 blocks in height, so if there are lots of hills in the city, the highest parts can get cut off”, he adds. “Otherwise the accuracy is supposed to be close to 100%, and rendering the Minecraft world with a tool that generates an isometric representation of it should show something very close to the original from SimCity 2000.”
Here’s an example. Pictured below is a SimCity 2000 metropolis built by Gosar:
Image: Jernej Gosar
And here is that same city, translated into Minecraft and fully walkable. Note how it even manages to grab the little individual trees and bushes from out the front of some buildings:
MineCity 2000
While this video highlights some of the basic interiors that the mod generates for some of the game’s buildings:
MineCity 2000 + some building interiors
Moving forwards, Gosar says he’d like to “make the project more usable”, lowering the bar for people to be able to use and understand it, ideally in the form of an online tool that would let users upload a SimCity 2000 save and he given a Minecraft world in return.
For now, though, given he has a hectic day job to attend to he “doesn’t have the time to work on it much, but I guess that the recent attention the project has received is a good motivation to move it forward”. If you’re brave and want to try it out for yourself, you can find the project here.
Mystery Flesh Pit National Park is a fictional project by Trevor Roberts, who having started on Reddit has for the past few years has been posting stories and artwork to his website, fleshing (sorry) out the tale of a huge creature that is discovered underground in Texas and…turned into a tourist attraction.
It’s a very cool pitch, like some kind of Lovecraftian Jurassic Park, full of absurdity but also abject horror, and it has slowly been picking up enough fans that it has been covered on sites like USA Today. Given the success of the project, and the fact that Roberts has built more of a detailed diorama of a world than a linear story, a video game adaptation must have seemed to a lot of people like a really good idea.
So last week Roberts announced that, courtesy of Village Fox Media, a Mystery Flesh Pit video game would be going into development, and would be seeking its funding on Kickstarter. Billed as a “survival horror video game for PC”, it would centre around the efforts of a crew tasked with helping the Park recover from a disaster—remember, it’s inside a giant beast—that kills 750 people.
A week later the Kickstarter—which was very light on demonstrations or detailed information on development—has been binned, with Roberts saying the decision was made after a combination of “fan feedback, a fumbled marketing push, internal disputes, and some deep introspection”. Specifically, it seems the process of handing off work on the game to other people…did not go well, with Roberts since writing (emphasis mine):
To those who were looking forward to a videogame, I apologize. Most people do not fully appreciate what a substantial undertaking it is to produce even a modest videogame. I have personally and carefully created each and every piece of the Mystery Flesh Pit project, but something as large as a videogame is wholly beyond my scope as an individual artist. When I am not the one directly responsible for overseeing its creation, I cannot ensure its quality. After this experience I can firmly state that there will be no endorsed videogame adaptions of the Mystery Flesh Pit as long as I am alive.
I sincerely hope that by cancelling this overly-ambitious Kickstarter campaign I have avoided what could have been a rushed and inferior gaming experience at best, and an unmitigated disaster at worst. It is also my hope that my decision to endorse this particular Kickstarter does not harm or hinder the superior work of other credible, talented creators that are and have been working hard behind-the-scenes to bring you a Mystery Flesh Pit Tabletop Gaming Experience late in 2023.
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“I have no hard feelings towards the developers”, Roberts tells me. “It was a mutual decision in the end to cancel it. I think they were a little bit too ambitious, and I had a moment of clarity where I saw the disaster this was going to become for all involved. I think I did the right thing. And, for the record, I have always been and continue to be wholly supportive of fan games. My statement about there not being a Mystery Flesh Pit videogame ever was, admittedly, a little overzealous. Fan games are awesome. I just think there are already too many games/movies/series that are poorly planned cash grabs by burnt-out creators, and I’m not about that.”
It’s refreshing to see Roberts see the writing on the wall and pull the plug like this now, and not months/years down the line—having already taken the money—like so many other doomed campaigns have done on the platform.
The tabletop adaptation, which as Roberts says is still coming, should be out early next year.
For a while there, Square Enix Montreal (later rebranded to Onoma) were making some of the best mobile puzzle games of all time. Hitman Go, Lara Croft Go and Deus Ex Gowere three of the slickest, most challenging games you could play on your phone, and all have gone down as classics of the genre. Sadly, one of them is about to disappear forever.
Onoma—who were suddenly closed earlier this month—announced earlier today that a number of their games will be “shutting down” in early 2023. Among them are Hitman Sniper: The Shadows, which was only released last year, and Deus Ex Go. The studio’s full statement reads:
Arena Battle Champions, Deus Ex GO, Hitman Sniper: The Shadows and Space Invaders: Hidden Heroes will be shutting down on January 4th.
The games will be removed from the App Store/Google Play Store on December 1st, and current players will not be able to access the games past January 4th.
Effective immediately, in-game purchases are stopped. We encourage prior in-game purchases to be used before January 4th, as they will not be refunded.
On behalf of the development team, we would like to thank you for playing our games.
Note that these aren’t simply disappearing from those two stores, they are disappearing, with the games no longer able to be accessed after January 4, even if you’ve already downloaded them. From a personal perspective—as someone who dusts the Go games off as time-killers every year or two—that sucks, but it’s also a tragedy from a games preservation standpoint.
People made this game, people bought this game and people enjoyed this game, for years, and with the closure of a studio and some rights changing hands it’s now just going to cease existing in an official capacity?
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The closures aren’t affecting Lara Croft Go and Hitman Go, at least, both of which are also available on the PC (Deus Ex Go was once available on the Windows Store, but has since been delisted from there as well).