One of my favourite internet jokes is: "I enjoy video games because they let me live out my wildest fantasies, like being assigned a task and then completing that task". Wilmot's Warehouse felt like that joke made manifest, putting you in the shoes of a tiny warehouse working squareboi. This puzzle-solving sequel, Wilmot Works It Out, doesn't come packaged with its predecessor's wry humour, nor the same sense of compulsion. Instead, it exudes a calm and homely sense of idle comfort. For me, that ultimately makes it less compelling, even if it is thematically the entire point. This is about a warehouse worker doing jigsaws on his day off.
]]>My favourite ever mode of travel in games is flying, so I was already poised (in mid-air) to really enjoy swooping around the world of Flock. It's a gentle exploration game from the people who brought you Wimot's Warehouse and I Am Dead (including Pip Warr, RPS in peace) where you never touch the ground, instead gliding around the strange forests and rippling meadows atop a giant bird with a beautiful trailing tail. Big Journey vibes, but more whimsical and colourful.
]]>Happy New Year, folks! Have you recovered from the all the 100+ hour RPGs that came out last year? Well, I have good news and bad news for you. The good news is that everyone seems to be taking a bit of a breather in 2024, because (at time of writing at least) the official "big'uns" calendar is looking remarkably slim at the moment. There are still some heavy-hitters coming our way this year, such as Avowed, Star Wars Outlaws and Path Of Exile 2, but 2024 looks like another year where it will be the smaller, independent games that shine the brightest. They certainly make up the bulk of our most anticipated games list for 2024, which the RPS Treehouse has been feverishly putting together over the last few days. The bad news is that there are still loads of great games coming out. So come, join us, and see what's on our personal wishlists for 2024.
]]>The Day Of The Devs showcases are always some of the brightest spots in the biannual trailer'thon gauntlets, and this year's inaugural edition for The Game Awards is no exception. There were 20 fresh-faced indie games highlighted in tonight's 90-odd-minute stream, and cor, there are some right old gems in here, too, with brand-new game announcements from the devs behind Genesis Noir, Kind Words and Tangle Tower to name just a few. We also got more in-depth looks at some of this year's most intriguing indie games that previously only had an enigmatic teaser snippets attached to them. So come and join us below, where you'll find a digest of all 20 announcements from this evening's showcase, as well as the stream in full if you'd prefer to watch it all as it happened.
]]>Spare a thought for any game attempting to compete with GTA 6 today. It can't be easy when big hitters like that inevitably suck all the air out the room, but bless the folks at Hollow Ponds for poking their heads above the 4K flamingo parapet anyway by releasing a lovely new demo for their upcoming critter collect 'em up Flock today. I've just been giving it a go over lunch, and it is truly a very relaxing way to decompress after a morning of poring over GTA gubbins.
]]>Flock is the next game from the makers of Wilmot's Warehouse, Hohokum and I Am Dead, but ever since it was announced last year, I've been wondering about exactly what kind of game it is. The first trailer revealed lots of strange, whimsical environments, equally whimsical-looking beasties and a little person flying around on the back of a giant bird herding them around in delightful swoops and swirls. We also saw some sheep grazing in a meadow before they, too, started to fly alongside your wilder, more abstract animal pals. But the question of what you do in Flock remained unanswered - until last week, when developers Hollow Ponds showed us a little bit more of their creature collecting game during the Annapurna Interactive Showcase stream.
There, they revealed that we'll need to collect and charm these creatures to get them to join our respective flocks, and that we'll be able to do so in co-op with a pal. It looks intensely charming, but it still left me with lots of unanswered questions. So I spoke to devs Ricky Haggett and Richard Hogg to find out more. Naturally, there are some things they're not ready to reveal about Flock just yet, but they did tell me that you'll start on top of a mountain and will be wending your way down it with your flock of sheep.
]]>During tonight's Annapurna Interactive Showcase, we got another lovely look at Flock, the latest game from Wilmot's Warehouse and I Am Dead devs Hollow Ponds and Richard Hogg. In it, we get to see exactly how its adorable creature herding works in co-op, which you'd probably hope to see, given its own Steam page also describes it as a co-op multiplayer game. But rest assured, Flock is still very much a game you can play on your own, without the need to have a pal along for the ride, the devs tell me.
]]>There were a lot of exciting announcements at today’s Annapurna Interactive showcase but multiplayer co-op flying sim Flock was an instant standout. Weird alien birds, colourful landscapes, pure whimsey, and charm - there was a lot going on. Just watch the trailer below to see for yourself.
]]>Hollow Ponds have released a video detailing the real-world inspirations behind their 2020 puzzle game I Am Dead, a game about a ghost returning to their hometown and view it through new (dead) eyes. The cultural specificity in I Am Dead becomes clear as the two lead developers, Richard Hogg and Ricky Haggett, discuss how the British seaside town of Hastings influenced the creation of the game’s fictional setting Shelmerston. It's 25 minutes long, but it's a lovely watch.
Hogg and Haggett give insights on the various buildings, objects, and jokes from Hastings that infiltrated their way into the game. The video shows off previously unseen concept art, photography, diagrams, maps and mood boards that were used in the development of I Am Dead. You will also learn a lot about the town Hastings.
]]>Loot Rascals let's you travel the cosmos beating up enemies with names like Lunk, Web Jock and Pool Beast in an effort to rescue your mate Big Barry from The Thing Below. You'll do so with items such as the Vortex Bin Lid, Satnav Teatowel and Space Shorts.
]]>Recently I have been blessed with a plethora of sweet, soothing games with a good sense of humour (like Spiritfarer, for example). I Am Dead, from the developers of perennial RPS favourite Wilmot's Warehouse, is a 3D puzzle adventure game about past and present and place, and is another tonic for these trying times.
In it, you play as Morris Lupton, erstwhile director of the Shelmerston museum, and ghost. Starting out dead does take a lot of the pressure off. Shelmerston is an unbelievably idyllic island community off the coast of England, in Channel Island territory, but it's also on top of a dormant volcano. Except it turns out the volcano isn't so dormant anymore, and you - accompanied by Morris's also dead dog Sparky - must hunt out the ghosts of other Shelmerston residents to try and solve this impending problem.
]]>"If you're a ghost, and you walk through a wall..." asks Richard Hogg, in the tone of a man confronted with a real head-scratcher, "...do you get to see the inside of the wall?"
It's a good question. The kind which, for most people, might fuel a good half hour in a pub, or a 2am chat with a partner who can't sleep. But for Hogg and his long-term collaborator Ricky Haggett - who last year spun a thought about the simple pleasure of stacking shelves into the phenomenal Wilmot's Warehouse - it's a question worth writing a game about. That game is I Am Dead, and after watching Hogg and Haggett play for half an hour, it looks like exactly the tonic I need in the middle of this long, dark year.
]]>Wilmot's Warehouse taps into some very deep-rooted components of the human psyche. It's a constant arm-wrestle between the immense satisfaction of a job well done, and the deeply disturbing realisation that you have absolutely no memory of what you were doing 30 seconds ago. The arm-wrestle is in constant flux, inching back and forth like an agonisingly slow metronome, with neither force ever emerging dominant. Which is what keeps you playing this silly brilliant game for hours at a time.
]]>There are perks to being dead, it turns out. You can talk to your dog who is also dead, talk to other ghosts, and look inside just about anything to take a peek at what's hidden within. Hollow Ponds gave folks a look inside I Am Dead, explaining how recently deceased museum curator Morris Lupton and his dog Sparky will save the Shelmerston with their new ghost powers.
]]>The next game from the team behind the wonderful Wilmot's Warehouse will not be Wilmot's Distribution Centre or Wilmot's Lockers, it's not about supply chains at all, and in fact it's a game where someone has already done all the hard work of organising for us. The collaborators of Hollow Ponds and Richard Hogg today announced I Am Dead, a "puzzle adventure game" about a lovely little island and the curator of its local museum - who happens to have recently died. Mystery is afoot. It looks lovely in the trailer, below.
]]>For the first three and a half billion years of its history, life on earth was fairly dull. It was, essentially, a load of little blobs mucking around in a great big sea. But then, five hundred million years ago, the Cambrian Explosion happened. Despite its name, it was not a sick wrestling move, but a sudden evolutionary riot, in which life diversified into a bewildering array of new and complex forms. These new creatures competed, and the winners - vertebrates, arthropods, molluscs and a bunch of worms - set the blueprint for every animal that existed thereafter. That’s the nature we’re familiar with; endless variations, but all on a surprisingly limited set of themes. And it’s great. But sometimes, just sometimes, you look at the sea and wonder what would be in it, if a different set of animals had ended up winning that primordial arms race.
Wilmot’s Warehouse gives me that feeling. Admittedly, it has absolutely nothing to do with the history of life on earth (although my warehouse does contain both dinosaurs and mammoths). It does, however, give me the feeling that I’m playing something from an alternate universe where the fundamental tenets of videogames evolved very differently indeed. And whatever universe he hails from, Wilmot is a bloody lovely ambassador.
]]>Time, once again, to reveal our Can't Stop Playing for this month. The announcement is coming a bit late because we had some trouble deciding for September, but then we looked at what we'd been writing about and, shockingly, playing, and there was really only one option. Who could have thought that pushing boxes around a black room would have us so completely in its grasp. Yes, it is of course the never-ending re-categorisation of Wilmot's Warehouse that we can't stop playing this time.
]]>I don't think we ever see the extent of Wilmot's horror. He's a square in charge of a warehouse, single-handedly responsible for storing and serving up hundreds of amorphous objects. We, the player, only see those objects from the top-down, a step removed from the abject terror of categorising off-colour melon slices that simultaneously resemble 50% of an egg. Maybe reality is less blurry from his perspective, but I doubt it. Wilmot's Warehouse is a world of raw pictorial language, and an ingenious platform to explore how language works in our own world.
]]>If you do not understand the low-key cerebral pleasure of inventory management, then what are you even doing playing videogames? Get out. Everyone else, welcome to Wilmot's Warehouse. A whole game about fiddling with your inventory and wrestling for space amid piles of bananas and hair dryers. It's basically a giant version of that suitcase in Resident Evil 4 that holds all of Leon Kennedy's eggs. It can be stressful at times, but there is one feature that makes all the box-stacking labour worth it. After a while, you get the chance to watch a timelapse of your warehouse, from the minute you began work, to the latest moment of perfectly formed rows of boxing gloves. It is glorious.
]]>Welcome to Wilmot's Warehouse, where boxes come in and meaning fizzles out. Or at least dissolves into puddles of tenuously-related nonsense. It's a puzzle game about storing and delivering objects - lots of them, under time pressure. It came out yesterday, and should appeal to anyone who's ever been secretly pleased when vast quantities of different-coloured beads have scattered across the living room. Or got a buzz from placing cutlery in the right receptacle.
I've played for ten minutes and already have a pile I'm referring to as "circles I don't understand". I think most people will like this, to be honest. Especially after seeing Pip's evident delight in the trailer.
]]>I suspect that everyone who makes games wishes they'd made Spelunky. Effectively perfect game design, unconstrained by the heavy flab of spectacle. Loot Rascals [official site] takes that game's random generation, escalating challenge, extreme balancing, minimal explaining and daily runs and applies it all to a slick, playful roguelite and collectable card game hybrid. Then slathers gloriously weird creature design all over it.
]]>Loot Rascals [official site] has been out for a little while, but in an Itch-only Refinery Edition for those who wanted to help test and balance the colourful card-collecting roguelike. Now that Refinery Edition has, presumably, been refined, and the finished game is making the leap to Steam on March 7th. It looks delightful, as you'll see below.
]]>I'd never seen Loot Rascals [official site] before this morning and yet it seems to arrive fully-formed: it looks great, it looks fun, you can buy it now. Although it's not fully-formed, and that's even why you can buy it now: the Refinery Edition is so named because the game's developers hope to use it to refine the game. There's a cracking trailer below.
]]>Loot Rascals [official site] is a freshly announced roguelikelike strategy affair from Hollow Ponds. It's got card collection and deck-building elements, robots, space travel, permadeath, a Scottish hologram character, and is wrapped up in a lovely-looking Jetsons-esque retro sci-fi aesthetic.
It's not due until next year, but it looks pretty special already. See:
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