Since Deathloop was first announced, I haven't been able to stop thinking about Prey: Mooncrash, the exceptional expansion to Arkane's Prey. It follows a similar sort of formula to what the studio have told us about Deathloop, with roguelite elements and permadeath that essentially mean you'll need to start all over again after each run. And now Deathloop has been delayed again, I reckon this is the perfect time to get back into Mooncrash - or give it a try if you missed it.
]]>QuakeCon At Home is live this weekend on Twitch, though it really should be called BethFest when you look at the schedule. The event has moved wholly online thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic, and the rescheduled celebration of id’s and Bethesda’s games has an intriguing schedule. Here are a few of the highlights.
]]>Here's a fascinating fact: Steam Charts has never won an award. I KNOW. If there's nothing else that demonstrates the corruption of the entire system, it's this. High quality, groundbreaking, Woodwardian journalism, are just some of the terms I use to describe this most esteemed of columns. And yet the silverware shelf gathers dust. It's a disgrace.
]]>At GDC this week, Prey's lead level designer Rich Wilson explained why their team decided to change the immersive sim formula for its Mooncrash DLC. Mooncrash is a fascinating artefact: it blends the immersive first-person exploration and triple-A production values of its parent game with experimental, permadeath, randomised elements pulled from roguelikes. It's a marriage that could not be more targeted to my personal tastes, but confusingly, Rich did not cite pleasing me personally as their primary motive.
]]>I've felt like I've been drowning in good games all year. Monster Hunter: World, Hitman 2, Red Dead, God Of War and now Smash Ultimate are all easy to lose dozens of hours to, and are masterfully crafted. But none of the year's blockbusters really resonated with me.
Here's five smaller games that did (plus some bonus mentions) which sent me running to Twitter to wildly gush over and try to convince people to try them. Four of the five are very systems-driven games, but all have hidden depths; the deeper you dig, the better they get. In no particular order...
]]>I’ve spent 2018 particularly distracted, flitting between games and feeling guilty that I haven’t quite finished them or spent the time they deserved. Maybe it’s because there have been so many good games? Or maybe I’m just awful. Either way, I resolve to take better care next year.
Now I look back, I realise that I’ve particularly enjoyed a series of games which gave me space to explore them on my own terms. Whether on the scale of giant monsters or the confined scale of the decks of a ship, they’ve all felt expansive and generous, and respectful of me as a player.
Also, it’s always hard to figure out a five, so shoutouts to Forza Horizon 4, Donut County, Far: Lone Sails and Total War: Warhammer 2’s pirate vampires.
]]>Prey: Mooncrash was already my pick for expansion of the year, and that was before today when Arkane Studios threw in two more games for free. Typhon Hunter is a multiplayer game inspired by Team Fortress 2 and Garry's Mod favourite Prop Hunt - a team of five shapeshifting alien shadow-spiders attempts to outfox a lone human. Transtar VR is an escape room-styled prologue to Prey for the fancy space-goggles crowd. Anyone who owns Mooncrash should check their Steam library for Prey: Typhon Hunter, which includes both and installs as a separate game. Prey (with its brillo expansion) is on sale, too.
]]>The deadliest multiplayer game of all - hide and seek - is coming to excellent Prey expansion Mooncrash next week, free. Typhon Hunter was announced when Mooncrash launched, and sounds a lot like Prop Hunt, a mode big with the Garrys Mod and Team Fortress 2 scenes. Six players, one as an increasingly paranoid human and the other five as shapeshifting Mimics waiting for a chance to pounce. It'll be a free update next Tuesday, December 11th for anyone with the Mooncrash expansion, along with a VR escape room mode. That's a trailer below, not a mimic - promise.
]]>Arkane’s space-faring update for immersive sim Prey was a more roguelike spinoff called Mooncrash, and now they’ve added some homages to the indie games of the genre that inspired them. The free Rogue Moon update gives players the chance to add skins based on these games to their operator companions, as you can see in the trailer below:
]]>While none of their games have been the industry-shaking hits I would have loved them to be, Dishonored and Prey developers Arkane have put the immersive sim genre back on the map. At QuakeCon last week, agents for the ever-sneaky VG247 managed to pin down Ricardo Bare, lead designer at Arkane. Despite the studio being famously evasive ever since that whole Press Sneak Fuck incident, he did have a few things to say about the present and future of the studio and its games.
]]>Goodness me, I'd forgotten how brilliant the opening of Prey is. Bluffs and misdirects, some delivered on immediately, others saving surprises up for later, it's an ever-backward-pulling camera as your complex situation begins to dawn upon you.
And thank goodness it is quite so good, because if you want to play Prey's New Game+, or it's Story Mode, you're going to have to go through it in its vanilla mode before you can see the differences. There's just some question about how much either adds. As for Survival Mode - well, it's great, but it's not a survival mode.
]]>Prey: Mooncrash is a game of refinement. It's a piece of DLC that uses an economy of space by asking you to replay the same sprawling collection of areas repeatedly, with varying characters, varying skillsets, and an ever-changing threat to combat. It's a game that will make you play Prey differently than you have before, and you'll be grateful of it.
]]>Not satisfied with bringing snow trolls and hellspawn to expensive cyber goggles, Bethesda are bringing two more of their games to VR – Prey and Wolfenstein. Wolfenstein: Cyberpilot and Prey: Typhon Hunter are set in their respective universes and, of the two, Typhon Hunter seems the most interesting. It’s a prop hunt-like bit of multiplayer hide and seek, in which five players are mimics pretending to be everyday objects, and one player is Morgan Yu, trying to find and kill them. "Typhon Hunter is a deadly game of cat and mouse," say Bethesda, "except in this instance the cat is sometimes a trashcan or a bottle of cleaning supplies and the mouse has a shotgun."
]]>At last night's Bethesda E3 conference, we got another of those 'here's a thing and it's out now' announcements. It's a Prey expansion, called Prey Mooncrash, which is pitched as "an infinitely replayable experience" in which the "enemies, hazards and loot" are different each time you play.
If spending money isn't your thing, Arkane had more Prey-flavoured stuff, too. A free update - also out now - brings new modes to the base game, including store mode, new game+, and a survival mode. Hop below for trailers and details of all of those - plus a scant mention of a multiplayer mode called Typhon Hunter that's coming later this summer.
]]>
