Annapurna Interactive - the publisher behind games such as Cocoon, Stray, and Neon White - have seen their entire staff resign after an internal dispute this month, via Bloomberg.
The resignations came in the wake of a dispute between Annapurna Interactive president Nathan Gary and Annapurna studio head Megan Ellison. As Bloomberg report, negotiations were taking place to "spin off the video-game division as an independent entity." After failing to reach an agreement, Ellison pulled out of the negotiations, resulting in the resignation of Gary and “other executives.” Further resignations followed, with a reported two dozen other staff leaving the company.
]]>An animated movie based on science fiction catventure Stray is in "active development", reports Entertainemnt Weekly. It's being developed by Annapurna Animation, the recently formed animation division of Annapurna Pictures, who also operate Stray's publisher Annapurna Interactive.
]]>Tonight's Annapurna Interactive Showcase brought us 30 minutes of fresh game announcements, putting a lovely (and hopefully final) full stop on this year's notE3 / Summer Game Fest period. While most of the announcements were updates on games we already knew about, there are a couple of cool new things in there that I'm personally quite pumped for, including a new Blade Runner game being developed internally at Annapurna Interactive, a new Keita Takahashi joint about a kid stuck in a T-pose of all things, and a new ghostly biking game from the team behind Nidhogg. I'd highly recommend watching the showcase in full if you can, but in case you need a quick refresher of what happened, or are just short on time, we've rounded up every announcement in order below.
]]>It’s episode 12 of Indiescovery and this week we’re being a bit cheeky as we dive into which indie game characters we’d love to do a pub crawl with. Who are we getting sloshed with? Who’s not making it past pre-drinks? Who are we sharing our end-of-night chippies with? All that and more this week! Summer has well and truly arrived here in the UK, but wherever you are, grab your sunnies, sip a pina colada, kick back, and have a listen.
Listen and subscribe via your podcast provider of choice! Find us on RSS feed, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Pocket Casts, Amazon Music, TuneIn, Deezer, and YouTube.
]]>It's episode seven of Indiescovery and this week, wow, the gang is tired. With a busy four days in Boston for PAX East, mine and Liam's brains were basically mush last week, so Rebecca - an absolute angel - graciously said she could host a special PAX East episode where she chats with Liam and me about the indies we saw on the show floor and try desperately to string together a coherent sentence. She also made bulletpoints of our entire chat so writing up the shownotes would be easier; we do not deserve her.
]]>This year's Game Developers Choice and IGF Award ceremonies were really heartening stuff. Getting to see so many great developers have their games celebrated by their peers will always warm the old cockles, especially when we celebrated so many of them in our own RPS Advent Calendar at the end of last year. Well, I say 'see'. In truth, I was tucked away backstage at this year's IGF and GDC Awards, clutching my dictaphone with a single question in mind: if each winner had to give away their award to another game in their category, who would it be and why?
It's an idea Brendan (RPS in peace) came up with back in the primordial mists of 2018, and it was so good I just had to knick it and do it again. It might be cruel to wrench these awards away so soon after receiving them, but it's all in the name of spreading good vibes and extra shoutouts, I promise. So here are the games of the year 2022, according to the people who just won awards for games of the year 2022.
]]>The founder of speedrunning institution Games Done Quick is heading off to find new horizons following more than a decade of helping organise epic runs for charity. GDQ announced that Mike Uyama will leave the organisation when Awesome Games Done Quick 2023, which began on January 8th, concludes. Uyama’s replacement as owner and managing director of GDQ is Matt Merkle, the organisation’s current director of operations.
]]>I've been looking back over an entire year of RPS reviews and, well, we've written a lot. Over the past twelve months, the RPS treehouse and our merry band of freelancers have reviewed 168 games in total - and that includes early access reviews, PC-port reviews, group reviews, reviews-in-progresses, and your common or garden fully-fledged reviews. 168! Damn. Even though game releases are still suffering from pandemic pushbacks, 2022 has been a busy year for games. There wasn't a huge number of big name releases - although the ones that did come out were plenty big enough - but, as always, we've had a wealth of wonderful indies releasing all year round, and we scooped up as many of them as we could.
Out of all the games we’ve given any kind of review treatment throughout the year, only a handful of them recieved RPS’s coveted Bestest Best badge; just 23, to be exact. I've gathered them all in one big round-up bundle below (there are round-ups of our favourite bits from other sections of the site, too), and they make a great collection of games. Have a scroll and click on any that take your fancy for the full review. Enjoy!
]]>With all the doors on our RPS Advent Calendar well and truly busted open for 2022 now, we thought it was high time to gather all of our favourite games of the year together in one handy location. If you've been diligently scoffing our Advent treats throughout December, then you'll already know what our game of the year picks are for 2022, but just in case you missed them or want to go through them one final time, we've got 'em all right here for you in our definitive Games Of The Year list. Enjoy!
]]>If you want to open today's door on the RPS Advent Calendar you're going to have to jump and pull on the handle, or scratch on the door until someone comes to open it for me. Unfortunately, today you don't have opposable thumbs - but you're way better at climbing, which is going to come in useful.
]]>Speedrunning charity event Awesome Games Done Quick is returning in January, and there’s plenty of PC runs among its freshly announced preliminary schedule. Notable standouts this time around are PowerWash Simulator, which might well be my personal GOTY contender, and a bonus appearance from cutesy cyberpunk cat sim Stray. There’s also a Google Stadia run of nautical indie action-adventure Wavetale, just a week before the streaming platform closes for good.
]]>Four legs? Check. Adorable? Yup. Winged and purple? Wait, that’s not a cat. It’s only Spyro the dragon, modded into Bluetwelve’s hit indie miaow ‘em up Stray. Quite a decent fit too, Spyro me ol’ chum. It’s a bit like if Toys For Bob decided to give the plucky young drake his own version of Sonic Frontiers.
]]>A lot of people love cats, as cyberpunk moggy sim Stray showed us when it launched last week. Now, you can enjoy Stray together with some buddies and/or pals thanks to a new multiplayer mod for the game. This is classic stuff people, because we’re talking splitscreen local co-op.
]]>Indie cat adventure Stray has been doing well for itself since it was released last week. Now, it seems other games want to get in on that cute factor. Cue Stray In Doom, which sends Doomguy off for a rest to let a sweet little kitty frag some demons in his stead. Creator Edy Pagaza tweeted footage from the mod earlier this week, and you can now try it for yourself by downloading it from ModDB. You can watch a trailer below. Aww!
]]>I'd rather play almost any game in first-person rather than third-person. A game in which I'm a cat might be one of the few exceptions. If you feel differently, and you'd really like to get inside the head of the feline protagonist in Stray, then there's now a first-person mod to help you.
]]>Less than a week after Stray launched, the smash-hit cyberpunk cat adventure has dozens of mods available with new looks for our little friend. My favourites are when modders make the game's cat look like their own real cat, and show me photos of that pretty cat. Then... you have some weirder options, like turning it into Garfield (in both realistic and cartoon forms) or a horrifying quadripedal version of GTA: San Andreas star CJ.
]]>Looking at signs in open-world catventure Stray makes me think I’m due for an eye-test. The code language in the game appears a lot like something that should be legible, but it’s not. At least, not straight away anyway. Luckily, these things don’t ever stay cryptic for long. HalfGlassGaming’s Josh Wirtanen has proffered a handy guide to how to read the chapter titles, signs and music sheets, with help from the growing Stray community.
]]>Never underestimate the innate cuteness of cats. It’s a phenomenon that’s served the Internet, Ancient Egyptian civilisation and Andrew Lloyd-Webber well. Now it’s the turn of Annapurna Interactive, publishers of miaow ‘em up Stray, who have seen the highest concurrent player counts on Steam for any of their games released to date. That's despite the game being free to PlayStation owners right now, if you sign up for their newly added seven-day free trial of their PlayStation Plus Extra subscription. Watch the trailer below to get a dose of cuteness for yourself.
]]>Long awaited cat 'em up Stray is out as of today, which is good news for us humans who play videogames. It may also be good news for actual cats, if the Twitter account Cats Watching Stray is any indication. It seems like cats can't get enough of watching their virtual doppelganger on screen, and in turn, I can't get enough of watching them watching.
]]>Want to find all of the Sheet Music locations in Stray? In Stray, you control an adventurous feline lost in a gorgeous dystopian city. When you first enter the Slums area early in your adventure, you'll meet a guitar-strumming robot named Morusque. Morusque asks you to find pieces of Sheet Music scattered around the city, of which there are eight in total. However, this is no easy task. The Slums are dense, and the Sheet Music locations are well-hidden.
In this guide, we break down all of the Sheet Music locations in Stray. As you find Sheet Music in the world, you’ll notice that they each have a number out of eight in the name, which should help you easily remember which ones you’ve already found.
]]>Looking for all of the Energy Drink locations in Stray? Energy Drinks are a type of currency in Stray. You can use them to purchase a piece of Sheet Music and a Memory from Azooz, the market place merchant in the Slums. You can get these Energy Drinks by interacting with Vending Machines scattered around the Slums. However, finding all of the Energy Drink locations yourself is a challenge, as the Slums are an incredibly dense urban environment.
In this guide, we'll show you all of the Energy Drink locations in Stray, so that you can easily find every Vending Machine. We'll also remind you where to find Azooz, so that you can return to the market place and spend your Stray Energy Drinks.
]]>I’ve been looking forward to Stray for years, mainly for the cat-tion adventure premise but also so I could enjoy more of its marvellous presentation. The final product (as reviewed by Katharine) isn’t quite as glossy as the 2016 test footage, but it’s still an impeccably detailed, gorgeously lit slice of cyberpunk – and even so, the PC version can run silkier than a Maine Coon’s coat.
]]>Cats are masters of their domain. As an owner of two tortoiseshells myself, they've unlocked routes in our house I never knew existed, using the tiny lip of our fridge as a gateway to the top of our kitchen cupboards, bed frames as launch pads to the middle bar of our sash windows (not even the actual window sill, those daft beasts), and don't even get me started on how they managed to get onto the top of our 2cm wide shower rail that one time.
Stray, BlueTwelve Studio's cat 'em up explorathon, puts you in the paws of a similarly savvy feline protagonist. The cat itself is a marvel of digital observation, fully inhabiting all of the best cat-isms I know and love. You can scratch the backs of sofas and knead and shred carpets with alternate squeezes of the trigger buttons, meow at will, lap from dripping water bowls, topple piles of carefully stacked books and push paint cans off the edge of ledges - and, if you leave them idle long enough, they'll stretch and catch flies too tiny to be caught by the human eye. You can also play a mean game of billiards, much to the annoyance of the local robots. I wouldn't go as far as saying it loosened my jaw quite as much as when I first set eyes on Trico from The Last Guardian, all told, but I reckon if BlueTwelve had the same kind of budget and scale as GenDesign and Sony's Japan Studio did back then, then Stray's cat would be every bit the equal of that famous cat-bird-chimera.
]]>When I look outside my window, I often see our two cats scrabbling up our back wall as they hop over the fence to visit the neighbour's garden. Up and down they go, covering distances seemingly impossible for their tiny, wiry frames, yet without coming to any harm whatsoever. It's an instinct the team at BlueTwelve Studio know all too well, having modelled their unnamed cat protagonist in their debut adventure game Stray after a couple of their own feline companions - and colleagues, it turns out.
"About 80% of the team are cat owners, or are being owned by a cat depending on how you see it," says producer Swann Martin-Raget. "We actually have two cats that are joining us almost everyday at the office and are working with us. The main character is based on one of the director's cats called Murtaugh. He's not an exact copy, but he's the main reference. We also have Oscar, who is a Sphynx, a furless cat, so he's a very good reference for animation because we can clearly see all the movements. We also have a lot of strays that we've adopted, but yeah, we definitely are huge cat lovers and these animals are fascinating to us."
]]>Stray, the game about being a little cat exploring around a big cybercity, has a release date - and it's soon! July, in fact. That's next month! Time flies when you're excited about getting to be a ginger tabby kitty.
]]>Annapurna really stretched the limits of notE3 by putting on their inaugural showcase so late in the day, but I’m glad they did. They showed off a lot of cool things, like Neon White and Stray. We even got the briefest of looks at the upcoming Outer Wilds DLC.
]]>Tonight's Annapurna showcase brought news of many games, and among them was Stray. First announced at E3 last year, it's a gorgeous-looking third-person adventure in which you control a cat trying to survive in a cybercity.
The first developer walkthrough of Stray revealed that someone has given the cat a gun. Watch the trailer below.
]]>Tonight, Annapurna Interactive held their very first E3-like showcase, showing off loads of games they're publishing over the next year or so, as well as revealing new developers they're working with. We saw new gameplay for Stray, Neon White, Skin Deep, and a very special announcement from Outer Wilds developers Mobius Digital about a cryptic new expansion.
If you missed the stream, read on, because we've made a big list of everything that happened at the Annapurna Interactive Showcase.
]]>One lovely surprise in Sony's E3 pressblast was the appearance of Stray, a game about a lovely little cat with a backpack who's exploring a Kowloon Walled City-esque cybercity filled with robots. If that sounds familiar, it might be because it's been around in the works for years, formerly codenamed HK Project. I'd half-given up on ever seeing it again. But now I have! And the cat is: very good. And it has: a little robot friend.
]]>The game doesn't have a proper name yet and I couldn't rightly tell you what it is, but I am certainly enjoying seeing a cat roam the neon alleys of a cybercity inspired by Kowloon Walled City in HK Project [dev blog]. Creators Koola & Viv call it "a cat adventure video game" - a grossly underserved genre. We'll get to be a cybercat wandering down alleyways, platforming around, and generally taking in the sights? It's still early days for the game, but my Monday's certainly brightened up by watching this:
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