Author: Zach Barbieri

As part of the Geoff Keighley-hosted Summer Game Fest, RGG Studio showcased a new story trailer for their upcoming game Project Century, which they unveiled under the new name Stranger Than Heaven. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5L3XVVzsmHE Previously, when initially announced, the game was set in 1915. This trailer is set in 1943, though how the game will juxtapose the time periods remains to be seen. Based on this trailer, it is suggested that we will follow two different protagonists, and in 1943, we follow a detective who can do several things, such as investigate objects and interrogate people, with him taking part in…

Nioh 3, in a lot of ways, builds off of Team Ninja’s work from their previous title, Rise of the Ronin. The experience blends the traditional experience that the studio has become known for, such as tight stages with brutally fast combat. Whereas Nioh 2 felt more like an extension of the first game, there are a lot of ideas at play in the third game that feel like a return to form. It seems that everything that came between in the 5-year gap served only as a refinement for what was to come in the series. This is juxtaposed,…

IO Interactive has showcased its first trailer for its upcoming game based on the James Bond character created by Ian Fleming, entitled First Light: 007. Announced in 2020, this is the first time we have gotten to see the Hitman developer bring the character to life on gaming consoles. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4qY9DYE184 First Light: 007 gives us a much different take on the character than we have seen across the movies and books, taking place at the beginning of 007’s career before he has become a well-established super spy. It also features a James Bond not modeled off of a franchise actor,…

Acting as the final announcement during the State of Play on June 4th, Guilty Gear developer Arc System Works announced their next fighting game, entitled Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls, which is slated to release next year. This was followed by a look behind the development and just how the Marvel universe came to collaborate with the fighting developer, which was facilitated through Sony. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fbfrV5qqnU Several characters from the Marvel superhero universe were showcased in the trailer, beating the snot out of each other, including Star lord, Spider-Man, Storm, Iron Man, and Captain America. The game features the same blistering fast…

DigixArt, the developer behind the narrative hitchhiking Roguelike Road 96, has showcased a gameplay trailer of their upcoming game Tides of Tomorrow as part of Sony’s State of Play showcase on June 4th. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wy7TP81eBc8 Tides of Tomorrow is set in a world that is covered in water and is meant to take on themes including the climate crisis, similar to how previous games from the developer aim to tackle similar issues facing the world. Players will be able to explore this world on land or in a boat as they embody the role of a Tide walker. While not fully…

Team Ninja and Koei Tecmo announced Nioh 3 during the PlayStation State of Play event on June 4th. The last game in the series was released initially in 2020 for the PlayStation 4, before being remastered for the PlayStation 5 in 2021. Despite this, Team Ninja has developed several games in the interim that draw heavily from the groundwork set by the series, including Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty and last year’s open-world title Rise of the Ronin. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXGm-JaxY54 Nioh 3 follows a similar setup to the previous games in the series. Set in a version of Feudal era Japan where…

CD Projekt Red’s upcoming open-world RPG, The Witcher IV, received a technical deep dive during the annual State of Unreal showcase, an event held by Epic Games that focuses on big games that will be using their Unreal Engine 5, as well as outlining updates coming to the open-source engine over the year. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nthv4xF_zHU In this deep dive, we follow the new Witcher protagonist Ciri in the region of Kovir, which appears to be a mountainous region with snowcapped peaks. According to the dev team, this gameplay demo is running on a base PlayStation 5, at 60 fps with raytracing…

It’s hard to look back on the effect that Stardew Valley had on the farming sim genre, which wasn’t limited to one game prior, but mostly ran through Harvest Moon. After that, and with the Cozy Sim genre growing exponentially in popularity, you can expect farming sims to use the game as mentioned earlier. They can be made on an indie budget, have pixel sprite art, but unlike them, it’s hard to see them as a throwback to the earliest years of the genre on the NES, and more of an homage to an homage. This is true in the…

Sony has confirmed that the company will be holding a State of Play showcase tomorrow on June 4th. In a PlayStation Blog post, Sony Interactive Entertainment content communication manager Tim Turi stated that fans of the platform will be getting”news and updates on must-play games coming to PS5,” also stating, “The show highlights a selection of great games from creators across the globe.” The event will be 40+ minutes long and will begin on June 4 at 2 pm PT / 5 pm ET / 11 pm CEST. Sony has not given us much in the way of what we…

Mark Gerhard, co-CEO of Build A Rocket Boy, recently responded to what he felt was a deliberate attempt by the media to “Trash” the studio’s upcoming game, MindsEye. In a Q&A session via Discord (and hosted by IGN), he went on to state “that there is a concerted effort by some people that don’t want to see Leslie (Benzies) or Build A Rocket Boy to be successful,” suggesting bot farms have played a part in this discourse to some degree. On the worst day, this is the statement somebody makes when they are caught in a lie and don’t want…