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While the plot kicks off with leaving home to find your fame and fortune, it quickly gives way to hijinks and weirdness. Take the three playable classes, for instance—you’ve got the smooth-talking Snake Oiler, the mystic Beanslinger, and the rough-and-tumble Cow Puncher. Never before have stick figures held such awesome, silly power.

Every self-respecting town needs a Sherf

The rest of West of Loathing promises to be equally wild, with dozens of memorable (and rowdy) NPCs, nearly one hundred unique locations, and over fifty exquisitely-drawn hats to equip at your discretion. Plus, there are sentient skeletons, gritty(ish) saloons, demonic cows and a drunken horse. I think every future game should be contractually obligated to have at least one drunk animal in it, but that might just be me.

Cow hats should also be a staple of RPGs

While the game first released in August of last year for Steam, there’s a bit more to it. West of Loathing is a pseudo-spinoff from Asymmetric’s hit browser MMORPG Kingdom of Loathing, sharing the same general universe, sense of humor, and breathtaking art style. In short, if you’re a fan of not-so-serious RPGs, you’ll feel right at home. It’s kind of like the meeting point between Fallout: New Vegas, Paper Mario, and The Three Stooges, and yes, I realize how wild that sounds.

Now featuring the color red!

Since launching in August, West of Loathing has garnered acclaim like PC Gamer’s “Best Comedy Game,” was called “one of 2017’s best games” by Rolling Stone, and was a finalist at IGF. For all the details you can mosey on over to the game’s official website and Nintendo’s own page. And hey, be sure to check for any snakes in your boot.

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Today marked the launch of developer ROCKFISH’s Everspace on the PS4 and PS4 Pro. If the name sounds familiar, it’s because I reviewed the PC version of the game a while back. Everspace is a first person space combat game that also mixes in roguelike elements. As I mentioned in my review, it is a lot easier to play than its more complex contemporaries like Eve Valkyrie or Elite Dangerous. As such, it’s a welcome release for fans of the genre who don’t want to have to buy a special controller just to have enough buttons to play properly. The roguelike elements and story give the game a unique edge as well; the story explains the perma-death associated with roguelikes, and it’s compelling enough to keep you playing. If you want to see my full review, check it out here. Note that I was evaluating it as a VR game, and unfortunately, the PS4 release of Everspace will not support Playstation VR.

You can download Everspace from the Playstation Store right now, for $29.99. The expansion pack called Encounters is also available for $9.99, adding some new locations and a new ship. The game and expansion are also available on Windows and Xbox One.

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In MachiaVillain you take on the role of a former minion turned big nasty threat and go about building your mansion of horrors. You then have to lure victims into your abode and do despicable, highly entertaining things to them. Like the premise so far? Yes, so did I. Unfortunately this is something of a case of a brilliant idea with relatively poor execution. Why we can’t just have a great idea and have it go hand in hand with great gameplay I don’t know. This seems to be something I’m complaining about a lot lately and I’m starting to get sick of the sound of my own voice.

You recruit from a pool of minions including zombies, skeletons and psychopaths and then use these to man your ever evolving mansion. All good so far. The first notable, (and slightly game breaking) issue is a lack of building units. If you take a game like Dungeon Keeper for instance you have imps that will do all of the gathering a building for you. This means that your other units can be assigned to rooms and have quite specific roles to play. If you take this out of the equation you have your basic units doing absolutely everything.

This instantly means that instead of planning your mansion and figuring out what rooms are going where and how best to locate things you’re spending all of your time micromanaging units and trying to make sure they are all doing as they are told. When you have three starting minions and you have to have them building, cutting wood or stone, collecting resources and manning rooms it’s asking a little bit much.

This is a relatively small thing but it impacts everything in the game. You are set a series of tasks including building specific rooms and luring and killing set numbers of victims and all of this is happens in real time. So lets take an example. Your recruits need to eat. If food is left out it spoils so you need to store it. Building food storage should really be at the top of your to do list. Thing is, you have to lure victims and to do this you need an office from where you can send out letters. Seriously junk mail in this game is beyond killer. You concentrate on that and your minions start going hungry. Your victims arrive but see a pile of brains, (you haven’t stored them,) get scared and run off. Rinse and repeat and amongst all of this your still cutting down trees.

Making something that’s far too complicated to begin with even more frustrating is a job board. You decide which minions are performing what jobs (usually up to three of four each) and then in what order these jobs are important. This would be fine if you had a lot more minions. When you have very few and they are having to do everything, any concept of ordered reasoning goes down the toilet and everything just descends into utter chaos. To add insult to this your minions are also about as smart as little blocks of concrete and even when you’re telling them what to do have a tendency of doing their own thing anyway.

I restarted the game four times and this isn’t uncommon with any kind of building management title. Each time your do a restart in most games you learn something and get a bit further. In MachiaVillain I just got to the same point and saw my minions starving and unable to kill anything because my would be prey kept running away terrified before they got to them. Speaking of people getting away, I haven’t mentioned that you have a suspicion level. If too many victims get away and this meter rises too high the entire town is coming out with pitch forks. That happens and it’s game over. This is just another thing that seems to be working against you. It should be a threat of something that happens if you play badly, but as it feels so hard to play well it’s just another way to die.

What I’m basically trying to say here is it’s all way too much, way too quickly. Start out by giving me a manageable task and then slowly add more until I’m used to juggling a bunch of things and I’m not noticing the game getting harder. This is called a difficulty curve and it’s perfectly normal. Please don’t drop everything on me all at once and expect me to manage because you’ve given me the basic controls and told me what you want me to do. This is asking for me to get really frustrated and turn the game off because I can’t get anywhere.

This, sadly is basically what happened. I don’t have an issue going back and starting again. I’m a roguelike fan, it’s in our DNA. I do have an issue with wasting my time, though. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome. I’m not insane and there’s only so many times I’m going to go from scratch without seeing a difference before I give up. Lets remember, this isn’t a quick five minute run and re-start, it’s two hours of my life I’m losing every time I do it.

So after that lengthy but not entirely unjustified rant what’s good about MachiaVillain? The basic idea is sound. I really like the notion of building my creepy mansion and becoming more notorious by completing a series of ever more nefarious tasks. I loved the story behind the game and really liked the artwork. You see a Don’t Starve-esque graphical style being used and this is coupled with some really lovely cartoon cutscenes.

There is also some very well written (if a bit obvious) humor here. It’s like they’ve gotten together a group of PHD artists, sound engineers and writers and then given the UI to a sadistic preschooler. If you have the patience to get past the first stages of the game it’s probably quite good, it certainly looks it. Sadly I’m not that patient and although I don’t want instant gratification I want to feel rewarded as I’m going or it’s just a huge turn off.

This game doesn’t annoy me because it’s bad. If you’re a master at multi-tasking you’d probably have a lot of fun with it. This game annoys me because it feels like they’ve deliberately made everything far more complicated than it needs to be. It should never feel like a game is fighting against you or that it doesn’t seem to want you to win. This is the feeling I’m getting here and it leaves a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. If you’re curious or have the patience of a saint give this title a play. If not or you want to play a similar style of game and actually maybe get somewhere with it go and find Evil Genius. Seriously, it’s good.

This review is based on a retail copy of the game provided by the publisher.

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Pretty demanding stuff.

Inspired by what the press release describes as the “VHS era B-movies,” Garage follows the journey of a drug dealer named Butch. He bursts from the trunk of a car to find himself in an abandoned multistory car park. For reasons as of yet unfathomable, the dead walk the Earth, accompanied by an assortment of horrifying mutant creatures intent on ripping our virtuous protagonist to shreds.

It’s Night of the Living Dead Zombies from Outer Space 2: When Mutant Canines Attack! And it’s about as cheesy.

Aside from the occasional cutscene interjection, the camera is fixed in the top-down position. As a result, the gameplay in Garage tends to revolve around pointing, shooting, and dodging until you’re no longer crowded by enemies on all sides. It’s the kind of endless rotation that is best suited to a twin-joystick configuration rather than mouse and keyboard, and so I reckon the Switch will immediately prove a more comfortable environment for the game – I often found myself struggling to multitask with the WASD set-up as I ran circles around the few boss baddies I faced.

The player character – that’s Butch to you – has a few tricks up his sleeve, and independent controls for arms and feet allow for some surprisingly epic moments. Kick through a door, fire axe in hand, as the living dead burst from the shadows and lurch toward you. Smash a crate, and find some ammo (or a skulking rat). Put your foot through a vending machine, and grab a chunk of health in Snack or Beverage form.

Med kits are gold dust in Garage, as they can be saved for later consumption. Weapons, on the other hand, are abundant, though your trusty fire axe will end the life of a zombie in one charged-up swing. It’s pretty simple stuff, but it’s all based on tried and tested methods of keeping the player from relaxing too much.

After all, you don’t want to axe your way through a chained door with no health, only to find this on the other side:

Yup, those are human arms. And human torsos. In a chain of human centipedery.

Garage is a bit of a cliché-fest, but there were a couple of things that caught my attention. The first, you see in the above image: gruesome, contorted bosses that are reminiscent of some of the more disturbing cinematic endeavors of the past century or so. The second came in the form of an unmarked drug, immediately and brashly ingested by Butch; in an instant, the world was set ablaze with pulsating technicolor, and meandering pathways that glittered with prismatic light began to form in front of my character’s dilated eyes. Our drug dealing dude had digested some of his own product, and it produced a shift in tone and aesthetic that I was sad to see fade away.

As a kite.

It is not hard to see why Garage has been compared to a VHS era B-movie. Unfortunately for the player, the plot is about as coherent as any two-bit zombie flick. Fortunately, though, it doesn’t matter a jot, as you’ll be too busy hacking away at the zombified populace to care about the ravings of a evil scientist or a business mogul named Richard Smith. To their credit, TinyBuild litters the world with gameplay items designed to render the narrative in something resembling 3D: discarded papers reveal anxious employees, and the occasional spooky cut-away advertises a drug with dubious side-effects.

Sadly, my time was cut short before the real plot began, and though I have no doubt it’s as contrived as the opening sequences I did enjoy the creepy cutscenes. From what I gathered, the business mogul with a bland name has hired the evil scientist to produce an army of invincible soldiers, but the evil scientist has gone off-piste and produced what he would describe as the best thing since sliced bread/intestines: two-headed hounds, undead monstrosities, and the Board of Directors stitched together like a Human Centipede. Perhaps Mr Smith lacks the business acumen with which we originally credited him?

Tell me that isn’t the most bat-shit crazy thing you’ve seen today.

Garage is rendered in the 16-bit style that I usually associate with much more cheerful subject matters. Since playing this (and The Long Reach, which by the way is well worth a visit) I’ve come to the conclusion that indie game design teams and graphic artists prefer the pixelated palette for a number of reasons, but I can’t for the life of me work out why it has been appropriated by the creators of horror games. Garage‘s art style lends itself best to those psychedelic moments I mentioned earlier; pixel art is meant to be vibrant, and the neon undulation of that rainbow-tinted world could not have been better rendered if it were produced by a triple-A developer.

I suppose the 16-bit graphics are conservative, easy on the eye and on the TinyBuild wallet. But then again, the Garage main menu looks like this:

So perhaps it’s a question of lowering the requirements for player immersion. Better to keep things 16-pixel simple than to overextend with a graphics engine that might not actually deliver. In any case, Garage looks as grim as it plays. right down to the mounds of eviscerated flesh and rotten corpses that pile up once the rounds start flying. Though I do wonder what might have been, if that concept art hadn’t stayed a concept.

Garage is definitely a mixed bag. The corny narrative and simple mechanics are not major drawbacks, but the overall effect is not exactly one of staggering grandeur. If Garage were a movie, I’m sure in a decade or two it would be hailed as a cult classic by a specific subset of 30-something year old men; unfortunately, VHS era B-movies have only become more underwhelming with time, and so to tap into that realm of hammy acting and godawful special effects was always risky business. Fortunately for Garage, the ever-pleasing pixel-art saves the day, as does the undeniable intensity of the top-down twin stick shooter. It’s derivative, it’s shallow, but it’s a good bit of harmless fun.

This preview is based on an early PC press build provided by the publisher.

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How someone can choose not to buy this game after looking at this screenshot is beyond me

But if you’re thinking of purchasing the game, you’d better act fast! Shantae: Half-Genie Hero – Day One Ultimate Edition is a limited supply, physical edition version of the base game with all DLC included, as well as an art book and soundtrack. As such, once stock runs out at various retailers, there will be no way to purchase the Day One Ultimate Edition (unless you buy it secondhand on eBay for exorbitant prices). Luckily, the game will be replaced with a new variant, Shantae: Half-Genie Hero – Ultimate Edition, which is the same package as the Day One model, minus the art and music.

Gaze upon its glory before it disappears forever

Ken Berry, Executive Vice President at XSEED Games, was clearly ecstatic about the news, proclaiming:

We’re blown away at how eager XSEED, WayForward, and Shantae fans were to get their hands on this limited edition for the Switch. WayForward have been great to partner with, and have produced a truly fantastic game! We’re all humbled and excited by the reception and sales for Shantae: Half-Genie Hero, and are working hard to make sure we meet fan demand so that Shantae enthusiasts can have a physical version of the game to display in their collection.

Sharing in the feelings of utter joy, Matt Bozon, Shantae Director at WayForward, shouted from the rooftops:

This has been a long, wild, exciting ride from launching the Kickstarter through to this latest release. Our fans have been incredible throughout this experience, and we couldn’t be happier with how everything has turned out for Shantae and our partnership with XSEED Games on the North American retail release. They came up with an amazing limited edition that really does justice to all the hard work our team put into Shantae’s latest adventure, and it has clearly been popular with all of our dedicated fans!

Fans will always back you when you have a giant mermaid boss shooting head lasers at the main character

XSEED and WayForward certainly made the right choice in Kickstarting Half-Genie Hero. Shantae has always had a cult following, and fans were eager to give money towards a new game after the excellent Shantae and the Pirate’s Curse (which is also available on Switch as a digital-only download). With Nintendo’s Switch selling like hotcakes, due in no small part to its wonderful portability, it’s not surprising that the Day One Ultimate Edition is disappearing so quickly.

The standalone Shantae: Half-Genie Hero – Ultimate Edition will soon be available at select retailers throughout North America at a suggested retail price of $39.99. As a reminder, this edition includes the base game, fancy outfits in the Costume Pack, the downloadable expansions Pirate Queen’s Quest and Friends to the End, all on a single cart the size of your thumb.

Once again, my procrastination has paid off, because I can now play as my fave Rootytops from the get go

For more information on Shantae: Half-Genie Hero, visit the game’s website. And if you’re worried you might not nab the Day One Ultimate Edition in time, hopefully there’s a lamp nearby that you can rub!

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I’m not going to go into too much detail about how this game plays or even what it’s about. This isn’t because I don’t want you to know, rather that I’m terminally lazy and I’d just be repeating myself when you can get all the detailed information you need here. As a brief overview I will tell you that this is one of the best hacking sims I’ve ever played. You take on the role of a mercenary hacker and are then tasked with completing a series of cryptic missions. Something else that is nice is that this game feels real and that it’s distinctively story-driven. This is something that I can say from experience a lot of other hacking games I’ve played aren’t. Oh, it’s set in the Black Watchmen universe as well, so if you happen to have played Alice & Smith’s other game, this one may be right up your alley.

NITE Team 4 is set for release this summer. Believe me, you might want to take the chance to get an idea of what you’ll need to do if you’re going to succeed in tackling this really challenging game. I think it’s safe to say I’m not the only one who reflects this sentiment judging, by the following words:

“We’re asking a lot of our players,” said Andrea Doyon, puppet master and co-founder of Alice & Smith. “The tools and techniques used in NITE Team 4 are easy to learn but difficult to master. What other game asks you to learn how to hack networks and delve into private company files? This demo should help prepare you for when you start day one at the NITE Team 4 Academy this summer.”

So there you have it. If you want to get an idea of what you’re letting yourself in for, why not pop over to Steam and have a look? I genuinely believe if you like this sort of game or love a good puzzle NITE Team 4 might be well worth a go.

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