Silent Hill Style Perspectives With Resident Evil Combat in Upcoming Agni: Village of Calamity
By Adele Wilson
An unauthorised investigation leads to something sinister.Face Ghosts To Collect Cards In Schoolbound
There's something strange about this place.90s Gloomy Survival Horror, Holstin, Switches Between Isometric and Third-Person
By Adele Wilson
An upcoming psychological survival horror.
Category: News
Drinkbox Studios’ Severed: A little bit Kill Bill, a little bit Fruit Ninja
By Steven Strom
The previous game from Drinkbox Studios, Guacamelee! was a wonderful send up of the Metroidvania genre that's colorful in more ways than one. Its bright Day of the Dead/luchador aesthetic was a cheerful celebration of Mexican culture, while its story and characters were frenetic and entertaining without becoming cloying or clichéd.Severed looks similarly Central American, but a whole lot more serious. Guacamelee! had its sullen side, but Severed sounds like a tale of revenge. Our warrior protagonist has lost her arm (and possibly more, if I'm interpreting the above trailer correctly) and seeks retribution against supernatural forces.So far it's only been announced for mobile platforms, but the devs haven't ruled out the possibility of bringing Severed to touchsreen devices like Vita, 3DS and even the Wii U. Considering the company's history with Sony, at least one of those is probably a safe bet.UFHO2 dev: Valve doesn’t want my game, so torrent it
Ciro Continisio of Tiny Colossus took to Reddit over the weekend in order to promote his strategy game UFHO2. After nearly two years stagnating on Steam Greenlight, and measly sales through Desura and Humble, Continisio has resigned himself to the fact that "nobody is going to buy it unless it's on Steam" and released a UFHO2 torrent onto The Pirate Bay. The release of the torrent came a little over a week after UFHO2 was released onto the iTunes Appstore where it's available for $3.99.UFHO2, which stands for Unidentified Flying Hexagonal Object, was posted to Steam Greenlight in August of 2012. Six months prior the game managed to pull in over $10,000 through a successful Kickstarter campaign. However, it is worth noting that about half of those earnings came from just around 10% of the backers. The game is a sequel to the 2007 game, UFHO, also developed by Continisio, which was available to play for free online. The servers for UFHO have since been shut down and the game is no longer playable.Butterscotch Shenanigans and the Art of Speedcrafting
By Andy Chalk
Butterscotch Shenanigans first appeared on my radar thanks to Gerblins, a cute little puzzle game that was both simple to play and shot through with personality. I liked it quite a bit, but as fun as it was, it didn't inspire me to think of the Butterscotch boys as a potential force in the field of mobile game development. That didn't happen until the March 2013 release of Towelfight 2: The Monocle of Destiny, a game I literally did not stop playing until May of that year, when Quadropus Rampage turned up and sent me on a quest to destroy Pete, the Mad God of the Sea. I'm still playing that one.I don't want to say that Sam and Seth Coster are a strange pair, but the games they create do make me wonder what's in the water they drink and where I can get some. And now they're in the midst of an even more unusual project: "Speedcrafting," a sort of weekly game jam in which they give themselves ten hours to develop a small but complete game - a "Butterscotch Mini" - from start to finish."Our current plan for production is eight Minis, one every Monday, though that's only to give us something to shoot toward should things get difficult. It's much easier to motivate yourself to do another one if there's an end in sight," Sam Coster recently explained. "However, they've been so useful (and fun to make) that we expect we'll be doing these until our blood runs cold."Civilization: Beyond Earth – because strategy games belong in space
By Jim Squires
You know who's great making PAX East announcements? Firaxis. Last year the studio used the Boston convention to announce the mobile port of XCOM: Enemy Unknown which, yes, managed to live up to the lofty promises they'd made. This year, they decided to go one step further and announce the next entry in everyone's favorite strategy series, Civilization.Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth will take players on a journey into the stars for the very first time (unless you count 1999's spin-off Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, which the devs of Beyond Earth love, but stressed they're going in their "own direction" from in a conversation with Kotaku).Following a series of events that Firaxis refers to as "The Great Mistake," the Earth is looking a little rough around the edges. As a result, humanity sets off to colonize a strange new world. Unlike past games in the series that draw from history, Beyond Earth will be about making choices to shape humanity's future.BREAKFINITY’s monetization is brilliant
By Jim Squires
When developing a free-to-play game, there's one question every developer faces: how is it going to make money? In-app purchases are one way to go. Ad revenue is another. In many cases, you'll see a mix of both. Phil Hassey's BREAKFINITY is no exception - but it's the way he balances the two that makes it so compelling.BREAKFINITY is what would happen if Breakout or Arkanoid were an endless runner. Players will clear just enough blocks to see their ball move up to the next stage in a never-ending quest for points. You'll only get one ball, but - and here's where things get interesting - you can buy more with premium currency OR get a free ball by watching a video advertisement. You can get two free balls every game in this manner, but since it caps out at two there's still a sense of competition. Your high score is going to be based on those combined three balls alone, not upsetting the leaderboards (unless you want to buy more with premium currency, of course).Plenty of other games provide incentives for watching video advertisements, but the reward usually comes in the form of premium currency, and it's often balanced in a way that prevents you from exploiting the system and raising an infinite amount of in-game cash by watching an afternoon of commercials. BREAKFINITY goes in the opposite direction - watching a quick 15 second video is BREAKFINITY's answer to "insert coin to continue." The more you play, the more ad dollars Phil Hassey gets. It's a win/win.But is it working?Guild of Dungeoneering: a self-described ‘reverse roguelike’
Guild of Dungeoneering is an upcoming reverse roguelike from developer Gambrinous. The game has players constructing the dungeon gauntlet that the hero will have to venture through, but the catch is that the player does not control the hero. The goal of the player is to, of course, ensure the survival of the hero through a careful balance of gameplay. Make a dungeon too easy and the hero won't get the experience they may need later on to defeat enemies. Make a dungeon too hard and it will more than likely result in a not-so-heroic ending.Gambrinous reinforces the design aspect of the game through Guild of Dungeoneering's aesthetics. The game has a hand-drawn look that reminds me of the little warriors I used to draw on folders, back in middle school math class. I know I'm not the only one who did that.While Guild of Dungeoneering is still in Alpha testing, Gambrinous are selling access to the current build for $9.99 on the game's official website. Gambrinous also posted Guild of Dungeoneering on to Steam Greenlight, for voting. Look for the game to be released late this year for Windows and Mac, with the possibility of a Linux release as well.This Week in China: Fruity Robo 3
By Jim Squires
I won't lie - that was a fun headline to type. I don't know what a "Fruity Robo 3" is, and there's a good chance that you don't either. But if you're in China, there's a very good chance you do - and you're no doubt excited to learn that it's about to be adapted into the mobile game Three Kingdoms of Fruit.What does it all mean? Read on to find out the answer to that and other questions, like "is Capcom looking for Chinese investment to enter the market?," and "how do the Chinese feel about Papaya?"Thanks again to Laohu.com for sharing the top stories out of China this week. For a daily dose of Chinese gaming news, be sure to bookmark Laohu.com.Hearthstone is getting its first expansion with Curse of Naxxramas
By Steven Strom
Curse of Naxxramas: A Hearthstone Adventure will be the first-ever expansion for Blizzard's free-to-play digital card game, featuring 30 new cards, a new game board and single-player class challenges.The expansion takes the form of a card-based dungeon crawler, with five "wings" unlocking over as many weeks simultaneously on all platforms. Each will feature new single-player encounters with boss fights and unique cards. The first wing, The Arachnid Quarter, will be available for free to all Hearthstone players at launch. The remaining content, true to the game's free-to-play model, will be available either with real money orin-game gold.Hearthstone saw official release on PC last year, while the iOS version launched in Canada, Australia and New Zealand last week (though if you want to be sneaky, you can learn how to get around that here).There's no word on the expansion's pricing or release at this time.