A blizzard of potential Battle Acesis billed as “a vision of the future for real-timestrategy” but if you glance at a screen, you might think you’re staring into the past: another toonified science fiction world of scuffed, shiny nodules, lanes and arenas, an overly functional colour scheme, and hotkeyed hordes of little and large units that appear devoid of personality, even by top-down generalissimo standards. Let’s start by addressing that last complaint: the units of Battle Aces have immense personality....

Classic RPGDragon Quest3 is getting a remake in Square Enix’s now familiar HD-2D style, which blends high-resolution 2D sprites together with 3D worlds. It’ll land on November 14th. “Waitaminute,” you might be saying, “Shouldn’t they remake the first two games beforehand?” No, you numpty, you nyaff, you roaster; within the internal chronology of Dragon Quest, 3 comes first. The tease for DQI and DQII comes right at the very end of the above trailer, and the three games together form what Square Enix are calling the Erdrick trilogy....

It’s “very interesting to see a small human being discover or see the world” WithShadow Of The Erdtreeabout to launch this week, From Software president Hidetaka Miyazaki has been doing a round of interviews discussing next steps for the venerated action-RPGdeveloper, or at least, hinting at them in the manner of aDark SoulsNPC suggesting that you might want to have a poke around New Anor Londo. In one such chat, Miyazaki strays perilously close to airing the “themes or core elements” of whatever game or games FromSoftware are working on post-Elden Ring, commenting that he has been inspired, albeit perhaps in a “short-term way”, by the experience of having a daughter....

… but I’m glad it’s finally over I’dbeen in Paristo see open worldaction-RPGShadow Of The Erdtreeearly and when I got back, Edwin messaged me. He asked whether I thought it was big enough to consider the DLC a pseudo-sequel, and at the time I said something along the lines of, “It’s hefty, but I think that’s probably pushing it”. I was wrong. The Land Of Shadow may not be as expansive as the base game’s Lands Between, but it’s knottier, denser, more of a twisting mass that burrows into the earth and soars into the skies....

Fight me Minecraftis, very often, just anice place to potter about in. But its call to adventure rings loudly in my square ears, and now that theTricky Trials updatehas dotted the underground with action-heavy, loot-filled Trial Chambers, I’m simply powerless to resist. I love almost everything about these, including how much of a fit they are conceptually. Minecraft’s strength as asurvival gamehas always been how it turns the gathering of its rarer rewards into a mini-adventure in itself: I was never fussed to craft a shotgun inNightingalebecause the shopping list of prerequisite unlocks and schematics looked like several evenings of tedium....

Need a hint for Connections? Read our guide for help with Connections #373 This guide is for a previous day! Looking for today’s solution? Check out theConnections hint and answers for Thursday 12th December! Want a hint for Connections today?Piggybacking off the monumental success of daily puzzle gameWordle, the New York Times has another fantastically popular word game out now. It’s calledConnections, and if you haven’t played it before, now’s the time to start....

Following the game being delayed indefinitely Life By You, the Sims-likemanagement gamepreviously troubled by several delays, has been canceled by Paradox Interactive, and Californian studio Paradox Tectonic have been shut down. The news of the game’s cancellation came last night through aforum post, with Paradox deputy CEO Mattias Lilja painting a picture of a game still too “lacking” for more development time to fix. This morning, it emerged that Paradox Tectonic, the studio working on the game, have been shuttered, viaGameWatcher....

Truly, a festival of nextness The big-bottomed craft-me-bang in question isOnce Human, which cuts you loose upon an Earth infested with Stardust. A world’s worth of Stardust sounds quite enticing, right? Touch of Disney with your wolf-skinning, guvnor? Wrong, Stardust is some kind of horrible endemic lifeform. Consuming water or food contaminated with it will drive you insane. I assume the Stardust plague is also the reason for those towering tentacle bosses you’ll meet when not fishing or building a patio....

Habbout don’t You forgot aboutHabbo Hotel, didn’t you? Habbo Hotel. With those words and the above image, it is possible I have sent a shocking dose of neurochemical nostalgia through your brain and into your various internal organs. Your vision blurs. You sweat. You are 12 years old again, frightened and intrigued at the idea of graduating to teenhood, bathing in the cool glow of a cream-coloured CRT computer monitor. “Habbo Hotel is back!...

Sequel when? TROTEOTGRPGOAT comes from Coin Drop Games, and despite the title, it actually sounds closer to a puzzle game. The idea is that you’ll navigate the final hour of anRPGthat never existed and - with help from an in-game manual, developer commentary, and a fictional unreleased documentary - learn how to solve its many challenges. It also sounds like there’s aBeginner’s Guide-esque throughline of meta-commentary around the ways we communicate about games....

Stuck on the Wordle word for June 18? Read our hint or find the answer below! This guide is for a previous day! Looking for today’s solution? Check out theWordle hint and answer for Thursday 12th December! Need a hint for today’s Wordle answer?Below you’ll find a list of clues to help you solve today’s word and preserve your streak. Every day,Wordlepresents its legions of players with a deviously simple quandary: can you guess the right five-letter word within just six guesses?...

That’s a common logistical fallacy If nothing else,Workers & Resources Colon Soviet Republicwill give anyone an appreciation of the incredible complexity and difficulty of building and maintaining a city. On another day I might call it the first ever citybuilding game. Even a Settlers orFactoriocannot match its extreme focus on logistical simulation. It isn’t realism for its own sake (look no further than the automated vehicles and the ludicrous citizen behaviour to refute that), but a fundamentally different interpretation of what city building means....

Tread carefully! A Quiet Place is a very solid horror movie that seemed primed for a video game adaptation from the off. After all, it already had all the ingredients of a video game right there: the whole film is essentially one overlong stealth mission with a punishing fail state - any crunchy glass or other noise would immediately draw the attention of deadly alien monsters - and at one point there’s a whiteboard with the narrative equivalent ofDead Space’s “CUT OFF THEIR LIMBS” graffiti scrawled on it....