Do your own stunts Credit where it’s due toSilent Sadie, whose Steam Next Fest demo isout now: even within the confines of a 2.5Dplatformer, I don’t think it could lean any harder into its love of pratfallin’, piano-tinklin’ 1920s comedy cinema. As a pair of scratchy, black-and white intertitles explain, you are Sadie, an aspiring actress and stuntwoman denied a fair shot at making it in the Golden Age of Hollywood....

Need some Connections hints? Read our guide for help with Connections #490. This guide is for a previous day! Looking for today’s solution? Check out theConnections hint and answers for Thursday 12th December! Looking for a hint to help with today’s Connections puzzle on 14th October?If Connections has you ‘round the bends’, you’re not alone. We’ve set up a bunch of clues to help you guess along the way. Connectionsis a word puzzle game published every day by the New York Times (NYT), the hosts of the endlessly popularWordlepuzzle....

They’re all passive skills, Terry Write travel journalism to imaginary places, my spaghettionce spelled out. Do package holidays count? In Nahantu’s jungles, I linger to take shots of vines spilling from verdigris-kissed cages, of footfall-slicked stone paths and mesoamerican mosaics. EvenVessel Of Hatred’s malignancy feels like a grimly gorgeous tourist trap. Trip Advisor-recommended cyclopean polyps. TikTok viral demonic cysts. I’ve even got a leopard cub to pose with. He’s not sedated, promise....

From scritches to riches What is the cutest type of eyeball? This question has plagued the games industry since Nintendo first allowed millions of unsupervised children to play god with Mii avatars and their customisable peepers. In low-stakes fishing gameWebfishing, you can give your fuzzy avatar one of 33 styles of eye (I counted). This is the mark of a solidAnimal Crossing-like. There’s a lot of other character creation bits and bobs, of course, but you’ll have to catch a bunch of bass and sell the haul to unlock every boopable nose and bleppy smile....

Beat the beat Sektoripromises to “transport you into another state of consciousness”, but what the pulsing soundtrack initially did was transport me to Youtube so I could look upthis scene from Spaced, where Michael Smiley raves out to a boiling kettle. By elegant coincidence, that video is about the length of my longest run so far in Sektori’s demo - a very busy 60 seconds or so. How exactly does Sektori propose to transport you to another state of consciousness?...

It’s a slippy slidey ice world out there One of the most important lessons in skiing is, presumably, to look where you’re going. You wouldn’t want to ski with your eyes closed or while viewing yourself from a drone pointed back at the mountain from above. That’d be daft. Or maybe not.Lonely Mountains: Snow Ridersis the frosty followup to the mountain biking original,Lonely Mountains: Downhill, and like its predecessor it’s about going fast while barely able to see what’s coming....

Tälk Borg It was a shared passion away from videogames that ended up moulding the shape that project would take. “We love tabletop RPGs,” says designer and programmer Sacchetti. “So when we stumbled into Mörk Borg, and then we started to play, we looked at each other in the eyes and said, ‘Why don’t we make a game out of it?'” For artist and designer Misbug, the task of working inside the world brought to (un) life by Johan Nohr’s arresting visuals has been challenging, but incredibly fun....

A step above Gris in ambition and execution Nevais the Sophomore effort from Nomada Studio, who you may remember from their beautiful, dreamy platformerGris. Neva is not a literal sequel to Gris, but it certainly seems to be one in a spiritual sense, as it, too, is a floaty hand-illustrated platformer fond of metaphor. Neva introduces some drama, with combat and a health system (if not actual stakes because of near-instant restarts), and although neither the platforming nor combat are precise enough to be neat bedfellows, I think we should be willing to forgive most of the mess....

Cowborg life sim Sometimes, a game needs an original premise before I’ll write it up, and sometimes, it just needs a flying car, or a slick revolver with chambers outlined in mouthwatering red neon. Say hello toExeKiller, which I am filing under “not new, but news to me”. I know, “ExeKiller” sounds like a computer virus, though I think the people who make viruses tend to favour less obviously nefarious names, like “Microsoft Werd”....

Being a literally living, breathing world, however, it will be affected by your presence. In the course of the campaign, you must decide whether to form a symbiotic partnership with your host, or treat the beast as brusquely as I treat my own allotment grow bags, and plunge it into sickness and sorrow. Myself, I would probably avoid irritatingthe planet-sized whale, if only because any other star-faring species you encounter will take note of the state of your companion, and respond to you appropriately....

lol wtf?? Cast your mind back ten years. Done? Good, you survived the hideous form of time travel known as long-term memory. Now, do you see a horrendous first-person shooter anywhere back there, full of memes and intentionally terrible font choices? Congratulations, you may have remembered 420BlazeIt, a freakish eyesore of a game developed during a 7-day game jam by one of the people behind Crossy Road, of all things. It briefly did the YouTuber rounds, back when YouTube was not yet the anxiety-inducing ad factory it is today....

That tracks Normal games for normal people, that’s what everyone loves. Cosy experiences where nothing goes wrong and you have absolutely zero things to investigate and no otherworldly mysteries to worry about. It may shock you to learn that we were recently duped by “normal” gardening simGrunn, which wasnot normal at all. But don’t worry, it won’t happen again. Today we bring you the ordinary and not-one-bit-suspiciousTrip, which sees players wandering from carriage to carriage, chatting pleasantly with passengers during a long train journey....

Wendigo againdigo I loved the originalUntil Dawn- a spruced-uphorrortake on those old FMV adventure games, with just the right mix of B-movie self awareness and creature feature scares. I was very close to buying the recent remake, actually, until I watched the extended prank scene online and realized, oh no, they’re taking themselves seriously now. They prestige-ified it. Itinsistedupon itself, Louis, so I didn’t bother. I still wouldn’t say no to a sequel though, and based on a couple of (admittedly vague) hints from two of the game’s actors, one might already be in the works....