The Day Before was an even bigger disaster than you thought: devs reportedly made to pay fines for bad work, learned it was an MMO from the trailers, and no one’s sure where the bosses are

A new documentary from German games sites Game Two and GameStar has shed some more light on the disastrous development of The Day Before, and boy howdy, it’s worse than you thought. Game Two says it spoke to 16 former Fntastic employees, one of its former “volunteers,” and seven staff from The Day Before’s publisher…

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Penny’s Big Breakaway makes me wish I’d spent more time playing platformers before Penny’s Big Breakaway

Despite passing through an intense Sonic the Hedgehog phase when I was around nine years old, I wouldn’t say I gotta go particularly fast. Over the ensuing two decades I’ve rarely sought out the classic pastime of accelerating a cartoon mascot to inhumane speeds. I’ve been content leaving platforming to speedrunners, kaizo enthusiasts—really, anyone who…

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Xbox and Gameheads are Amplifying Black Voices in Gaming

Category: Games Xbox and Gameheads are Amplifying Black Voices in Gaming Dametra Johnson-Marletti, Corporate Vice President, Gaming Consumer Sales at Microsoft Published February 1, 2024 Summary Xbox partners with Gameheads to showcase Black-created games in recognition of Black History Month.Explore a wide variety of games curated by Black communities at Microsoft.This Black History Month, we’re…

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Dredge dev says a mechanic that killed NPCs without warning if you let them go hungry lasted for about 3 days after the game’s launch before they patched it out, because ‘people f*cking hated it’

Dredge was one of 2023’s out-of-left field indie greats—we gave it an 89 in our Dredge review, then later bestowed it with Best Setting award for our Game of the Year shoutouts. It wears that mantle well from what I’ve seen as a genuinely brilliant bit of bathophobia–inducing atmospheric horror, in which you man a…

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Avowed’s game director says Obsidian’s choice to limit players to just two races is partially down to its first-person camera

One of the unfortunate bummers about Avowed—which is set in the Pillars of Eternity universe—is that you’ll be limited to playing either a human or an elf for story reasons, as your adventurer will be an envoy from the largely elf-slash-human dominated Aedyr Empire. That’s kinda disappointing, seeing as Aumaua, Dwarves, and the fuzzy li’l…

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Feature: The Quest To Preserve Japanese Feature Phone Games

“I looked at all these game preservationist organisations and nobody was saying anything”. Before iPhone and Android devices became the primary platforms for mobile gaming, there was already a healthy community of gamers in Japan experiencing the joy of playing video games on their phone, thanks to the emergence of Japanese feature phones. These proto-smartphones…

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