Constance is a metroidvania that wants its monsters to mean something

Constance’s store page on Steam insists its titular heroine, the one with a flappy cloak, slender weapon, and impeccable animation, is more than just another Hornet. This is a game set in “a colorful but decaying inner-world, created by her declining mental health” where I can “Experience playable flashbacks about personal struggle, creativity, work-life-balance, and…

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The League of Legends trading card game is surprisingly good, because it embraces the best trends in card games

Trading Card Games are in an odd place. They’re probably more popular than ever, with more playing them than ever. Given Magic: The Gathering’s recent big focus on crossover events, which makers of Wizards of the Coast keep reporting as being phenomenally successful, they’re probably making more money than ever. At the same time TCGs…

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Why I love Injustice 2’s story mode

Who would win in a fight? Comics writers know this is what fans argue about, endlessly, and feed those arguments with crossovers and stories like Batman vs. Superman. Usually it’s naff stuff where characters just biff each other for a bit and then abruptly form a getalong gang as if they weren’t battering each others’…

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We owe Skyrim’s beloved Stealth Archer to one of the designers of an all-time classic PC stealth game, who wrote Todd Howard ‘a big document of stealth in 20 different games’

I love stealth games, and I love playing a sneaky guy in bigger RPGs: Fallout, The Elder Scrolls, Cyberpunk. You best believe that, when given the option, I’m crouch walking for 80 hours straight. I’m not alone in that preference either: The Stealth Archer in Skyrim, which plays exactly how it sounds, is a memetic,…

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GTA 5’s character-swapping system was a stroke of genius that was supposed to feature in San Andreas 9 years earlier—this masterclass mod makes that dream a reality

As I flitted between Peter Parker and Miles Morales boroughs-apart in Spider-Man 2’s New York City, I thought: why haven’t more games copied the character-swapping system from GTA 5? Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 first swung onto PS5 consoles towards the end of 2023, and breached the shores of Steam at the beginning of this year. Grand…

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A former Valve dev revealed how, while a VR version of Half-Life 2 was being made, a single metro cop’s toe created a ‘time-travelling’ bug that softlocked all versions of the game

One of the coolest things about Half-Life 2 is its physics engine, but as anyone who has played a physics-based game will know, even the best-in-class tech is prone to quirks here and there. Valve’s legendary narrative shooter was no exception, as former Valve developer Tom Forsyth shared in a thread on Mastodon. In the…

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