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…

Read More

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…

Read More

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…

Read More

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…

Read More

Palworld update fixes save-bricking capture bug, permanently-nerfing respec juice, and Pals randomly levitating or dying to ‘unexplained falling damage’

Palworld deserves kudos for actually following up on its success with bug fixes—Pocketpair now has the unenviable task of matching the sudden, unanticipated expectations that come with an indie breakout success with further support. The team’s stated mission goal on its roadmap—primarily a focus on squashing game-breaking bugs—is getting done. Patch v.0.1.4.0 aims to fix…

Read More

Kurt Russell gives thoughtful and nuanced answer about why he wouldn’t voice Snake in Metal Gear Solid 3, also seems to think the character is actually Snake Plissken

Since the series’ earliest days on the humble MSX, one of the big inspirations behind Metal Gear has been John Carpenter’s Escape from New York. Protagonist Solid Snake gets his callsign from Kurt Russell’s character Snake Plissken (a link that would later be solidified when Snake uses the codename Plisken in MGS2), as well as…

Read More