Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we've found ourselves playing over the last few days. This time: zombies, space people and parkouring enforcers.
If you fancy catching up on some of the older editions of What We've Been Playing, here's our archive.
Stardew Valley maker Eric Barone has revealed his next game, ConcernedApe's Haunted Chocolatier.
It's a spooky chocolate-making, monster-stabbing, small town-living role-playing game, with a visual and musical style similar to that of the hugely popular Stardew.
Dicebreaker Recommends is a series of monthly board game, RPG and other tabletop recommendations from our friends at our sibling site, Dicebreaker.
If you imagine the entire back catalogue of Hammer Horror films and every episode of The Twilight Zone combined into a single interactive experience, you've effectively described the experience of playing Betrayal at House on the Hill.
Debuting as 'Project Hazel' at the CES trade show earlier this year, Razer's wearable air purifier and face mask is now a genuine product called the Zephyr that retails for £99. The idea here is to provide a constant supply of air in and out, purified to an N95 standard to help prevent the spread of viruses, while also providing a distinct look complete with RGB lighting. Razer very kindly sent me one of the few units earmarked for the UK press ahead of its full reveal as part of RazerCon 2021, and so I've been testing it for the past few days to see whether it really lives up to the hype.
Looking at the Zephyr, the design here is quite similar to dual-filter half masks used for painting or working in similarly noxious environments, with fans on each cheek drawing air through circular filters, before expelling through another filtered grille at the base of the mask. Medical-grade silicone creates a seal around your nose and mouth, while a pair of straps (one adjustable, one not) go around the back of your head to hold the Zephyr in place.
Among Us hits PlayStation and Xbox on 14th December.
Innersloth's phenomenally-popular teamwork and betrayal party game launches on Xbox One and Xbox Series X and S (and on Xbox Game Pass), as well as PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 on that day. It's already available via Xbox Game Pass for PC.
Rockstar has unleashed the annual Halloween event on Grand Theft Auto Online, which sees the return of old modes and some new spooky phenomena.
First up, there's a phantom car on the loose that appears out of nowhere to kill players. Here's a clip of a poor soul getting attacked.
DICE is standing firm with its replacement of classes with Specialists in Battlefield 2042 as it shares an extensive list of key takeaways from the open beta.
The studio also released a new video revealing the remaining five Specialists for the game's launch.
343 Industries has released a new video showing off the team's effort to make the PC version of Halo Infinite the best it could possibly be.
The video has a roll-call of every type of PC-specific feature you could imagine while emphasising that the PC build isn't just a port of the Xbox version of the game.
Nvidia has announced a raft of upgrades for its GeForce Now cloud streaming service with a new premium tier offering RTX 3080 class graphics performance, allowing for 1440p120 gameplay across a range of platforms and 4K60 HDR, limited for now to Shield Android TV devices. New latency reductions techniques are also promised, with Nvidia making bold claims about input lag up against competing cloud technologies - and even local devices.
All of this is made possible via brand new class of server blade Nvidia is bringing online, dubbed the 'SuperPod'. While you're not getting to an actual RTX 3080 as such, you are getting equivalent enterprise-class hardware based on the same GA-102 silicon, backed up by an eight-core, 16 thread AMD Threadripper processor working in combination with ultra-fast PCIe Gen 4.0 solid-state storage and an impressive 28GB of 3200MHz DDR4 memory. This gives the SuperPod top-class graphics performance (only an RTX 3080 Ti or RTX 3090 are faster in the Nvidia stack), though CPU performance would fall a little short of the latest Ryzen 5000 and Intel CPUs.
Microsoft has announced new 2TB and 512GB Seagate storage expansion cards for the Xbox Series X and S.
Seagate already has a £200 1TB storage expansion card. The 512GB and 2TB cards will be available soon in all Xbox markets, Pamela Wang, from the Designed for Xbox team, said in a post on Xbox Wire.
The Dark Pictures Anthology has been shaking up the horror genre in gaming ever since players boarded the ill-fated Man of Medan in 2019. The spooky tale of ghost town Little Hope followed soon after in 2020, and now, in 2021, we're trapped underground in a Mesopotamian temple in the early noughties as the Iraq war blazes overhead. It's been a delight to see the Dark Pictures Anthology surprise players with unexpected twists and turns with every new instalment, and House of Ashes is no exception.
In House of Ashes, you switch control between five characters who find themselves trapped in long-lost ruins after what should have been a routine mission goes wrong. Soon enough, they find themselves stalked by something other lurking in the darkness. As is now tradition with this series, all of these core five characters can either survive or die depending on what you do and what choices you make.
UPDATE 21/10/21: A fresh video has revealed the mysterious creatures teased in this week's creepy earlier video as Hisuian forms of Zorua and Zoroark - yet more Gen 5 creatures set to get new versions in the upcoming Pokémon Legends: Arceus.
The fan-favourite Zorua and Zoroark were hard to get hold of when they originally debuted. These new versions are Normal/Ghost-Type.
UPDATE 21/10/21: Following yesterday's wobblycam snatch of leaked Uncharted movie footage, Sony has dropped a considerably shinier, full-length trailer, showcasing around two-and-a-half minutes of Tom Holland's young Nathan Drake in action - and it's not just airplane mishaps and jokes about Scottish accents! We get some globe-trotting plotting, some treasure hunting, rooftop running, more of that cargo plane sequence, and a lot more Mark Wahlberg as Sully. And a very dapper Antonio Banderas makes an appearance too.
The trailer also gives us a UK release date for the Uncharted movie, which is now confirmed to be arriving in cinemas here on 11th February 2022.
Welcome to Will vs Weird Tech, a semi-regular feature in which we take a look at some of the most interesting objects to have passed through our Bristol HQ over the past few weeks - stuff that doesn't fit neatly within our regular round-ups of the best gaming peripherals or our reviews of the latest CPUs and GPUs, technology that's doing something a little different.
In this edition, it's time to get wild for peripherals that cross over the traditional boundaries. We go racing with the Wooting Two HE analogue keyboard, add RGB to our ears with the Razer Hammerhead True Wireless earbuds, and take a flight with two Lexip joystick-equipped mice. Here, nothing is as it seems...
Volition's first reveal of its upcoming Saints Row reboot did not, it's fair to say, seem to bare much in common with the series of old. A few gameplay snippets that followed helped bridge the divide, but a newly revealed look at some early missions has given the clearest indication yet of how Volition is looking to revitalise its ageing sandbox series.
As shared by GameInformer, the new nine-minute pre-alpha gameplay video offers a look at two early story missions: Making Rent and Idol Threat. The first of these takes place before the Saints are even officially formed, with The Boss and the game's core supporting - Kevin, Neenah, and Eli, all previously members of rival gangs - orchestrating a robbery on a loan office to raise some cash.
Hello! If you haven't been around the site much in the last month you might not know that we recently launched a supporters program. You can now subscribe to Eurogamer to view the site ad-free, get early access to the new Eurogamer Podcast, read some exclusive posts and more. You can read more about it in my announcement post and you can sign up here.
One of the things we're doing for our Premium subscribers is Ask Eurogamer: exclusive live Q&A sessions with the Eurogamer staff on a range of topics about our jobs, the site, and of course the games we love and the industry we cover. We're going to hold the first of these tomorrow (Friday 22nd October) at 3pm UK time, and it's going to be all about reviews.
The addition of Kingdom Hearts' Sora to Super Smash Bros. Ultimate as the game's final DLC character was a complicated process, creator Masahiro Sakurai has revealed.
Writing in his latest Famitsu column, Sakurai initially thought the rights issues to include Sora in Smash would be too insurmountable to sort out (thanks, PushDustIn).
Work on PlayStation 3 emulator RPCS3 has reached a major milestone, with every game ever released on the console now successfully booting.
Spotted by Kotaku, the RPCS3 team announced that all known games and apps from the PS3 now, at the very least, will boot using the emulator. That accounts for more than 6000 applications total.
Following its previously reviewed partnerships with Remedy Entertainment, Inside developer Playdead, and Fumito Ueda's gen Designer (The Last Guardian), Epic Games' publishing arm has announced two new partners in the form of Cozy Grove creator Spry Fox and Eyes Out, the new studio co-founded by Nine Inch Nails guitarist Robin Finck.
Details on the titles each studio is developing for Epic are limited but previous word from Eyes Out - whose other co-founder is Cory Davis, creative director and designer on Spec Ops: The Line - revealed the team is working on a new single-player cosmic horror game.
The Nintendo Switch version of Life is Strange: True Colors will arrive in "early December", publisher Square Enix has said.
This version was originally set to arrive last month alongside the game's other console and PC editions, but was pushed back at the end of August.
Android apps are finally available on Windows 11, albeit currently just for users of the operating system's beta channel.
Microsoft made the announcement overnight via the Windows blog.
UK retailer GAME has warned scalpers it has "strong measures" in place to stop multiple orders this morning, ahead of a new release of PlayStation 5 stock.
The chain will continue to enforce a limit of one console per customer, and subject each order to automatic checks after it has been put through.
UPDATE 21/10/21: Nintendo has now released an update for Metroid Dread that fixes the game closing bug, as well as "several other issues to improve overall gameplay experience." You can read details on how to update the game here.
ORIGINAL STORY 15/10/21: Nintendo has apologised for a progression prevention bug in Metroid Dread.
Spider-Man: Miles Morales is not a new game by this point, but it's one that still surprises me.
Spider-Man is one of my favourite superheroes, so I obviously couldn't wait to play Insomniac's Spider-Man back when it came out in 2018. The smooth freedom of web-swinging around New York City certainly released my inner friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man. However, the fast-paced combat and intense use of every button on the controller generated frustrating barriers that ultimately denied me full Spidey immersion.
As part of its 25th anniversary celebrations for Tomb Raider, Square Enix has revealed footage and details of Tomb Raider: Ascension, an early survival-horror-like prototype created by Crystal Dynamics as it explored ways to reimagine the series - with various aspects of the project ultimately making their way into the developer's 2013 reboot.
"After narrowing in on the concept of a survival story on a remote island," explains Square Enix over on YouTube, "[Crystal Dynamics] began developing what was internally called Tomb Raider: Ascension." The project is said to have "felt closer to a horror game than a Tomb Raider title" at one point, although this aspect would eventually fade into the background as the studio opted to focus in on survival elements.
Earlier this year, we started DF Direct Weekly - initially envisaged as a way to cover more topics and to do so in a way that wouldn't require massive production values. The obvious way to do this is via a simple Microsoft Teams or Zoom meeting - but the results just weren't good enough, not meeting quality thresholds and looking out of place on the DF YouTube channel. At the same time, we were also looking at ways to more easily deliver higher quality filmed material in a 'work from home' environment, where space is at a premium and where time is of the essence.
In addressing the filming challenges of DF Direct Weekly, we ended up creating environments that would hold up not just for the Direct but for interview and DF retro content too. Ultimately, it's all about integrating mirrorless cameras instead of webcams, while tapping into some of the best streaming hardware available. We think that some of the lessons here could be useful shortcuts for anyone that's looking to create a modern, clutter-free way of streaming or recording videos - so this is a breakdown of exactly how our final setup works, from audio and video to lights, capture and controls.
I almost can't believe I'm writing this, but Cyberpunk 2077 has been delayed yet again.
The game's long-awaited PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S versions will now not launch until "the first quarter of 2022", CD Projekt has now said. An exact new date was not given.
The third big addition to Assassin's Creed Valhalla has been spied again via a datamine of the game's latest patch.
Ubisoft is yet to detail the expansion, but it has teased a second year of post-launch content and shown an image of the fiery door to Muspelheim to illustrate what is coming.
UPDATE 3.15pm UK: Oculus has now provided the following statement on changes to its Resident Evil 4 VR version:
"Oculus Studios, Armature, and Capcom partnered closely to remaster Resident Evil 4 from the ground up for VR," a Facebook spokesperson told Eurogamer today. "This includes immersive environments and high-resolution graphics. It also includes select changes to in-game dialogue and animations that we believe will update Resident Evil 4 for a modern audience."
Dusk is a dark, pixelated, nightmarish boomer shooter - and it left a strong impact when it first shipped on PC back in 2018. In fact, it's one of my top ten games of that year, and it's still brilliant even today. On the surface, the game looks like it stepped right out of 1997, doing a remarkable job of capturing the Quake aesthetic, but beneath the hood, you may be surprised to learn that this is actually a Unity engine project. That's no problem for a modern PC, but what about Nintendo Switch? Dusk is coming soon to the console hybrid and I'm happy to report that the Switch conversion is excellent.
Now, in theory that shouldn't be too difficult, right? After all, Dusk is a retro-stylised shooter, built to approximate the look and feel of a mid-90s, software-rasterised polygonal first-person action game. Dusk does a commendable job of mimicking this very specific Quake-like look. Its hand-painted textures, designed to seamlessly tile across large planes, lack any sort of bilinear interpolation. These textures proudly flaunt raw, pixelated texels, boldly eschewing mip-maps as they're slathered across every map. The maps and the denizens populating them are made up of precious few polygons lending the game an abstract appearance - the silhouette of its jagged architecture and low colour assets strengthen the nightmarish aesthetic Dusk so beautifully delivers.
Amazon is now working on enabling New World region transfers after a vociferous player backlash.
Earlier this month, Amazon U-turned on letting New World players transfer their characters to a server in a different region.
This week sees the long-awaited arrival of Denis Villeneuve's Dune in UK cinemas, and, not to be outdone, No Man's Sky is getting in on the big, wormy sci-fi action too, giving its burrowing space sausages a terrifying makeover as part of its latest update.
This newest addition to Hello Games' ever-expanding exploratory space sim is described by the developer as an 'accidental' Halloween update, and primarily takes the form of a brand-new limited-time Expedition event, titled Emergence - the first to feature narrative elements.
There's a new Lego Star Wars game coming out next month.
Lego Star Wars: Castaways is described as an "online social, action-adventure" game in which you get to build and customise your own in-game Lego minifigure character. It launches exclusively on the Apple Arcade subscription service on 19th November.
Amazon is giving New World players "The Stoic" in-game title and the "Waiting" emote for free to make up for the MMO's terrible launch server queues.
When New World launched last month it exploded in popularity, becoming the fifth most-popular game on Steam of all-time by concurrent players.
Dead by Daylight is receiving criticism online following the news its Pinhead character model, introduced in its latest Hellraiser content, has been made available for NFTs.
The multiplayer title's developer Behaviour Interactive shared on Twitter that it worked with a company called Boss Protocol "over several months to adapt in-game models for use as NFTs".
