Hello

and welcome to Sk Tech News. I am about to say things are hotting for July. There’s also Ubisoft and Xbox doing theirshows as part of the neverending fake E3, but those are the games of tomorrow - this news is about the new PC games in the here and now. And here are some picks… Death Stranding is an obvious biggie in July,as Hideo Kojima’s post-apocalyptic, postman simulator comes to PC.
This excites me on a technical level as it’s the first outing of Guerilla Game’s Decima engine on PC, which we’ll see soon in their Horizon Zero Dawn PC port.
Death Stranding was a staggering looking game on PS4, but now we’ll see the photorealistic models of it’s all-star cast at true 4K and clamber around it's vast landscapes with frame rates unlocked - not not to mentionultra wide monitor support, which is a perfect fit for hills and valleys you explore as himout of The Walking Dead. The game itself is kind a mad - it’s a hiking simulator with a big focus on balance and weight distribution, but there are also bitswhere you throw grenades made out of your own blood at ghosts. And it gets even weirder on PC with side.
Missionsthemed around Portal and Half-Life, made in collaboration with Valve. Whatever Death Stranding is, it certainlyain’t boring, and we’ll hopefully have a full review before July 14th. What’s black and white and a red all over? Sounds like the setup for a terrible joke,but it’s actually the pitch of Othercide, a turn-based tactics game from Lightbulb Crewthat drops you in a monochromatic world where the only flashes of colour are the scarvesworn by your squad of sisters and the blood they spill in battle.
While the core of the game looks familiar,as you exploit the turn order along the bottom of the screen, and stretch action points intodeadly combos, Othercide does look much more surreal than your typical XCOM-alike: youbuild squads from a pool of daughters, who you can also sacrifice to heal each other,and maybe pass on a few of their traits. If the squad wipes out you can purchase newpowers to make the next run easier - so there are a few hints of a roguelite about the game. It basically looks like it’s going to forceyou into a corner, and ask you to make a lot of tough calls. A stressful end to the month, when it arriveson 28th July.
If, like me, you spend at least a few minutesevery day thinking about the golden age of point and click adventures, you’ll likelybe thrilled that Beyond A Steel Sky is heading our way in July. Or to put it in terms genre fans will understand:combine good news with brain. It’s the follow-up to Revolution’s 1994classic Beneath A Steel Sky, a sci-fi epic set in a desolate Australia - very Mad Max- where people live in vast cities. Beyond has swapped 2D for 3D, much like Revolution’smore modern Broken Sword games, and promises to inject a bit more life into puzzles withNPCs that follow more naturalistic behaviours that you have to manipulate as part of yourpuzzle solving. You can also hack Union City’s digital infrastructure,changing the behaviour of devices to further mess with those digital lives. If you want to really prep for the game, theoriginal Beneath A Steel Sky is free on GOG.com.What better time to get familiar with it?
The announcement of Rogue Legacy 2 comingto early access is a really welcome development. Rogue Legacy 1 was ahead of the Rogue-litecurve when it arrived in 2013: giving us a 2D hack and slasher where every death putyou in a new castle and the shoes of your child, complete with whatever weird genealogicalaffiliations they inherited. Here in 2020 it feels like every other gameis a Roguelite, but this sequel looks so improved it’ll likely rise to the top all over again. Just to list some of the improvements: noweach class has a specific weapon to master, there are heirlooms that grant new powersadding more of a Metroidvania vibe, there are gold bonuses for taking on more debilitatingcharacter traits to reward the hardcore, while new accesibility options will help strugglingheroes, and new level generation technology to create even better biomes to explore. This is on top of new traits, classes, spells,equipment… listen, I know it’s lazy to just list stuff, but the 23rd of July can’tget here soon enough. Releasing a paid multiplayer game into a landscapedominated by a free-to-play behemoth is a bold move, but then Rocket Arena is hardlya timid shooter. For starters, everyone’s armed with rockets- the clue’s in the title - and it swaps traditional death for a Smash Bros-type systemwhere you drive up damage in order to knock opponents from the arena with a massive blast.
What follows is a colourful smackdown withhuge explosions lighting up the world, while cartoon-y characters activate skills to doeverything they can to stay in the arena. One of my colleagues played a preview buildand said it’s great fun, and it has all the cosmetics and season structure that keepsus busy in Apex Legends or Fortnite. But the big difference is price: can a 25pound multiplayer game hold its own in this day and age, or will it go the way of Lawbreakers? RIP. It’s fate will be decided beginning on 14July. Grounded is an odd one: Obsidian’s firstgame since being bought by Microsoft and instead of making, y’know, the RPGs they’re famousfor, it’s a survival game about shrunken kids lost in the back garden. I’ll admit, Honey I Shrunk The Kids: TheGame wasn’t what I personally hoped for from this studio union, but the recent demopartially won me over. The process of smashing up bugs and plantsto get the building blocks for items and shelter is familiar to a thousand early access survivalgames, but the difference here is a lack of early access jank: it all seems quite polishedand neat, and the giant garden setting creates fun pockets of surreal discovery as you hideinside soda cans and watch the sunset through the jungle canopy of an overgrown lawn.
Of course, if you’re familiar with our videosyou’ll know I have this massive weed growing on my patio, so I don’t have shrink forthe same effect. Anyway: this is still early access, of course,so expect some bugs, of both the insect and technical variety. It’s on Steam, but is included in an XboxGame Pass subscription, so that’s a much cheaper way of trying it out with some pals. Maid of Sker? More like Maid of Scares, am I right? Well, hopefully I am: this is a first personsurvival horror game from Wales Interactive - and true to their name, it’s based onWelsh folklore.
You’re exploring a hotel patrolled by blindmonsters, so every creaky floorboard or scenery bump is an invitation for them to crush yourskull in. It sounds a lot like the Jeff section fromHalf-Life Alyx, but stretched to an entire game - you can even clasp your hand over yourmouth to hold your breath in - just not too long or you’ll gasp your way into the grave. There’s also a strange orb - a phonic modulator,apparently - that can deafen enemies, though it comes with limited ammo - which is wherethe whole survival horror thing kicks in. It’s this panicked resource management thatinterests me - too many horror games are just walking simulators with jump scares. Will this be something more? We’ll find out at some point in July. If that last game was the Maid of Sker, thisnext one features tracks made for cars. Made for Scars. Skars? Okay, that doesn’t work. But hopefully Trackmania will, although fora game out, er, tomorrow, there’s been remarkably little shown of Nadeo’s latest user-generatedracer. It’s pitched as a remake of Trackmania Nations,which was a free version of the game with a big emphasis on online competition - thatseems to run into this Trackmania with a tiered pricing model that gives you more communityfeatures for more money.
Of course, the real appeal lies in hooningaround impossible track designs, livened up here with a bigger building space, new iceand dirt surfaces, as well as special modifier track pieces that can put everyone into slowmotion for that dramatic photo finish. The new structure looks like it’ll serveup seasons of new tracks and highlight community builds, so if you’re not into constructionyourself, you can sit back and let everyone else do the hard work. Nice. If Trackmania’s track designing sounds atad conservative, you might want to check out Rock Of Ages 3 Make & Break, where youcan build winding obstacle courses for people to race boulders down. Rock of Ages has always been barking mad:a blend of tower defence as you attempt to protect yourself from an onslaught of rollingdeath and then switching to the rocks themselves as you steer giant lumps of spinning destruction- or cheese - through your enemy’s defences. It’s all wrapped up with hand animated stylethat echoes Terry Gilliam’s Monty Python animations. It’s… a bit much. But when you’ve been stuck in doors forwhat feels like 15 years, a bit much is quite nice. The room I work in is increasingly turninginto a furniture store, so the fantasy of smashing everything to shet is really appealing.
Y’know: open world cartoon violence forteenagers not old enough to buy GTA. My expectations were low for a remake andso I was pleasantly surprised by what a nice job Black Forest Games appear to be doingwith this one: it’s not a simple HD remaster, but a full makeover that really punches upthe visual chaos of Crypto’s alien rampage. Now, I’m saying that some flashy explosionsare going to radically reinvent a simple sandbox action game, but there is something very reassuringabout this kind of mid-tier console adventure, the kind of game that vanished as the budgetgap between AAA and Indie got out of hand. I imagine it’ll be a bright, colourful wayto waste ten or so hours come the 28th of July. Before I wrap up this video I also wantedto give a quick shout to a few more things on my radar: there’s Fight Crab, which I’veonly really selected because it’s called Fight Crab.
I probably shouldn’t say more as, of course,the first rule of Fight Crab is we don’t talk about Fight Crab. I’m also intrigued by Roki, a point-and-clickstyle adventure influenced by Scandinavian folklore - if you type Scandinavian folkloreinto google images you get this picture of a man talking to a fox, which is the realreason I included it. There’s also Drake Hollow, which is aboutbuilding villages for vegetable creatures and bashing out the brains of anything thatwants to eat cute vegetable creatures. There’s also Neon Abyss, which is one ofthose hundreds of roguelites mentioned in the Rogue Legacy 2 bit, bit with a reallyhectic looking arsenal and fizzy sprite work.
Honestly, I could list another 20 more greatgames coming to PC this month, but I’m really hungry and want to go and eat some cereal. Why not help me do my job for me and recommendmore great games in the comments, which I’ll then read while eating said cereal. We’ve got loads of great previews linedup for the next two weeks, so why not subscribe to channel for those by hitting the big buttonin the middle. And watch some of our recent videos on everythingfrom Biomutant to Humankind. As always, please write something nice under the post and we’ll hopefully see you soon. Thanks for watching. Bye for now.