Melbourne startup raises $9m for mental wellness game based on tending houseplants Question blockĪ question from reader Lawrence: Can you recommend a JRPG that isn’t turn-based? I have enjoyed Kingdom Hearts combat but could do with a little less Disney! Simon Parkin on why Neon White is an exhilarating speedrun through a celestial dreamscape (Predictably, he did not get a straight answer.)į1 22: a stunning racing game sullied by money-grubbing – review Immense sigh.īusiness Insider interviewed a die-hard Nintendo fan who spend $40,000 (£33,000) on company stock just so he could ask in an official shareholder meeting if there would be a new F-Zero game any time soon. It’s been a horrible week on gaming social media, as Monkey Island creator Rob Gilbert vows to stop posting about the forthcoming sequel because people keep sending him abuse about it, and one of the developers behind God of War: Ragnarök publicly asks people to stop sending dick pics. The new Sims 4 expansion will send players and their Sims back to high school – perhaps not a fondly remembered place for The Sims’ huge queer fanbase, although it could be an opportunity to rewrite our suboptimal experience of adolescence through gaming’s premier wish-fulfilment simulator. Every time a multiplayer-only online game is announced, I suck my teeth: it’s a crowded genre, the metrics for success are very unforgiving and a lot of them sink without trace. The Sega/Creative Assembly team has announced its new game: a multiplayer shooter called Hyenas, in which teams compete to nick stuff from spaceships. It has huge adolescent energy, in a good way. It’s sort of a parkour shooter, but also … a card game? And a visual novel? Watch the trailer and you’ll agree that it’s super-intriguing. Ten white-suited masked sinners have been plucked temporarily from hell to purge some demons for God, and now there’s a competition to decide which one of them gets to stay in heaven. I’m a sucker for a game that defies categorisation, and this is one of them, described as a “game for freaks” by its designer Ben Esposito. Recently mysterious anime-inspired speedrunning game Neon White have been bigged up. And, of course, The Last of Us: Part II, a landmark game in many ways – lesbian representation being one of them. Wait: there are more I endorse, including another teen romance, The Last of Us: Before the Storm Dream Daddy, a surprisingly wholesome dating sim about setting up cute dads and the entire NSFW oeuvre of anarchic, erotic game designer Robert Yang. And Zagreus himself can romance three characters of different genders, all at once if he likes, like the bi-polyamorous sex god that he is.

After every failed attempt, he ends up back in his father’s chambers in the underworld, but what makes it so easy to persist with Hades is its brilliantly entertaining interpretations of characters from Greek mythology, most of whom are fabulous. I am one of millions of queer people who has found community through games: 21% of the UK’s video-game workforce do not identify as straight, according to survey by industry body UKIE (the Association for UK Interactive Entertainment).ĭid you expect that a game about the Greek gods would not be super gay? Hades is one of the best roguelikes ever made, in my opinion – a game about trying to escape hell as Zagreus, the son of Hades.

Thanks to the industry’s entirely warranted reputation for toxicity, people might not think of video games as a particularly gay-friendly medium – but they have kind of always been queer, to borrow the title of academic Bonnie Ruberg’s book. Pride events took place in London last weekend, and among the million people lining the streets for the event’s 50th-anniversary were parade contingents from PlayStation, Microsoft and Square Enix, among other game publishers and developers. Thank you to our ever-brilliant games correspondent Keith Stuart for covering for me while I screwed my head back on after the festival. Thankfully, a decade-plus of E3 coverage prepared me well for the fragrant crowds and inevitable liveblogging tech issues. In case you’re wondering where I’ve been, I was on secondment from video games for a week covering Glastonbury.

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