DayZ flash mob group staging raves, games, more shenanigans

Don't bring an AK-47 or a fire ax to a rave, unless it's DayZ .

. With millions of playersbuying into the early-access, standalone alpha of the zombie survival sim, it's safe to say a DayZ flash mob group was bound to surface. Founded back in February, the Steam grouphas been releasing videos of its meetups in recent days. You can check out one example below.

A lighthearted subversion of the game's more typical kill-or-be-killed experience of wandering and looting, the video is one of severaluploaded by the flash mob group. While I'd more likely be the guy sitting in the corner desperately trying to open a cold can of beans, there's a certain joyful goofiness to the flash mob that makes me smile. Other events captured by the group include a rap battle and a not-so-serious attempt to test the limitsof DayZ's simulated gravity.

For a comment thread collecting the flash mob group's ideas, go here. Also be sure to check out our excellent recent series on life in the DayZ alpha, DayZ Diaries.

Thanks, Kotaku UK.

Life is Strange 2 confirmed by Dontnod

If you've not finished Life is Strange yet, then don't worry, I won't spoil the fact that Doctor Who turns up during the ending to berate Max for abusing her time travel powers to gain the upper hand during awkward social interactions.

If you've not finished Life is Strange yet, then don't worry, I won't spoil the fact that Doctor Who turns up during the ending to berate Max for abusing her time travel powers to gain the upper hand during awkward social interactions. Oops! Actually I haven't played Life is Strange, but I have just started following a Let's Play on YouTube, and I'm intrigued to see where the story's heading.

I'm enjoying the experience enough to be pleased that a sequel is on the way. Oh yeah: a sequel is on the way. Huzzah! Dontnod co-founder Alain Damasio revealed as much during this French interview, stating that—according to Reddit's translation—"I worked as a script doctor on Life is Strange developed by the studio DONTNOD and I will participate on Life is Strange 2 later".

We've known that Dontnod wants to do a second season/sequel for a while now, with co-Game Director and Art Director Michel Koch stating that they'd probably use an all-new cast if there were to be a follow-up.

We finally reviewedLife is Strange a couple of weeks ago, when the final episode hit, and had some thoughts about the divisive endingtoo. I obviously haven't read either of those articles, and you probably shouldn't either if you haven't finished the game yet.

SOMA interview: Frictional's creative director discusses disturbing new sci-fi horror

Frictional Games earned several slots in our round up of the best horror games on PC , and deservedly so with games like Amnesia: The Dark Descent under their belt.

, and deservedly so with games like Amnesia: The Dark Descent under their belt. But what of their next venture, SOMA? This sinister sci-fi horror was teased with a series of live-action videos before being revealed to be another exploratory first-person horror game, this time set in a Giger-esque world of dark, undulating cables and exposed brains. Time for a chat with Frictional Games creative director Thomas Grip to discover the thinking behind his latest horror.

PC Gamer: What does a sci-fi setting let you do that Dark Descent's 19th Century one didn't?

Grip: I'd say that most importantly it gives a sense of believability to happenings. When a game takes place in the past or some fantasy world, you are not personally connected. It then takes place in a reality separate from the one you inhabit. But when you deal with a futuristic setting, it is about things to come. This makes it easier for players to accept the scenarios they are put in, and it's harder to outright dismiss things. Instead it raise the question of whether or not it could actually happen. So even if there are some fantastic elements to the story, it becomes much more rooted in reality. This is a gives rise to a different mindset and is one of the big strengths of sci-fi in general.

PC Gamer: What are some of the themes SOMA's story will explore?

Grip: The major underlying theme of SOMA is consciousness. The subjective nature of this topic fits perfectly with a first person game where you are are in constant control. When immersed in game like this the boundary between yourself and the protagonist gets slightly blurred, something we will take full advantage of. The player is put through journey that will give rise to all these deep philosophical questions about the self, free will and so forth simply by playing. Combined with an ominous horror atmosphere it we aim to provide a really creepy and disturbing experience.

PC Gamer: Have you drawn inspiration from certain sci-fi books or films to create that atmosphere?

The three major inspirations are Philip K Dick, China Mieville and Greg Egan. These authors start with strange ideas and then take them as far as possible, which is exactly what we want to do as well. There are also a ton of thematic overlaps too. There will also be a bunch of Lovecraft sprinkled on top.

PC Gamer: How will the story be relayed, through environmental cues?

Grip: Our storytelling is done on multiple levels, the most basic being simply to play the game. The player will actively take part in all the important events, living through all of the plot's major moments. I think it is really important that it should be possible to get a general outline of the story even if you miss all of the details. This is not to cater to players that want to run through the game, but instead I find it an important design cornerstone. Whenever possible, the player should be DOING things instead of being TOLD things. In the end the player should be able to retell the narrative as "I did this, and then I did that...", and not just describe what happened in cutscenes. When you are set on the story being possible to follow without reading all exposition material, you are much likelier to keep this "storytelling by doing" design on track.

Going down a level, we have the common things like audio logs and notes. But what I think sets us apart from most other games is that we go into great effort to make sure that everything is consistent. So if the player listens to some audio-log they should be able to ponder why it was placed there, when it was recorded, etc. You can pull a lot of narrative from the game simply by considering the placement of the story material.

And this brings us to the lowest level which is all of the details in the world. Voices from creatures you encounter, posters, objects scattered in the environment and so forth. And just like with notes and logs, we go to great lengths to make sure that everything makes sense. You will be able to think of our world as an actual place, and not constantly ignore game-specific elements like health packs and conveniently placed cover.

PC Gamer: Does SOMA share any mechanics with The Dark Descent, or are you creating new systems?

Grip: The basic control scheme is set up is just like in Amnesia. You can pick up almost any object, physically interact with doors and that sort of thing. So anyone who has played any of our previous games should feel right at home. But beyond that it gets a little bit different. For instance, In Amnesia: The Dark Descent we had a global sanity system that lasted through the game, and we will have some similar things in SOMA, but on a more local basis. Quick example: there will be creatures that mess with your head in various ways and this will only happen in the areas they are present in. We want to the players to never really figure out how the underlying systems work, and make sure we keep a fresh experience throughout.

PC Gamer: What makes a great horror game? What can you do that can't be replicated in other mediums?

Grip: As much as possible should happen inside the player's head. You want to build up this sprawling model of the game's world in the players' minds. This will result in a much richer place than what you could possibly simulate. The next, and really hard, part is to make them use this mind model when they are playing the game. For instance, upon encountering a dark hole with some vague sounds coming from it, you want players to use their entire imagination to conjure up what might lie ahead. You want them to act as if the figments in their mind are real, and to let this control as much as possible of their experience. The better you can do this, the better horror game you got.

DayZ targeting better zombie behavior with expansion of dev team

Since its December release , the most complex and frightening encounters I've had in the DayZ Standalone have involved other human beings, not the survival sim's undead population.

have involved other human beings, not the survival sim's undead population. But with the recent expansionof its development team, the DayZ designers at Bohemia Interactive are now laying out a plan for a better-behaved zombie antagonist, according to aon the game's official dev blog.

Zombies in the current early-access version of the Standalone look sufficiently decayed and are aggressively persistent in their bloodlust. But they also occasionally walk through walls and ignore solid objects. It's the kind of problem the developer is looking to solve now that the design team has nearly doubledin size in recent months.

"Our major focus has been on establishing the architecture, both in the team and in the game, in order to deliver best in the future," the developer reports. "This involved us drastically increasing the size of the team working on the game. This had a severe short-term impact on our progress as our existing team had to devote time and resources to training and planning. The new zombie pathfinding is a good example of this approach beginning to produce results."

One promising solution to zombie pathfinding uses an approach called "navigation mesh," a technique that the developer believes will give it the results it wants but also balances the performance requirements of DayZ's massive game world. The new method abandons an older approach which had two different systems governing zombie behavior—one for building interiors and one for outside. You can check out some screenshots illustrating the new navmesh approach here.

"Because the system is now unified it means that more efficient (and more natural) pathfinding solutions are available to the AI, at a fraction of the performance cost as before," according to the developer.

The changes to zombie AI are still upcoming, but be sure to check out the complete postfor more info on other features and changes planned for the DayZ Standalone, including animal design, fishing, and fireplace building.

Life is Strange director's commentary arrives

When the boxed limited edition of Life is Strange was announced in November, one of it's extra features was a director's commentary through which the devs could impart their knowledge of making horrible situations steadily worse by way of time travel (described by Jody Macgregor as " a refreshing glass of gut punch ").

"). The new edition was released yesterday, complete with soundtrack and art book, and with it the director's commentary has been released for everyone for free.

Disappointingly, it's not an interactive commentary. Instead of replaying the game, collecting snippets of insight at your favourite scenes, it's an hour-long documentary about Life is Strange divided by subject. After downloading the Director's Commentary DLC, you have to launch it within the game itself. Still, it was one of our personal picksfor 2015, so any excuse to go back is a good one.

Nether Territory Wars update gives players some much needed structure

Urban Survival MMO Nether was in such an early state when I last played it a few months ago that it wasn't even entirely clear what kind of game it was going to be.

was in such an early state when I last played it a few months ago that it wasn't even entirely clear what kind of game it was going to be. It nailed a desperate, post-apocalyptic mood, and had basic shooting and crafting systems in place, but I wasn't sure what I was supposed to do. Yesterday's Territory Wars update hopes to alleviate that, giving Nether players some much needed structure.

Nether players can now join tribes through an initiation process, and capture 10 different buildings in the city to earn money, weapons, and other bonuses. The more tribesmen you have, the faster you'll capture a building. If you abandon it for too long other tribes could move in, or they could just storm you and take it by force.

The tribes and map control system is the most significant but far from the only addition in this latest update. The map was doubled in size by adding the entirely new Wasteland area to the west of the city. A new loot system should make the interface more intuitive and also adds more searchable items in the world. New tutorial quests should make all of this easier to understand, and there's a ton more, which you can read about on the game's Steam page.

Zombie Monsters Robots announced: free-to-play shooter from former Epic China team

En Masse Entertainment announced that it will release Zombies Monsters Robots (ZMR), a free-to-play third-person shooter in which you kill the things listed in its title.

En Masse Entertainment announced that it will release Zombies Monsters Robots (ZMR), a free-to-play third-person shooter in which you kill the things listed in its title. It's developed by Yingpei Games, the Chinese studio formerly known as Epic Games China. The game is actually already out in China under the name Mercenary Ops 2, which has more than 30 million registered players.

ZMR spins familiar video game yarn: humanity invents the portal technology we want so badly, but it instead just lures cross-dimensional creatures to our world. You'll kill these creatures in a wide range of cooperative campaigns and wave-based survival missions with up to eight players. You'll also be able to compete with other players in multiplayer matches for up to 16 players.

Yingpei Games contributed to Gears of War, and you can definitely see hints of that game in the brief glimpses of gameplay in the trailer below. To get a better idea of what ZMR is, you can also check out our previous coverage of the first Mercenary Ops.

ZMR is set to release this summer.

Life is Strange is a refreshing glass of gut-punch

Something nobody tells you about high school is that the main reason you should make the most of it is not because “these are the best years of your life” (if they are your life sounds kind of awful), but because you’ll probably be stuck dreaming about the place for years afterwards.

Something nobody tells you about high school is that the main reason you should make the most of it is not because “these are the best years of your life” (if they are your life sounds kind of awful), but because you’ll probably be stuck dreaming about the place for years afterwards. A decade or so of anxiety dreams will relentlessly whisk you back to your teenage years like a really shitty form of time travel.

Life Is Strange is a game about an 18-year-old American student named Max who has the power to reverse time and fix her teenage failures before they become the mainstays of her dreams for the rest of her life. She can dial the clock back a limited period (typically to the beginning of the game’s last scene transition) and have a do-over, letting her see the immediate consequences of her actions and then reconsider them. Sometimes it’s a power that can alter drastic mistakes and even save lives, and sometimes it just lets her see things the way a more experienced person would, realizing which decision is the typical ‘dumb teenager’ thing to do. Sometimes it seems like her power is a simulation of being an adult.

Though developed by Dontnod, the team behind Remember Me, Life Is Strange resembles Telltale’s recent games like The Walking Dead and Wolf Among Us. It’s being released episodically (four of its five parts are available so far), and it plays like the kind of adventure game that simplifies the puzzles so they don’t become roadblocks in the flow of the story, while inserting Big Decisions that become the things you agonize over instead. When you see a student break the law do you tell a teacher? When your friend gets in trouble do you try to take the blame?

You’re reminded of Max’s ability to rewind time after each choice by the way she questions whether she’s done the right thing no matter which you choose, which does make her seem a little wishy-washy. Playing so many games that present moral quandaries means I’ve learnt to enjoy being decisive and then sticking to my guns, even when bad things follow—in fact, especially when they do. There’s dramatic potential in the moments when you realize your problems are your own fault. Commander Shepard from Mass Effect makes her mind up and sticks with it, dammit, no take-backsies.

In other games your decisions in these moments help to create a solid character to fill the empty protagonist-shaped hole at the center of video games. Replacing that with second-guessing means Max doesn’t feel as well-defined, but then of course she’s not. She’s 18 years old. Life Is Strange works best when I remember Max isn’t a space captain, a grizzled detective, or a survivor of the zombie apocalypse, and let her experiment in ways that might seem foolish to an adult.

Max doesn’t feel as well-defined, but then of course she’s not. She’s 18 years old.

By comparison Max’s best friend Chloe is the kind of indelible character I quickly grew attached to. As is traditional in genre fiction the rebellious buddy is more interesting than the hero. Blue-haired punk brat Chloe (voiced by Ashly Burch of Tiny Tina and Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin’? fame) rarely equivocates, always sounds like she’s either on the edge of a breakthrough or a breakdown, and lives in the moment. She’s a force of nature and a perfect balance to the more cautious Max.

In the first episode of Life Is StrangeMax has just returned to her home town of Arcadia Bay after several years in Seattle and is reconnecting with her roots. In the way of kids everywhere she fell out of contact with her best friend, and there’s tension between them even as they slowly reaffirm their bond. Out of all the things you can use Max’s power to do, it turns out one of the most significant is having more time to spend with someone close to you. Sometimes Life Is Strange can feel on-the-nose or even emotionally manipulative—its tone veers between Donnie Darko, Twin Peaks, and a Steven Spielberg movie—but when it’s effective it is a tall frosty glass of gut-punch.

There’s one more episode to go and time-travel stories do have a tendency to fall apart in their finales, but even if it does I’ll consider it worth playing for the way it’s resonated with me so far. The message of Life Is Strange is that life is short, and you should treasure the time you have with the people you care about. It delivers that message so potently that when I finished the last two episodes I immediately wanted to get in touch with someone I love. That’s rare in any kind of art, let alone video games, and worth valuing.

Steam Halloween Sale is a vicious slasher of prices

Like a masked psychopath sneaking up on a group of skinny dipping college students, the Steam Halloween Sale has suddenly arrived to murder your wallet in cold blood.

has suddenly arrived to murder your wallet in cold blood. There are 156 spooky games up for sale, including Eldritch, The Walking Dead, Don't Starve(which now comes bundled with a free horror mod), and... Sleeping Dogs?

OK, so I'm not sure what the requirements were for Minimum Creepiness Levels, but the most of the games for sale are at the very least sporting the steep, steep discounts that we know and fear from the Steam Summer and Winter Sales. Snag Limbofor 75% off, Amnesia: A Machine for Pigsfor 30% off and the point-and-click 1996 adventure I Have No Mouth and I Must Screamfor less than three bucks.

If you've got titles of varying degrees of spooky and/or creepiness in your backlist, take a minute to stop by and see what you can find. The sale only lasts until November 1, so be quick about it.

DayZ developer acquires new studio to work on standalone version [Update: Everything but the name]

Bohemia have been in touch to provide the following clarification: they have acquired Cauldron's facilities, technology and staff for their new Slovakian studio, but not the Cauldron brand itself.

It looks like the DayZ Standalonewill be getting a few new helping hands. Creator Dean "Rocket" Hall has announced the purchase of Slovakian game developer Cauldron by Bohemia Interactive, with 25 of that studio's staff set to work on the zombie survival sim, according to a report at Eurogamer.

Hall announced the purchase during an appearance at EGX Rezzed 2014, where he also revealed the DayZ SA alpha had sold more than 1.7 million copies since its December launch. Cauldron is to be re-named Bohemia Interactive Slovakia, according to the Eurogamer story. The Bratislava-based studiohas worked on a range of different titles over the years, including several in the Cabela'shunting series. The studio purchase is likely what Hall was referring to when he wrote in a blog update a month agothat the development team was "effectively doubling."

Other details revealed in Hall's presentation include some new in-game items and mechanics planned for the next update to the alpha. These include upgradable fireplaces and a crossbow which should be introduced when the update goes live sometime in April. The loot spawning system will also see some changes after the update, with doors resetting and gear reappearing in different areas of the game map at different times.

Even in its alpha state, DayZ still offers one of the most unique gaming experiences around. To get more people on the project, plus designers who have some experience recreating the great outdoors in gaming, sounds like a welcome development for the game's future. For a refresher on what DayZ is all about, be sure to check out the excellent DayZ Diaries.

Watch the Life is Strange season finale trailer

The season finale trailer for Life is Strange has been revealed, ahead of its release tomorrow, though be warned that it's quite spoilery if you haven't played the previous episodes.

if you haven't played the previous episodes. You can check it out above, though if you haven't played the first four episodes then you might want to steer clear. It's mostly a recap of events so far, accompanied by swelling music and Max talking about the end of the world. Has Max 'changed too much destiny'? We can find out tomorrow.

The series so far has been widely praised: you can find our ode to the first four episodes here.

I haven't been quite as taken with Life is Strange, though I'm intrigued to see how it resolves—as much as time travel plots ever can. The series deserves credit for not pulling its punches, though whether it fully earns the right to play with the subject matter is up for debate. There are times where it handles the relevant issues exceptionally well, and times where similar issues are used for shock value.

Still, If you don't mind a bit of tonal inconsistency, it's definitely worth a look.

Urban survival MMO Nether is now in beta on Steam Early Access

Nether , the urban-focused DayZ-alike we first told you about in August, has just hit Steam Early Access.

in August, has just hit Steam Early Access. The hopefully brutal survival MMO is now in Beta, and eager early adopters can get in and start checking out the game.

Developer Phosphor Games also released this live-action trailer a couple of weeks ago. Though live-action trailers aren't my favorite thing ever, this one is sufficiently gritty to sell the atmosphere of this post-apocalyptic hellscape.

Nether takes a few pages from the DayZ playbook, but replaces sometimes-slow, always-stupid zombies with a much more predatory bad guy called the Nether. Phosphor is also replacing the wide-open spaces native to Arma 2 with a dense urban environment based on the West Loop of Chicago. Looting skyskrapers and bunkering down in a burned-out apartment building is an intriguing concept, and now we finally get to see if the game can live up to the promise of its ideas.

If you buy into the beta, you'll get several extra keys to send to friends, which is a nice touch in a game where backup will always be appreciated.

Life Is Strange: Episode 3 trailer features mischief, drama

You aren't really playing/watching/reading/injecting a high-school drama unless there has, at some point, been Antics.

You aren't really playing/watching/reading/injecting a high-school drama unless there has, at some point, been Antics. Using homemade explosives to break into the principal's office is most certainly Antics—even if it's in aid of solving a mystery. It may even be Shenanigans.

After a high-spirited opening, this trailer for the third episode of Life Is Strange turns to drama. Words are spoken; expressions are expressed; an indie band plays quietly but intensely in the background, thus highlighting to all that yes, there are feels, and that yes, it is all too much to deal with.

Episode three of Life Is Strange is out tomorrow. It's called Chaos Theory, but probably won't feature any spies in nightvision goggles.

Among the Sleep gets Oculus Rift support; free alpha starts tomorrow

Regular PC Gamer readers have probably heard about Among the Sleep, because I keep writing about it .

. I keep writing about it because it's a first-person horror game from Norway in which you play as a two-year-old—which I think is pretty cool. Not sold yet? Well, you'll be able to try out a public alphademonstrating some early parts of the game (which now has confirmed Oculus Rift support, by the way) starting tomorrow (Tuesday) at 11 a.m. PDT.

Among the Sleep is currently in the final four days of its Kickstarter campaign, with about $15,000 to go as of the writing of this article. The aim of the campaign is to allow some of the entirely part-time dev team to start working on the game full-time, which Krillbite hopes will allow an overall better final product when the game releases late this year.

The alpha will likely show off an early part of the game, which I got to play around withback at GDC.

Project Zomboid mapping tools released: die horribly in your own backyard

Article by Becky Mullen
The Indie Stone have released the mapping tools for Project Zomboid, their indie zombie survival game.

The Indie Stone have released the mapping tools for Project Zomboid, their indie zombie survival game. If you've ever felt the urge to see your home-town overrun with zombies - and who hasn't - your time has finally come.

The tools, which were used by developers for creating the in-game maps Muldraugh and West Point, will let players create their own sandbox maps in whatever sadistic or artistic manner they choose. The question is no longer just how you die, but where.

The game is still only available in its alpha stage, but already has incredible levels of customisation. By releasing the mapping tools to the community, The Indie Stone are hoping to create an “explosion” of user-created content. Already praised for it's replayability, Project Zomboid could give players the opportunity to experience the whole world (and beyond) as a zombie infested wasteland. Using the map tools, players are able to build individual houses, islands, and a lot more - but not change the existing maps themselves.

While this may become possible in the future, The Indie Stone want to keep the focus on creating brand new community content to expand the experience of Project Zomboid. Ambitious community projects are already in the works, including skyscrapers and a huge community map. Players are also hoping to recreate famous zombie films using the game's Last Stand mode.

The modding community have already had a strong influence on the game's development - after all, The Indie Stone hired one of their modders last year.

Although there are currently no tutorials available for using the map tools, a community wiki has already been put up at pzwiki.net, and developers are still on hand in The Indie Stone forumto help out. The tools are worth checking out - and could give you a tactical advantage when the real apocalypse hits!

Contagion Kickstarter funded, a "spiritual successor" to Half-Life 2 mod

Those who sunk hours upon hours into the Zombie Panic Half-Life 1 and 2 mods will be happy to know that a funded spiritual successor, Contagion , is being made by some of the same people and will be available on Steam Early Access before this Halloween.

According to the Kickstarter video embedded above, Contagion hosts randomly-generated levels and objectives that players will need to complete if they hope to survive. Some modes might require going off the beaten path to save civilians who are holed up in a nearby house. Contagion also includes a PvP mode, meaning you'll have to keep a lookout for human enemies either living or dead.

Contagion sounds promising, but I'm curious if it'll be different enough to stand out on its own in a world that's already flooded with zombie games. There are the randomly-generated objectives to give it its own flavor, but I'm not sure that'll be enough to attract players who've made runs in Left 4 Dead 2part of their daily routine. We'll be able to give it a try soon.

Life Is Strange: Episode 3 trailer features mischief, drama

You aren't really playing/watching/reading/injecting a high-school drama unless there has, at some point, been Antics.

You aren't really playing/watching/reading/injecting a high-school drama unless there has, at some point, been Antics. Using homemade explosives to break into the principal's office is most certainly Antics—even if it's in aid of solving a mystery. It may even be Shenanigans.

After a high-spirited opening, this trailer for the third episode of Life Is Strange turns to drama. Words are spoken; expressions are expressed; an indie band plays quietly but intensely in the background, thus highlighting to all that yes, there are feels, and that yes, it is all too much to deal with.

Episode three of Life Is Strange is out tomorrow. It's called Chaos Theory, but probably won't feature any spies in nightvision goggles.

New Survarium alpha screenshots show off rust, decay, fog

New screenshots of Survarium , the online spiritual successor to Stalker, have surfaced from the game's alpha development phase.

Stalker, the fantasticfirst-person shooter with a legion of devoted fans, set expectations high for Stalker 2, which was then unexpectedly and unceremoniously cancelled. Since the sequel officially died, Stalker 2's former developers have set up shop as Vostok Gamesto pursue an MMOFPS version of the game that never happened.

Survarium will pit players against the mutants and vicious human enemies familiar to fans of post-apocalyptic fiction in a free-to-play multiplayer setting. It's completely different from their single-player, story-based bonafides, but the developers seem confident that the ideas they began to flesh out in Stalker 2 will be just as engaging when players meet them in Survarium.

The screenshots look and feel like Stalker, which is an accomplishment in itself. Rusted out tanks and broken electrical stations show off the landscape, and I can already tell that I don't want to get caught in this world alone at night .

We spoke with Survarium's developers earlier this year, and since then development has continuing with growing popularity. The game is currently in alpha testing and will release later this year.

Banned H1Z1 cheaters may be allowed back, if they publicly apologise

A couple of days ago, 24,837 H1Z1 cheaters were banned , en masse, from the game.

, en masse, from the game. According to Daybreak president John Smedley, the bans have since prompted many cheaters to confess to and apologise forusing cheats. In a series of tweets, Smedley explained that, before he'll even consider lifting a ban, the apologetic cheater must go a step further.

"If you want us to even consider your apology," Smedley wrote, "a public YouTube apology is necessary. No personal information please. Email me the link."

Smedley stressed that the apologies should contain no personal info, and also that they should be directed at fellow players, and not Daybreak. "Although you hurt our business this is about them not us."

A few hours ago, Smedley tweeted the first such apology.

"Going to be honest," Smedley wrote, "I wish it wasn't about the money, but he's first and that means something."

Life Is Strange Episode 3 out next week

High-school hijinks continue next week with the release of the third chapter of Dotnod's episodic adventure Life Is Strange.

High-school hijinks continue next week with the release of the third chapter of Dotnod's episodic adventure Life Is Strange. Called 'Chaos Theory', episode three marks the half-way point of the five-part series, and will be available to full season owners on May 19.

Here's what the press release says about the plot of the next episode:

"In this next instalment of Life is Strange, Max and Chloe’s investigation into Rachel Amber’s disappearance lead them to break into Blackwell Academy after dark, to search for answers. Secrets will be uncovered and Max will find another use for her power."

Our reviewer, Cass, was a fan of the first episode. Hopefully, as the series progresses, it can continue to provide more memorable moments.

Among the Sleep launches Kickstarter to aid final stages of development

Among the Sleep, the atmospheric horror game in which you play as a baby, is now on Kickstarter with the hope that fans will support it as it makes its final steps toward release.

with the hope that fans will support it as it makes its final steps toward release. Though the game is feature complete, the devs at Norway's Krillbite Studio say the $200,000 in crowdfunding would allow them to turn some of the part-time team into full-time developers as they seek to round out the sharp corners and put those plastic protector things on the light sockets before letting us loose from the crib.

"We're now at the point in development where we have finished the core gameplay and levels, but there is still a lot of production, and a ton of polishing and testing left to do. We want to take our time and make the game as good as possible," the Kickstarter pagereads.

"The only obstacle we see going forward, is that everyone at Krillbite still work part time jobs on the side to survive while developing Among The Sleep. This inhibits our focus and productivity on the game, and we don't want to lower our expectations to the quality of the finished game, or delay the release. We hope this Kickstarter will help us deliver the best possible experience we can, within a reasonable timeframe."

If you're curious, you might find our hands-on preview from GDCinformative. Aside from Kickstarter, you can also read more about the game on the official site.

H1Z1: King of the Kill's new Ignition mode is Battle Royale for impatient people

I haven't played H1Z1 in a while: I initially spent some time in survival mode, both alone and with " friends ", and took a few stabs at winning its Battle Royale mode (note: I lost).

(note: I lost). Since then, Daybreak has split the gameinto two separate Early Access titles: Just Survive, and King of the Kill. With the introduction of a new Battle Royale mode called Ignition, it seemed as good a time as any to jump in to the King of the Hill side of the game.

What I found is that Ignition is Battle Royale for people who are incredibly impatient to kill and die. Rather than BR's slowly paced hunt for gear, the long runs through the wilderness, the careful searching of buildings, and the tense build up to the final few confrontations, Ignition is in a big hurry to get players heavily armed and careening toward each other at top speed.

A match begins with players being lowered from individual helicopters—wait, no. A match begins with players trying to entertain themselves in the multiplayer lobby before the match begins.

I, too, entertained myself. I ran around punching other players. I went prone and tried to roll across the entire map. I used the various emotes. I fought a crowd to see who had the right to sit on the lobby's only toilet. I added my boots to the pile of boots that appears in every lobby for some reason.

I also traded in some of my boring pants to try to win a new pair of pants with H1Z1's loot gambling thingie. Let's see how I did!

Oooh. Brown pants . I won brown pants. Of all the colors, brown is the brownest. All the other players are going to be brown with envy when they see my new brown pants.

Finally, the match began properly. As I was saying, players are lowered to the ground from helicopters, and begin the match already sitting on gassed-up ATVs. Then everyone speeds off to get equipped. Every player has invisible explosives attached to them, and has only a few minutes to reach a safe zone before they detonate. Safe zones are visible on the map, and you can spot them when you get close as a chopper hovers above them casting down magical green beams of safety-light. Any player not in a safe zone when the timer expires blows up. Surviving players must then race to the next safe zones before the next timer expires. As the match progresses, there are fewer zones and less time to reach them.

The driving physics are about how I remember.

My first round didn't go so well. I was lowered to the ground and sped off toward a brown clump of buildings I'd spotted from the air. It registered that player death notifications were appearing almost immediately. And not the usual kinds of early BR deaths: by axes and fists and maybe a pistol. Players were being killed moments into the match by shotguns and assault rifles.

This is because Ignition is swarming with guns. In fact, upon spotting another player about twenty seconds into the match, I ran up to punch him to death only to discover he was already packing.

I'm not sure how he managed to shoot me dead without ever raising his pistol, but the point is there's no real scavenging for gear in Ignition. Pick a building and you'll almost certainly find it stuffed with weapons, ammo, armor, and of course other players looking for the same.

My next match didn't go much better. While speeding down a road—again, mere seconds into the match—I was first injured by one player with a shotgun and then another wielding an AR-15. Discovering I couldn't bandage myself while driving, I had to pull over to stop my bleeding before my health ran to zero. Just as I did, more bullets arrived to finish the job.

Eventually, I started surviving a bit longer, mostly by avoiding the bigger settlement areas and aiming for more distant, lone buildings. There's a strong impetus to loot the first place you see, but there's plenty of time on the clock before the first detonation, so it doesn't hurt to loot in less crowded areas and let the first gaggle of players kill one another. I got myself armed, took a few other players out, and eventually made it to a safe zone.

Crouching in some bushes and watching through a scope, I saw other players arriving in the zone and begin culling each other. I also got an idea of just how many players die when the timer expires and their explosives detonate. You can see the notifications spamming below.

And it was like that in every match I played. If you can make it to one of the first safe zones, you've got a decent shot at being one of the final survivors because a good handful of players will wind up getting blown to bits due to poor clock management or not knowing the map very well.

I later became one of them because don't know the map very well. This was the second instance of safe zone spawns, and I picked the one the map showed as being on an island. Unfortunately, the map didn't show that most of the island consisted of sheer cliffs, so I wound up just driving around it looking for a way up. I didn't make it, but I still placed 9th.

My strategy from then on was avoid players whenever possible, get to the first safe zone in one piece, hide if I hadn't picked up weapons or shoot players as they arrived if I had. It typically worked OK, except just about everyone is better at shooting than I am, and one time my rifle wouldn't fire despite being loaded.

I never won, though I did place 9th a second time. The third safe zone was located on top of a mountain, and since I'd once again forgotten the details of the map I couldn't find the road up, so I attempted to just drive up the sheer side of it. It was a slow and agonizing trip, but I did manage to get my ATV into the safety circle. Though I immediately slid right out again.

A few more adjustments and I was back in the circle and no longer slipping down the side of the mountain, but here's a funny thing: when you spend long minutes sliding around on a sheer cliff on a noisy ATV, other people tend to see you from miles away. Just as I'd safely parked, another player shot me in the back. I hope, at least, he enjoyed the show.

Ignition mode is clearly an attempt to goose up Battle Royale into quicker rounds with more action and fewer lulls, and I think it works. Like the rest of H1Z1, it's sort of sloppy but a lot of fun, and nothing to take too seriously. I think Ignition's shorter, gun-happy, action-heavy matches might do well for Twitch viewers who don't want to spend quite so much time watching players slowly run around scavenging in Battle Royale, and it's a good option for players who enjoy BR but want to get right to the carnage.

Invisible, Inc: hands-on with Klei's turn-based spy thriller

Klei Entertainment's Invisible, Inc is a big, turn-based game of peek-and-go-sneak.

Klei Entertainment's Invisible, Inc is a big, turn-based game of peek-and-go-sneak. Seriously, peering nervously around corners is a large part of this game. In fact, paranoid surveillance is all but mandatory for success. This is not a game where you brazenly swagger in, guns a-blazing. This is an environment for tactical espionage, a place where you shiftily lure patrols into janitorial closets, knock them unconscious, lock them in, walk out and install a shock trap on the door for good measure.

Not that guns aren't readily available. Even the team you begin with, the stealthoriented ACME Agency, is dressed in appropriate artillery. The problem here is that bullets are expensive. They cost action points to shoot, action points to reload. More crucially, they cost you Invisible, Inc's most precious resource: anonymity. Sometimes, all it takes to acquire your very own personal firing squad is a single, ill-timed gunshot. Similarly, virtually anything you do can potentially trigger an unwanted firefight. A misstep onto a pressure-sensitive floor panel? Being impolite to a computer geek when he finds you rooting through the mainframe? Totally legitimate ways to get yourself killed. Which is OK, because you weren't meant to be a trenchcoat-swaddled secret agent if your solution to everything is brute force. This game can and will dock cash for 'cleaning bills'.

Very much still in the alpha stage of development, Invisible, Inc is both promising and frustrating. That's partially because this complicated game of cat-and-mouse doesn't open with a tutorial. Instead, it simply dumps your two-man team in a quiet room with a computer console. No mission statement, no explanation as to what the myriad buttons peppering the interface meant. Good luck, old chap. You're on your own. HQ is watching. Tally-ho.

Much of my first two hours with the game was spent feeling slightly bewildered. At first, I tried it the old-fashioned way. I led operatives through doors and had their partners shadow them closely. It wasn't an effective technique. Guards would dogpile on them, robots would perforate their toes with bullets. It was only after a few desperate attempts that I realised I needed to peek first and select actions later. Likewise, the importance of the Mainframe mode didn't really sink in until I successfully appropriated a turret, staged a bloodied commotion in the far end of the building and snuck away while the guards were busy investigating.

Situations like that are what invite return visits to Invisible, Inc's tense, procedurally-generated levels. While currently missions are rarely more complicated than 'escape the floor' or 'shut down computer and then flee', they present opportunities to string together complex manoeuvres, and test your facility at outwitting rooms full of guards. There's also the challenge of balancing greed and pragmatism. CPU points, the currency used to hack into the game's electronic systems, don't carry from level to level. Credits do. As a result, you're forever perched on the razor's edge of a decision. Do you ransack that safe and rescue that captured agent so you can expand your two-man operation, or do you just charge to the exit?

It helps that Invisible, Inc controls easily enough. While weighted with a hundred variables to consider, the game itself operates on familiar rhythms. Your agents all come with specialised talents and unique skills. Each turn, you decide how they'll spend their action and movement points. Minor tasks like snooping around corners or opening doors will not take up precious action points but scanning for adjacent machinery will. Once you've exhausted your options, it's time to pass control to the AI. As with many turn-based games these days, navigating the interface requires only a click of the left or right mouse button. Rarely has shopping been so hazardous. We have you out, er, roboted. “I think they're dead.” “Just a minute, honey. I'm checking his wallet.” Beautiful blonde woman behind laser bars? Sounds legit.

Interestingly, Mainframe mode exists separately from this exchange of turns. So long as CPU points are available, it's entirely possible to continue hacking through electronics, forcing safes to yield their contents and cameras to defect to your purposes. But Invisible, Inc's cyberspace has its hazards. Some devices are rigged with viruses or failsafes. New programs are installed at random, making it all the more needful to ration your CPU points. Make one mistake and you might find yourself subjected to lockdown.

There's a lot to be excited about in Invisible, Inc. Klei Entertainment's clean, comic book art style works fabulously with the slightly campy '60s spy movie aesthetic. If you're willing to contend with a nighvertical learning curve (or dally with a community guide), it's definitely worth picking up in its current state. Already, the game is accumulating updates, the most recent of which introduced unlockable teams and a new metagame. For Klei Entertainment, a semi-indie studio already associated with reliability and cool stealth games, a bright future seems written in permanent ink.

Cry of Fear, a full conversion horror mod for Half-Life, releases on Steam Wednesday

Alongside the likes of Slenderman and that ghost girl from Curse of the Blood Moon, another indie horror contender has been brewing in the original Half-Life engine.

Cry of Fearis a free total conversion mod constructed on the back of Gordon Freeman's maiden voyage, and it's releasing standalone this Wednesday. Using 100% custom assets, the mod was developed by Team Psykskallar, which even went so far as to implement animated cutscenes and a few other non-native elements in the 15-year-old engine.

This release will be available on Steam as a stand-alone download that won't require the original Half-Life to play. Although, if you don't already own the original Half-Life, you could snag one of our highest-rated shooters of all timefor $10 at this point. The original Cry of Fear mod is available on the official site.

Cry of Fear looks to take place in a dark, urban area, and your character is shown equipped with a pistol, a phone-mounted light, and a drab hoodie. Somehow, I don't think that's going to be enough to feel safe. Just a hunch.

Show Us Your Rig: Battle Royale modder Brendan Greene

Show us your rig
Brendan Greene, creator of "PLAYERUNKNOWN's Battle Royale" mode for Arma 3 and H1Z1, has a modest rig but one with an air of old school cool about it.

Each week on Show Us Your Rig, we feature PC gaming's best and brightest as they show us the systems they use to work and play.

Brendan Greene, creator of "PLAYERUNKNOWN's Battle Royale" mode for Arma 3 and H1Z1, has a modest rig but one with an air of old school cool about it. Then again, I don't think a GTX 770 really counts as old school, so maybe I'm just saying that because of the slight sepia filter and the Morse Key on his desk. I was lucky enough to interview Greenelast month, and he was kind enough to take some time and show off where he does his modding.

What's in your PC?

I live by myself in a small village in Kildare, Ireland. I built this PC a few years ago while I was in Brazil and as such it is not the most powerful setup and I hope to upgrade soon, but for now it does the job.

CPU: Intel Core i5 @ 3.00GHz Storage: Corsair Force 3 SSD + a few external drives for storage RAM: 8GB Dual-Channel DDR3 GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770 Mouse: Razer Death Adder Keyboard: Razer BlackWidow Chroma Headphones: Logitech G35 Monitors: 23" Samsung SyncMaster & 22" HP Pavilion Monitors.

I also have a Razor Blade I got while over in San Diego with Daybreak Games (SOE) and they also hooked me up with some nice peripherals which I badly needed.

What's the most interesting/unique part of your setup?

Interesting? Well I do have a Vibroplex "Lightning Bug" Morse Key which I love. I have a soft spot for old tech like that. I also have an old leather sampler as my mouse pad.

What's always within arm's reach on your desk?

A notepad and a cup for tea. Both are very useful things when trying to figure out problems.

What are you playing right now?

H1Z1, Arma 3: KotH, and Next Car Game: Wreckfest.

What's your favorite game and why?

Delta Force: Black Hawk Down Multiplayer. I loved that game as it had so many intense modes, player created maps, and what really got me hooked was that you had to learn to zero correctly as it had actual bullet physics.

Invisible, Inc DLC to add agents and lengthen campaign

The Contingency Plan expansion for turn-based heist game Invisible, Inc arrives on November 12, adding four new agents, extra side objectives and a mysterious "complication" that promises to lengthen main story campaign.

The Contingency Plan expansion for turn-based heist game Invisible, Inc arrives on November 12, adding four new agents, extra side objectives and a mysterious "complication" that promises to lengthen main story campaign. Endless mode is getting ten new levels and two extra starting programs will give you new ways to diddle security systems. Corps will respond with "new guards, new Daemons and new security systems". There's no mention of a price, yet.

Invisible, Inc is one of the best games of 2015. You command a team of spies in a series of procedurally generated stealth missions. Hack terminals, steal data, mug CEOs and use your rogues' varying abilities to get out before you're swamped by guards. Invisible Inc doesn't rely on dice rolls to create tension—you always know what guards can and can't see, what they can do and where they're likely to go next. By discarding the element of luck that so many stealth games rely on, Invisible, Inc becomes an outstanding procedurally generated puzzle game with a great sense of style, as you can see in the new screens below.

This is the latest in a string of top games from Klei, who made Mark of the Ninja and Don't Starve. We can't wait to see what they do next.

Reinstall: Cryostasis

This article first appeared in issue 241 of PC Gamer UK.

I first played Action Forms' icebound horror shooter for a review in another magazine – and I can't say I got it right. Nothing I said was exactly wrong, either, checking off the repetitious rooms of glum-looking bulkheads, the imprecise melee combat and eventual descent into gormless, clumsy gunfire. And yet, three years later, I still find myself thinking about this game and occasionally shivering. For all the monotony of its spaces, for all the trite jump scares, its atmosphere is deeply, enduringly freakish and, above all else, cold.

“BioShock on Ice” is the easy-reach slogan and, budget and execution aside, it's not such a bad fit. Both games have a protagonist of unknown purpose rediscover an isolated civilisation, left to stew in its madness for decades. BioShock's is Rapture, the city under the sea, where grand ideals have gone horribly awry; Cryostasis takes place on a Russian ship, the North Wind, paralysed by the vanity of its captain, the rancour of his subordinates and no small amount of ice. Twenty years have passed and its crew have starved and frozen or worse, and the player finds himself stumbling through the frigid bowels of this derelict vessel, slowly piecing together the ship's fateful last days.

The revelation Cryostasis reaches may be garbled, but the initial mystery is just as effective as BioShock's. And though the frozen cabins and engine rooms have none of Rapture's grandeur, they are charged with a similar elemental threat. The ocean is slowly drowning and reclaiming BioShock's shattered submarine city, but here on the North Wind the ice has already done its work – and there is something stirringly awesome and implacably malevolent about the way that natural force has consumed the vessel.

The task here isn't just survival, but resurrection: finding the means to get parts of the ship whirring back into life. As they do so, the fronds of ice that emboss every surface recede and streak into liquid. Icicles drop from their perches to shatter on the floor. Doors loosen and mechanisms thaw out, enabling your passage from one sequence of claustrophobic rooms to the next.

Heat is health here, and your life depends on huddling beside anything that may momentarily raise your temperature – even, rather fancifully, a lightbulb. But the dial measuring your body heat soon drops, making prolonged sorties between heat sources tense. While there are only a few opportunities to freeze to death by misadventure, it's soon apparent that there are other things on board – things that once were the ship's crew. Now they are white-eyed horrors, beards matted with frost, which lurch from the shadows at any given opportunity, hissing and wailing. You can't help but panic – the sludgy melee system recreates the sort of exhausted, ineffectual combat you might expect from someone padded out like a seal-skin Michelin Man.

Cryostasis deploys these shocks with gruelling regularity, but not without skill. One exhausting sequence sees you navigate a flooded engine room in a dinghy, nervously flitting its single spotlight around the dark, silent interior. The inevitable happens, but is no less horrid for it: a sudden eruption rocks the boat as a dead man claws his way in, unseeing eyes and face split wide open like an angler fish.

One of the game's oddest gimmicks is that you are occasionally required to travel back in time, using the bodies of dead sailors to relive their last moments, cast in the grainy saturation of old film stock. If you can avert their death, you can alter the ship in the present, and progress. It's only an option at prescribed moments, and the means of survival are often clumsily handled, but there's a potent dramatic irony in knowing the man's fate and then working to avoid it.

Sudden, fleeting visions of the past also allow the designers to deploy jump-scares wherever they please, resulting in a constant sense of vulnerability. Additionally, it's the means of delivering backstory: you get to watch crewmen desperately reinforce a bulkhead as the water pours in, or eavesdrop on the arguments between the ship's commanding officers.

It's effective writing, even if the voice-acting is halting and hokey. On the prow of the ship, the captain dismisses the advice of his subordinate – an ambitious young officer who wants the captaincy for himself. As the officer lays out his case for avoiding an ice floe, the Captain folds the data printout he's been given into an origami boat before pressing it into the younger man's hand, brusquely suggesting that this may be a more fitting command for the officer's skills.

Interspersed with the plight of the ship is another story, revealed through illustrated papers the player occasionally discovers. It's a retelling of Maxim Gorky's fairytale The Flaming Heart of Danko – a parable of demented leadership that echoes the crew's own failing trust in their captain, and his increasingly reckless attempts to recover it.

The appearance of these pieces of paper isn't given any explanation, beyond their obvious symbolism, and it's far from the only thing to lack satisfying resolution. How the player is able to straddle time remains a mystery, and there's no attempt to suggest how the dead crew can come back to life or why they are so intent on your demise. The later enemies – hulking sentries with shoulder-mounted spot-lights and tommy-guns apparently welded to their forearms – clearly have no place in this story, and although the North Wind's fate is neatly concluded, much of the game remains bafflingly incongruous.

Though it ultimately unravels, Cryostasis offers a powerful, rare kind of horror, eschewing hysterical demonic imagery in favour of a more earthy, unsettling folkloric parable. Men are cursed by their own hubris, and annihilated by the merciless, malevolent ice. Playing it now, the game's chill still cuts through hot water bottles, fingerless mittens and thermal underwear. While the rest of the game crumbles and falls away like an ice sheet, its frozen centre remains perfectly preserved.

EverQuest II launching free-to-play servers!

In a bold, unexpected move, SOE announced today that EverQuest II will be free-to-play...on some servers.

In a bold, unexpected move, SOE announced today that EverQuest II will be free-to-play...on some servers. It's a bit confusing, so allow us to break it down for you. EQII's existing subscription model will remain completely unchanged on existing servers, but in addition to them , SOE is launching new servers that will house an "EverQuest II Extended" version of the game that allows anyone to download the client and play through all of the content up through, and including, The Shadow Oddyssey expansion for free.

While the content will be free, some races, classes, and spell tiers will be locked to Extended edition players and need to be purchased separately. In addition, the usual potions, items, and boosts will also be available in the cash shop. In addition, New Halas, the newly refined starting zone will also be available to players who choose the free-to-play route.

The most unique aspect of this jump to free-to-play, that really separates it from LOTRO and DDO's optional subscription models is that the two versions of the game (live subscription and Extended edition) will be housed on completely separate servers. For all intents and purposes, they can be considered two unique games. Existing subscribers will be given the option to "copy" their character to the new realms, but there will be some limitations on what gear/item will be copied with it to ensure there isn't massive inflation on the new free-to-play servers. Players that do copy will keep their existing character on the live servers and the two characters will level up completely separately. The beta is scheduled to go live August 17 , so free-to-play servers will be up then. There are several types of payment options on the Extended servers, click the image below to see a full-sized breakdown of how all the different account types will work.

In an exclusive interview this morning, Producer Dave Georgeson told me that he's very exited about the potential for the free-to-play version of the game to grow the player base rapidly and told me that the existing subscription players have been clamoring for it for a while. But the same players also insisted that these players be kept entirely separate from existing players who want to pay a subscription and level up their characters in a completely cash shop-free environment, which fueled the decision to launch new servers for the Extended version of the game. He expects both versions of the game to exist side-by-side indefinitely, and while not opposed to merging the two types of servers sometime in the distant future if players demanded it, the current plan is to keep them separate forever. While he wasn't sure if this sort of business model is the future of the entire MMO industry--he told me that if he was launching a new MMO, he'd probably try a subscription model first--he knew it was right for EQII at this time, calling it a "giant trial version" that removes any barriers for players who were on the fence about giving EQII a try.

We couldn't agree more. With so many quality MMOs on the market, its tough for gamers to try them all out without throwing down a massive wad of cash. Every gamer wants something different out of their MMO, and the more MMOs that offer a free-to-play version to let gamers find out which MMO is the right one for them, the happier everyone will be!

For full details, read SOE's press releaseand the FAQ page.

Galak-Z's free expansion 'The Void' enters beta today

Galak-Z was one of the hidden gems of 2015 – a viciously difficult twin-stick shooter set in procedurally generated, anime-influenced space mazes.

was one of the hidden gems of 2015 – a viciously difficult twin-stick shooter set in procedurally generated, anime-influenced space mazes. I haven't managed to finish it yet, but for those who have, the forthcoming The Void expansion will be very welcome. It adds an endless mode tied to leaderboards, providing a decent reason to boot the game up every day.

It's not yet finished, but you can still play it: studio 17-bit has kicked off a beta on Steam, and while anyone is free to take part you'd best heed this warning – all leaderboard placements will be wiped once the expansion launches proper. If the prospect of that happening doesn't infuriate you, go ahead.

The endless mode isn't the only addition. There's also a daily challenge, which tasks players with getting the highest score on the same level layout. For details on how to take part in the beta, click over here.

Galak-Z reviewed very well when it released for PC late last year. In his review, Chris Schilling wrote that its "challenging but immaculately calibrated controls power an exciting and enormously rewarding sci-fi roguelike."

Among The Sleep is a first-person horror game that has you play as a two-year-old

Norwegian devs Krillbite Studios want to make you cry like a baby in their upcoming horror game, Among The Sleep.

Norwegian devs Krillbite Studios want to make you cry like a baby in their upcoming horror game, Among The Sleep. This will be accomplished by having you actually play as a baby. In a house filled with monsters, creepy shadows, and earthquakes. Alone. If you thought wandering around an abandoned castle as the strapping, athletic Daniel in Amnesia: The Dark Descent was creepy, check out the trailer below.

We don't have many details on when we might see this scary fairy tale released to the public, but you can follow the Krillbite blogfor more info.

EverQuest II going free-to-play next month

Another day, another MMO goes free-to-play.

Another day, another MMO goes free-to-play. Sony Online Entertainment continues its transition away from the subscription model by doing away with EverQuest II's traditional subscription-only servers, starting in early December.

In a letter to fans, executive producer Dave Georgeson outlined why EQ2 is going F2P, and what the new payment structure will be.

EQ2 already had a free-to-play version called EQ2: Extended, but with this change Extended and traditional EQ2 will merge, putting an end to user complaints about the divided community. Georgeson explains: "We believe the key to meeting your expectations is to provide more flexibility and to deliver what you want when you want it, whether it's basic game content, full subscription access to the game, or something in-between. So in early December we're going to change things to be 'Free to Play. Your Way.'"

What that means is best explained by this handy chart, but here are the takeaways:

Gold membership will cost $15 per month and provide full access to all races and classes, as well as seven character slots. Basically, it's the same deal subscribers have now. Silver membership costs $5 per month. Silver members are limited to four characters, and may only gain spells up to the Expert tier. Free member are limited to two characters and Adept-tier spells. Both Silver and Free users are limited to four races and eight classes, and have restrictions on the equipment grades they may access.

So, sort of free-to-play, but there is a lot of convenience and flexibility that comes with paying.

Galak-Z transforms into a PC game on October 29, with a new mode

Galak-Z: The Dimensional is launching on PC October 29, with a ton of bug fixes and tweaks implemented since it debuted on the PS4 on August 4.

Galak-Z, the (deep breath) 80s-inspired mecha anime roguelike space shooter (phew) finally has a PC release date. And, surprise: it’s soon!

Galak-Z: The Dimensional is launching on PC October 29, with a ton of bug fixes and tweaks implemented since it debuted on the PS4 on August 4. More significantly, the PC version is releasing with a brand new difficulty option called Arcade mode, designed for players who found the roguelike structure too punishing. Developer 17-Bit gave us exclusive access to a near-final build of the PC version to play around with, and it feels fantastic on PC, with a new keyboard/mouse control scheme and rock solid framerate.

Galak-Z is mostly the same game that launched on the PlayStation 4 back in August, but Arcade mode is a significant addition. Designer Jake Kazdal told me that he was surprised by some of the feedback he got when Galak-Z was released; he knew the game was hard, but wasn’t prepared to hear so many people say it was truly, seriously punishing . Death comes fast in Galak-Z. If you don’t master its acrobatic controls, using forward and reverse thrusters, a strafe, and a dodge to avoid enemy attacks, you’re toast in no time. And when you die in the original roguelike mode, you start over a “season” of five missions. Arcade mode is 17-Bit’s solution.

It’s a simple addition. Instead of starting over an entire season when you die, you simply restart from the mission you failed. The game’s random generation functions just as it does in roguelike mode, which means you won’t be replaying the same mission parameters each time you die. You don’t get to keep the scrap (used to purchase ship upgrades) that you collected during a failed run, but you retain any scrap you’d spent at the beginning of the failed mission. That offers an opportunity to make different choices, or at least tackle a new mission without being weakened.

Galak-Z running at 2560x1440.

After failing one mission a couple times, for example, I decided to spend scrap I’d been saving to repair a point of HP on my ship, just in case that one hit point meant the difference between life and death. More than once I’ve warped out of a level after just barely juking half a dozen pirates and space bugs hungry for my hull, HUD blinking with a single remaining bit of armor.

Progress in Arcade mode doesn’t carry over to Rogue mode, which means if you want to fully clear the game, you’ll still have to tackle Galak-Z’s seasons in perfect runs. Kazdal told me he’s spent a good chunk of time designing fun Steam trophies to give players goals to shoot for. After getting my ass handed to me a few times in Arcade already, I’m planning to use the more forgiving mode to hone my skills before tackling Rogue.

PC Settings

Keybinding options: check, as you can see from Galak-Z's VCR-themed options menu.

High refresh support: also check.

The rest of the team’s time since August has gone into fixing bugs and performance issues that caused frequent slowdown on the PlayStation 4. From the PC beta build I’ve played, performance is flawless. Galak-Z never dropped a single frame from 75Hz (the panel's default refresh) on a gaming laptop I tested on, although that system was running a powerful Nvidia GTX 970M SLI combo. We also tested the game on a desktop rig with an Intel Core i5-4790K and a much weaker Nvidia GTX 950 graphics card. It ran at a flawless 60 frames per second. On a system with an Nvidia GTX 780 Ti and a 144Hz monitor, the framerate fluctuated from about 110-144 Hz.

The PC port doesn’t have all the features I’d love to see for Galak-Z; there are no individually tweakable graphics or anti-aliasing settings (just low, medium, high). There’s no native mod support, though I’m hoping easy access to the Unity files in the Steam folder will allow for some enterprising modders to have their fun with Galak-Z. 16:10 resolutions aren’t currently supported. But the most important stuff is there: customizable keybindings, unlocked framerate, and resolution options beyond 1080p (although Kazdal told me the assets aren’t at 4K, so it’s going to look its sharpest at 1080p).

On a 144Hz monitor and 780 Ti, intense action dropped the framerate to 110 fps. 60 fps is yesterday's news.

The keyboard and mouse controls feel surprisingly great—actually more precise than the gamepad controls the game was designed for. My favorite part is being able to use A and D to strafe left and right, and aiming with the mouse is obviously snappier than using a stick. There’s definitely a learning curve after playing with a controller, but I think keyboard/mouse will quickly become my preferred way to play.

17-Bit plans to release Galak-Z on Steam on October 29 for $20, with a 20 percent discount at launch. We'll be playing more of the beta build over the next two weeks. The season five DLC, which will be free for both PC and PS4 owners, isn't launching simultaneously with the PC release, but according to Kazdal, it's still on its way.

If you're hungry for more on Galak-Z, check out our making-of story from visiting 17-Bit in Kyoto, Japan last year.

Aliens: Colonial Marines and Alien vs Predator are back on Steam

If you've lost sleep over the absence of Aliens: Colonial Marines and the 2010 version of Alien vs Predator on Steam, then it's time to relax: they're back.

on Steam, then it's time to relax: they're back. Both Sega-published games disappeared from Steamand several other services late last year, and while no explanation was provided it was likely due to some dizzyingly complicated licensing conditions.

You're probably not overly concerned by the disappearance of one of the most notoriously poor video games of the last decade, but sometimes when licenses expire, games disappear from digital storefronts for good: a deal between Activision and Marvel expired at the start of 2014, leading to the removal of, um, Deadpool. It's still not back.

Here's hoping this doesn't happen, even temporarily, to Alien: Isolation, which took our Game of the Year gongfor 2014.

EverQuest II going free-to-play next month

Another day, another MMO goes free-to-play.

Another day, another MMO goes free-to-play. Sony Online Entertainment continues its transition away from the subscription model by doing away with EverQuest II's traditional subscription-only servers, starting in early December.

In a letter to fans, executive producer Dave Georgeson outlined why EQ2 is going F2P, and what the new payment structure will be.

EQ2 already had a free-to-play version called EQ2: Extended, but with this change Extended and traditional EQ2 will merge, putting an end to user complaints about the divided community. Georgeson explains: "We believe the key to meeting your expectations is to provide more flexibility and to deliver what you want when you want it, whether it's basic game content, full subscription access to the game, or something in-between. So in early December we're going to change things to be 'Free to Play. Your Way.'"

What that means is best explained by this handy chart, but here are the takeaways:

Gold membership will cost $15 per month and provide full access to all races and classes, as well as seven character slots. Basically, it's the same deal subscribers have now. Silver membership costs $5 per month. Silver members are limited to four characters, and may only gain spells up to the Expert tier. Free member are limited to two characters and Adept-tier spells. Both Silver and Free users are limited to four races and eight classes, and have restrictions on the equipment grades they may access.

So, sort of free-to-play, but there is a lot of convenience and flexibility that comes with paying.

Making Galak-Z: a day in the life of an indie studio in Kyoto, Japan

I've known Jake Kazdal for about 15 seconds before he's talking to me about Shigeru Miyamoto.

I've known Jake Kazdal for about 15 seconds before he's talking to me about Shigeru Miyamoto. We meet outside the International Manga Museum in Kyoto on a dazzling afternoon, bright with an edge of wind. It's the beginning of November, and Kyoto is announcing the arrival of autumn. Kazdal is talking about video games, in a roundabout way. He usually is, whether we're eating ramen at Ippudo around the corner, or sitting in his office playing Galak-Z, the space shooter his studio 17-Bit is hard at work on, or winding through the narrow alleyways where Kyoto's nightlife comes alive at dusk. He loves games in a way that I first found inspiring and later envied.

I really, really like video games. But not as much as Jake Kazdal.

He leads me into the Manga Museum's small cafe, where legendary artists have visited and sketched their creations on the wall. Kazdal points out Miyamoto's charming Mario pen drawing in a far corner. I always knew Miyamoto was the man behind Mario, of course, but I didn't know he drew the iconic plumber, too.

Nintendo's headquarters are in Kyoto, a 20 minute subway ride from Kazdal's office near the Manga Museum. Later I ask if he knows where Miyamoto eats lunch. "I do not. I haven't started stalking him yet, but it's all part of the plan as soon as I get some free time," he jokes.

Miyamoto's mario

Kazdal hasn't even really had time to unpack yet. 17-Bit is in the last few months of development on Galak-Z, which seems like an odd time to move a studio halfway across the world, from Seattle to Japan. I met up with Kazdal because I was interested in playing Galak-Z, seeing how it's changed since the last build we played at PAX, and what the move to Japan meant for the game's final few months of development.

What I got was a rare unfiltered look into the development process of an indie game and what makes its creator tick. Galak-Z was rough and unfinished, with bugs here and undubbed lines of dialogue there. It was simply the most recent build the team had been working on, with broken scripted moments and events that may well have been working a few days before. And it was, despite all of that, a hell of a lot of fun to play.

I sit on a tatami mat in 17-Bit's new office a dozen floors above downtown Kyoto and flit through space in Galak-Z's nimble fighter, while Kazdal takes notes on a yellow legal pad. He asks questions while I play, jotting down when the AI didn't behave to his liking or bits of dialogue didn't properly trigger. As I play, we talked about his take on game design, Galak-Z's inspiration, and the risks of moving 5000 miles a few months before shipping a game.

Galak-Z: roguelike meets Halo meets SHMUP

Galak-Z is a daring game, though it seems like a cocktail of surefire gaming favorites. It looks like an anime-inspired twin-stick space shooter roguelike with gorgeous Macross explosions and a fighter straight out of Battlestar Galactica. That hits about seven gamer demographics at once. And it is actually all of those things—except a twin stick shooter. Galak-Z's craft fires in the direction it's pointing, and it controls with a weighty sense of propulsion, like the sleek hovercraft of the WipEout series. Mastering the fighter's zero-g acrobatics to shoot enemies while weave through clouds of bullets takes real skill.

Dodge or die

Click the expand button to play animated gifs

Your shields drop fast. If you're not willing to run from fights, you will die. The ship has both forward and reverse thrusters that can whip it around in any direction, but you still have to account for momentum. Holding down a button to lock-on a flurry of expendable missiles can instantly devastate a tough enemy, but staying alive in the middle of a fight long enough to get that lock is playing a dangerous game. Galak-Z immediately makes you realize how easy twin-stick shooters are, by comparison. Enemies aren't there to be killed by the thousands for a high score.

"I'm not a big twin-stick shooter fan, so that was never really on the board," Kazdal says as I try to get the hang of the ship's controls. "If you're shooting a million enemies, it's a different kind of rush. But I like more thoughtful combat. You have a lot of responsibility in this game. The physics, just maneuvering in the environment is one thing, and lining up your shots, it's not easy. It's difficult to line up your shots. It's like this combat simulator in this zero-g space based on real physics."

AI plays a big part in Galak-Z's combat, which takes as much inspiration from Halo as it does R-Type or Gradius. Rather than a constant stream of enemies, Galak-Z's three AI factions (Imperials, pirates, space bugs) show up in small clusters that you can barrel into for short, tense firefights. They're tough, even on the lower difficulty levels. Galak-Z's difficulty ramps up through seasons structured like an anime TV show, with five episodes comprising each season. I made it about ten minutes through the first episode before dying to an enemy that I most definitely should have run away from to let my shields recharge.

"I hate that you can die in our fucking tutorial," Kazdal says as my ship explodes into space dust. "I've been fighting with the system designer about it. I think I'm going to take it out. The goal is to get you into the game as soon as possible, not to take you out."

I skip past the tutorial when I jump back into the first episode. Bits of un-voiced dialogue try to introduce me to my next mission. Like most contemporary roguelikes, Galak-Z uses procedural generation to vary its episodes each time you play them. An episode's objective won't change, but the environments and layouts of missions will.

Galak-Z is the first roguelike I've played that really and truly thrives on its combat. In Spelunky, Binding of Isaac, even Nuclear Throne, I feel like the goal is to survive, to progress, to make it as far as you can in a single run. That's what makes a roguelike a roguelike. Galak-Z is an action game first and foremost; the roguelike structure simply ensures that its missions will play out differently, one run to the next.

Kazdal takes notes as I play. The game's weapons dealer, Crash, who appears in random locations like Spelunky's shopkeeper, won't talk to me when I fly near him. Bug. He writes it down. An objective doesn't trigger when I finish the mission. He writes it down. Health packs are supposed to show up in the shop to offer mid-mission ship repairs, but they aren't rendering. Bug. Pad.

"This is game design," he says. "Why did this break now? So many things are so subtle." Kazdal spends as much time as he can just playing the game over and over again, partially looking for bugs and potential issues, but mostly scrutinizing every moment of a combat encounter. That's all done on feel. "You play a bunch and you play a bunch and you feel it out. I just get this really strong gut feeling, like this is moving in the right direction, but this guy is too hard, this is too unforgiving, this doesn't feel good. A game should feel good, you know? That's the bottom line."

Galak-Z obviously needs its last bits and pieces to be sewn together, and then it needs polish. But it's fun , even when it's not quite working right, even without most of its weapon upgrades at my fingertips and sound cues missing. As we talk about the game, I think about how many tiny details can dramatically affect the playability of a challenging game like this.

One bit of UI looks just a little too much like an arrow indicating the direction of an objective, but it's not. Kazdal is still thinking about and experimenting with how weapon upgrade unlocks will work. A small change there could totally alter the balance of tougher missions.

One of the pirate enemies looks just a bit too much like an Imperial, and I die, confused, when I lead him to a group of pirates and expect them to fight. When you pull this off, it's one of the most satisfying elements of Galak-Z's AI design. The factions will blow each other apart and leave you feeling like you've survived the battle at the end of Serenity.

Kazdal is director, lead artist and designer, but he's not a programmer. Whenever he feels like something's just a little bit off in a Galak-Z playtest, he has to communicate to the members of the team who actually write the code. "I'm like, it's not as fun as it used to be...something's wrong. I'll talk to the programmer who's like 'no no no, everything's fine,' and I'll say 'can you take a closer look?' And they'll be like 'you're right, [this enemy] used to back off at this time, and someone changed their reaction time from 2 seconds to 10 seconds.' Shit just breaks naturally. It's like ghosts in the machine. If you're not paying total attention, a lot of that shit could just go away, stuff we worked really hard on could just evaporate."