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Daylight is the opposite of nightlight. Nightlights are meant to keep you safe while tucked into bed in a dark, silent house. They're the glimmer of assurance that no, there's nothing hiding in your closet, under the bed or behind that door.

Daylight's purpose is to drive you to paranoia, anxiety and fear. It's meant to make you think that yes, there is something behind that door - and that wall. And under that scaffolding. And down that hallway. Everywhere, really.

If the first trailer doesn't spook you, try the second one below. And tonight, maybe leave the lights on.

Daylight is due out on April 29 for PC and PS4. [Image: Atlus]

Georgia governor Nathan Deal today signed a bill that will grant local video game developers $25 million in tax credits, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.

The legislation, part of House Bill 958, will give tax breaks to Hi-Rez Studios, Tripwire Interactive, and other Georgia-native development studios. The state previously courted developers in 2008 with the similar Entertainment Industry Investment Act, which provided a 20% tax credit to local film, TV and game development studios.

[Image: City of Atlanta]

The follow-up to 2012’s hit feels like more of the same, but is that a bad thing?

Each Monday, Chris Livingston visits an early access game and reports back with stories about whatever he finds inside. This week, space-based gathering, crafting, and dying in Space Engineers’ new survival mode.

There’s a large red and white spaceship, its front end crumpled after what must have been a spectacular nosedive. There’s a tiny yellow space engineer inspecting the wreck, armed with only a handful of tools. There’s the inky blackness of outer space, the comforting glow of a distant sun, and an asteroid field of stationary rocks, chock-full of ore and minerals to mine. As the astronaut floats there, enchanted by the view, he notices a few of the asteroids — quite a few, in fact — have given up waiting for him to visit them and taken a more proactive stance. They’re delivering themselves to him. Well, at him, anyway. In an awful hurry.

… [visit site to read more]

In addition to the game's cancellation, 56 people have been laid off.

Alpha gameplay footage of Road Redemption shows off the high-speed brutality players can enact on fellow motorcycle-riders on a strip of desert highway. We're not sure if the sound effects are final, but that thump when the player hits an enemy rider is already quite satisfying.

Road Redemption is a spiritual successor to the Road Rash series, and was funded on Kickstarter in May with $173,803. It's due out for PC, Mac and Linux from developer DarkSeas Games, and the alpha is available to play now for $40 (or $70 for a special edition) via the game's official site.

Capy's gorgeous marriage of Zelda and Dark Souls was one of PAX East's best.

The realm of Final Fantasy XIV is reborn on PlayStation 4 to kick off another new week of new game and movie releases.

Tell us what you want to know about the suggested Disney Infinity and Avengers crossover.

Every morning, my inbox contains at least one email pointing in the direction of a less complicated and/or complex Dwarf Fortress. There was a time when I believed in the dream of an approachable Dwarf Fortress with a friendly interface but I’m starting to think that even the slightest simplification invalidates the comparison. Dwarf Fortress is complexity, of simulation and control, and the games that do have something in common with it often have far more in common with more traditional management sims or roguelike adventures. KeeperRL, sensibly and pleasingly, plays more like top-down Dungeon Keeper than Dwarf Fortress with the edges smoothed and the corners cut. The alpha is available and crowdfunding has begun.

… [visit site to read more]

I’ll tell you what’s in space: a big load of nothing. Oh I’m sure it’s very pretty and makes you think and all that, but I’ll find my abyssal mirror in the ocean thank you very much. You know what’s down there? Iron snails, radiant deathworms, giant woodlice, immortal jellyfish, and colossal creatures we discover by finding bits of them in other monsters’ stomachs. So naturally I’m pretty jazzed for Unknown Worlds to plumb watery depths in Subnautica.

The Natural Selection 2 devs over the weekend pulled a virtual gold tasselled rope to open digital red velvet curtains and reveal the open-world oceanic build-o-explorer, and it looks quite pleasant.

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current mood: Optimisticcurrent song: Lou Reed – NYC Man

It’s a Monday and you’re back at work, but outside your window the sun is shining. You know you’re going to go into it later and have an adventure, but for now things aren’t so bad. You have friends here. You have music playing. Boots had your favourite sandwich in stock for your £3.29 lunchtime meal deal. And there’s a collection of in-development games to browse, to help you get excited about the future.

Dreams! Pilotable spider robots! Heists!

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Sean Hogan recently released a demo for Even The Ocean, the game that he is developing with artist/writer Jon Kittaka following the release of the marvellous, mysterious and melancholy Anodyne. The fruits of a cursory glance suggest that the game is a lo-fi platformer with survival and crafting elements – a genre most of us are intimately familiar with, whether through exploring Terraria or bounding between the stars. The first glass doesn’t reveal Even The Ocean’s depths though – it’s actually two games in one, a narrative adventure and a parkour platformer with a central energy conservation mechanic. Take a look. Have a play.

… [visit site to read more]

So it was promised, so shall it be. Chris Roberts said he’d lift the lid on Star Citizen‘s long-awaited dogfighting module in April, and now here we are. Previously, a sleepy hangar was The Final Frontier, but below you can watch Roberts take one giant leap into space’s infinite, gleaming black. It looks absolutely beautiful, but yeeeeeeeah this is still a very, very early game.

… [visit site to read more]

Road Rash spiritual successor Road Redemption wants it all, and it wants it now over a long period of time in which it will slowly but surely build out its feature list, eventually culminating in an open, procedural United States full of gangs, vehicular mayhem, and presumably roads. For now, however, you can scream down a desert highway while bludgeoning men with shovels and the like. The American dream, in other words, if you’re a lunatic or a very frustrated gardener.

… [visit site to read more]

I don’t know how to feel about Bound By Flame. I mean, it looks spectacularly competent in all ways, which I realize is something of an oxymoron. Let me explain: it’s swollen – nearly pregnant – with pomp and bombast, but I can’t really see what makes it truly special or standout. Developer Spiders’ previous somewhat comically titled role-player, Mars: War Logs, was the same way, except then it turned out to be not so good. If nothing else, though, Bound By Flame‘s combat looks pretty good. You can watch it below. Also, I just skimmed my own paragraph and saw the phrase “pregnant spiders,” and now I need to go find a new brain because this one is ruined.

… [visit site to read more]

Cracking whips and outwitting Frenchmen - a fond look back at one of the greats from LucasArts.

A Homeworld Remastered Collector's Edition is prepping for landing, developer Gearbox announced at its PAX East 2014 panel today. The special edition will include, among other things, a replica statue based on the game's Mothership, pictured above. The figure stands at more than 12 inches tall, is USB-powered, and lights up.

Gearbox polled fans last month asking what they'd like to see in a Collector's Edition, and it looks like people chose "big spaceship." Can't say we blame them. [Image: Sierra Entertainment]

Gearbox and Relic plan on bringing a gorgeous depiction of space.

Papers Please but with cyborg limb repair. Blurring the line between human and elevator. MMO burial.

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Sundays are for whatever you please. Don’t let me tell you what you can and can’t do. You’re free and the world is your lobster.

• Richard Cobbett’s Patreon work is getting into swing. This past week he posted a video review of Heroine’s Quest, before doing something a little more unusual and writing a personal piece in Hearthstone, Anxiety And Me.

… [visit site to read more]

Always Sometimes Monsters doesn't play, look, or read as particularly human. Vagabond Dog's story about traveling across the United States to win back your first love, built in GameMaker, is a heady brew of visual novels like Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward and SNES-era Squaresoft role-playing games. Squat, big-eyed cartoon characters wander about squat cartoon college dorms and warehouses having lengthy conversations in a lackadaisical but outsized tone, like a less scatological Kevin Smith movie. Vagabond's new PAX East 2014 demo impresses because of how a deeply human game peeks through these layers of artifice.

"You can play as any race, gender, sexual orientation," Justin Amirkhani, creative director and writer on Monsters, explained. "People treat you differently based on who you are, what you look like, and whether they have personal prejudices or not."

​The demo demonstrates this philosophy well, but takes time to warm up. In a clever fourth wall-breaking sequence, Amirkhani and his partner Jake Reardon actually appear in the game, explaining why the player I'd get to control would be randomly selected. As a failsafe making sure my decisions reflected my own personality and prejudices, it worked nicely. The lovesick character picked for me came close to the mark: a white, heterosexual male writer. His great love? A Hispanic woman named Gina.

From the show floor at PAX East 2014, Vlambeer has unleashed an update that adds co-operative multiplayer to Nuclear Throne. The game is currently available via Steam Early Access for $12.99.

"We launched it about an hour ago, I'm uploading it from the show right now. We're updating the website to make sure it's ready. The goal for now was two players, and we're looking into the possibility of more than two players," Vlambeer's Rami Ismail tells Joystiq. "At this point two players is so crazy and insane that we're not so sure it's a good idea to have four."

Ismail says that his team thought Nuclear Throne would be a fun single-player experience, but the community clamored for a multiplayer component.

"We've been live streaming, we've been really open about our development, but we were worried about multiplayer. Since it was such a big deal though, we decided to do it between the live streams we did. When it was done, we realized it was good. Local multiplayer for two people. The build will be available in just a little while." [Image: Vlambeer]

When I ask Firaxis lead designer why the studio decided to take the Civilization series to space with Civilization: Beyond Earth - just announced at PAX East - his answer is simple: "Why not?" Designer and programmer Anton Strenger offers a little more meat. "I think that one of the things that space allows us to do as designers, and for the artists as well, is to get free from a historical context." Civilization has always been tied to human history, but Beyond Earth allows it to branch out in a fresh new direction (even if that direction isn't completely new to Firaxis).

"We, as designers, were free to come up with really fun new gameplay systems that didn't really make sense in a more historical game, or even like a fantasy game." Specifically, Strenger mentions one of Beyond Earth's new tactical elements, the orbital layer, which allows players to launch satellites over a planet, influencing the events below. Firaxis' artists had a field day creating satellite designs, says Strenger. Producer Lena Brenk chimes in, "Yeah, that was amazing to see the artists. Usually we have historic reference that they're working from, and right now they get to invent a world, basically, an alien planet in the future."

That's not to say, however, that Firaxis is just making everything up. "It's really important to us that the player be able to draw a line of plausibility through the entire experience," says lead designer Will Miller, "we want the suspension of disbelief maintained throughout." Beyond Earth begins around 200 to 250 years in the future, he says, and science-fiction fans will recognize plausible concepts like like ships that fly at sublight speeds and cryogenic stasis. "But where you end up is quite different, so we're going to draw that line from where we are now to these sort of post-human evolutions." You won't be starting NASA from scratch, in other words, but Beyond Earth starts in a believable place: Humanity travels to a new planet. The question is how you choose to master it.

Tango Gameworks' upcoming survival horror game needs to start saying more about itself.

Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth was just announced at developer Firaxis' panel at PAX East. It's not a sequel to Alpha Centauri (those rights are owned by EA), but 2K Games is finally giving fans the spiritual successor to the sci-fi strategy game they've been constantly nagging Firaxis about for over 10 years.

The elephant in the room has been tackled right up front at the PAX East panel happening right now. Firaxis' Will Miller, who is lead designer on the Beyond Earth project, said, "The heart and soul [of Alpha Centauri] lives at Firaxis. For all the fans of Alpha Centauri, this is the game we've made for you."

The 20-year-old strategy series continues with a new take on humans colonizing other worlds.

This is news worth working on a weekend for. Firaxis have announced Civilization: Beyond Earth, a spiritual successor to Alpha Centauri. There’s an announcement trailer below, which doesn’t show any of the game but does set the scene.

… [visit site to read more]

Ever tell ghost stories around a campfire? Or recount your life's adventures at a party? Storium by Stephen Hood aims to recreate those experiences, with the Internet acting not only as your audience, but your collaborators. You begin by choosing a world with a unique setting and history, and from there, create your own tale to tell within it. Other players can then join in on your story, contributing their own characters and actions.

The game is focused on writing, but mixes in game mechanics such as cards representing characters, items, obstacles and goals to keep players focused and the story moving forward. Think of it like a session of Dungeons & Dragons where the focus is less on killing monsters and more on acting out a scene.

The game has already been funded via Kickstarter, though more funding means more worlds for users to play in. So far, Storium is supporting worlds and settings like Bram Stoker's Dracula, a Red Dawn-like world where Russians invade the US, post-WW2 Los Angeles, and a near future where criminals and law enforcement alike alter their genes to become superhuman. There are no solid release windows or platforms given on the game's Kickstarter page, but it is advertised that players will be able to access Storium "with just your computer, tablet, or smartphone." [Image: Storium / Stephen Hood]

Are you at PAX East this weekend? If so, you might want to stop over at the Unreal Engine Epic Booth #1447 to check out the first ever tournament for Tiny Brains developer Spearhead Games' upcoming Project Cyber. The game is a 3-on-3 take on soccer, with a distinct cyberpunk flair and aesthetic.

Spearhead has intimately tied Project Cyber to livestreaming; the studio streams the game's development weekdays on their Twitch channel, takes suggestions on features to implement from their audience, and features in-game livestreaming as well. Those who tune in for a match of Project Cyber can even trigger in-game events with their votes, according to studio co-founder Malik Boukhira. "The possibilities for this technology are endless, and we'll be soliciting more thoughts about it at the Unreal Engine Epic booth," he said in a press release.

There's no expected release date for Project Cyber, but even if you're not at PAX East, you could potentially get in on the action early by requesting one of Spearhead Games' free Steam keys via their website. Thus far, more than 50,000 people have requested such keys. [Image: Spearhead Games]