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Nidhogg's sword-fighting is exhilarating and exquisitely balanced. Against friends, its appeal is perhaps limitless.

White Night is a ‘narrative survival horror’ game that I first learned about earlier today. Two minutes later, I was as excited for its release as I am for just about any other game coming out this year. Not coincidentally, two minutes is the length of the most seductive trailers I’ve seen for a long time. We missed the video’s debut in October but now that the light of our lanterns has fallen upon it, I urge you to watch it without further ado. Think Alone in the Shadows and Fog of German Expressionism.

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Company drops new information about its launch plans at Valve's Dev Days summit.

Brad McQuaid is hoping to raise $800,000 to make Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen.

Its full name being ‘The Rapture Is Here And You Will Be Forcibly Removed From Your Home‘, but there’s about as much chance as that fitting into our post title space as there is my being clean shaven for any reason except a funeral. It’s an exploration game, created by one Connor Sherlock (and what a fabulous name that is), set during an unspecified end of the world event. You have twenty minutes to do what you will. Then everything ends.

It’s a little bit amazing.(more…)

The internet was ready to huff-and-puff and blow Telltale’s house down to find information on the next episode of their fable-inspired, Fables-derived adventure The Wolf Among Us. When a Reddit user created a popular thread to complain about the lack of information though, co-founder Kevin Bruner piped up with a rough release date. The second episode will hit during the first week of February.(more…)

Blackguards draws its combat rules from The Dark Eye, a pen-and-paper RPG more familiar to folks in Daedalic's native Germany than to us weaned on Dungeons and Dragons...

Remember when we told you about The Whispered World 2, and you were all like, “Yeah, it was quite good, but Sadwick was so bloody annoying.” And we were like, “No, but look! This seems to be about a brother and sister who aren’t Sadwick.” And you were like, “Well, okay, we’ll see, but that seems good news.” Well, we’ve seen. For reasons we cannot fathom, Daedalic seem to think it’s a good idea to send out press releases boasting that Sadwick will be playable in the new game.

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“Imagine a piñata filled with all your favorite games”, Concursion’s website suggests. Eager to comply, I closed my eyes and leaned back in my chair. A vision intruded like a mote into my mind’s eye – I saw Garrett hanging upside down from a tree as a masked figure beat him with a blackjack. Having disastrously misunderstood the concept of ‘piñata’, I turned my attention to a different image – a sandwich with my favourite games as the filling, the garnish and the bread. Great. Now I’m eating Garrett pastrami. Concursion aims to be just such a treat, combining genres into a single flowing experience. The video below shows top-down mazes, platforming, JRPG combat and side-scrolling shooting. That doesn’t cover any of my favourite games!

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We bare our Steam sale piles of shame for all to see, and share some recommendations in the process.

Evolve differs from other shooters in that each of its classes contain multiple characters. Today, we've got the first glimpse at one of them.

There are a lot of attempts to save Morrowind from the ravages of time, but while it’s not the prettiest, OpenMW somehow seems the most ambitious. It’s a complete “engine reimplementation” for the old RPG, replacing what was there before with a modern, cross-platform and open source core. If Skywind is a shallow attempt to replace the body of Morrowind with something new, shiny and gold-plated, then OpenMW is the equivalent project designed to augment the game’s withered guts.

A new video outlines the progress of the project as of v.0.28.(more…)

Christine Love, the creator of visual novels Analogue: A Hate Story and its sequel Hate Plus, is currently working on a new game called Ladykiller in a Bind. This new erotic visual novel focuses on "social manipulation and girls tying up other girls," Love wrote on her blog, though an interview with Polygon thankfully sheds more light on the game's manipulation hook.

"Really, dating sims are inherently about manipulating other people - pick the right dialogue choices based off what you think they expect, learn about their interests so you can give them perfectly tuned gifts, make decisions based off whether you'll impress them or not - but like to pass it off as being about romance. Well, *crag* that. You can still do that in Ladykiller in a Bind; we're just not going to pretend that it's anything other than manipulation. It'll have consequences."

Sex is another big aspect of not only the game, but relationships overall, Love argues, and she's striving to "get that right" in Ladykiller in a Bind. "Sex is a pretty crucial aspect of how people in relationships interact, not just some arbitrary achievement at the end of a romantic arc. So I feel like I really want to get that right ... and what's a better way to explore power dynamics than through kinky sex? Framing it in a BDSM context just makes it more explicit."

Ladykiller in a Bind is due some time in 2015 and could possibly be Love's last visual novel, she told Gameranx. The author admits she's becoming worried that she "focused too much on making the same sorts of games" and that she needs to take steps toward increasing her range as a developer.

Dancewall Remix is one-part Japanese game show, one part Kieron’s ghost. The former because it’s about fitting your form through the human-shaped holes in oncoming walls, albeit incorporeal ones. The latter because it’s about striking poses and pulling shapes in front of your computer. It does the latter using your webcam to track your movements, and it’s up on Steam Greenlight now. Check out the faintly terrifying trailer below.(more…)

Catlateral Damage delighted me when it first sauntered onto the scene and calmly wreaked havoc on everything we idiot humans hold dear last August. Its central thesis, the message it hoped to spread to future generations like so much toxoplasmosis? Cats are jerks, and if you leave them alone they will inevitably start breaking all of your things. But what are games if not the 21st Century’s great equalizer? And so, Catlateral Damage allowed you to take on the role of the cat. Revolutionary! But the game didn’t stop there. Oh no. It’s continued to evolve every day since, and now it’s resurfaced on Steam Greenlight with a whole host of new and upcoming features.

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Every day, in addition to The Daily Fix, we list off the day's biggest stories in this simple and easy to read format.

Double Fine's Broken Age is nearly upon us, available to general audiences on January 28. Kickstarter backers, however, get in early and start playing the game's first act today.

We've played through the opening of Double Fine's Kickstarter adventure. Here's what we think.

This artsy yet challenging game is as weird as its title suggests, and surprisingly clever as well.

Yasumi Matsuno's crowd-funding project has officially launched.

Following word that SimCity will no longer require an Internet connection to function, lead engineer Simon Fox has posted a lengthy explanation of why it took so long for developer Maxis to strip out that much-maligned feature.

"The original creative vision for SimCity was to make a game where every action had an effect on other cities in your region," Fox wrote. "As such, we engineered the game to meet this vision, setting up the player's PC (client) to communicate all of its information to the servers."

Fox then addresses claims made by Maxis general manager Lucy Bradshaw that the game simply couldn't function offline. "Lucy once said that Offline wouldn't be possible 'without a significant amount of engineering work,' and she's right. By the time we're finished we will have spent over [six and a half] months working to write and rewrite core parts of the game to get this to work."

To drive his point home, Fox explains that SimCity was designed from conception to periodically check in with the game's servers. This allows players' cities to communicate with one another (and transfer water, power, garbage and other utilities), as well as the entire SimCity universe. Removing this feature involves writing new code for the game to simulate this transfer of information and resources, which is why it's taken so long for Maxis to remove the online requirement.

Finally, Fox thanks SimCity players for their patience. "We know you want Offline play in SimCity and we are really happy that we are finally getting ready to deliver it to you."

Among bug fixes, new features, and modes, the upcoming patch will wipe characters and ships.

I want to talk about the “click”.

I saw the click just a few days ago, playing a game that the other player hadn’t ever played before. It’s a click you can see, like a switch flipping behind a person’s eyes. What’s better than seeing a person you like finding enjoyment in something? It’s amazing when you see it – really satisfying. Yes, even when that click goes click at a point when the other player is HAMMERING you into the ground. It’s also a click you can feel, and I want to talk about the times I’ve felt it – and I hope you’ll maybe share some of the times you’ve felt the click too.

Click to read on.(more…)

Change is coming. WoW's Ghostcrawler has officially joined the League of Legends developer.

We polled IGN followers on Twitter and Facebook to see if the upcoming Steam Machines interest them.

The full Banner Saga - not just the Factions PvP multiplayer - is available now through various digital distribution networks for PC and Mac. Raising the flag on the single-player hand-drawn Viking RPG saga will cost $20 (€22.99/£18.99).

Created by Stoic Studio, which includes ex-BioWare employees, along with a soundtrack by Austin Wintory, the game was an early success of the Kickstarter era, amassing over $700K in donations. Time to find out how faith paid off.

Indie developers Joar Jakobsson and James Primate have pulled back the curtain on Rain World, a slick-looking stealth platformer for Windows and Mac that seeks financial support via Kickstarter.

Rain World casts players in the role of a nomadic slugcat who searches an abandoned industrial complex for food before heading into hibernation. The world is fraught with danger, however, as fierce alien predators are also on the hunt, and the decaying environment presents a series of unique platforming challenges throughout.

Rain World seeks $25,000 in funding, and backers who pledge $10 or more will receive a downloadable copy of the game upon completion. Rain World is also up for community vote at Steam Greenlight.

Let’s put words to it: 2013 was the year of the roguelike; 2014 is the year of the survival game. Whether they’re still in alpha or not, this feels like DayZ and Rust’s moment, and there are a dozen games on the horizon hoping to get in on the fun. The Forest is one of them, putting a significantly different singleplayer horror spin on the foraging formula.

In an interview with Eurogamer, with Endnight Games’ creative director Ben Falcone, laid out some details of the game’s story and NPC AI.(more…)

The Banner Saga is a tantalising prospect. An independent release from a small team of former Bioware employees, it promises a rich story, a new world and intricate tactical combat. It also has the most stupendously attractive art I’ve seen in a long time. Impressed by the opening hours, I’ve since spent several days in the game’s icy company, I’ve deliberated long and hard to bring you my final verdict. Here’s wot I think.

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You can pre-order the sci-fi shooter from the creators of Left 4 Dead now, and be rewarded with the Monster Expansion Pack.