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Platinum Games is hiring new staff for an online action game, following the departure of several well known developers from the company.

Spotted by Tech4Gamers, the company listed a game designer role on its official website, stating that an online action game is in the works at the studio. The job listing lists some desired skills, including experience working on online action games as well as history in level design for online or “open field” games.

Platinum Games, which is currently working on Ninja Gaiden 4 alongside Team Ninja, has had a mixed run these past few years. Bayonetta 3, got a positive review from us, Babylon’s Fall was an astronomical failure, and senior developers have left, including but not limited to Hideki Kamiya.

Given Babylon’s Fall, the online action title listed in this job ad would be the studio’s second attempt at this style of game. Platinum Games has long struggled with financial success, even as its single player games have proven critically popular, garnering a loyal fanbase over the years. Games like Astral Chain, which were absolutely mint, never quite brought in the big bucks. The company’s desire to pursue online games makes business sense with this in mind, even if older Platinum Games fans see the sort of games they loved become less of a priority.

Given that Platinum is only hiring right now for this online action game, it’s safe to say we probably won’t see it any time soon. But still, it’s something to keep an eye out for. We know Platinum Games has several games cooking in the oven at the moment (Ninja Gaiden 4 included), so while recent years have marked a new era for Platinum, it’s clear the studio isn’t finished just yet.

Do you think making an online action game is the smart move for Platinum? Let us know below!

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Jump Over The Age has announced Signet City, a new narrative RPG that aims to bring a new perspective to its storytelling.

Coming from the team behind Citizen Sleeper’s acclaimed dice-based RPG, Signet City is a post-punk setting filled with ecological collapse and govenernment overreach, inspired by the 1980s in the UK and how it affected cities of the North.

A distinctive element is the art style, which draws upon black and white photography, screentoned manga and pen and ink drawing for its monochrome visuals.

The experience plays out in the first person, though, as you are both a parasite and host, choosing paths and actions to navigate the world. Once again, you’ll be rolling dice in a tabletop-inspired RPG system, though here the emotions of your host will affect the chances of success.

via Steam

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I am in the dusty basement of Manchester cathedral. On the streets above me, there are police searching for anyone who would challenge the state. Someone like me. I am supposed to be working on a weapon to use against these fascists. It isn’t a gun or a bomb, it is a machine that eats books.

At least, that’s what I should be doing; instead, I’m searching for the final letter between the members of a love triangle of 1950s academics. I’ve tracked down all their trashy novels and papers on temporal dynamics, but I want to find the last bit of saucy gossip. Smashing the state can wait a moment.

There is a lot I won’t tell you about TR-49, Inkle’s latest puzzle game. I don’t want to ruin any of the epiphanies that lie in wait for you. But it is a treat for anyone looking to get all up in the personal lives of some long-dead fictional authors.

I know there are many of you curtain twitchers out there.

When you first awaken in that dirty basement, you are told by a voice over the radio that within the machine in front of you is a book. You must find a way to extract it from the machine’s archives before the police close in. However, when you turn the machine on, and its orange monochroma screens fizzes into life, you discover that its brain has become garbled. Whatever directory existed to guide users between the different entries in its databanks is corrupted. It falls to you to remap the archive and identify all the logged sources.

The sources within the machine are disparate. There are research papers with titles like Astral Perplexities, science-fiction novels retelling Arthurian legends with bug-eyed aliens, academic journals writing scathing takedowns of other academic journals, and personal letters sent between authors. It’s like trying to make sense of the papers littering a doctoral student’s cluttered bedroom floor.

You navigate between files in the archive by entering four-digit codes into the machine, selecting letters and numbers on a rotary dial. If the code you enter matches the address of a file then the machine’s monochroma screen zooms out and skates across the archive to your document, moving like a library microfiche machine. I’ve been playing on both my desktop and Steam Deck, and entering codes into this fictional machine has a delightful physicality to it. As you roll your thumb to select the letters and numbers the thumbstick clicks beneath your hands like you’re spinning a safe tumbler. It evokes the mechanical nature of those early 1950s computers, back when transistors were measured in inches not nanometres.

When you first land on a file in the machine’s archive, its title and contents are a mystery, encrypted and illegible. There is, however, always a note from the archivist who uploaded the document. These short blurbs offer clues to its identity. They might say, for instance, that it’s a book that was reviewed in the tenth edition of a particular literary journal. Find the journal in the archive and the archivist’s note appended to that file might tell you that edition contains a particularly scathing review of ‘Miracles of Water’ (not a real book in the game). You can now return to the first entry and pair its four-digit code with ‘Micacles of Water’ in your in-game notebook. Once successfully paired, the title and the extract will reorganise themselves into legible text and you will have returned a little order to the machine’s scrambled internals. Identify all of the machine’s sources and you might just piece together the mystery behind the device’s purpose.

A note on spoilers. The screenshots in this review and the paragraph below reveal some answers to early game puzzles. But there is nothing here from beyond the first 30 minutes in the game.

As you reassemble the archives, you will learn the rules of the machine. Recognising, for instance, that each log identifier follows the structure of the game’s title: two letters, two numbers. These stand for the initials of the author or publication and the year of its publication. Enter RS-83, for example, and you will be taken to a copy of Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1883 book, Treasure Island. From that identifier format, and the clues you spot in the archivists’ notes, you can begin to make leaps of logic. An early discovery is the publishing schedule of a literary journal. Once you know its publisher code and how often a new edition was published, you can jump forward to find new editions, uncovering a trove of titles, author names, and biographical clues useful for identifying further sources.

While Inkle provides an in-game notebook that automatically records titles, log codes, and creates brief biographies of the authors you discover, I also found myself scrawling across the tea-spattered pages of my own workbook. “She remarried?”, “Died 1971 but daughter pubbed open letter. Must find it”, “GA-00 = God Almighty year zero???”. As you piece together the archive, you catch glimpses of a literary scene filled with friendships and rivalries, admirers and haters, geniuses and idiots. There are references to their arguments in the archivists’ notes or direct call outs in the extracts you decrypt. I didn’t just want to know the function of the machine or discover the elusive text demanded by the radio operator, I wanted to know everything I could about their lives.

While there are a multitude of authors in the archive, your constant companions are the archivists: Cecil Caulderly, Beatrice Dooler, and their daughter, Aliz. Their notes hint at what’s in the files, helping solve the TR-49’s puzzles, but they also reveal the strain the work puts on Cecil and Beatrice’s relationship, the heavy responsibility Aliz feels in following her parents’ footsteps, and tease at mysteries within their own family life. Despite being a game filled with dead texts, the archive you’re restoring is alive with the people that created the library and wrote the sources that fill its digital shelves.

With the entire archive open to be searched from the start of TR-49 there is a sense you have complete control of your investigations. You could just start entering four digit archive codes and there is a chance you may stumble across an entry deep in the machine’s memory. You decide what clues to follow, and so your path through TR-49’s archive may be quite different to mine.

That freedom is a double-edged sword, however. As you can investigate any corner of the archive at any time, throwing out author designations and publication years with abandon, you can stumble into entries sooner than Inkle may have intended. I found the first pieces of a puzzle and leaped to the correct conclusion before I had the full context of the parts I was slotting together. Solving the puzzle ended the game, triggering a dialogue between characters which discussed significant details of the story that hadn’t been touched on at that point in my playthrough.

I’m being vague, as I don’t want to spoil any of the mysteries of such a short game, but I had so fallen into the world Inkle had created that to find myself unceremoniously stumbling out of the other side was disappointing. After hitting the credits you are given the opportunity to return to an earlier point and try a different approach, which I did, but then hit another ending I wasn’t looking for. There are still mysteries to uncover and sources to identify in my game, but after hitting two endings, it’s difficult to regain that same headspace where I was lost in its world.

I say I’m done with TR-49, but I never did find that final letter. Maybe, I will give the game one more go. After all, is the game really complete if I don’t find out what she said to the spurned academic after he wrote that journal article that was derided in the Literary Review?

This review was based on a review build of the game provided by developers Inkle.

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Right, if you were hoping to play a single copy of the same game online across two Nintendo Switch 2s, it appears you’re out of luck. Nintendo’s rolled out its new Virtual Game Cards to the classic Switch via an update that lays the groundwork for the new console, and it’s reportedly gotten rid of the ability play the same digital copy online on two systems simulataneously.

This was first identified by folks on ResetEra, who clearly downloaded the Switch software version 20.0.0 that Ninty’s just released and immediately decided to have some fun with a mate. The change itself is seemingly a bit of murky one – the method it’s nixed was viewed by some players as a cheeky “loophole” and its striking from the record looks to just be down to the different way that Game Cards handle Switch games.

Basically, what people had previously been doing in order to play Switch games online with a mate is logging into the game owner’s account on two different Switch consoles – a ‘primary’ one and a ‘secondary’ one. The primary one would see the game owner set up their copy of the game, then hand over to the second player who’d sign in to their own account and still be able to fire up the instyalled game to play online.

Then, the game owner would turn on the ‘secondary’ Switch, log into their account to install that same game, then be able to play it online. Boom, two people on two Switches playinmg the same digital copy of a game online together, via a method that’s a lot easier to do than it to explain without twisting your tongue and tonsils together.

However, with the deployment of these Virtual Game Cards, it’s reportedly no longer possible to follow that and play online, because the Game Cards treat digital games like a single cartrige. However, simultaneous offline play looks like it’s still on the table, even if it’ll require you to set your Switch as offline via a new Online License option in the settings.

Naturally, folks who love a good bit of online play with a mate and don’t want to have to buy two copies of a game are pretty unhappy with Nintendo having gotten rid of something they’d been doing on the reg just before it drops its new console. The word “downgrade” is being chucked about in the thread I linked earlier

Now, the Switch 2 isn’t here yet, so there’s a chance Nintendo sees the backlash and comes up with a solution – or at least makes it clear whether features like Gameshare, which has also been rolled out with this Switch update and currently will let you play some games online together via local wireless, will become a fully-blown catch-all replacement for the method that’s been taken off the table.

Were you regularly using this method to share your Switch library and play online with your mates, partner, or Grandma? Let us know below!

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I like a factory simulation that fervently embraces the basic evilness of factory sims, these games about wrapping a smoking, clanking straitjacket around a realm of organic colours and unsuspecting resource deposits. Or in the case of Asema, around the wonders of the interstellar abyss, and whatever life it contains. “You are old, one of many,” goeth the blurb. “There may be an infinite amount of your kind in the cosmos, older than stellar dust. But for you, the only space that matters is the one you can silence.”

Gosh, that’s a sentence, isn’t it? Up there with “Sins of a Solar Empire” in terms of billowing nihilism. What else have you got to offer, Asema? You say you’re replacing our beloved conveyor belts with huge railguns, so as to launch resource packages between factory nodes suspended in a 2D gravitational simulation? Yes, I think the grasping starbarons who read Rock Paper Shotgun would enjoy hearing about this.

In Asema, you slowly build up a relatively freeform logistical network that reaches across moons and asteroids. You kick off with one drone in the rich shallows of the inner solar system, then extend your reach via unlockable technologies into the outer void.

The big problem is gravity, a “unique environmental puzzle” for any Kuiper Belt magnate trying to optimise their loading bay configuration. “Your heavy machines will naturally drift toward the nearest gravity wells, such as moons,” explains the Steam page. What’s more, “anything can become a gravity well when it has enough mass – even one of your own machines.”

If this is a daunting prospect, there are waterwings of sorts for people who can’t do slingshot maneuver equations in their heads. “You don’t need to calculate orbital math or plot trajectories,” the devs continue. “You just need to manage your economy. Build and power dedicated Focus arrays (computational anti-gravity) to keep your grid stable, counter the pull of the moons and gravity wells and keep your factories perfectly positioned.”

This does sound like it could ultimately rob the idea of its complexity, to be honest, but there is the implicit mid-to-late game prospect of power-outs that send your entire factory network spiralling into the nearest black hole. Yes, Asema has those too.

There’s a demo on that Steam page. The full game is slated for release later this year. If you’d rather shoot explosive shells out of those railguns, maybe give In The Black a look instead – it’s a space combat game from former X-Wing and Mechwarrior devs that also features a Newtonian physics simulation.

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Mario Kart World started development back in 2017 as a game for the original Switch, but ended up becoming a Switch 2 one because it devs felt the tech boost was necessary to deliver the world bit of it. Said devs have also offered us some more info about its most important character – Cow.

Yep, that’s right. Mario, Luigi, Bowser, Peach, they can all go do one. Moo Moo Meadows cow is the king of these streets, with an aura so powerful she can momentarily stop even the most outraged of Ninty fans from being unhappy about prices or worrying that they might not be able to make the switch to Switch 2 right away.

These tidbits and more come from a new interview Nintendo’s put out with Mario Kart World producer Kosuke Yabuki, programming director Kenta Sato, art director Masaaki Ishikawa, planning team lead Shintaro Jikumaru, and music lead Atsuko Asahi that so long it’s been divided into four parts. So, make sure you go grab your beverage of choice first if you plan on reading it all in one go.

We were thinking about what to do for the next Mario Kart game even during the development of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, and we began prototyping in March 2017,” Yabuki explained, “It was at the end of that year when we officially started work on it as a project. I felt that in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, we were able to perfect the formula that we’d been following in the series up to that point, where players race on individual courses. That’s why, this time, we wanted the gameplay to involve players driving around a large world, and we began creating a world map like this.”

“When we were developing for the Nintendo Switch system,” Sato explained further on in the chat, “it was difficult for us to incorporate everything we wanted, so we were always conscious of what we were giving up in return. We discussed things like toning down the visuals, lowering the resolution, and we even considered dropping the frame rate to 30 fps in some cases. It was a tough situation.

“Yabuki-san first brought [the idea of switching to Switch 2] up around 2020. Back then, we already had an idea of the next system’s expected specs, but it wasn’t until a bit later that we actually received working development units. Until then, we just had to proceed with development based on provisional estimates.”

“Of course, the graphics needed to be more detailed [due to being on Switch 2],” Ishikawa added, “But like Sato-san, I also felt like it was outweighed by the sense of relief. From the beginning, the designers were saying they wanted to make the art richer, so I thought we could achieve that now.”

The devs also explained how the driving Cow came to be, and offered a glimpse into her…er…mindset.

“Each new Mario Kart game features new characters to race with, but since we added so many to the previous game, we wondered where we could go from there,” Ishikawa explained, “And then one of the designers came up with [a] silly sketch of Cow cruising along, and I thought to myself, “This is it!” (Laughs) So that’s when we realized the course surroundings actually contained a lot of untapped resources.”

MK World’s devs call these environmental decoration characters who’ve gotten behind the wheel “NPC drivers”, with Yabuki noting that “it’s pretty funny to see a four-legged Cow holding onto motorcycle handlebars with her front hooves.”

Though, you shouldn’t worry, as Ishikawa insisted that he’s pretty sure Cow is “still in touch with her animal nature” due to the pose she assumes when she jumps, and that she’s “actually a pivotal character in the Mario Kart series” as a legacy of giving the devs ideas for other characters.

Will Cow become a pivotal character in your life once you get your hands on Mario Kart World? Let us know below!

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It took a while to get going, but the Nintendo Direct has started firing out some exciting new announcements, and for Switch-owning Final Fantasy fans, the appearance of Final Fantasy Resonance, an all-new HD-2D pixel-art entry in the series, should keep them very happy indeed.

Final Fantasy Resonance is launching on 22nd October for PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch and Switch 2, and PC.

Final Fantasy Resonance is set in the world of Lapis, a place beset by evildoers, that lies on the edge of annihilation. You play as Rain, a knight of Gransheld, who must travel across the world taking down monsters and badguys in turn-based combat. There’s some clear Octopath Traveller vibes going on, but this also leans more heavily on 3D areas and 2D sprites, to give it its own feel.

You can also call upon Visions – Final Fantasy stars from other games, including the iconic Cloud Strife – to help you in battle, unleashing powerful moves and abilities as you do. These seem to take the form of full CGI cutscenes, which might feel a bit odd, but I guess we’ll have to wait and see how it turns out.

Either way, you won’t have to wait all that long to get your hands on this one. It’s just four months away!

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Like the summonable, energy-shooting ghoul I cultivated on my spaceship’s zombie farm, Romeo is a Dead Man is a bit of a grower. After an iffy start that exhibits plenty of Grasshopper Manufacture weirdness but not much Grasshopper Manufacture charm, its disparate parts do eventually coalesce, forming a lean yet muscular hack ‘n’ slash with a playful talent for mixing up its mediums.

God, so many mediums. The tale of Romeo – small town cop turned cyborg samurai, enlisted to hunt multiple space-time variants of obviously evil ex Juliet – is told not just through Unreal Engine cutscenes, but also animated pulp comics, stop motion, and 16-bit pixel art, and that’s just in the first half hour. It gets eclectic while you’re actually playing, too: bloody melee combat remains the star but it’s rarely long before you’re dragged off to do some 3D puzzling, or to upgrade your stats and items by playing arcade and mini-games.

It’s unfortunate that, in the early stages, not all of it lands. Such variety initially appears to paint a surface-level veneer of innovation over the action, which itself starts slow, only pitting you against shambling undead and the occasional powered-up meat monster. Neither does it help that the plot is largely stakeless multiverse nonsense, adopting a blandly literal interpretation of Suda51’s recurring Kill the Past theme and repeatedly contradicting itself with cheerful ‘Don’t worry about it’ handwaves. Game, I want to worry about it! Worrying is just caring with an extra syllable!

Stick with it, though, and Romeo is a Dead Man develops a genuine capacity to surprise. In part, because it knows when to commit to the bit. There’s an extended sequence halfway through that dips into survival horror, and instead of merely taking away Romeo’s ability to swing a sword, the entire game shifts into a claustrophobic over-the-shoulder perspective while introducing stealth and Resident Evil-style puzzle elements that never reappear anywhere else. That’s a bonkers amount of investment for a single switch-up. I don’t want to spoil the latter stages, like I’m apparently willing to do for the horror bit, but these also run further with the cross-media aspect, skillfully relieving some of the more dramatic moments with high-effort swerves into absurdist, visually diverse comedy.

Also, y’know, it’s a pretty good action game. Combat recovers from its weak start as well, both trusting you to uncover the nuances of its combo swishing and gradually enlarging the menagerie of angry flesh flappers – mostly in a sensible order of challenge – to test what you’ve learned. Romeo is no Dante or Raiden, agility-wise, but what his fighting style lacks in flashiness is more than made up for in tangible, satisfying weight. Even the default sword, perhaps the most purely functional weapon among an arsenal of power fists and sci-fi spears, cuts through crowds and bisects behemoths with a moreish chunkiness. Romeo can also wield guns, though I ended up having enough fun with the blades that I only whipped out my shotgun when necessary. As in, needing to shoot things that were either a) flying out of reach or b) liable to explode in my face upon thwacking them.

The relatively lengthy wind-ups and recovery times do require more than a measure of timing, and bosses will happily teach a harsh lesson in it. But simultaneously, Romeo is a Dead Man is barely ever about passively waiting for an opening. There’s no blocking or parrying, and successful strikes fill a blood gauge that lets you lash out with more powerful special moves – which also partially refill your health. All of this conspires to thrust you into highly aggressive, excitingly pacey brawls, where taking some hits might be worth it if you can fill that blood bar in return. Dodging, too, often feels like less of an evasive technique and more an offensive manoeuvre for shifting into the optimal backstabbing angle.

None of this is especially groundbreaking. But it seems like before you can start layering on novelty cinematics and genre juggling, it’d be important to for your action game to have good action. And Romeo is a Dead Man’s fighty parts are meaty, frantic, and terribly good fun.

Truth be told, it’s also not just the most ambitious of Dead Man’s silly asides that can extract a grin. Between missions, I always enjoyed returning to the FBI’s spaceship hub (long story), where – in exchange for parting with the third dimension – you can chat, trade, and upgrade with weirdo agents and amusingly out-of-place family members. Here, the ‘Sure, whatever’ humour works better than in main story beats; nobody questions the logic of growing allied zombies like carrots so you can call them up in later battles, which makes it funnier when you yank one out of the dirt to triumphant fanfare. And there’s something both sweet and entertaining about having Romeo’s mum, settled inside the ship’s galley, cook buff-granting katsu curries using ingredients you’ve found drifting in space. As Yuri Gagarin said, “I saw how beautiful our planet is, and also how many jars of cumin are just floating around up there.”

I wasn’t quite so happy in Sub-Space, the loosely Tron-ish alternate dimension that most missions have you poking around for keys and light navigational puzzles. Its aesthetic, that of a Zen garden as built in a heavily shader-modded Minecraft, is quite nice. But whereas the rest of the game got better with time, the appeal of yet another dive into Sub-Space only waned. For one thing, a lot of these sections just go on far, far too long, slowing down progress in a way that becomes ever more incongruous with the impetus-heavy combat. For another, going there utterly knackered my framerates.

PC performance, in general, lurches around like a Regent’s Park pedalo in a Caribbean storm. At what is usually an easy 1440p, my RTX 3090 – running Ultra settings with Quality-level DLSS 4 – couldn’t reliably hold 60fps, with drops to 30fps and sometimes even lower in some Sub-Space areas. I also tried the Steam Deck, using the lowest possible settings plus FSR upscaling, and that fell deep into the twenties too – even in real space. This is thankfully not a repeat of the No More Heroes PC port, as you do at least get proper mouse/keyboard support and, evidently, those custom graphics options. Still, it’s no smooth runner either.

Whether that’s a dealbreaker, I’ll leave between you and your rig. If you can run it, though, Romeo is a Dead Man provides smiles, surprises, and memorable swordfights, especially once it warms up. It probably won’t go down as an all-timer in Grasshopper Manufacture’s ouvre, and in 20 years’ time, I doubt YouTube will be recommending me Romeo videos as often as it currently does Killer7’s Russian Roulette scene. But that’s fine: quality slashing and organic zombie gardening can still count for plenty.

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