Independent developer ChillBase has released the first major update for OneState after its full release this spring.

Their popular online social roleplaying added new content with brothers / actors Daniel and Louis Moncada, famous for their role as “The Cousins” from Breaking Bad.

The new 1.1 update “Under Pressure” adds a new “Dos Caminos” storyline that follows both brothers in-game as legendary criminals that open the door to a more dangerous side of the city. 

“I’m excited to join forces with OneState, the open world Social RolePlay immersive mobile game. Now you can drop in the LA style city map with my skin character and become one of the most influential figures in town,” said actor Daniel Moncada. “The question is do you want to be the friend of The Cartel? – See you soon!”

Louis Moncada added, “I’m very excited to join the ChillBase family on this amazing game. Can’t wait for everyone to see the final product. It’s amazing!”

ChillBase founder and CEO Matvei Lipatnikov also said, “We’re constantly expanding OneState and creating new opportunities for players. This update adds a whole new layer of advanced gameplay for our clans and gangs.”

To hype up the big update, ChillBase hosted a two-day offline event at Santa Monica Pier in Los Angeles where they had street artist Chris Riggs transform a vehicle into a large-scale art installation inspired by the game’s universe. The car was showcased at the RASA Festival, and got a lot of attention.

The second day visitors were invited to participate in an interactive detective quest. By scanning a QR code, they got entered into a digital experience where they could choose their own character role just like in OneState.

After this players had to search for clues around and inside the vehicle, and upon solving the mystery, they got a Gold Ticket that can be redeemed for a custom OneState burger at Pier Burger, located directly on the pier.

Here’s a rundown on the new content, plus a new trailer:

The Dos Caminos update stands apart as a focused cultural moment built around two instantly recognizable brothers, two connected in-game paths, and a new layer of criminal storytelling.

Version 1.1 provides the stage with the addition of the Moncada brothers today. Developed together with Rocks production, the collaboration brings Luis and Daniel Moncada into OneState as figures players can recognize, follow, and build a story around.

The first release of the Dos Caminos update provides players the chance to unlock both brothers and two exclusive outfits: Grim Specialist and Silent Professional.

Luis Moncada and Daniel Moncada arrive in OneState as legendary criminal-world figures and recruiters, opening the door to a more dangerous side of the city. Their presence is designed to feel narrative-first as they are introduced as characters who invite players into a world of pressure, loyalty, ambition, and high-value opportunity.

Version 1.1 “Under Pressure” also introduces Rocks Production, a new clan-level production system built around synthetic diamonds as a high-value black market commodity.

Players move through an end-to-end cycle that begins with raw material extraction in the Laboratory, continues through multi-stage processing and equipment chains, and ends with cooperative delivery runs across the city.

For the first time in OneState, clans receive a complete production economy that functions as its own operational vertical. The Laboratory becomes a shared workspace that multiple gangs operate near one another, creating tension without direct competition for the same resources. Operators manage equipment, control queues, monitor efficiency, and track performance through public clan dashboards, member leaderboards, and 14-day history. Success becomes visible through payouts and the progression of the clan’s workspace, where storage changes as production grows.

Delivery turns production into risk. Up to four players can take part in cooperative transport runs, with the host carrying the cargo and teammates riding together in the vehicle. The more batches a crew decides to move in a single run, the longer the route, the higher the exposure, and potential rewards. “Under Pressure,” coordination becomes the difference between profit and collapse.

The update also introduces the Thalmer Trading Platform, a new city landmark and OneState’s first proper player-to-player marketplace. Set inside a skyscraper with the atmosphere of a high-stakes business expo, the platform allows players to trade vehicles and weapons directly with one another. Ownership now carries resale value, turning vehicles, equipment, and market timing into part of the city’s wider economy.

For serious gangs, Syndicate Contracts add another layer of clan activity. These special assignments ask gangs to deliver high-demand goods and vehicles in exchange for Honor Points and major payouts. The system creates new strategic pressure inside clans, were members decide what they are willing to sacrifice for collective progress and where gang hierarchy is shaped by contribution to shared goals.

Beyond the criminal-business vertical, Version 1.1 expands cooperative role-play with the Mobile Med Unit, the first two-player cooperative job for the medic faction. During a shift, two paramedics deliver medical supplies to local pharmacies and respond to emergency reanimation calls across the city, earning bonus rewards for saving lives along the way. The result is a more active, human side of city service gameplay: two medics, one ambulance, and a city full of trouble.

Players will also discover three new motorcycles that will be available for the first time in this update. Each designed around a different fantasy of movement through the city: extreme speed, timeless classic style, and rugged adventure spirit. Available through in-game events and the official website, the motorcycles support full customization at Tuning Shops, giving players a new angle on the city and a new form of self-expression on the road.

OneState recently launched its full 1.0 version globally on both iOS (via the App Store) and Android (via Google Play).

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It is, as I write this, one year to the day since I and two fellow, newly-orphaned siblings finished the process of auditing, packing, and clearing out our childhood home. The final task: enduring the fearsome rattling and suspect braking of our dad’s neglected Renault Megane, just long enough for it to sputter to someone mad enough to buy it off us. The irony, that this clanking full-stop on the end our bereavement’s lengthy administrative aspect could so feasibly kill me, was not lost.

That process, from the last beep of hospital machinery to the unhaggled exchange of French scrap metal, took 11 months, so it’s good that A Storied Life: Tabitha condenses its own house clearance to just a couple of hours. Posthumously asked by an elderly friend to give her cottage a tidy, you spend half your time in A Storied Life rummaging through her things in a kind of reverse Unpacking, selecting which bric-a-brac to throw away, which to keep, and which – with her blessings – to auction off for cash. The other half is spent taking inspiration from the objects you’ve kept to rewrite her water-damaged memoirs, a bittersweet series of word puzzles that still achieves a certain warmth – provided you can come to terms with the peculiar writing style.

At the very least, I enjoyed this a lot more than the early demo I played last year. That laid the logical issues of A Storied Life’s junk-into-words concept very bare indeed: there was no way of predicting the memoir material you’d get from any given object, even the ones with seemingly the most sentimental value, so progressing to the next room often meant being forced to write contradictory, sometimes grammatically criminal nonsense. She always LOVED her husband, did old Ms. Kettlewell. He was NEVER around for the childrens’ LABRATORY.

The finished game can still slip into this, to its detriment – in most contexts the Fridge Poetry gibberish might raise a laugh, but this is putting words in the mouth of the recently deceased. At the same time, ending up with a legible page-turner does feel a lot more doable than in that demo, with running out of ‘good’ words a rarer event. And, while this is achieved through further gameifying the process of item-packing, an approach I previously found uncomfortable in the narrow confines of a vertical slice, the addition of capital-M Mechanics is unexpectedly fitting in the full game.

It helps that you can simply replay each room you’ve cleared, so improving a duff chapter is just a case of rewinding and choosing to save different items. But the game also drops hints, without getting outright prescriptive, about which item combinations would make for a coherent story. Matching dot patterns on your cardboard box to the patterns on each item secures at least a broadly usable selection of nouns and adverbs, and finding multiple items with a matching theme – gardening gear, say, or keepsakes from a lost husband – will produce more sensible-sounding word combos.

I accept that this is the exact kind of right choice/wrong choice gameyness I needled the preview for. Again, though, it makes more sense here, particularly as the game’s replay-happy structure encourages a mental recalibration. I’d previously assumed that A Storied Life’s dearly departed pensioner was a fixed character, one whose memory I’d betray with every goofy word jumble; it’s more accurate to say that her personality and history are player-defined on the fly, such is the breadth of tales that can be told through her eclectic trinkets. She can be a loving wife and a doting grandmother. She can be a careerist horticultural genius. She can be an aspiring witch. She can be a fraudster who may have bashed a blackmailer’s head in with a hammer. All are canon, and none are, and as much as it stings to knowingly, reluctantly scribble in a grammatical error, it’s not betraying a memory. It’s just that this memory might be different to the one you invent on the next playthrough.

This open-endedness wouldn’t be possible if A Storied Life didn’t fill its house with interesting bits. Much of the interactables are just junk – filler items that will end up in the recycling box even on a fourth or fifth playthrough – but there’s plenty that will tickle the imagination, from occultish wall hangings to old medals to a photo with a scratched-out face. Since this is ultimately about spinning your own stories, you’re never fed clarity on the more curious possessions, though this does avoid being overly insistent on your subject’s life in ways that could undermine the characterisation you’re following. Maybe the dry red matter on the hammer really is just rust.

It’s also easygoing as a puzzler. The only waft of challenge comes when your desire to save as many mementos as possible bumps into the paltry capacity of your sole box, cramming wooden ducks and chess boards into the tiny grid layout like you’re stuffing JC Denton’s pockets. Once victorious at Cardboard Tetris, you still need to make sure any breakables are bubble wrapped – lest they smash and fill your memoir screen with undesirable words – and that an especially heavy box is reinforced, both of which deplete your pile of packing supplies. Running out, however, never feels like a serious concern. Tape and bubble wrap are replenished from Ms. Kettlewell’s own cupboards, and you’ll soon gain a ‘budget’ that can easily and instantly cover most unmet supply needs. Auctioning, meanwhile, almost runs itself. Drop a vaguely valuable-looking item into the selling box for each room and the dosh rolls in passively.

It’s not dull, though. Also like Unpacking, A Storied Life trades in intimate, well-realised spaces where poking around brings gratification in itself, and not just because of the stories that its population of thingamajigs can tell. The nicely hand-drawn, SFX-heavy presentation does particularly well to balance the comforting familiarity of this largely unremarkable British abode – the pokiness of the kitchen, the soft creaks of cupboard doors, the low rustle of unfolding jumpers – with the melancholy of it outlasting the person who lived there. I’ll admit to hanging on the view of a few emptied rooms, quietly regarding the bookless shelves and the patches of discoloured wallpaper where a frame once hung, just as I once did for my own family home.

For this, it has my respect, and I don’t regret giving it my time. It just bears remembering, amid the dust, the quietness, and the boxes of unreliable memories, that the bookwriting values flexibility above the pursuit of a single, perfectly scribed chronicle.

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Crimson Desert developers Pearl Abyss have outlined the tweaks they plan to make to their very wide open world game between June and September, as part of continued and relentless efforts to morph it into a shape which can please everybody. Notably, they say they’ll be acting on feedback about Red Pudding’s rather forgettable story with some changes designed to “strengthen the narrative flow” and stop people falling asleep mid-cutscene. They’ve also teased some more substantial DLC coming further down the line.

“We have been carefully reviewing the story-related feedback you have shared with us,” the studio wrote in a rundown of tweaks coming to the game over the summer. “To further strengthen the narrative flow of Kliff’s journey and to make it more engaging, we are working to refine and improve the coherence of key scenes. We hope these improvements will offer something new even for those who have already experienced Pywel.” I’m not sure anything they’ve got up their sleeves can suddenly turn around a tale put together over years, but hey, fair play for trying.

Beyond that, new combat encounters will be added, allowing folks to “prove their true strength as a Greymane” and the re-blockade system which sees enemy strongholds reset so you can clear them out again is being added to. “A new phase is being developed to make the flow before and after a blockade more natural, along with ways to defend certain strongholds from the threat of invasion,” Pearl Abyss wrote of the latter. “Rewards will also be improved to make the process of liberating strongholds feel more rewarding.”

Cross-save across PC, PlayStation, and Xbox is also incoming, as are rather vague improvements to playing as Crim Des’ two other protagonists Damiane and Oongka and tweaks to the likes of trading/farming.

Finally, Pearl Abyss revealed that some more substantial DLC is in the works, which they promise will be “a meaningful addition to your journey”. No concrete details were shared beyond that.

If the DLC boasts more sexy towers and/or ghost trains, I may well give it a whirl.

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