Author: [email protected] (Lauren Morton)

In honor of the day of fools, the latest in extremely niche Stardew Valley modding brings us one player’s vision of a more sensible world: an everything bagel that actually requires everything as an ingredient. How does it all fit into one bagel? I can only assume a blender is involved. Stardew Valley modder SiTheGreat…

There are few gaming accomplishments more satisfying than the thrill of pulling off kills in stealth action games. The sweetest of feats can be achievements or timed runs or trick shots but there’s something extra special about a grudge kill. Shadow of Mordor, the Warner Bros. action game of 2014, was a factory for satisfying…

After the critical success of its emotional, musical adventure Journey in 2012, Thatgamecompany’s creative director Jenova Chen had aspirations to reach a much broader audience of players. Journey was popular on console, with an audience that Chen jokingly described as men in their 30s who were conveniently journalists and awards judges, but “teenagers hated Journey,”…

Farming and community sim MMO Palia has been in open beta since August 2023 and today it’s sprouting on Steam where it will continue to be free-to-play in early access. Now that the scheduled patch downtime is over, you can download Palia on Steam to either hop in for the first time or sign into…

The delightfully friendly MMO from Journey’s developers, Sky: Children of the Light, finally has a proper PC launch date. It’s been in open beta since 2019, first on mobile phones and then on consoles, but never on PC—the Steam page has promised a release date of “To be announced” for the past year. Like Thatgamecompany’s…

Underneath the professional atmosphere, there was a defiant tone to this year’s Game Developers Conference. During the GDCA awards, Larian Studios boss Swen Vincke called out corporate greed for “fucking this whole thing up for so long,” and other developers gathered to have a cathartic scream about the state of the industry. In an interview…

Say what you will about the properties of rose quartz and other supposedly supernatural gems in real life, in the world of The Sims 4 there’s no question: gemstone jewelry can really improve your mood, skills, and defy death itself if you so choose. The newest Sims 4 DLC, Crystal Creations, comes with a suite…

Alongside the new Crystal Creations DLC pack this week, The Sims 4 got a pretty standard game update with bug fixes—but it also brought a new interface icon that caused a bit of an “everyone disliked that” moment in the community. The Sims 4 now has a store icon visible at all times in its…

The biological phenomenon of carcinization has struck again and now it’s strategy games that are evolving into crabs. Newly announced Crab God is a side scrolling (side crawling?) strategy and management game that puts a group of underwater followers into your omnipotent pinchers.  “With an army of adorable Crablings under your claw, you must lead…