The Maw 22nd-27th January 2024

rockpapershotgun.com:

As W.H. Auden once wrote: “our apparatniks will continue making / the usual squalid mess called History: / all we can pray for is that Videogame News Writers may still appear to blithe it.” Welcome one and all to another week of addled product journalism care of your ever-salivating host, the Maw, ravenous hype god and certainly not a silly metaphor I’ve come up with to make my job sound grander than it should be.

This week's menu of new videogame releases: world-jumping squad tactics adaptation Stargate: Timekeepers (23rd Jan); wild-eyed Soviet job sim Trans-Siberian Railway Simulator: Prologue (23rd Jan); Valheim-ish fantasy survival game Enshrouded (24th Jan, early access); fugitive Asgardian town-builder Roots Of Yggdrasil (24th Jan, early access); moody anime fighter Under Night In-Birth II Sys:Celes (24th Jan); rolly-polly shooter Go Mecha Ball (25th Jan); asymmetrical multiplayer dungeon romp Phantom Abyss (25th Jan); finger-jabbing courtroom drama Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy (25th Jan); jaunty yakuza RPG Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth (25th Jan); infant witch adventure The Cauldron Kids: The Summoning of Mr. Vermicelli (25th Jan); hand-drawn horror MMORPG Mad World - Age of Darkness (25th Jan); high-kicking octa-quel (is it a word?) Tekken 8 (26th Jan).

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Old School RuneScape is getting an (optional) HD mode, Jagex have announced. It'll support fully dynamic lighting and new fog effects, and is the first of several enhancements detailed on the developer's blog.

The just-announced Deviator looks a heck of a lot like Hollow Knight.

I suspect we're going to spend a fair bit of this week writing about a game that came out last week - Palworld, which exceeded one million concurrent players on Steam over the weekend. At the time of writing it's still comfortably ahead of perennial Steam chart-topper Counter-Strike 2.

IT IS MAWNDAY. Lock S-Foils in attack position! If you don't have any