Some days, I wonder if every word written before a trailer is actually superfluous. It’s a visual medium, after all. What can a description achieve save to clumsily gesture at the true shape of something; a dog-eared tour brochure for a thrilling weekend spelunking in Plato’s cave? I can usually shake this feeling, but gory zombie action game Showa American Story is my breaking point. There is nothing I can impart about this thing that will not be conveyed better by allowing its new trailer to wash over you like a tide of sheer videogame. Here’s it:
Souls
In strategy game Sintopia you harvest a whole civilisation’s souls for your own custom-built hell
One of my favourite satires is the Screwtape Letters, an epistolary novel by Narnia scribe C.S. Lewis. It consists of messages from an oily elder demon to his nephew about how to correctly groom the soul of an unsuspecting human being. It’s a claustrophobic send-up of managerial politics and nepotism, with World War 1 unfolding in the background. A real pick-me-up. Sintopia is the Two Point incarnation of that premise – in other words, brighter and breezier and definitely more slapstick than Christian. It puts you in charge of a world divided between Earth and hell, and challenges you to ensure a steady movement of optimally sinful souls between one and the other. Say your prayers and watch the trailer.
Lone Survivor creator’s gorgeous “Zelda x Demon’s Souls” action-RPG is back in development, over a decade since reveal
About 12 years ago, we drew our breath in pain to report that Lone Survivor developer Jasper Byrne’s new “Zelda x Demon’s Souls” action-RPG was no more. “It was too big for a single person to make,” Byrne wrote at the time. “This is the root of the problem. It wasn’t that I fell out of love with the idea, just that I can’t physically do it.” That was then and this, thankfully, is now. Byrne has tentatively returned to the project and begun sharing screens on social media.