• Frictional Games reckon that the next project won’t be until at least the year after next.
• They have an outline written up for a movie version of Amnesia.
• The team behind Amnesia have only met once in real life.

Also, for anyone interested in creating a game then you can learn some more about how the team operates here. It’s very similar to how the teams behind big mods work.

For every article on the web relating to Terraria there will be at least one reference to a certain other Indie title which apparently shares similarities with it. So to get it out of the way, here comes mine. Terraria is not a Minecraft clone as some might have you believe, they both have simplistic graphical styles, give players freedom to remove and build blocks in a randomly generated environment and have a mining and crafting system. That is where the similarities stop. With that done, on to the actual review.

Terraria is a 2D action RPG in which your goal is to explore a huge, randomly generated world inhabited by monsters, demons and bunnies, all while finding and building items which will enable you to travel farther and deeper into the games content. When you first create your character and world you’ll start out in an empty area of dirt, sand, trees and water, with only the game’s guide and a number of hostile, wandering slimes for company. From here on out it is entirely up to you how you play the game, while certain milestones will need to be met, such as houses needing to be built for other friendly NPCs to move in to, it is up to you to choose how these milestones are achieved.

-Insert Bat out of Hell reference here-

Much of what many will consider to be the core game involves digging underground killing enemies for money and mining various materials to improve your weapons and armour. With multiple types of weaponry including; swords, bows, guns, boomerangs, ninja stars and others that I haven’t found yet, even after 30 hours of gameplay on one character, the combat in Terraria plain and simply works. At its core combat consists of equipping a weapon, waiting for the target to get in range and clicking, aim is required for ranged weapons but it doesn’t try too hard to be fancy. More depth is constantly being added to the combat mechanics with frequent updates to the game, the last patch in particular introduced critical hits and ammo storage, previous updates have added potions which provide various buffs to the player on top of the standard health and mana potions. For a while combat may not even seem to important and might just be seen as another method of survival and gathering materials, this is of course until you meet one of the game’s three bosses.

That is an eye with teeth... I know...

In most cases the first boss a player will face will be the Eye of Cthulu (see above), he will spawn on random nights until you eventually defeat him, which can take a very long time, even if you are able to survive him, killing him requires weapons that can whittle down his health before the sun rises and he floats off back into your nightmares. While the other two bosses won’t randomly appear in an ongoing effort to make you cry, it is still worth hunting them down to earn whatever loot they drop.

When you eventually reach the upper tiers of armour the game then becomes about you doing whatever the hell you want while you find more items to assist you in the genocide of whatever species of monster you hate the most. It’s here that the weapons really start to feel fun, gone are the golden swords and silver bows, now you have lightsabers and cannons that shoot stars out of them. Some might take this period of time as an opportunity to hunt down their world’s version of hidden biomes such as underground jungles or floating islands, all containing yet more loot.

Aside from the wonderfully retro soundtrack and huge amount of random events, I won’t praise a lot more, mostly due to the fact that I have to complain at some point but also due to me not having enough hours to write a novelisation of my playthrough. So here comes the thunder.

I HAVE THE POWEEEEEEEEEEEEEER!

You will eventually run out of stuff to do. In a standard singleplayer game, this is expected, but in Terraria it’s a problem. In a game without any clear objective or plot, you expect the game to keep you entertained, but at some point you will have the best weapon, the best armour and the best equipable stats boosters, and not have anything to do with them other than kill the stuff you’d already been killing for however many hours before. This is however being addressed in future updates, with Re-Logic having said they aim to give players more to do, with more biomes, world types and other such magic being introduced.

There is no tutorial. Dependant on how much understanding you have of the game prior to playing it, you may take a very long time understanding how basic things such as crafting and NPC housing work. Since launch this has been addressed slightly, with the Guide now giving more helpful tips than he used to. At the later stage of the game, the lack of handholding makes discovering new weapon recipes a challenge, one that will keep you playing, but when you start out it’s not the most encouraging thing.

Finally, joining a friend for co-op is much more irritating than it should be. In most Steam games you’d expect to just be able to accept an invite and instantly start joining their game. In Terraria however you must first find out the host’s IP address then enter it into the menu to connect. This is far from difficult, but when the person you’re trying to join first requires an explanation on what an IP address is shortly before sending you the wrong set of numbers, it’s the opposite of a good time.

I wish I had more bad things to say about Terraria, I have much more fun pointing out flaws in games/people than I do proclaiming their brilliance, but Terraria is fun in digital form and at the low price it’s available for, I’d say it’s quite the bargain.

“Complete the first two singleplayer missions to unlock host multiplayer”

This is the first massive red flag in Headup’s new isometric zombie game, promising players slow and tactical game play with the surprisingly egoist boast of being similar to the nearly perfect “Commandos” series–just with zombies you see. Well, having no alternative, I fired up the singleplayer (After abashedly realizing that there is not even an options menu on the main menu. Amusingly there is one in game, go figure) and found out the hard way that, in all honestly, trapped dead presents one of the most unfixably broken and busted foundations of a indie game I have played–perhaps only rivaled by the old gem Cortex Command that got abandoned all too soon.

The key problems with Trapped Dead lie in the foundations. To begin with the aesthetic is unappealing and very dull, with southern rock blasting during what should be frantic moments, and embarassing voice acting with thick–and fake–accents reminding me of what might come of a True Blood mock show. The game sprawls across a done-to-death tale of two friends being sucked into a zombie apocalypse, a fierce and fiesty love interest, the old vindicated sniper dude… its all here. The aesthetic is so boring, its a shame too since it sports a highly decent lighting and texturing side of things.

But this should be your concern: the sheer amount of bugs that present itself is… embarassing, and I am wholy confident–having gone through development scenes myself in extensive mods–that Headup did not even play the game before releasing it. The first cause for concern is when you’re asked to pick up a bat, mousing over it prematurely causes the game to crash or the bat to vanish. Upon reloading I waited until it told me to, only to have it tell me to “Click to select it onthe bottom right inventory screen”. After three minutes of looking I realized that there wasn’t one, and that I had to click in the empty space on the screen until he pulled out a bat. Yikes.

Red square is where the inventory should be. Circle for where the bat should be. Ruh roh.

Now we’re getting somewhere! Bat equipped and zombie in sight, its time to engage the sucker and… he doesn’t fight back, and my guy swings ridiculously silly. And damage markers float off their heads. Uh oh.
In the second mission I had enormous problems even trying to figure out what I was doing, with items names being blacked out, with doors not opening like they should, with zombies not taking any damage due to not possessing the “quest weapon”, and all sorts of silliness that boiled down the experience from slightly amusing to downright painful to play.

Black square is where the item name should be. Notice I still don't have an inventory. That zombie should be attacking me. Alt + F4

Items with names blacked out, save spots that make no sense, a weird, brief tutorial that, if you don’t follow, literally kills you… There’s too much restriction and control. This game is very thin skinned, its very delicate. If you try to think outside the box you pay for it, if you try to break anything you will. And that 100% linear design goes against everything about most zombie games.

Score Sheet:

Graphics – 3/5
Sound – 1.5/5
Story – ?/5
Gameplay – 2/5
Stability – 1/5

Blocks that matter is a platformer in which you can grab surrounding blocks and re arrange them into new shapes strangely reminiscent of tetris. The ultimate goal is to climb all over these new blocks to reach new out of reach areas. Although it does go deeper than that, it still stays fresh all the way through and being able to use different methods to finish each level really allows for some re-playability. Check it out here and buy it on steam here.

Dr. Rosalene and Dr. Watts have rather peculiar jobs: They give people another chance to live, all in their head. But due to the severity of the operation, the new life becomes the last thing the patients remember before drawing their last breath. This story follows their attempt to fulfill the dream of an elderly man, Johnny. With each step back in time, a new fragment of Johnny’s past is revealed. As the two doctors piece together the puzzled events that spanned a life time, they seek to find out just why the frail old man chose his dying wish to be what it is. And Johnny’s last wish is, of course… to go to the moon.

Jump over HERE to pre-order what looks to have the most original story I have ever seen!

Minecraft maker Mojang is entering the publishing business, announcing Oxeye Game Studios’ Cobalt as its first third-party release.

Mojang’s Jen Bergensten is part of the Oxeye team working on Cobalt, and Scrolls composer Mattias Haggstrom is working on the game’s music, making the project a “very natural” first collaboration, the company said in a statement.

“Early on, even as we were founding Mojang, we talked about the idea of collaborating with other indie game studios to release more great games,” the company said. “We wanted to find studios who have our philosophy of developing games, which is staying close to the community and treating it as a service.”

The Lua-coded Cobalt will come to Windows machines first, followed by promised Macintosh and Linux releases. The game will be shown at Mojang’s PAX booth next month.