Month: September 2018

Back in 1997, Theme Hospital laughed us all back to health with its acutely tongue-in-cheek approach to hospital management simulation. 21 years later, Two Point Hospital pulls at the same nostalgic heart strings, channeling Theme Hospital’s brand of brash, British humour and mixing it with some surprisingly deep economic management gameplay. Two Point Hospital simultaneously pays homage to its predecessor while surgically carving out its own place in your heart.

Two Point Hospital puts you behind the administrator’s desk and charges you with both the grander and finer aspects of managing your new hospital empire, from designing the internal layout of each building down to hiring staff and researching treatments. You’ll start out small with only a single hospital and a handful of illnesses to worry about treating and slowly build your way up towards managing larger locations with multiple buildings and a vast range of wacky illnesses that require special rooms and equipment to treat. Its goofy style–bright colours and characters with big, bulbous heads–belies the depth of its management simulation, finding a good balance between both aspects. Helpful tutorials in each mission ease you into the concepts behind new objectives at a comfortable pace, and as you complete them, you’ll earn stars to unlock new missions as well as room types.

For your hospital to run smoothly and make lots of money, patients need to be diagnosed and then treated as quickly as possible. For some that means a quick trip to the GP’s office, then a jab in the injection room. But for most, this means long stays and visits between different rooms for tests and eventual treatment. For these patients, as well as your staff, you’ll need to make sure there’s plenty of things around to keep their mood up, placing importance on how you make use of your space. Getting it right can make the difference between having the best reputation in the business, or causing an innumerable number of patient deaths, dropping your reputation and bank balance into the toilet. Helpfully, you’re given lots of colourful graphs and floor charts to work out what needs improvement, so you’re not left out in the cold trying to work out why all your patients are rage-quitting and storming out the hospital doors before being treated.

The tools for drawing out rooms and placing furnishings feel intuitive and robust; rooms are drawn out like blueprints on a floor plan, then once you’re happy with the layout you can place your items like desks, bookshelves and coffee machines. Items help add prestige to a room, and are unlocked using Kudosh, a reward currency that’s awarded for completing objectives. The larger the room and the more you fill it with items, the higher its prestige and happier staff and patients will be when using it, meaning staff work longer and for less money and patients will pay you more. This creates an interesting dichotomy between saving available space for a bigger variety of rooms, or building larger, higher-level rooms and seeing the effects that both have on your staff and patients.

Later missions go out of their way to shake up the established gameplay loop by throwing machine-damaging natural disasters like storms and earthquakes at you. You need to draw on everything you’ve learned up to that point as mission objectives broaden and your funds start to spread thin. You also have to consider the mind-boggling number of different treatment rooms to research and prioritise which to build and which patients to turn away. While some diseases only require a pharmacy to cure, others require their own rooms with expensive equipment, and putting all your money into the wrong treatments could leave your bank account reeling.

Thankfully anything that’s researched in one mission becomes available in all others, so if you get stuck somewhere and don’t have the funds to research what you need, you can always go back to a previous hospital and get them to front the research bill instead. This grander focus across all your hospitals extends to a light multiplayer portion in the form of leaderboards. All of your stats like cure rates, money earned and reputation are saved to online leaderboards, where you can compare your successes and failures against your friends. It’s only good for bragging rights, but it’s a nice addition regardless.

Part of Two Point Hospital’s overwhelming charm is its sense of humor, which permeates every corner of the game, from the fantastically funny radio station–complete with fake ads and feature segments–to the pun-laden disease names like Jest Infection or 8-bitten. Someone suffering Mock Star shuffles about with the look and swagger of Freddie Mercury, requiring a session with the psychiatrist to pull them out of it. Equally funny are the contraptions used to cure some of the rarer conditions. The Extract-a-Pan treats Pandemic and is a giant magnet on the end of a tube that pulls the pan off the top of the patient’s head. The writing throughout is sharp and witty, with the descriptions of various ailments being a particular high point.

But just discovering those diseases and their often darkly funny symptoms, as well as watching your staff and patients go about their day, feels rewarding enough. Everything moves with the look and flow of a cartoon pantomime; patients will die only to come back as ghosts and haunt your hallways until a janitor can come along and suck them up with a vacuum cleaner. At one point my receptionist got up from his desk, vomited in front of patients because he was disgusted by something, then left to pour a coffee in the break room before demanding a pay raise. It nails the Theme Hospital nostalgia and is so good that even the 20th time you hear the announcer ask patients “not to die in the hallways” is hilarious.

Part of Two Point Hospital’s overwhelming charm is its sense of humor, which permeates every corner of the game.

The one area where the game does suffer is in the minor grind of starting a brand-new hospital for each new mission. After spending hours perfecting several locations, going through the early phases of a new hospital starts to feel more like a chore than it should. It’s not a long process, but it quickly becomes a section you want to rush through to get to the things you haven’t seen yet.

It’s remarkable that it’s taken so long for a spiritual successor to Theme Hospital to show up, but now that it’s here, it feels like it’s been well worth the wait. The exaggerated, cartoon look and relaxed approach to management make it inviting enough for most players, while the deeper aspects of its economy are enough to keep seasoned players engaged. Two Point Hospital not only re-works an old formula into something modern and enjoyable, it also iterates on the classic brand of irresistible charm and wit, making something that’s truly wonderful.

After a slight delay, Fortnite‘s 5.40 update has finally arrived on PS4, Xbox One, PC, Nintendo Switch, and mobile. Along with introducing another new item to Battle Royale, the Grappler, the patch marks the start of the High Stakes event, which features a new limited-time mode and its own set of challenges to complete. Here’s what they are the rewards that you can earn.

The aforementioned challenges are tied to the new LTM, Getaway. Unlike a typical game of Battle Royale, this heist-themed mode divides players into teams of four, with the objective being to find one of the four safes scattered around the island, extracting the (appropriately llama-shaped) jewel housed within, and making it safely to the getaway van.

There are three High Stakes challenges in all, which will reward you with XP and new High Stakes cosmetics. Each is fairly straightforward and can be reasonably completed by taking part in enough Getaway matches. You can see the full list of High Stakes challenges, and the rewards they confer, below.

• Play matches of The Getaway (10) — 5,000 XP
• Deal damage to Jewel-carrying opponents (500) — Suited Up spray
• Pick up a Jewel in different matches of The Getaway (5) — Cash Flow skydiving trail cosmetic

If you manage to complete all three of the challenges before the High Stakes event ends next week, you’ll unlock one final reward: an exclusive Crowbar skin for your pickaxe. Additionally, developer Epic offering a new Wildcard skin in the Fortnite store throughout the event, which comes with four interchangeable masks and a Cuff Case back bling.

Epic is also selling a new Ace Pack. It runs for $5 and comes with two similarly heist-themed cosmetics: the Ace Outfit and the Swag Bag back bling, which looks like a duffle bag stuffed with cash. You’ll also receive 600 V-Bucks–Fortnite’s in-game currency–for purchasing the Ace Pack, making it a particularly good value.

As previously mentioned, Fortnite’s 5.40 patch also added a new traversal tool to the game’s arsenal, the Grappler. This gun can be fired at walls and used to launch yourself around the map. Meanwhile, Week 9’s set of challenges are scheduled to go live very soon, on Friday, September 7.

There are so many ways to watch new movies these days that it’s sometimes hard to keep track of what’s coming out. The biggest films still debut in the old fashioned-way–in theaters, with home releases still a few months off. But with the rise of streaming and Video on Demand, we are increasingly seeing simultaneous releases for smaller movies, with films getting a limited theatrical release on the same day that they are available to buy and rent digitally.

The rise of Netflix and Amazon as major players in film production has also disrupted standard release patterns. Netflix in particular has attracted some major directors, and their movies will bypass theaters entirely and premiere worldwide on the streaming platform. Over the next few months we can expect major new releases from acclaimed filmmakers such as Paul Greengrass, Alfonso Cuarón, and Jeremy Saulnier, all of which will make their debuts on Netflix.

Of course, movies that did get a theatrical release continue to move to digital platforms after a few months. This is a great way to catch up on movies you might have missed on the big screen–or are keen to rewatch.

This week sees the release of The Nun, which is one of the year’s most anticipated horror movies as well as the latest entry in the Conjuring universe. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom makes its digital debut, Marvel’s Black Panther comes to Netflix, and one of the year’s most acclaimed documentaries is now available to rent. So here’s our look at the best and most interesting new movies in theaters and available to watch at home this week.

New Things To Watch In September 2018

At this point there’s a good chance you’ve stumbled on a movie in the “Conjuring Universe,” which encompasses a laundry list of horror movies and spinoffs that all either loosely or directly relate to one another. This year, a brand new entry arrives in the form of The Nun, a spinoff of both The Conjuring movies proper and of the Annabelle movies. And it’s looking to up the terrifying ante by deep diving into the lore of one of the Conjuring Universe’s most pervasive villains. So, who exactly is “the nun?”

Brace yourself for some spooks–and some spoilers–from a handful of the Conjuring films.

The titular nun is actually–surprise!–a demon. She’s not just any demon, mind you–this one is named Valak and it’s been creeping through the margins of Ed and Lorraine Warren’s life for a while now. It got its first real introduction back in The Conjuring 2, where it proved just how manipulative it could be by posing as not one, but two “poltergeist” style hauntings and terrorizing a family in England, and even obliquely tried to claim responsibility for the Amityville murders.

The Amityville connection actually takes place a year before the bulk of the movie, in flashback as Lorraine recalls a vision she saw of the nun while she and Ed were investigating. This led her to start researching the potential demon connection even before they got the call to start investigating in England, totally unaware that the same force was related to both hauntings. Whether or not Valak actually inspired the DeFeo killings in Amityville or if it was there specifically because it had taken an interest in Ed and Lorraine is left ambiguous.

Eventually Lorraine was able to put the pieces together, connecting the visions she’d had back in Amityville with the visions she was having now and figure out the link–and the demon’s name, which had come to her in another waking nightmare back at the Warrens’ home. The creature was Valak, an eldritch and inhuman entity also known as “the defiler” or “the marquis of snakes.” While this is largely a series of totally made up titles, Valak itself is actually “real,” in the sense that the name was borrowed by the Conjuring masterminds from real world demonology texts. Sometimes spelled “Valac” or “Ualac,” the actual entity dates as far back as the 17th century and was described in grimoires like The Lesser Key of Solomon.

Actual Valak is usually depicted as a cherubic boy with angel wings, usually perched upon or riding some sort of serpent–so, no, not anything like a demonic nun. It was formally recognized as a “president” of Hell, as far as the rankings and hierarchies of demons are concerned, and was most commonly associated with finding and uncovering treasure, especially if that treasure was somehow related to snakes.

Please don’t ask us who in the 17th century was summoning demons to look for snake treasures because your guess is as good as ours. Obviously there were no shortage of creative liberties taken when translating Valak from historical figure to monster movie phenomenon, and most likely, the Conjuring team picked it because of its cool sounding name more than anything else.

And for demons, names are pretty important, even when they’ve been thoroughly fictionalized. In accordance with the “laws” of demonology, knowing the demon’s true name gave Lorraine power over it and she was able to effectively banish it back to hell, saving both Ed and the Hodgeson family in the process. But the story doesn’t exactly end there–there’s still the matter of just what Valak actually wanted and why it seemed to have such a keen interest in the Warrens to begin with.

While Valak doesn’t actually get a big reveal or any time in the spotlight in either Annabelle movie, it’s presence is felt there as well. In Annabelle: Creation, there are a few instances where it’s heavily implied that it was actually helping the demon manipulating Annabelle work to possess the orphan kids. Why it would be interested in helping out a fellow demon, or what its end goal may have been, is really anyone’s guess–best guess is that the big reason is because it’s a demon, and demons love evil.

The Nun is set to hop back even further in the timeline–back to the monastery in Romania where the original photo was taken and, hopefully, take a closer look at some of those more persistent questions. What has Valak been working toward this whole time? What does it actually what? Where did it come from? Chances are, the answers to those questions are going to be anything but pleasant.

In many ways, Metro Exodus feels like a parallel to the journey of developer 4A Games. Having moved headquarters from Kiev, Ukraine to its new office in Sliema, Malta as development for Exodus began in 2014, the studio seems ripe to tell a story about venturing off from home while maintaining its identity and building off of a strong foundation. After getting hands-on with the upcoming sequel, it’s apparent that much of what makes the series unique is still intact, though some changes are inevitable as the game charts new territory.

Metro Exodus continues the journey of main protagonist Artyom, who has left the labyrinthine underground tunnels of Russia with his wife Anna and a group of Spartan Rangers. You’ll be spending more time on the surface (even more so than Metro: Last Light) as you trek eastward in search of a new home, staving off the hostile nuclear winter and fighting off the enemies you’ll make along the way. It’s worth nothing that this is also the first time the game’s story was created without the direct involvement of Dmitry Glukhovsky, author of the Metro novels for which the game’s are based on.

We had the opportunity to speak with Huw Beynon, global brand manager for the Metro series at publisher Deep Silver about Metro Exodus–everything from the influence of the STALKER games and branching from the source material to gameplay changes and non-lethal runs were on the table. The following interview was edited for clarity and readability.

Metro Exodus was originally set to launch late this year, but after a delay, it’s slated to release on February 22, 2019 for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC. 4A Games is also working closely with Nvidia to incorporate new ray tracing graphics technology to create more realistic global illumination and lighting on the PC version–we’ll have a feature on how this is being done soon here on GameSpot.

GameSpot: Having played through Metro 2033 and Last Light, I understand Exodus is quite different from the tunnels of the metro. It’s not necessarily an open world, but when you’re working with so much more space, the atmosphere is little different. So, how are you capturing that Metro vibe and staying true to the series?

Huw Beynon: That’s fundamentally the biggest challenge that the studio has. Exodus was kind of born out of this ambition to try and do something new. So the first two games were more linear and story-driven, inspired very much by Half-Life. Also, given the size of the team at the time, Metro 2033 I think topped out around 50 or 60 people. Metro: Last Light [had] 70 to 80 [people]. So, the idea of doing a more open game with that kind of team size and resources was out of the question anywhere. So, with the first two games, they focused on something they knew they could do, and do really well.

And then, you know, after literally six or seven years spent in the tunnels beneath Moscow, working underground, we wanted to try something different. They couldn’t come back and do Metro 3 to be more of the same. I think the concept originally came from the art team. They said, “We want to explore the environments,” and we got all these ideas, and they came up with the idea for this journey across Russia.

That kind of explains leaving Moscow and this creative desire to explore new environments and do new things. Also from a design perspective, we didn’t want to just retread the same formula. A lot of the team had experience at GSC Game World, before 4A was formed by a splinter group who broke away from GSC, including creative leads from the STALKER games. They wanted to try and find that perfect marriage of more open-ended and emergent gameplay but still keep the experience feeling unmistakably natural, and the spent a huge amount of time the first few years trying to find that formula where we could have both, and it wasn’t an easy process. A huge amount of prototyping and iteration to get that balance. I’m pretty happy with where we ended up.

Metro’s not meant to be easy going, where breadcrumbs are just laid out in front of you. Feeling lost, having to explore, feeling alone, it’s part of it. Those are all sensations you should experience when you’re playing. The fear of the unknown, that’s part of the Metro experience.

I think for Metro fans, it’s really important to make it clear that it’s not an open world game. It’s a series of levels, and you play them in linear order, and you still have traditional Metro-style levels when the game starts; the game will feel very familiar, and then at E3 we showed the first of these new huge levels, we call them sandbox survival levels. Each one of those can take several hours to complete, several days worth of in-game time, that’s where we’re going to gradually expand the horizons. Let the player explore, still try and keep all the elements the players love about Metro–the atmosphere, the scavenging, that sense of immersion, but also give them more latitude and freedom.

You wouldn’t say that they’re like hub worlds, necessarily?

I wouldn’t call it a hub world. I kind of call it these big levels, like miniature open worlds. So within that level is a defined space. One of the things that’s really important is we want to keep the story front and center. There’s always this sort of golden path, which, if you want to you can play through these open levels and you can kind of imagine playing it as a metro game where you can follow the path around if you want to, but they’re fully open. You can go off and explore at any old time. We’ve purposefully avoided any of the kind of trappings of contemporary open world games where you have side quests and fetch quests, x-number of towers.

There’s no checking things off lists, right?

We don’t do any of that arbitrary stuff, and you don’t have a side quest tracker. There’s the story objective, and then you can go explore: exploration should be its own reward. So no one’s going to tell you, “Hey, here’s a side mission to go and explore that farmhouse.” You’ll see that farmhouse through your binoculars, you’ll get just like a question mark that says there’s something there. Then you can go to it, explore it, it’ll have it’s own narrative, storytelling, like you could get some loot, you could get some other reward, but it’s entirely up to you whether you do it. We’re not going to hold your hand and say, “These are the things you have to check off and do.”

I think if you played the STALKER series, that’s the strong inspiration. But when you play [Exodus], mechanically, it feels like a Metro game. Everything you’re used to is there.

Are there any considerations that, in the modern sense, maybe we need to provide more guidance for the player this time around? Or is it strictly, here’s that X on the map, it’s up to you?

I think one of the rules for Metro has always been don’t underestimate the player. It’s not a pick-up-and-play [game]. You need to sit down, go through the mechanics, and understand how the game works. Let’s think of it as a thinking person’s shooter. We’ve never tried to dumb it down or make these concessions. I think we’ve definitely improved the user experience, like the accessibility, quality of life. Just kind of like, refine our craft a little bit.

But Metro’s not meant to be easy going, where breadcrumbs are just laid out in front of you. Feeling lost, having to explore, feeling alone, it’s part of it. Those are all sensations you should experience when you’re playing. The fear of the unknown, that’s part of the Metro experience. It might not be for everyone, but what I’ve learned from working with friends for however long, we’ve got our fans and they love that, so they love the fact that the game doesn’t hold your hand, that it is challenging, that it doesn’t underestimate them. It rewards them for thinking before shooting, or exploring off the beaten path. So, that’s the kind of game 4A likes to make. No change.

There’s an on-going day and night cycle, I noticed the time of day on Artyom’s watch and it sits in the corner of the screen. I’m wondering, is time-of-day more than just an aesthetic tool to create atmosphere, or does that play into any of the story beats or gameplay elements?

From a gameplay perspective, I think the two key differences are obviously being able to do stealth. Obviously, stealth is a huge part of Metro–manipulating individual light sources because when you’re playing underground, you’re basically playing at night all the time. So, you turn out the light sources one by one to get these pools of darkness. That’s the best way to execute the stealthier approach. You can still do stealth in the daytime with pools of shadows to move between, but it’s much more difficult.

Players can find outposts and rest camps where you get the full crafting bench and can rest to set the time of day to what you want. If you want to play stealthily and be that ninja/ghost or whatever, take down everyone one by one, you’re probably going to play a lot of the game at night. You’ll find stealth is obviously more forgiving or easier when it’s completely dark, but then at the same time, there are a lot more other threats that you’re not going to be able to see. So when you go out in the wilderness at nighttime, it presents its own challenges and dangers. It’s a choice of how you want to play.

Is there a possibility of a completely non-lethal playthrough?

I believe it’s possible to do completely non-lethal.

When I’m presented with the options, especially in immersive sims like the Deus Ex series, Dishonored, I always try to go non-lethal, and be as stealthy as possible.

Now I need to qualify that, because it’s still not quite final, so, in theory, I know there are some levels where that will be almost impossible. But certainly in some of the more open levels, it’s possible to go [non-lethal].

In 2033 and Last Light, there wasn’t necessarily a morality system, but there was still a mechanic that accounted for certain actions you took–and you’d see a flash and hear whispering voices to indicate its activation. Is there still going to be a mechanic like that in Exodus?

We’ve not taken anything out. There’s been an awful lot written about the system we used in the previous two games, and I think it’s really important we don’t over explain it. So yes, the system exists, and your actions have consequences in this game like in the first two games.

In the first two games, depending on your actions, the ending would be determined. It’s simplistic to call to it a morality system because it’s not simple like, “hey, this is the good thing, this is the bad thing.” It’s all these other shades of gray that are actually tracking all the other decisions you might not even be aware of.

You get the ending that you deserve. That’s true of Metro Exodus as well.

I didn’t get to mess with the crafting too much but I understand there’s different types of resources you gather. In past Metro games I could modify weapons with attachments and use military-grade ammo. How far are you going with the crafting this for Exodus?

That’s a big change, but it’s necessary in open environments. We don’t have trade outposts way out in the wasteland. That system worked really well for previous games because there was a thematic fit and also because they were linear.

This time around, we’ve got no idea which way the player is going to go through a level, when they’re going to run out of ammunition, so everything is done much more dynamically. So now, rather than finding new weapons, purchasing attachments and upgrades for it, you can find new weapons from enemies and also strip guns for the attachments that go into your arsenal. You can customize weapons at any point by just bringing out your backpack. Every gun now has five attachment slots. Scope, barrel, stock, magazine, and under the barrel like a laser sight attachment to it. These might affect the performance; rates of fire, ammo capacity, or handling properties of the weapon change accordingly.

Previously, you stock up on supplies at trading posts, and things like medkits and filters you find on the ground. It was easy to balance when it was a more linear experience. Now you have, instead of just one currency, you have two resources: chemicals and materials. You accumulate those and then you can spend chemicals on maintaining and cleaning your weapon. You can craft medkits and gas masks, you just have to find the materials to make the filter and medkits. You can use materials to craft ammunition on the field for hand-made weapons like the T-Bar and the Hellsing.

I think if you played the STALKER series, that’s the strong inspiration. But when you play [Exodus], mechanically, it feels like a Metro game. Everything you’re used to is there.

What we didn’t do, we didn’t have these crazy recipes like three of ‘this’ and two of ‘that’ combined you get this. What we’re trying to do is always keep the player in that red line where they’re not quite comfortable like they’re always in need of something. We can do some of that dynamically as well. What we have here, than just what you find and pick up to get that. Fine tune that experience. And it’s definitely not perfect at the moment, but it’s going to come through the balancing we do before the final game, but it feels pretty good at the moment.

Would be fair to say that resources throughout the game will be relative to what you have in your inventory, or at least slightly change?

Yeah, it can change. One of the other things we want to do and haven’t fully figured out how this is going to work. Some people absolutely love the [nature of] super-low resources of Metro, like an every-bullet-counts kind of thing. There are other people who want to engage in the story more and have a slightly more relaxed experience. There’s is no one-size-fits-all way you can just cater to both people. What we’re going to try to look at is some different kinds of settings. We’ve not fully figured that out.

Will there be a ranger mode, and is that going to be available straight up? Do you have to finish the game again before you unlock it?

So, it’s in the build at the moment. It’s going to be available to everyone. It should be there right from the start. There’s literally nothing gained from locking content behind pre-order. Buy the game, get the game. Buy it new, buy it secondhand, pre-order it, whatever. When you sit down and play through it, that’s the experience that you get.