As the title suggests, Something Is Killing the Children is graphic and horrifying. When it was first announced, the comic seemed like it could be a Stranger Things riff, an adventure story about kids fighting a terrible monster. While it does have some of those elements, the first issue makes it abundantly clear that this story is going to take things to a much, much darker place.
“There are battles with monsters and whatnot, but this book is coming from the darkest possible emotions and those are the emotions I want to explore in the series,” writer and series creator James Tynion IV told IGN.
Tynion has been carrying the title of this series around for a long time. He originally attached it to a short story in college, but that story faded away while the title continued to rattle around in his brain. Even as Tynion moved to the big leagues, writing everything from Justice League Dark, Constantine: The Hellblazer and Batman/Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, ideas for Something Is Killing the Children would still come to him. It wasn’t until he brought these pieces to publisher Boom! Studios that he finally came up with the story that title was meant to tell.
The Nintendo Switch has loads of fantastic local multiplayer games. But the exorbitant prices Nintendo charges for first-party controllers means you basically have to take out another mortgage to stock up on extras. Thankfully, Power A offers a number of high quality options at affordable prices. Its upcoming set of Switch controllers cost $49.99 each and they sport beautiful officially licensed Nintendo-themed designs. Some of them will ship on September 15, while others are slated for September 30. Let’s check ’em out.
Satin Blue Chrome Zelda Nintendo Switch Controller
Post-apocalyptic turn-based tactics game Overland–think XCOM crossed with The Oregon Trail–launches for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC on September 19, a new trailer has revealed.
Indie developer Finji’s latest game puts you in control of a group of survivors in a post-apocalyptic America. You’ll travel across the country in a vehicle, stopping to scavenge for supplies, rescue fellow travellers, and fend off the game’s peculiar rock monsters. There are also dogs you can pet, and they even wear backpacks. Good doggos.
Each level and character you meet on your journey is randomly generated, making each road trip different from the last. There’s an emphasis on grabbing what you can and escaping back to your car before being overrun, and you’ll have to make some tough choices about who to save and where to travel to next as you continue the fight to survive.
Castle Crashers Remastered, the classic side-scrolling beat-’em-up from developer The Behemoth, is launching on September 17 for Nintendo Switch. A PlayStation 4 version is set to follow shortly after, but no specific date has been announced yet.
The Switch and PS4 version will be similar to the remastered edition that made its way to the Xbox One back in 2015, which is, of course, an upgraded version of the Xbox 360’s original 2008 release. It will contain the Back Off Barbarian mini-game, all previously released DLC, and various gameplay improvements and performance updates, such as 60 frames per second gameplay and improved textures. The Switch version also utilizes the system’s HD Rumble feature and four-player local Joy-Con support.
The original Castle Crashers was one of the first games to establish Xbox Live as a viable marketplace for indie games and smaller-scale projects. As for why it’s coming to Switch and PS4 11 years after launching on the 360, The Behemoth co-founder Dan Paladin says it mostly boils down to game preservation. “With Alien Hominid not being ported often, we’ve seen it slowly become unavailable in most places,” he said in a recent blog post. “When we make games we want them to stick around. Taking advantage of the updated hardware of each generation is also very satisfying. Higher resolutions, higher framerates, chances to make tweaks, and better overall quality. Our debut title (Alien Hominid) was available on both Gameboy Advance and Nintendo Gamecube.”
GameSpot’s review praised the original game, saying, “The main storyline offers hours of bad-guy beating and princess-rescuing fun that it is sure to please. The ability to play with friends should make the experience richer, even if it is limited to a more local experience. As a testament to its entertainment, feature losses and some disappointing online play hardly slow this juggernaut of amusement down. This is an absurdly hilarious romp you won’t soon forget.”
Castle Crashers is launching on September 17 for Nintendo Switch, with a PS4 version to follow.
The products discussed here were independently chosen by our editors. GameSpot may get a share of the revenue if you buy anything featured on our site.
With Labor Day and a three-day weekend on the horizon for many in the US and Canada, there’s no better time to squeeze in some extra gaming time, and there are plenty of deals available this week in case you’re looking for a new game to play. On the PlayStation Store alone, there’s a massive August Savings sale going on all month long, and now Sony has kicked off a flash sale on PS4 and PS Vita games on top of the existing deals.
This is one of PSN’s smaller flash sales compared to previous ones we’ve seen–and it completely omits PS3 titles, with only a few Vita games up for grabs–but there are some gems to be highlighted. Notably, the Persona Dancing: Endless Night Collection is 50% off, selling for $50 instead of $100. The rhythm game bundle includes Persona 3: Dancing in Moonlight, Persona 5: Dancing in Starlight, and Persona 4: Dancing All Night, the latter of which is only available on PS4 through this collection. The Persona 3 and Persona 5 dancing games can also be experienced with PlayStation VR.
The flash sale deals will be available in the PlayStation Store until Monday, September 2, at 8 AM PT / 11 AM ET. See some of the best discounts below.
Crash Team Racing: Nitro-Fueled — $30 ($40)
Crash Team Racing: Nitro-Fueled Nitros Oxide Edition — $45 ($60)
Far: Lone Sails — $11.24 ($15)
Hitman 2 — $30 ($60)
Hitman HD – Enhanced Collection — $24 ($60)
MLB The Show 19 — $24 ($40)
MLB The Show All-Star Edition — $30 ($50)
MLB The Show 19 Digital Deluxe Edition — $48 ($80)
Persona 3: Dancing in Moonlight (VR) — $30 ($60)
Persona 5: Dancing in Starlight (VR) — $30 ($60)
Persona Dancing: Endless Night Collection — $50 ($100)
Sega Genesis Classics — $18 ($30)
The Sims 4 Bundle: City Living — $25 ($50)
The Sims 4: Get to Work, Dine Out, Cool Kitchen Stuff — $25 ($50)
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt Complete Edition — $15 ($50)
This Is the Police — $5 ($20)
Titan Quest — $9 ($30)
More great deals for Labor Day
Sony isn’t the only company offering special deals around Labor Day. Be sure to check out the other gaming sales happening now through the weekend, including a 12-month PS Plus membership for $40 at Ebay, free-to-play weeks for Rainbow Six Siege and The Elder Scrolls Online, discounts on brand-new games released this week, and more.
Yakuza 7 was unveiled just yesterday during a press conference with series creator Toshihiro Nagoshi. Titled Yakuza: Like A Dragon in the West, it aims to be a “watershed” moment for the long-running series, introducing a major change to its usual action as combat switches to a turn-based system akin to JRPG games such as Dragon Quest–which new protagonist Ichiban Kasuga is a big fan of. It’s a surprising and drastic change straight out of left field… except we’ve all been here before.
Developer Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio released an April Fools video earlier this year that joked that the Yakuza combat would change to a turn-based system. We already knew that Kasuga was taking over protagonist duties after Kazuma Kiryu bowed out of the series in Yakuza 6: The Song of Life, so his appearance in the April Fools video wasn’t anything noteworthy. In truth, the prank-filled day is a bit of a nightmare, with hoax after hoax guaranteeing that you can’t believe anything you read or watch. Occasionally a company will put out something funny, but that’s usually as far as it ever goes. The Yakuza video was one of the better examples, elaborately reshaping the series as a turn-based JRPG complete with a four-person party, character levels, and skill moves that drink from a pool of SP. It still had that outlandish Yakuza charm, but framed it in a different way where over-the-top attacks are picked from a menu as opposed to being something you activate with Heat and a weapon in-hand.
Now we know why it was elaborate enough to look like an honest-to-goodness video game: Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio was showing us Yakuza 7 the whole time. It’s a bold move, sticking a four-minute video for your next, series-altering game up on YouTube five months before officially announcing it. But it worked. No one suspected a thing and now it comes across as an act of sly genius.
Conan Chop Chop, a hack-and-slash action-roguelike with couch co-op, was also announced as an April Fools joke before developer Funcom turned the joke on us and revealed that it’s actually a real game. The roguelike, starring a cute little Conan the Barbarian, was due out in September but has since been delayed into 2020 while the team expands the game’s scope by adding online multiplayer.
Who knows, maybe Yakuza 7 and Conan Chop Chop aren’t the last games to get the April-Fools-but-actually-it’s-a-real-game treatment. What was once a throwaway day of obvious pranks is now something worth paying attention to. Maybe the next Sniper Elite game is really a visual novel dating sim about love blooming on the battlefield. That Sonic the Hedgehog battle royale game is starting to sound real right about now, right? And we certainly wouldn’t put it past Nintendo turning Kirby square. The possibilities are endless.
Yakuza 7 will release on January 16, 2020 in Japan for PlayStation 4. The game will be released in the West later in 2020.
Imagine that you wake up one morning and, to your horror, discover that you had inadvertently committed an act of infidelity. Think about the kind of confusion and dread that might race through your head at that moment. How did it happen? What the hell are you going to do? How on earth are you going to explain and amend the relationships with all parties involved? What kind of deep-seated anxieties might have led to this moment? In 2011, Atlus’ Persona studio explored this predicament with Catherine, using a peculiar blend of social simulation and Sokoban-influenced action-puzzling. Eight years later, Catherine: Full Body is a remaster that demonstrates how well the game’s distinctive premise and exploration of adult themes still hold up, even if its new additions to the plot don’t fit in seamlessly.
Vincent is a 32-year-old man in a long-term relationship with his girlfriend, Katherine, and at a stagnant point in his life where he isn’t exactly sure what he wants for his future. His core group of friends are in different circumstances, but they share similar dilemmas; being in your thirties is hard. Vincent has recently found himself plagued by frequent nightmares of scrambling up a crumbling tower, and he’s losing sleep and in a constant haze because of them. One morning, after a big night of drinking, he wakes up next to someone who is absolutely not his girlfriend, and what follows is a frantic, weeklong crusade to try and deal with the repercussions and decide what he wants to do with his life before Katherine can discover what’s really going on.
Central to Vincent’s coping process is his aforementioned core group of friends. Every night after work, they all get together at their local bar, The Stray Sheep, to hang out. It’s in these regular social scenarios where Vincent can confide in his friends, talk through his state of mind, sound off on his next course of action, and, hopefully, find a resolution. The conversations between characters are mostly predetermined, though the onus to spend Vincent’s limited time having them is on you. A key component which you do have influence over, however, is your cell phone. Vincent will regularly be contacted throughout the night (by Katherine and his new fling, Catherine), and how you choose to respond to their text messages and calls, if at all, will impact Vincent’s ethical compass–represented as a meter with opaque binaries.
Time ticks along as you perform actions in the bar, and its patrons will come and go. You can skip these social sections entirely if you wish, but doing so robs you of the game’s most engrossing component. Vincent’s journey is a deeply introspective one, and though the plot’s major beats unfold in the cutscenes that bookend each day, the nuances of his character come through in his interactions with other people. Managing Vincent’s connection to his phone, and, in turn, how he treats the women in his life from a distance, sways how he might later react to significant plot points and revelations. Getting to know Vincent’s deeply flawed but sympathetic friends, as well as peeling away at the backstories of the other bar patrons as the week goes on, helps to explore themes revolving around maturity and the nature of human relationships. Full Body’s inclusion of the Japanese vocal track also provides an interesting and different take on character performances if you’ve already experienced the English version before.
The ebb and flow of your social actions–chatting to your friends, ordering another drink, checking your phone intermittently, and spending time with Vincent’s idle thoughts–make the ritual of whittling away time at the Stray Sheep strangely satisfying in its mundanity. The evocative soundtrack helps to foster this relaxed contemplative state, as does the game’s holistic but understated audiovisual style. It’s an incredibly pleasant atmosphere to be in, and it succeeds in replicating the quiet delight of spending a night drinking with friends with no particular occasion.
It’s nice to have that safe haven, because when Vincent goes home to bed each night, the nightmares start, and that’s when things get really stressful. What’s causing the nightmares is a mysterious unknown at first, but from the outset, it’s clear that they act somewhat as a lucid metaphor for Vincent’s internal strife. You need to guide Vincent up a sheer, crumbling tower constructed entirely of cubes and other cuboids, sometimes while being chased by a monstrous personification of one of Vincent’s objects of anxiety. The tower is rarely more than three cubes deep, and while its construction might sometimes form a natural staircase for Vincent to climb, you’ll frequently need to create a path upward yourself by pushing and pulling the cubes around in strict, grid-based arrangements.
This task quickly escalates in difficulty, as the sheer tower faces become higher and harder to navigate. There will be fewer pieces to work with, while blocks with unique properties will also appear, such as being immovable or shattering after being stepped on twice. These scenarios stop you from creating an ordinary staircase, and they force you to think of more unorthodox ways to arrange and move around the tower. Vincent can hang on the edges of blocks, and blocks will support each other so long as a horizontal edge connects; both these rules are fundamental to many of the techniques required to work your way up.
Finding that potential path takes careful consideration and forward-thinking, and this can be nerve-wracking. You need to keep up your momentum, lest the stage crumble under your feet and you fall, and the soundtrack–rousing renditions of an inspired selection of classical pieces–ratchets up the urgency of your ridiculous predicament to a high degree. It’s very easy to put yourself in a dead-end situation, even with the game’s generous undo mechanic, and at times you might stare at the pieces you have to work with for what seems like an eternity without any inspiration. But when you do have a sequence of moves in mind, successfully put them into practice, and start flying up the tower without pause, that sense of mastery and accomplishment is incredibly exciting.
This remaster also includes a number of additional difficulty options and assists, however, if reaching those moments of elation are too few and far between. These include, among other things, a “Safety” difficulty level, which eliminates failure, and an auto-climb option that can be disabled on a whim. Catherine’s puzzle difficulty does spike in places, so it’s a boon over the original for anyone who wants to keep up the momentum with Vincent’s story. If you love the puzzles, though (and I certainly do), Full Body also includes a handful of additional modes, which dramatically increase the amount of available stages. The story mode offers a “Remix” variant featuring new block types and stage layouts; the in-game “Rapunzel” arcade cabinet boasts a buffet of new stages in the same vein, too. Babel returns as a discrete puzzle mode with challenging, randomised stages for one or two players, and there’s also a head-to-head competitive mode with local and online options. There’s a lot here, but the biggest addition to Catherine is the inclusion of another potential love interest for Vincent, named Rin.
While Katherine is sensible and Catherine is uninhibited, Rin acts as a sheepish but wholehearted personality for Vincent to fawn over. She’s introduced right from the get-go and woven into the game’s existing story beats, both in new cutscenes and into the social segments at the Stray Sheep. However, perhaps unsurprisingly, Rin’s integration isn’t an entirely seamless one.
On a superficial level, story moments involving Rin will often play following whatever cinematics were part of the original game, and with that come some pacing issues. These new scenes have a strong, stylish direction, featuring more interesting edits and creative shot compositions than existing ones, but they unfortunately make the rhythm of cycling between social simulation, nightmare puzzles, and stretches of cinematics feel a little unbalanced. More significantly, though, the integration of Rin completely dismantles the game’s enigmatic sense of mystery.
If you’ve played the original version of Catherine through to one of its many different endings, then you’ll have at least some idea of how Vincent’s real-world difficulties and his nightmarish tribulations are related. However, it was previously hard to get any tangible sense of how things might fit together until the original game’s penultimate chapter. Conversely, as soon as Rin appears on screen in Full Body, it is immediately clear that something is amiss, and this feeling of peculiarity is ever-present whenever Rin is involved in a scene. Even though her arc is an enticing new mystery in itself, and does feel additive to someone who already knows everything about the original Catherine’s narrative, it’s a shame. As soon as Full Body starts, Rin acts as a big, flashy distraction from the largely grounded and plausible story that Catherine revels in during its real-world sequences for most of its running time.
Chasing Rin through the new branching path in the story feels a little inelegant overall, too. Actively choosing to pursue either Catherine or Katherine as Vincent’s ultimate goal always feels like trying to hit a moving target. Trying to push Vincent in a certain direction on the game’s ethical meter was difficult because of how hard it was to decipher which choices represented what–not just in Vincent’s text messages, but also during the series of confronting “confessional” questions that you’re asked in-between nightmare levels (eg. Would you rather kiss an alien or a corpse?). Pursing Rin feels far more blatant–a series of questions are flagged upfront as opportunities to “break” the meter and set off on a whole new path.
Once you do break onto that new path, things go to some fascinating places. But the broad feeling of the new story branch is that it feels, well, too broad. Rin’s enthusiastic earnestness rubs off on the direction of the new content a little too much, and even though the scenarios posited are genuinely interesting to see unfold, it lacks a more grounded subtlety that invites a similar level of contemplation to the existing branches for Katherine and Catherine. What’s more dismaying is that the ultimate conclusion to Rin’s story branch actually feels like it undermines the otherwise positive themes the new chapters work so intensely to convey, seeming to suggest that the kind of love that Rin and Vincent can potentially share is fantastical in nature.
But Rin’s presence still brings an intriguing new edge to Vincent’s crisis, and Full Body still tells a fascinating, personal tale. The nightmarish block puzzles are still weirdly intense and satisfying to surmount, and the Stray Sheep is still a wonderful bar to spend your nights in. Full Body does a great job in refining and refreshing the Persona studio’s fascinating foray into the social lives of adults, and Catherine continues to stand out as a game that feels both incredibly bizarre and authentically intimate.
Sony Interactive Entertainment Japan Asia has outlined its plans for the Tokyo Game Show 2019, which runs from September 12 to 15 at the Makuhari Messe in Chiba, Japan. Sony will be showcasing numerous games at the PlayStation booth on the show floor, but unlike previous years this is yet another event that won’t feature a Sony press conference.
The company opted to skip E3 entirely earlier this year, marking the first time it has done so since entering the video game industry in the mid-90s. “PlayStation fans mean the world to us and we always want to innovate, think differently and experiment with new ways to delight gamers. As a result, we have decided not to participate in E3 in 2019,” a PlayStation representative said at the time. Sony also decided not to host its annual PlayStation Experience, so TGS is just the latest event in the 2019 calendar year to feel the absence of a usual Sony press conference.
Sony recently shared some of the first details about its next-gen console–which we’re tentatively calling the PlayStation 5. It’s likely the company is keeping its cards close to its chest, passing on this year’s events until it has something more meaningful to reveal regarding the future of PlayStation in 2020.
Regardless, Sony will still have a show floor presence at TGS. The PlayStation booth will offer playable demos of upcoming PS4 titles such as Final Fantasy VII Remake, Nioh 2, and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (which Sony Interactive Entertainment publishes in Japan), as well as featuring PlayStation VR demos for Space Channel 5 VR Kinda Funky News Flash! and Marvel’s Iron Man. There will also be a mega-theatre showing footage from Kojima Productions’ Death Stranding, and Sony is hosting a special match on Modern Warfare featuring members of professional Esports teams.
The company is hosting a series of stage events over the course of the show, too, with developers showing gameplay demonstrations of upcoming games. These events will be live-streamed so we’ll likely see more footage from titles like Nioh 2 and Final Fantasy VII Remake. The full stage event schedule and further information on the full lineup of games at the PlayStation booth will be announced at a later date.
In other TGS news, Capcom is set to reveal a new Resident Evil game–codenamed Project Resistance–prior to the show, with attendees being able to get their hands on the potential co-op title once the event opens its doors.
