Category: Games

Stray, a game about a cat wearing a backpack in a world taken over by robots, was already poised to be the most precious thing in the world before we even saw gameplay. During the July 29 Annapurna Interactive stream, however, we were given our first look at Stray in action, including a harrowing chase sequence. And we also learned as part of the event that it’s coming out next year.

After meeting a drone named B12, the cat is able to communicate with those around it, including the humans who still exist in the harsh world we wouldn’t wish on a single real kitty. It’s so harsh, in fact, that a chase soon begins as slug creatures try to consume the cat. Using B12’s unlockable abilities, the drone is able to stun them long enough for them to be defeated.

You’ll have to use your stealth and agility to make it through Stray, and according to Annapurna Interactive, you’ll also need to sometimes be “as annoying as possible.” If you have ever had a cat, you know this is a crucial element of their entire species. You can even knock stuff off of ledges to solve puzzles and claw up a leather couch like a little demon.

Stray was planned for a 2021 launch, but it’s now going to launch in 2022. Alongside the PC release, it will also be available on PS4 and PS5. Make sure to stock that backpack full of plenty of catnip toys and delicious tuna treats while you wait.

During the Annapurna Interactive Showcase today, a group of surprising collaborators announced that they would be working together on a new, unannounced game: Stanley Parable and The Beginner’s Guide creator Davey Wreden, Gone Home and Tacoma co-creator Karla Zimonja, Minecraft composer Daniel ‘C418’ Rosenfeld, and obviously, Annapurna itself.

Wreden and Zimonja appeared at the event in a plant-strewn room, drinking out of a fancy tea set and teased whatever it is they’re working on. They didn’t offer any concrete details, except to introduce Rosenfeld as the game’s composer and Annapurna as its publisher. It’s not clear if the tea was a hint or just a really cozy set dressing.

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We’ve loved all four of Ivy Road’s founders’ aforementioned past creations: We found The Beginner’s Guide to be “thought-provoking and disarming” and said The Stanley Parable was “witty, unusual, and quietly discomfiting.” Tacoma gave us a glimpse of a “fascinating future” with “wonderfully written characters” while Gone Home was “one of the finest stories we’ve ever experienced in games.” 

And then there’s C418’s work, which includes the entire original Minecraft soundtrack and then some. So whatever Ivy Road is cooking up, it’s being built on an exciting foundation.

There were plenty more announcements out of Annapurna today, including other collaborations between the publisher and companies like No Code and Outerloop, as well as release windows for Stray and The Artful Escape and an expansion for The Outer Wilds.

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Rebekah Valentine is a news reporter for IGN. You can find her on Twitter @duckvalentine.

A new trailer for Solar Ash debuted during the Annapurna Interactive Showcase, revealing that developer Heart Machine’s upcoming game will launch for PS5, PS4, and PC on October 26. The trailer showcases a bit more of what exploration looks like in Solar Ash which, according to creative director Alx Preston, is the first-and-foremost focus for the game.

“We’re traversal first,” Preston told GameSpot. “That was kind of the vision of the game: Control the traversal, the environments that you’re moving through, and the spectacle of it all. Especially the scale on the grandiosity of it just feeling impossibly large and you’re feeling really tiny and insignificant in as many ways as possible. The traversal absolutely takes precedence and the combat is kind of intermingled with that traversal.”

To do that, Heart Machine has designed Solar Ash’s movement mechanics to be fairly easy to grasp. You will have to practice to achieve the same level of fluidity seen in trailers. But when I asked Preston, he said that Solar Ash’s movement more closely resembles the easy-to-pick-up web-swinging mechanics of Marvel’s Spider-Man than the carefully timed button presses and precise turns needed to perform an amazing aerial goal in Rocket League.

“I would say it’s pretty approachable,” Preston said. “I think we’re very aware of how challenging a third person game can be with a freeform camera.”

“If you’re comfortable with third-person action games, you’re not going to find anything super wild here where you have to be pressing both triggers in tandem or anything like that. I would say it’ll be pretty straightforward how to manage your character.”

With all this focus on traversal, you’ll need somewhere to go. According to Preston, Solar Ash delivers with an open environment. “I would say [the world] is kind of–it’s open,” Preston said. “It’s very big and open in a lot of ways, but it’s not an open-world game. I’m not going to sit here and be like ‘You can go anywhere,’ like you can go to Gannon’s castle right away or anything like that. There’s an order to things.”

And yes, if you buy Solar Ash for PlayStation 5, you will experience different sensations and sounds while moving around thanks to the PS5 DualSense controller’s 3D audio and haptic feedback. “I won’t get too into detail other than the DualSense is super rad and we’re going to do some stuff with it,” Preston said.

Several other games were shown off during the Annapurna Showcase, such as the memory-driven interactive story A Memoir Blue and card-based, speedrunning-focused Neon White.

A new trailer for A Memoir Blue debuted during the Annapurna Interactive Showcase, showcasing a beautiful-looking atmospheric game that mixes together 3D animation and hand-drawn 2D art. The trailer noticeably doesn’t feature any words, and creative director Shelley Chen says that’s true for the full game.

“There’s no words in there, like zero words are spoken by the character, zero narration,” Chen told GameSpot. “We decided to have the character animation do all the communicating. Back in the old days, people didn’t need words to watch movies. They can get a joke, they can get at the emotion of the characters. So that pumped me to do it this way, because I don’t really play many games. I watch more movies than play games.”

Instead, A Memoir Blue’s story of champion swimmer Miriam, who begins to think back on her childhood memories with her mother, is primarily told through the character’s body language, which can be captured in different ways depending on whether the character is a 2D or 3D model. And as a big fan of Disney movies, Chen also sought to use music to tell A Memoir Blue’s story.

“[Sound FX Ray Gould] did a really, really great job on the background music,” Chen said. “We worked really hard on it. He definitely had a hard time working with me, because I watched a lot of Disney classic movies and their background music always followed the movie scene, like the emotion is very strong in Disney’s soundtracks. So I told Gould that I wanted to have that element in our game since it was such an important part to communicate like how you should feel, what’s the character’s mood. I think the player is going to enjoy it a lot, the music of the game.”

This all comes together to create an experience that Chen likens to a more interactive book. “A Memoir Blue could be a book,” Chen said. “Every interaction is like flipping a page.”

Between all the talk about movies and books, I asked Chen if she saw A Memoir Blue as a puzzle game at all (the player primary interacts with the world and moves from scene to scene by completing small puzzles). And she doesn’t–instead, she describes A Memoir Blue as an “interactive story.”

“I wouldn’t say it’s a puzzle game,” Chen said. “When I give the elevator pitch I use ‘interactive story’ because back in IndieCade 2018, I was talking about the game and I couldn’t find a genre for this kind of game, so that’s why I call it an interactive story. It’s too easy to be a puzzle game. I feel like a puzzle needs to involve a lot of logic, a lot of thinking. But for our interactions, it’s more about your first thought, your intuitiveness–what do you think you should click on and what do you think you should interact with. In our puzzles, there are many, many, many, many different meanings behind them.”

And for Chen, she hopes folks discover their own meanings from A Memoir Blue’s story, just like the movies and books that she loves. “It’s a very, very simple story, so I’m not worried that the player won’t get it,” Chen said. “And even if they don’t get it, it’s okay. It’s completely okay, because when we look at movies, when we listen to a piece of music, when we look at artwork, we all have different points of view. When people see stuff, they all have different thoughts. That’s the point of taking out the words in A Memoir Blue, I want to encourage that to happen.”

A Memoir Blue currently doesn’t have a release date but it’s scheduled to launch for Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PS5, PS4, PC, Switch, and iOS. The game is coming to Xbox Game Pass as well.

Many other games got new trailers during the Annapurna Interactive Showcase, such as the speedrunning-focused, deckbuilding shooter Neon White. Annapurna Interactive revealed that it’s partnering with more indie studios as well, such as Falcon Age‘s Outerloop Games.

The Annapurna Interactive Showcase revealed a new trailer for Neon White. Despite being in first-person and featuring gunplay, this game is not a first-person shooter. Neon White isn’t a roguelike or deck-builder either, despite featuring a cyclical run-based formula and card-based combat. According to its developer, Ben Esposito, Neon White is a “speedrunning” game.

“[Neon White] is structured like a speedrunning game in the sense that you have a bunch of levels and to proceed in the game–to continue in the in-game competition so to speak, in the fiction of the game–you have to achieve certain medals or certain status by playing the levels faster,” Esposito told GameSpot. “So you play a set and you survive through them and then you revisit them and you start to pick them apart and start to play them faster and get more familiar with them.”

“I’m a little reluctant to say it’s exactly like a speedrunning game because I think that to a lot of people, that scares them a little–it evokes the extreme dedication of a Twitch streamer. But I think it’s an accurate description because [Neon White] is structured where the main goal is to get faster at it. But the game is designed to onboard you into speedrunning in a pretty gentle way if you haven’t done it before.”

In Neon White, you play as the titular character, a demon from Hell who’s competing against other demons for a chance to ascend to Heaven. You race through levels, killing enemies in a competition of skill and speed. With each enemy you defeat, a card is added to your hand. Each card has two effects depending on whether you use it or discard it. As an example, a card may give you a shotgun attack if you use it, or send out a fireball if you discard it.

Neon White is composed of over 100 levels, each of which is about 20 seconds long, though Esposito said that a few of the later ones are a bit longer. Getting higher scores is part of Neon White’s progression but there’s also a bit of a visual novel component to the game as well, where you can befriend and even enter relationships with some of your fellow demons, learning more about their mysterious pasts–as well as your own. To raise your relationship status, you’ll need to find gifts which are hidden within levels. So sometimes you’ll replay a level not to get a better score, but to find a secret pathway to a hidden gift you missed the first time through.

“There’s a gift in every single [level],” Esposito said. “The gifts are a totally different way of thinking about each level. Sometimes, what you have to do to solve the puzzle of ‘How do I use my resources that are available in this level to get to that strange part and collect the gift?’ That then feeds into the downtime where you can give that gift to a character. Then you’ll progress along their relationship. You’ll also get side quests too, which are like bonus levels. So it’s hopefully like a cycle where you’re playing the levels and getting more story content, which leads to more levels.”

Going the extra mile to get high scores and improve your relationship with others will reward you with a more comprehensive ending. “I don’t want to give the impression that there’s like multiple endings,” Esposito said. “The way the game works is that there is a main story that’s happening. However, you can affect the ultimate outcome. There is a true ending and functionally the way the relationships work in the game is that they, as you deepen them and you unlock more stuff, you find out the backstories behind everyone and you find out the relationships everyone used to have when they were alive. The idea is that there’s this second layer to the story that you could have completely ignored. But if you are interested in digging, you’ll find a lot more going on between all the characters, which will then ultimately lead to you getting the true ending. But you have to dig for it if you want it and you don’t want it. That’s fine.”

And to that end, Esposito doesn’t want folks to stress out playing Neon White–you don’t have to perfect everything if you just want to get to the end credits. But the goal of playing the game is to get faster, and there are systems in place to help you do that if you’re not a pro speedrunner. “We have a system called Insight whereas if you’re grinding a level and not getting better medals, we’ll start unlocking more features for you to ease you in, like, ‘Hey, here’s how you should play this,'” said Esposito.

“If we’ve done our job, if you keep revisiting those levels, you will get to that level of skill because the game is trying its best to give you the right information at the right time to keep nudging you towards becoming faster and faster. Then once you get the platinum medal, then we reveal the global leaderboard for that level. Then you can realize how bad you actually were.”

Neon White is scheduled to launch for Switch and PC this winter.

Musical adventure The Artful Escape will arrive on September 9, and it’s bringing a truly impressive voice cast, including actors and actresses from Game of Thrones, Kingsman, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Predator, and more.

Announced during the Annapurna showcase today, The Artful Escape will launch for Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, and PC (and will launch into Xbox Game Pass). The game is a psychedelic side-scroller about a teenage guitar prodigy, Francis, who’s looking to craft his stage persona and travels to mystical worlds to do so.

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While trailers and gameplay have previously been wordless, we’ve now learned that the game includes a number of high-profile actors and actresses. Francis will be played by Michael Johnston (Teen Wolf), and is joined by Lena Headey (Game of Thrones’ Cersei Lannister), Mark Strong (Kingsman, Kick-Ass, Shazam!), Jason Schwartzmann (Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Rushmore), Carl Weathers (Predator, Arrested Development), and Caroline Kinley (Love is Blue, Love is Yellow).

Announced as The Artful Escape of Francis Vendetti, we’ve been seeing snippets of the game – developed by Australian studio Beethoven & Dinosaur – since 2017. We’re very happy to see it finally on the way.

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Forza Motorsport 7 is being delisted from digital storefronts and Game Pass and will become unavailable to purchase after September 15. The Forza Motorsport series Twitter account made the announcement Thursday, detailing how the delisting will impact players who own the game or DLC.

Though not an unusual move for the Forza Motorsport series (previous games have had sales halted, usually due to licenses from car manufacturers, celebrities, or even music labels have expired), the “End of Life” status is hitting before the release of the eighth Forza Motorsport game, which was announced in July 2020. Developer Turn 10 skipped its usual release cycle to take time to innovate on the franchise.

“There can be more than 500 license partners on any Forza game, for cars, tracks, music, etc., and licenses can all have different terms and expirations date,” The Forza Twitter account said in response to fan questions. “Servers will continue running, our support team will still be working on the game, and we’ll even be able to keep running Rivals events for our partners. End of Life just means the game won’t be available for purchase.”

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Players who own the game before the September 15th deadline will still be able to download and play the game (along with DLC), and multiplayer and online services will continue.

If by some chance you’re also an Xbox Game Pass member, and purchased Forza Motorsport 7 DLC (before today’s announcement) but have yet to purchase the base game, you’ll receive a token for the game through Xbox’s message center. You should receive a token by August 2 and will need to redeem it by September 15.

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Keep in mind that anyone just playing Forza Motorsport 7 via Game Pass won’t be able to play post-September 15. That includes cloud streaming.

Thankfully, Microsoft is offering a discount for anyone who wants to lock down a copy.

• Forza Motorsport 7 Ultimate Edition: $19.99 (£17.49, €19.99) 

• Forza Motorsport 7 Deluxe Edition: $14.99 (£12.49, €12.49) 

• Forza Motorsport 7 Standard Edition: $9.99 (£7.49, €9.99) 

Meanwhile, folks who’ve managed to get an Xbox Series X/S are waiting on Forza Horizon 5, and we recently got a new look at all the different biomes you’ll visit in its version of Mexico.[poilib element=”accentDivider”]

Joseph Knoop is a writer/producer for IGN.