Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era will release in PC early access on April 30th, Hooded Horse and Ubisoft have announced. The new strategy RPG from developers Unfrozen is the first freshly baked HOMM game in over a decade, and will launch with a mixture of familiar and new modes, spanning singleplayer and multiplayer.

If you're new to the series – there is the faint but horrifying possibility that you were not yet born, when the last one came out - it's a turn-based affair with procedurally generated maps, where you alternate between tending to your towns and sending heroes, fantasy beasties and armies on quests.

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Resident Evil director, Devil May Cry producer and former Tango Gameworks boss Shinji Mikami is now making games for Shift Up, developers of Stellar Blade. You know, the one with the shiny bums and quite good hack-and-slash mechanics. The one that has a DLC version of 2B off've Nier Automata (pictured). Shift Up have acquired Mikami's new company Unbound, which he founded in 2022 after leaving Tango.

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Ho, wasteland packmules and sticky-fingered ornithologists! Embark have released a sizeable Arc Raiders update. Titled Flashpoint, it introduces a new shotgun, SMG and deployable together with a Close Scrutiny map condition, a fresh breed of Arc enemy, some cosmetic bundles, and a feeding boost for Scrappy the loot chicken, which will cause him to dig up a wider variety of more valuable items. As warned, they've also permitted all those awful Shredder things from Stella Montis to infest the other maps.

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A major French consumers group is taking Ubisoft to court over the publisher's ending of online support for The Crew in March 2024, rendering the notionally singleplayer-friendly open world racer unplayable. They're acting with the backing of the Stop Killing Games movement, who want publishers at large to stop yanking servers and taking games offline.

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There is a tiny wild sun trapped inside my crystal tower. I hear its garbled voice and catch the yellow of its fire through the blinding white blocks of the summit. The tower itself is so bright on the outside you can barely identify objects placed on it, but I have smashed the crust and dug a network of passages, and it’s shadier within. A realm of shining fog, slick as tooth enamel, with fissured, fugitive reflections that call to mind the beautiful quartz spacecraft in Noctis.

The relative gloom inside the tower implies that the structure’s external radiance is also a reflection. It appears to be caught in the glare of some celestial body, but if such a body exists, it emits radiation invisible to the naked eye, discernable only from its impact on other bodies. The skies of Lucid Blocks are dark and cloudy even by day, inasmuch as ‘day’ means anything in the game. There is one major astral feature, a hazy torus that neither rises nor sets, luminous enough to orient by when exploring the game's procedurally generated landscapes, but not enough to actually light your steps after dark. The only real sun here is the one below. The one I crafted. It slurs and shouts, nosing the walls of its prison.

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An ancient, work-in-progress version of Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto IV has reportedly been discovered on an Xbox 360 development kit at a car boot sale, somewhere up Edinburgh way. Dating back to November 2007, about six months before the open world game's launch, it's said to contain a cut model for a Liberty City river ferry that once featured in a trailer.

While we only have the buyer's word that the development hardware - "a phat white Xbox 360 XDK with a Rockstar North label on it" - is legit, former Rockstar technical director Obbe Vermeij has, at least, verified that GTA 4 was once supposed to have a ferry, though he doesn't have much to share about the presence of materials for what appears to be a canned GTA 4 zombie minigame. Cor!

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Much of the time, using social media is like fondling a wasp's nest, but sometimes, sometimes, social media is Nice. For example, Firaxis narrative director Cat Manning recently started a Bluesky thread "of small practical pieces of advice developers just starting out or unfamiliar with a genre might not know". The replies and quote-posts include thoughts from people with credits on fairly big games.

Inevitably, they run the gamut of approachability. At one end of the spectrum, you have Apex Legends engineer Jay Stevens jauntily observing that "a navmesh is a very handy thing to have, even in a multiplayer game without NPCs", which I maybe half-understand, and sounds like it could be the opening to a Broadway song of some kind. More digestibly, you have former Marvel's Avengers and current Legacy of Orsinium developer Keano Raubun commenting that the "biggest bang for buck in (open world RPG) game writing will always be NPCs having funny ambient conversations amongst themselves".

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Hello, new week of PC games! Hey, I thought you'd be taller. Ah, I see what's happened: the Maw has eaten Friday again, and swallowed next Monday for good measure. As ever, the normies are calling this a "bank holiday weekend". There are various festivities planned - apparently, some bunny has been running around laying chocolate eggs.

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Some people like to ease into the week, as though dipping toes into a frigid northern sea, and some people Monday Hard by wrapping their arms around an iceberg. Are you the latter kind of bather? Try this on for size, then: Riftborne is a real-time sci-fi grand strategy game that's controlled using an old-fashioned, "terminal-style" interface.

Seize your silly computer mouse and feed it unto the dog. Where you're going, there shall be no drag-selects, cursor animations, right-click menus, and all the rest of that piddly frippery you are accustomed to in these modern SO-CALLED "best strategy games", with their cosseting, 32+ colour visuals that even your dog might be able to understand, assuming you didn't just kill your dog by feeding her a piece of plastic.

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Free-to-play tactical shooter PUBG: Blindspot is being shut down by developers Arc Team and publishers Krafton a whole couple of months into its early access career. Launched on February 5th, it will cease service on March 30th.

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Slay the Spire 2 developers Mega Crit have rolled back aspects of last week's big STS2 balancing update, which nerfed a number of cards according to the broad objective of making infinites – that is, cunning combos that let you prolong your turn forever - harder to accomplish.

The patch in question isn't even formally part of the roguelite deckbuilder yet – you have to opt into the Steam beta branch to test it out. But it has sparked a ruckus nonetheless among the Spire Slayers, some of whom attempted to review bomb the game despite Mega Crit's protestations that Slay the Spire 2 is still in early access development.

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In ZIPIT's splendid story-driven photography sim The Wide Open Sky is Running out of Catfish, you are a young witch living on the back of a huge, aerial catfish – a benevolent flying island of trees, fountains and windchimes that puts me in mind of The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker.

The catfish is sad that the skies are so empty nowadays, so you must use a magic flute - see, we're definitely in Zelda's orbit - to transform into a similarly gravity-agnostic eel, which eats clouds and poops them out as various creatures. Snapping photos of those creatures grants you seashells, which turn into more clouds when thrown into the fountain.

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Teyon and Nacon have revealed Hunter: The Reckoning – Deathwish, a new "semi open world" first-person single-player RPG set in the World of Darkness table-top universe. Where stablemate series Vampire: The Masquerade is about a secret society of bloodsuckers, Hunter is about the humans who stalk and kill those bloodsuckers together with werewolves, ghouls and, well, anything remotely monstrous or supernatural.

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Alien Deathstorm is the new sci-fi FPS from Rebellion, developers of skull-popping shooter series Sniper Elite and the recent, Very English survival game Atomfall. What is Alien Deathstorm about? Why, it's a slice-of-life story about a neurodivergent person growing up in the big city HOHO OF COURSE NOT, it's a game about aliens in which there is a storm that will make you dead, set in another collapsing extra-terrestrial colony full of dependably phat, lived-in 1980s technology. Here's the announcement trailer.

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I have two dreams as mayor of an island town in Nova Roma, the new early access city-building game from Lion Shield and Hooded Horse. One is to erect a fantastic water network for my people - a sturdy yet poetic lattice of aqueducts, following their deft gradations down from the mountain rivers to cisterns gracefully spaced amid the insulae, forums, circuses and temples. In my reborn Rome, no populous bathhouse, tinkling fountain, or humble latrine shall ever run dry. With my other hand, I shall raise mighty dams, diverting the rivers away from my walls to avoid flooding in times of heavy rainfall, while exposing velvety expanses of buildable, tillable soil.

My citizens will learn to treat water frivolously, swilling and pissing it away in their decadence, much as they did in the Rome of old. The fools! For when my empire of hydration is complete, I will ascend the slopes and whimsically commission one final dam. Trusting in my stewardship – for what reason have I given them to disobey? - the citizens shall toil day and night to finish the structure. Then, when the last stone is laid and the sluices slam shut, they shall gaze in horror as a tidal wave engulfs their fair metropolis and sweeps all their precious bloody bathhouses away.

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I am shocked to discover that this is the first time we've written about Amberspire, the new sci-fi city builder from Nic Tringali, developer of starfaring monastic strategy game The Banished Vault. Shocked, I tell you!

It's set on a gas giant moon, looks a bit like isometric Sable, features dice with arcane symbols, and challenges you to "cohabit" with an ecology of ooze, silica and rust, rather than turning everything into a mall. It's the kind of speculative fiction racket an eco-vibing hipster like myself goes crackers over, and here I am announcing Amberspire to you with the release barely a month away on 6th May. I can only hang my head in shame, and offer you this trailer.

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House House were kind enough to keep a video of my hands-on session with Big Walk, filmed by one of the participating PRs. Generally, a full video of a preview event including player audio is a lifesaver for a journalist, struggling to keep notes while pushing buttons. But in this case, I don't want to watch the Big Walk video, because then I would hear what the other players were saying when I wasn't there.

You see, I fell down a cliff midway through Big Walk, and spent the night floundering about in the ocean. Eventually, a developer armed with a big, ball-shaped lamp tracked me down and ushered me back up, hoisting me onto his shoulders so that I could leap to a rock. Nights in Big Walk last moments. I was gone for the length of a luxurious toilet break. But still, those were moments in which the others were gathered, waiting for me. Perhaps they were making fun of me. I don't want to know.

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It takes a lot to get me interested in anything tower-defensive these days, and I'm getting pretty grouchy about paper-based aesthetics, too, but "minimalist strategy game" Painted Kingdoms combines these trends to promising effect. It takes place in a living book, where each chapter is illustrated according to a different cultural heritage, extending from Europe to China.

As a roving general-hero, your job is to build a settlement by filling in the blank pages with your magic brush, giving rise to both fortifications and lovely wild spaces. Then, you must fight off waves of badniks who threaten to set the paper alight, reducing your pop-up terrain to ash.

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Slay the Spire 2's multiplayer component is a lovely, sociable game of tactical chemistry and unity in the face of hideous door-based lifeforms, but inevitably, the modders are trying to ruin the bonhomie by adding PvP.

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Like many people at companies preoccupied with discovering the next "goose that lays the golden egg", Half-Life 2 and Portal writer Erik Wolpaw has been "poking around" with generative AI. He and a small team at Valve have been testing out different applications, in what Wolpaw assures us isn't a "concerted" effort at implementing the soul-regurgitating, workforce-abrading gadgetry in any particular new game.

Wolpaw's current feeling is that generative AI isn't very good at anything "creative", like cracking jokes. But he does think Large Language Models could make for entertaining NPC voice reactions in games such as Grand Theft Auto and, indeed, Wolpaw's own Left 4 Dead, because AI is marvellous at being a fawning little gopher. It is fantastic at "going along with whatever insane thing you say and kind of adjusting to the flow of that".

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