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Bloober Team is taking its horror game cred into a new direction with the launch of publisher Broken Mirror Games. This "co-development label" is collaborating with Rock Square Thunder, an indie outfit founded by ex-Bloober devs, for a new open-world survival horror game called I Hate This Place. It's scheduled for release in the final quarter of 2025 on PC, PlayStation, Xbox Series S/X and Nintendo Switch. The source material for this adaptation is a comic book series of the same title from Skybound Entertainment by writer Kyle Starks and artist Artyom Topilin. Fittingly, the game has kept a hand-drawn style for its tale of protagonist Elena, who has accidentally unleashed a nightmarish force and now has to fight for her life by using her wits and finding shelter before the sun sets. While its exact focus in the genre has shifted, Bloober Team has created several well-received horror games such as Layers of Fear, last year's Silent Hill 2 remake and the upcoming Cronos: The New Dawn.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/bloober-team-launches-horror-publishing-label-with-debut-game-i-hate-this-place-220032691.html?src=rss
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Theres something really exciting about FBC: Firebreak, Remedys take on cooperative, online first-person shooters. Ive been trying to pinpoint a specific wow factor since attending the games developer-led demonstration last week, but Ive concluded its a combination of multiple cool features blended perfectly together. FBC: Firebreak is set in the sterile headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Control and it features Remedys trademark dark surrealism, but its also infused with a healthy dose of silliness and mechanical depth. The result feels like a modern Left 4 Dead in the best possible way, just with Hiss instead of zombies and three players instead of four. Left 3 Dead, anyone? FBC: Firebreak takes place six years after the end of Control. The Oldest House, which used to be the seat of power for the FBC, has been sealed with the Hiss inside, and its now time to eradicate the invasion and lift the lockdown. The agency is sending in the Firebreak team, a unit composed of government volunteers with no extra combat training and little hope of making it out alive. As a member of Firebreak, youre handed some special equipment, patted on the back, and locked inside the headquarters with the Hiss and every unfortunate employee its infested. Good luck. The game is broken down by Jobs, which are essentially custom-built missions in specific regions of The Oldest House. All Jobs have three zones, but otherwise each one has a unique objective, crisis, and environment. After selecting a Job, you get to customize your run by setting the Threat Level and Clearance Level Threat Level determines combat difficulty and the number of rewards up for grabs, while Clearance Level sets the number of zones you have to clear and the type of rewards. I will say we do have more than three clearance levels, and you get into some pretty interesting stuff later, such as corrupted items that appear during the job, game director Mike Kayatta said. Remedy Entertainment Before the match begins, each player gets to select one of three Crisis Kits, loadouts designed with specific playstyles in mind. Crisis Kits come with a tool and an item each. The Jump Kit is based around electricity and it has the Electro-Kinectic Charge Impactor, a portable jackhammer kind of device with a conductive metal plate on the end, capable of slamming into enemies or propelling yourself into the air. It also has the BOOMbox, which plays music to attract enemies before exploding. The Fix Kit gives you a big wrench thats able to repair machinery and stagger Hiss, and it also includes a turret that you have to smack with the wrench to assemble. The Splash Kit is for all the water signs out there it features the Crank-Operated Fluidic Injector, an industrial water cannon that can extinguish fires and soak enemies so theyre primed for extra damage, plus a Humidifier, which sprays healing water in a wide area. A good way to look at all of this is that you're going to kind of combine the threat level and the clearance level and the type of job you want to play to sort of create your own load, your own experience, exactly the session that you're looking for with whatever group you're playing with that night, Kayatta said. Members of the Firebreak squad have their own Research Perks, or upgrade slots. You purchase Perks with currency earned during Jobs, and stacking upgrades of the same type strengthens their effect. Equipping three Perks of the same type lends that ability to nearby teammates as well. Remedy Entertainment For example, one perk might give you the feature that each missed bullet has a chance to return to your clip, or the ability to extinguish yourself by jumping up and down, which is how that of course works, community manager Julius Fondem said. If you equip just one perk, you get its effect. Simple, straightforward. If you equip two of the same type, you get a stronger version of that perk. And if you equip three of the same perk type, you can actually share its effect with your nearby crewmates. As you increase your kit proficiency, you'll increase the slots you have to play with, giving you the opportunity to play with a lot of different builds and strategies. Killing Hiss is all fine and dandy, but collecting currency is a major goal of each run in FBC: Firebreak, too. Currency is used to purchase new gear and cosmetics as well as Perks. Ultimately, Firebreak is about efficiency, Fondem said. You can't fail objectives, but the longer you spend doing them, the more and more Hiss will show up to stop you, increasing the chance that your crew dies on the job. That means the longer you spend exploring for currency, the more risk you're inviting and the harder it will eventually become to make it back to headquarters in one piece. Speaking of currency Remedy promises it wont charge for critical content post-launch. We want to keep all of our players united, which means that all playable post-launch content, such as Jobs, will be free for everyone who has the game, Fondem said. We'll support the game by offering paid cosmetic content as well. The Job that Remedy showed off in the media briefing (and featured in todays Future Games Show Spring Showcase) was Paper Chase, a mission filled with flying yellow sticky notes, sticky-note monsters, and one hulking sticky-note titan as the final boss. Its set in a classic FBC office space, concrete walls and blood-orange carpet, and players have to eradicate the rogue, multiplying sticky notes as well as the rushing Hiss. Little squares of paper swirl through the air and cling to the players face, covering the screen at times, amid explosions, flickering lights and showers of bullets. At one point, a player places a piggy bank in their melee weapon and smashes it on the Hiss, screaming, Stand back, piggys coming out! It activates an AOE wind effect on nearby enemies. There are environmental factors to mess with and a range of weapons to deploy shotguns, machine guns, rifles, pistols, water cannons, turrets, grenades, electrified impact devices, boomboxes and overall, Paper Chase seems like a damn good time. Remedy Entertainment Its taken plenty of iteration to get to this point. And as it turns out, FBC: Firebreak isnt limited to three players just to differentiate itself from a slightly similar 6-year-old game with a four in its title. The reason why we did three-player squads, really, it was like an organic quirk of the development, Kayatta said. We actually started testing with four players. I think it just didn't feel quite as good. It was a little harder to understand where people were. That's something that's, like, not required but definitely helpful in this game. And it just felt like, with all of the chaos and all of the fun systems going off, three just felt right over time. So that's it. And yeah, you can play solo or duo. FBC: Firebreak is due out this summer, and its heading to PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S and PC via Steam and Epic Games Store, plus itll be available day-one on Game Pass and PlayStation Plus. Itll support cross-play. Remedy is aiming for a lower-minimum PC spec requirement and optimizing the game for Steam Deck. Still, FBC: Firebreak will ship with full ray-tracing support, DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation and NVIDIA Reflex capabilities.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/fbc-firebreak-first-look-left-4-dead-but-with-remedys-silly-surreal-touch-214657219.html?src=rss
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Console makers and game developers like Microsoft, Nintendo and Electronic Arts have created a new initiative, managed by the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), that aims to make it easier to know what accessibility features games have. The new Accessible Games Initiative has defined a set of 24 accessibility tags that will appear in participating game storefronts and product pages so players can know what features a game has before they buy it. The tags have easy to understand definitions and cover a range of accessibility features games offer, like subtitles, input remapping for controls, text-to-speech and speech-to-text in chat and narrated menus. All of the tags and definitions are available to view on the Accessible Games Initiative's website. The ESA also says it will provide developers with criteria for the tags so they can develop accessibility features with them in mind. The new tags are designed to co-exist with existing accessibility information on product pages, but some companies may choose to focus exclusively on the new "cross-industry" standard. For example, Microsoft plans to "replace existing Xbox Game Accessibility Feature tags with their equivalent Accessible Games Initiative tags" to avoid duplication, while keeping its own tags that aren't in the initiative's list. The idea for the Accessible Games Initiative "was first developed by Electronic Arts, Google, Microsoft, Nintendo of America, Sony Interactive Entertainment and Ubisoft," according to the ESA, and new companies have joined in time for launch, like "Amazon Games, Riot Games, Square Enix and Warner Bros. Games." Offering some kind of standardized way to know what accessibility features a game has is desperately needed. While developers have gotten better at offering accessibility features in their games by default, players interested in a specific feature have mostly had to rely on third-party resources like Can I Play That? to figure out how well they've been interpreted and implemented. These tags should start to fix that. The only open question is when they'll be adopted. The ESA told The Verge that "the timeline for implementation of the tags is company-dependent," meaning there could be a wait ahead for players hoping to take advantage of the Accessible Games Initiative's work.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/game-companies-will-standardize-accessibility-labels-on-storefronts-and-product-pages-211335539.html?src=rss
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