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There's been a bit of a resurgence of stop-motion games in recent years. For one thing, The Spirit of the Samurai is set to arrive on Thursday and it looks pretty compelling (you can play as a cat in some sections!). During the Day of the Devs showcase, we got a look at another intriguing stop-motion game that's a bit further out. This one's animated entirely with felt. Feltopia is the first project from creative director Andrea Love and her team at Wooly Games. Love has long used needle-felted wool to create stop-motion animations for commercials, short films and social media, but hadn't seen the medium being used in a game before. "We realized there was a gap in the market for this type of aesthetic, and decided to fill it," Love said. Love describes Feltopia, a cozy spin on the side-scrolling shoot 'em up genre, as a "cute 'em up." You play as a sheep herder named Skyrider who uses magical powers to purge the world of an encroaching smog and save their Rainbow Flock. You're not killing enemies here. Instead, you're restoring infected creatures and bosses to their true forms. Wooly Games "Wool lends itself really well to the natural world, so I knew I wanted to create a game with sweeping landscapes and lots of elemental effects," Love said. "The classic side scroller mechanics mixed with our hand-felted, stop-motion techniques gives Feltopia both a novel and nostalgic feeling, which is a balance I like to hit with my animation work. Our goal is to take a typically violent genre and invert it so it is about transformation and healing rather than destruction and death. Feltopia looks charming as heck. It's immediately apparent that Love and her team have infused a ton of personality into their first game, and this could be one worth keeping your eye on. Wooly Games, which started work on Feltopia last year, is aiming to release the game in mid-2026. It'll hit Steam first and arrive on other platforms later.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/feltopia-is-a-side-scrolling-shoot-em-up-animated-in-felt-182353538.html?src=rss
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What would it look like if you took the fast-paced arena shooter stylings of Doom Eternal and flipped the gory, grimdark aesthetics upside down? You might end up with something like Incolatus: Don't Stop, Girlypop!. It's a "Y2K girly-pop arena-style movement shooter where standing still is not an option," as game director Jane Fiona of Funny Fintan Softworks put it during the Day of the Devs showcase on Wednesday. "The faster you go, the more damage you deal and the more you heal." In Incolatus, a mining corp is trying to drain the world of love, its most precious resource. Trees are dying and fairies have been ejected into the world at large, and it's up to you to save their homes so you might argue that it's even darker than Doom Eternal. Thanks, capitalism. Funny Fintan Softworks After you (a revolutionary eco warrior) eliminate an enemy robot, you can grab the remaining love that it was running on to power up your weapons and deliver more damage. The love that you collect also plays a factor in the dress-up metagame. You can change the look of your character's arms to personalize things a bit. If you donate love to fairies you encounter, you'll get more customization options for your arms and guns. Five cool points to anyone who correctly guessed that movement is a critical aspect of Incolatus. The quicker you move, the more your guns expand with additional barrels and scopes. Funny Fintan has incorporated its own take on bunny hopping (a classic arena shooter movement technique that a player can use to boost their speed). It's called wavehopping, and you'll need to slam to the ground, double jump and dash oddly enough, mimicking the form of a wave to take advantage of it. Incolatus, which is coming to Steam "soon," immediately stands out thanks to its hyperpop vibe with bright pinks and greens, as well as the era-appropriate soundtrack. As it happens, the "don't stop moving" mantra has lodged that one S Club song firmly in my brain.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/pc/incolatus-dont-stop-girlypop-may-be-the-y2k-fever-dream-arena-shooter-you-never-knew-you-needed-182348483.html?src=rss
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Since its announcement in March, it's sounded like Sleight of Hand should be a fantastic stealth-action game in a magical noir setting and now it looks that way, too. Its latest trailer, revealed in the Day of the Devs 2024: Game Awards Edition stream, showcases witchy card-slinging gameplay on the gritty streets of Steeple City for the first time. In the stream, creator Joshua Boggs describes Sleight of Hand as, "If you took Metal Gear Solid and replaced the guns and tools with cards." This is followed by a shot of the protagonist, Lady Luck, trying to sneak past a guard, only to trigger a brass-backed exclamation point as she's spotted. The classic stealth references don't end there, either: Lady Luck is voiced by Debi Mae West, who played Meryl Silverburgh in Metal Gear Solid. (The new trailer begins at 37:20 in the below video). Lady Luck is a retired occult detective who takes on one last case in order to destroy her former coven, which has a stranglehold on Steeple City. The game combines third-person stealth action with card-based strategy, and in the new trailer, these mechanics appear to work in hardboiled harmony. Cards in Sleight of Hand allow Lady Luck to see through walls, deploy smoke bombs, blind enemies, teleport, sling hexes and crush all the bones in someone's body, to name a few abilities. Side note: On its face, Sleight of Hand's premise is eerily similar to Deconstructeam's The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood, a fabulous 2023 game starring an exiled witch who enacts revenge on her former coven by reading and building tarot decks. The games are entirely different otherwise Sleight of Hand is third-person stealth action and Cosmic Wheel is an isometric narrative affair and I don't point this out because I think anything nefarious is going on. I just thought it was interesting. Clearly there was something in the zeitgeist that made card-wielding witchy women a hot concept at both studios, and it's fascinating to see how the same conceit can be interpreted in such vastly different ways. Sleight of Hand looks like a stylish new entry in the stealth-action genre, and its witchy noir universe seems to support a variety of approaches in each encounter. It's developed and published by New Zealand studio RiffRaff Games. RiffRaff was originally founded by Boggs in 2019 under the name MayDay, following the success of his spy-comic game, Framed. Tencent threw down an undisclosed amount to become a minority investor in the team in 2022, which is when it changed names to RiffRaff and hired up talent from around the globe. Sleight of Hand doesn't have a firm release date, but it's on track to hit Steam, Xbox Series X/S and Game Pass in 2025.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/pc/sleight-of-hand-gameplay-trailer-showcases-occult-card-strategy-in-a-noir-world-182341033.html?src=rss
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