Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs is done. Okay, it’s not quite done, and what a bloody relief, but Frictional Games – creator of the original Amnesia: The Dark Descent – posts that thechineseroom has handed over their final build of the title, all ready for “testing, tweaking, optimising, porting, translating and all those things that are part of the process of creating and releasing a game”.

“How come a game meant for Halloween 2012 has been delayed for so long?” asks Frictional co-founder Jens Nilsson, airing a jolly good question. “Originally we thought it would be a short, experimental game set in the universe of Amnesia, but thechineseroom had a vision that was bigger than that. As their work progressed, the potential for a much greater project emerged. What we ended up with is no longer what we had first imagined, but a fully fledged Amnesia game. A different kind of Amnesia, but definitely not a short experiment.”

There you go, then. According the post, the game should be proper ready in time for Q2. And there I’d just managed to scrape the flavour of the first Amnesia from my harrowed soul.

White Paper Games have just put out, in trailer form, a shockingly accurate depiction of my average day on a hangover. Oh, I jest. It’s really for Ether One, a first-person mind-bender that’s looking curiouser and curiouser. Just have a gander at that lovely drawn-on art style (epilepsy warning – possible seizure trigger):

Set to be the first of two narrative-centric puzzlers, Ether One has you take on the task of a “Restorer” – one who has the ability to project into and restructure the minds of others. You’d expect a person such as this would be getting one hell of a jolly out of the knack, but in actual fact Restorers use this superpower to for the good of all mankind, okay? Sheesh.

Anyway. Stranded in a labyrinth of memories, and now bleached of your own identity, your job is to heal a client’s broken mind by poking about and “rebuild[ing] the fragile structures within”, as the game’s blurb lays it. On the way you’ll uncover her past and find that the path back to your own salvation is interwoven with hers, which is just as well really.

As an added bonus you’ll get to flash about a camera that would fill a hipster with hideous, screeching indifference, and shit will get all Matrix on you. Can’t say fairer than that.

The game will also feature QR codes. Buggered if I know what that means, but give it the ol’ nod if you want to see it Greenlighted on Steam. I know I do.

Farming, eh? Who’d have thought an activity so fundamental (and by fundamental I mean dull) could transmogrify into the gaming equivalent of a chocolate-coated crack pipe. And no, I’m not talking about Farming Simulator 2013, the very thought of which fills me with terror.

I lost countless hours (okay, 80) to Harvest Moon before I took my monastic vows and eschewed handheld consoles until I could afford them again. There is just bloody well something about the gentle rhythm of sowing and watering and harvesting and animal husbanding and fucking about with magical gnomes and smashing rocks to find DIAMONDS and maybe marrying the town alcoholic. I mean, isn’t there?

What I’m trying to say is, Stardew Valley, where have you been all my digital life? Look here:

Do you see? Tell me you see.

Stardew Valley, despite having an utterly forgettable name, has a feature list torn bleeding from my pleasure centre: in addition to your common and garden gardening, it’s got those RPG elements that have been all the rage since the beginning of time, as well as crafting, socialising, cooking, and fishing. Fishing, is what I said. For those ornery souls not built for the farmer’s lot, there is a network of Mysterious caves in which to spelunk and do battle. Did I mention archaeology? I believe it slipped my stunned mind.

Fucking fantastically, the game will also include same-sex marriage in addition to the boring old vanilla option. I’m fascinated to see that co-op play for up to four farmhands will be supported; who can tell what brand of mischief that augurs?

If the game is everything I’m hoping it’ll be, I’ll probably never leave the homestead again. Do us all a favour and help it harvest a Greenlight, would you?

It was a dark, soul-wringing day in the depths of Hidden Exit when Terraria’s development stepped on a primordial black hole and obliviated. The capacity to feel joy was sucked straight the hell out of my face, and I started staring at the Starbound development blog in the same way my fictional cat stares at small living things that it is about to torture and then kill.

BUT HOPE HAS REARED ITS HIDEOUS, LEAKING FACE.

As if to taunt me alone, Terraria dev Redigit has posted a call for a list of features people would most like to see in a “hypothetical” update of the time destroyer he helped birth. Bless.

High up on the list is, of course, all the content heading into the touted console version of the game (sniff). That aside, Steam Workshop support is a big “pretty please”, along with new biomes, more special dimensions, and a gigafuckton of equipment, block types and creatures. The usual, in other words.

On a personal note, I simply want an infinite, never-ending tempest of things with which to decorate my imaginary house with, Redigit; thanks for asking.

GolfXTRM is what you get when you dunk a suit-coated golfer in a jar of ketamine and shove his head in a NES cartridge slot.

Made amid the fantastical Fuck This Jam – whose dashing premise is that something vauntiful will happen if you get people to make games in genres they fucking hate – it’s a surreal golfing sim with procedural woodlands, seasons, and trees that grow in real time. (Read that again.)

There is no hud. There is just a ball to strike – and doing so is delightfully kinetic, like half-time amid a game of Die by the Sword. You explore, forgetting to look for the stupid ball, your body developing the sort of momentum that would piss off Newton. The world swims by like a calm green fever.

“Golf games seem to be about watching power meters and adjusting targeting sights,” says creator Eugene Hopkinson (AKA Riot) on the game’s landing page. “I prefer being outdoors, exploring procedural landscapes, and playing with physics simulations.”

It’s currently rather crashy and empty, but development continues. I hope it will for some time to come.

PS: For the record, I fucking hate golf.

Swamps. Never met one, but I’ve always thought of them as the sort of thing to avoid, because not even water wings can save you from the glutinous death of Quicksand™ – not to mention the sabre-toothed alligators, the corrosive gases, the miscellaneous undead, and the hillbillies with their infernal banjos.

However, I’m prepared to give swamps a a good old second chance if the latest tech video out of the makers of The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing is anything to go by. Apparently, the humble swamp is quite the trick to get right in a game engine “because of the various textures like leaves, mud and water, of course”, according to the Neocore Games devblog post on the topic.

But that hasn’t stopped their top engine mage – who has clearly struck a deal with something sinister – from doing this:

If that’s any indication of the sort of thing we can expect in the game proper, count me thoroughly in.

If you’ve ever wondered what it must be like to drown – what’s more, in mid-air, so to speak – then golly well look no further than Asphyx, a clever little browser game by Droqen.

The premise: have a lookabout. The complication: is bloody ingenious. If your character falls in the water, and fall in the water he certainly will, you (the person, the very you) have to hold your breath. If you suck even a teat’s worth of the oh-two, you have to own up and press escape.

It’s like a handshake deal, right? No secret agent type is going to kick your chair out and give you the ol’ waterboarding if you don’t hold your breath. But you’d know. You’d carry that terrible secret to the grave.

Honestly, this is the sort of game I’d have thought I’d cheat my way through like a vagabond with a charming smile, but there is something of the magic to this. Without the self-imposed “mechanic” of holding my breath, there would be little to keep me going through Asphyx. But with this challenge, everything is different. Every plunge is imbued with urgency, and every missed jump, every fall, is a lung-punching bastard of an occurrence.

Indeed, the game hijacks the emergency signals that are pinging your brain for its own devious ends. I suppose it’s like that other form of asphyxia that nobody’s supposed to talk about.

Play it. It’s as free as the air you breathe.

(Thanks to Rock, Paper Shotgun for pointing this beauty out – and to Droqen, who is holding my head down in the virtual pool.)

PS: Asphyx reminds me, distantly, of a thoroughly awful short story by Chuck Palahniuk. What ever you do, don’t read it.

Oh, blast my slovenly inattention. Joakim Sandberg, also known variously as Konjak and The Second Coming of the Pixel, has released a new alpha for The Iconoclasts. It’s shorter than the first, it’s been the subject of ratcheting and tinkering and cries of “my pretty”, and you will want to play it over and over until the next release.

This is now late news, I’m aware, but it’s news that irradiates the cockles of my heart – and something I simply must post about, seeing that I’ve done a fair bit of harp-twanging upon the topic. With its sidescrolling cheekiness, disgustingly lovely 16-bit charm and charactertastic story, I can think of few games I’m awaiting with more rabidity. It’s as if Square, high as the dickens following the release of Final Fantasy VI, had executed a daring sideways flip into the SNES-era arms of Mario and Metroid and just never looked back.

Just examine the frames of this here new trailer:

Everything about the The Iconoclasts feels like it’s about to bleed love all over the new carpet. The artwork is dashing, the controls tight, the action varied and compelling, and the characters full of, well, character.

And need I remind anyone that this is a one-man outfit? Sandberg does the pixels, the coding and the sound all by himself.

I am sick with envy. Sick with it!

I’ll say this about orphanages out in the countryside: I don’t trust them. I’ve never been in one without having a fit of the snivels. Not that I’ve ever been in one, mind, but I’ve seen enough of them through the reliable lens of popular culture to know that they are only marginally better for your health and sanity than a grinning lunatic with a stolen scalpel.

Be that as it may, not everybody has this life-saving primal instinct. And what a relief, because if we all had the paranoid nature of a certain game reviewer whose name I shall carry with me to the grave, we would not be cowering beneath the hellsome goodness that is They Bleed Pixels.

Coming out on a Steamy 29 August, They Bleed Pixels is Spooky Squid’s first bloodsoaked foray into the realm of commercial games. And it’ll wring you till you haemorrhage.

The game casts you in the button-black shoes of a lass straight out of a loligoth catalogue. Freshly arrived at an orphanage run by, I would presume, HP Lovecraft’s aborted twin, she comes across a book dripping blood in a library. Then the dreams start.

It’s in these dreams that the game takes place. And to be honest, the minimal framing story takes a welcome back seat to the visceral gameplay.

They Bleed Pixels, a side-scrolling, monster-flogging platformer, has been described by some comment trolls as “Super Meat Boy with fighting”, but they are drooling idiots and deserving of your pity. This is very much its own game, and it’s pixel noir at its very most brutal.

Each level has you traverse an Inquisition’s worth of spikes, blades and homicidal monsters. Following a straightforward set of tutorials, it starts off mildly enough to let you get the hang of the controls. Then it applies the thumbscrews and slams you in an iron maiden.

With any platformer of this variety, everything hangs on the controls, which in They Bleed Pixels are snappy as a bullwhip. The meat of the game rides on the old staples of the double-jump and wall-flip, and these are handled with acupunctural precision.

But the real revelation is the combat. Using just one button, those loveable fellows over at Spooky Squid have created a hypnotic fighting system with the depth of an ocean trench.

The trick lies in context. Tap the attack button while you’re holding forward, for example, and you’ll vindicate that old warning about running with scissors. Hit it while standing still and you snap off a kick, which does no damage but breaks through defences to launch beasties across the screen (hopefully into a set of spikes or a spinning saw blade). Hold that kick down and you send your opponent skyward, from whence you can set up a meaty juggle and lay on some serious beatdown.

And the better the beatdown, the faster your so-called “Sigil Meter” fills. Spectacular, comborific affairs top your meter out in seconds, after which you can cast a sigil (fairyfolk talk for “checkpoint” in this realm) and regain your misspent health. The sheer number of moves you can chain together, and the tactical oversight required in the fighting, make for mayhem with a glossy grin.

When the good game talks of bloody pixels, it sure means it. Enemies bloom into gouts of the runny stuff (tallied in pints for high scorage), which stains the land and drips from spikes in discrete streamers of red.

Most of this blood, admittedly, turns out to be your own. You’re going to die a lot in They Bleed Pixels, and the game sheds not a single tear of shame over rubbing that shit in. See, when you die your corpse remains, most probably impaled on one of the many pikes and spikes that litter the world like the wet dreams of a certain Vlad.

In just one level I died over a hundred times.

God, it’s horrible. But it swims that bloody strait deftly, managing somehow to feel fucking, fucking impossible but never actually undoable. Each successive act of intrepid suicide garners you a little more finger memory, and before long the impossible has become merely transcendentally difficult.

The lot of it is ensconced in an aesthetic that manages to be charming and sinister at once. The pixel presentation is spot-on, managing to be lo-fi stylish while staying the hell out of the way, and the backgrounds do a splendid job of conveying a sense of dreamlike vastness. The sound, too, is weighty, squeamish and full of pent-up goosh.

Now I must make special mention of the music. It’s done by the awkwardly titled DJ Finish Him, one of the many faces of one Shaun Hatton. It manages to capture the ground-pixel glitchiness of that hallowed 16-bit era, taking itself seriously but winking surreptitiously at you, the player. Wonderfully, when you take too many hits to your three-hearted stock of life, the music plunges underwater and warbles away tunelessly. It’s an excellent way to gauge exactly how close you are to a spell in the mortuary, and it sounds cool to boot.

If there’s anything I’m a touch wiffly about it’s the game’s length. It’s bastard-hard, oh aye, but it’s also a fairly short run through the butchery. That said, there are excellent guest levels (with the promise of more), arty unlocks, ludicrous achievements (excuse me, “Blood Badges”) and plenty extra challenges to dig up.

Pettiness aside, I’m deeply chuffed. They Bleed Pixels is every bit as fun-inducing as I thought it would be; no doubt people who have cyborg hands and genitals of tungsten will be posting their 22-second speed runs of the game on YouTube this time next week.

Somebody had to do it. We’ve had soccer games, and we’ve had soccer management games; now, we finally have the technology to create a soccer fuckabout game in the guise of Lords of Football.

Hitting the personal computer come the harsh light of summer, the “world’s first football lifestyle simulation” will let you play with surrogate soccer stars both on and off the pitch. “You command a team of footballers who demand training, leadership and a high-end lifestyle to keep them motivated,” a game blurb reads.

So you’ve got to put them through their paces on the pitch, as well as give them reasonable access to the holy trinity of capitalism: the beer,  the slot machine and the stripper. Real-life titillation sold separately!

Letting them run off the leash too long can have hazardous effects on the field, particularly if a tabloid gets wind and a scandal blows up. On the other hand, footballers need to carouse. It’s in the fucking contract, innit.

We all know that footie players are a naughty, precocious bunch. Such as is the case with other forms of wealth and fame, the soccer world has its fair share of the irresponsible funsies. Sucking a line of cocaine off the topographical features of a model is one of the perks of the position, I’m given to understand.

Just how deep this simulation rabbit-hole will go is anyone’s guess currently (barring Italian developers Geniaware, who ought to have a bloody good idea). I reckon it’s safe to say a hangover will wreck your striker’s game, but what if he takes some milk thistle and has a Bloody Mary in the morning? What then? And if your goalie develops an addiction for love, do you get to check him into a luxury rehabilitation programme for caught-outs and cop-outs?

“Will you fulfil your potential, inspire your team to greatness and become a Lord of Football?” Will you indeed.