Challenged to a supernatural game by the sultan, you have to fulfill the conditions of a mystical game that demands you commit dreadful sins: Carnality, Bloodshed, Conquest, and Extravagance.You'll have to desperately scheme, manage your limited resources, and explore the depths and heights of society to win a stay of execution—and to survive the consequences of the horrible things you did to win.Sultan's Game is a really cool narrative card...

  Speaking to Nightdive founder Stephen Kick and VP of business development Larry Kuperman at this year's Game Developers Conference, I was curious about how it felt to be returning to System Shock 2 for the studio's upcoming remaster. After all, I had a loose understanding that Shock 2 is the game that kicked off Nightdive in the first place.Kick recounted the unlikely story of how he found himself making...

Against the Storm is one of the best city-builders of recent years, taking the SimCity cycle of building cities destined to be destroyed by natural disasters and infusing it with a roguelike structure, such that the death of your city is merely a part of the game, rather than the end of it. Yet alongside this, one of the key secrets to its success is the diverse array of anthropomorphic...

Rust is, famously, an unforgiving affair, a survival game where someone murdering you and stealing everything you own is also known as 'Tuesday'. But Facepunch's open-world cruelty simulator does have at least one merciful bone in its emaciated, battle-scarred body. In 2021, Facepunch added a softcore mode, which mitigates some of the vanilla game's brutality with features like safe spawning zones and the ability to recover some of your loot...

Pacific Drive received its "largest ever free content update" this week, one which introduces a brand new way of playing Ironwood Studios' vehicular survival game. But you'd better step away from the newswheel, bucko, because I'm hijacking this article for my own devious ends. While the headline addition of the update is some fancy-sounding expeditions, it's a secondary feature developer Ironwood Studios has folded in, which actually made me consider...

Of all the unmade sequels that I'd like to exist, Dishonored 3 is at the top of the list. The original Dishonored ranks among my favourite games ever (especially when you throw in its incredible expansions), while Dishonored 2 is generally regarded as one of the best games of all time.Sadly, a third game never happened due to the second selling below publisher Bethesda's expectations, and the chances of it...

For five years the indie designer known as Pizza Pranks has been publishing Indiepocalypse, a monthly "bundle-zine" of 10 experimental indie games by different developers. They're always a bit off-kilter, and they come with a helpful pdf zine where the creators of each one do a postmortem on their inspirations. It's also full of handy links to other places you'll find niche games, like the interactive fiction zine ChoiceBeat.The latest...