Key Note Gaming

When Colossal Cave Adventure was first circulating among computer enthusiasts in the '70s, I wasn’t even born yet. I’ve never had the pleasure of experiencing the original spelunking adventure, but I’ve certainly enjoyed the fruits of its success. Colossal Cave’s legacy has spawned not just more text-based adventures like the ones legendary genre pioneer Roberta Williams was inspired to create as a part of Sierra Online, but it’s also one of the progenitors of everything we play today that remotely touches the adventure genre. Even Elden Ring might not exist without Colossal Cave. So what does it mean to remake Colossal Cave in 2022? Text-based adventures have largely fallen by the wayside, so Roberta Williams and her husband Ken Williams are tackling the adventure most notably by visualizing it for the first time . I’ve now had the chance to play the earliest snippet of Colossal Cave Adventure at both GDC and now at Gamescom, with two hands-on previews in VR on the Meta Quest ...

Indie low-poly horror showcase EEK3 returned this year in the form of an hour-long selection of trailers for upcoming games, hosted as always by a purple skeleton named Skully. While the Nintendo Switch logo appeared multiple times, don't worry, every game featured is coming to PC. This year's complement of trailers included a few games we've seen before, like GoldenEye homage Agent 64: Spies Never Die , as well as Ghostlore , which is basically Diablo 2 only with monsters from Southeast Asian folklore, and Signalis , which reimagines The Thing as a cyberpunk anime with Resident Evil's inventory and Silent Hill's atmosphere.  But there were plenty more we hadn't seen before, many of which are now on my wishlist. Like Mother of Many , in which you're a mouse farmer who has to grow vegetables, cook food, and fight to end the curse your family suffers under by defeating hordes of enemies with a scythe. Or Loretta , a rural noir adventure set in the 1940s ...

“Every night!” I’m sitting across a table from Hideki Kamiya, mildly taken aback. This is, in part, because his response bypassed our translators entirely and came directly in English. Mostly, though, it’s because – I’m realising as my mind races to reshuffle the subsequent questions – this is not the typical answer given by an industry legend when asked how often they’re able to actually play games. A much more typical answer is some level of remorse over not being able to play much these days, but that they found titles X or Y interesting over the past year or two. Be it because of a supernatural need for very little sleep, incredible talent and time-management, or perhaps just games really being his core pastime, Kamiya is very much not one of the typical. Soon after, I am being schooled on not knowing enough about Columns. He is in disbelief that I dislike the music, until it becomes apparent that I’m only familiar with the Mega Drive game. According to the mind behind Devil M...

On an average day about a dozen new games are released on Steam. And while we think that's a good thing, it can be understandably hard to keep up with. Potentially exciting gems are sure to be lost in the deluge of new things to play unless you sort through every single game that is released on Steam. So that’s exactly what we’ve done. If nothing catches your fancy this week, we've gathered the  best PC games  you can play right now and a running list of the  2022 games  that are launching this year.  Midnight Fight Express Steam‌ ‌page ‌ ‌ Release:‌ August 24 Developer:‌ Jacob Dzwinel Launch price:‌ ‌$20 |‌ ‌£16 ‌|‌ ‌AU$29.95 Midnight Fight Express is a beat 'em up crime saga about Babyface, a reformed crim whose quiet, rehabilitated life is thrown into chaos by a drone warning of an imminent citywide disaster. A bunch of rogues are planning to take over the entire city, and Babyface has until dawn to stop it. This involves, of course, beati...

Great moments in PC gaming are bite-sized celebrations of some of our favorite gaming memories. I'm happy to control just one person in RPGs, but I do love when they say, "Actually, this time we're going to need you to construct between four and six independent heroes without accidentally picking a combination that leaves you without skills that will turn out vitally necessary about 10 hours from now. Good luck!" OK, I don't love finding out I've made a completely non-viable party. Or when it happens the only worthwhile magic weapons are longswords and I've gone and specialized in handaxes and polearms. Or there's a really interesting NPC rogue who wants to join the party, but I've already got one and there's no point having two. Those things are annoying, and I've taken to googling in advance what companions are in RPGs so I can avoid hitting the same archetypes. But in spite of the pitfalls they fall into, I will happily spend way to...

Ulf Andersson was a designer on both Payday games before becoming CEO and creative director of 10 Chambers, so he knows a few things about co-operative heists. Though 10 Chambers continued the co-op theme with hardcore horror shooter GTFO , which hit version 1.0 in December, GTFO didn't have the same "Robert De Niro tries to orchestrate the perfect crime and it all goes wrong" vibe as the Payday games. 10 Chambers' next release sounds like it will.  In an interview with NME , Andersson described the studio's upcoming game by saying, "I'm back on the heist shit, basically—so it's a heist cooperative FPS, and it has a sort of a techno-thriller theme. I read a lot of sci-fi books, and so imagine everything that cyberpunk is inspired by, and a ton of other shit." Unlike the Payday games, which were defined by the moments where an alarm goes off and you end up gunning out of the bank and rampaging through the streets with a sports bag full of loot,...

Epic is once again collaborating with Time Magazine to host an in-game event, " March Through Time ," commemorating Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963. Last year, Epic debuted the event to a mixed reception, and quickly had to remove players' ability to perform most emotes while loaded into it. The defining images of it in my mind remain stuff like Superman and Rick Sanchez raising the roof in front of a projection of Martin Luther King Jr., a staunch critic of the government of the United States who was martyred for his political activity. Does this at all seem disrespectful? Keeping people from smeezing in front of MLK is a great start, but the whole thing still feels a bit crass. That's not to say videogames have no place in teaching history⁠—Ubisoft's actually done some great work with its Discovery Tour mode for recent Assassin's Creed games.  The thing i...