Developer Fallen Leaf has partnered with publisher Dear Villagers on their upcoming science fiction psychological thriller Fort Solis and announced a PS5 release alongside PC this Summer 2023. Get ready to explore an abandoned mining facility on the red planet of Mars while solving the mystery of the missing crew and make crucial decisions that change the course of the narrative.

You play as engineer Jack Leary as you explore Fort Solis station on your own. Gather clues from various labs, crew quarters and bunker in order to figure out what happened here. You must race against time as nightfall brings new horrors and complications! The game features multiple endings stemming from difficult decisions you will be forced to make throughout the game.

Fallen Leaf game director James Tinsdale chimes in and says: “We’re all fans of hard sci-fi and horror, so with Fort Solis we wanted to create a tense, classic sci-fi tale that players are free to piece together at their own pace. To us immersion was the key factor here, and we’re very proud of all the work our team and our collaborators have done in bringing Fort Solis to life. It’s such a fully realized, lived in place, and we’re thrilled for everyone to discover it when it launches later this year.”

Fort Solis utilizes Unreal Engine 5 to power an intricately immersive setting and features a first class voice cast crew including Red Dead Redemption 2 lead Roger Clark, Troy Baker (The Last of Us, Death Stranding), and Julia Brown (The Last Kingdom, World on Fire). The game also features no camera cuts, load times, or HUD, for an extra immersive experience.

Fort Solis is coming to PC via Steam and PlayStation 5 sometime Summer 2023. You can wishlist the game now on Steam to support the developers!

Check out the newest gameplay trailer below:

Screaming Chicken: Ultimate Showdown is an upcoming multiplayer party game that encourages mayhem, chaos, and of course, sowing discourse among friends. “Dress up your chicken and jump onto the battlefield to take on your friend in physics-based challenges. Push your opponents off the map with unique and crazy weapons and watch as the play area collapses under the pressure!” Of course there is multiplayer, featuring online PvP, shared/split-screen PvP, Online co-op, and Shared/Splitscreen Co-op.

Screaming Chicken: Ultimate Showdown sports an impressive sounding 130 maps, meaning I may never have to play the same map more than once. Maps include areas like crowded city streets and sandy desert oases. If that doesn’t tickle your fancy there will also be a map creator where players can design their own maps and share them with the community with full Steam Workshop integration.

Screaming Chicken: Ultimate Showdown is headed to Steam on April 13th.

Warhammer 40,000: Darktide released late last year, and was received some mixed reviews. Repetitive missions, unfinished systems, and unfulfilling progression were some of the highlighted complaints. I reviewed the title myself and can agree on some level with those claims. Nevertheless I enjoy the heck out of Darktide. Darktide is the spiritual sequel to the highly enjoyable Vermintide and Vermintide 2 games. Vermintide had players in Warhammer fantasy, while Darktide takes place in the dark, grimey space of 40K. I’ve been into the series from the get-go and while Darktide is far from a perfect game it is still a ton of fun, especially when I can find three friends to play with.

Yesterday developer Fatshark released the Tools of War content crop. The new content adds ten new weapons, new conditions, combos, bug fixes, improvements, and quality-of-life updates. You can read the complete notes here, or watch the handy video down below.

A big part of all sports sims is the career mode. Select your favorite player or manager, or maybe even create yourself, and take on the highest challenges the various sports present. Golf is no different and certainly not EA Sports PGA Tour. The trailer below showcases that career journey the game will take you on across all four majors. 

You start by customizing your golfer’s attire, equipment, and even swing. Then pick whether to begin as an amateur or a pro.The amateur tourneys are only available for those players. If you want to start at the bottom and experience the thrill of putting in the hard yards, go through the amateur ranks. That's what I'd do. 

As you grow into the game, Career Mode will use XP and skill points to progress their golfer. Kind of like an RPG as your skills develop over time into categories like Power, Driving, Approach, Short Game, or Putting. Increasing the skills also unlocks new shot types and upgrades to keep pace as the courses themselves get more challenging. In the Season Hub you can monitor upgrades, peek at the calendar of upcoming tournaments, and track progression and milestones through ongoing Quests. Quests lead to increased control over things like ball and club specs and how they perform on the links.

Seems like a robust system to really grow as a player and live that rags to riches journey - actually this is golf so... riches to more riches? Anyway, EA Sports PGA Tour releases April 7th for PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC via the EA App, Steam or the Epic Games Store. 

Guerrilla Games announced today over on the PlayStation Blog that Horizon Forbidden West: Burning Shores is now available to pre-order, and it’s a bit cheaper than this writer expected. The PS5 exclusive expansion retails for $19.99 and takes players on a journey to a volcanic Los Angeles that has been ravaged by tectonic activity.

This new story picks up where the main story of Forbidden West ended, so you’ll be required to finish that before the Burning Shores DLC will be available to you in-game. I was of the mind that this would be a $29.99 expansion, considering it’s a PS5 exclusive and increased game prices in general, so I think $20 is actually quite fair. Check out a new pre-order trailer:

The Aliens IP has proven to be one of the more flexible film-based properties to make the jump to our beloved video game world, spanning a variety of genres from survival horror to co-op third-person shooter, and now tactical strategy. Today, developer Tindalos Interactive announced that Aliens: Dark Descent will launch on June 20^th for PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, and PC. We also got our first brief look at gameplay in a new trailer.

In this squad-based action game, you’ll command a squad of Colonial Marines and investigate a mysterious Xenomorph outbreak. It features a cinematic narrative campaign and gameplay built for both mouse & keyboard, as well as controller. You’ll recruit and manage your hand-picked squad, with combining the right weapons and abilities being a major key to surviving. Choose wisely though, because Dark Descent features character permadeath and any marines you lose will be gone forever.

I need to understand more about the difficulty the game presents, but I am keeping a close eye on this one for sure.

If you are one of those gamers like me that live at the crossroads between loving classic games but needing all the new tech-y advances, you've likely checked out the Pixel Ripped games.

The previous titles in the series (Pixel Ripped 1989 and Pixel Ripped 1995) pay homage to classic games by taking old-school game mechanics and having them bleed off the screen into VR worlds. Pixel Ripped games are VR games that feature games within the game. Players play video games on TV screens or Gameboy-like devices, but the games come to life in the world around the player, often in exciting and unexpected ways. Think of playing Tetris, but the blocks start falling from the ceiling of the room you are sitting in.

Until now, the developers at ARVORE have had to pay homage to classic games without actually using those games. But with the announcement of Pixel Ripped 1978, ARVORE has revealed a partnership with Atari, meaning that it can put assets from actual classic Atari games into a Pixel Ripped title. This, of course, is wildly exciting.

This partnership is an amazing idea, opening up new worlds for AVORE to explore in VR. “We have always paid homage to our favorite games from the past in this series, but now in Pixel Ripped 1978, thanks to our partnership with Atari, we can actually reference the fantastic games and consoles from that era,” said ARVORE CEO Ricardo Justus in a recent press release.

Pixel Ripped 1978 is scheduled to launch this summer on PC, PlayStation 5, PS VR2, and Meta Quest 2.

Developer Spike Chunsoft has announced that the latest installment in the Science Adventure series from Mages: ANONYMOUS;CODE will be releasing in the West this September. The game previously released in Japan last June to positive reception from Famitsu. Set in 2037 Tokyo, you play as Pollon Takaoka caught in a series of plots as a result of his encounter with a mysterious girl named Momo. The Science Adventure series has always featured a ratio of 99% science and 1% fantasy to create an environment that is inspired by real world scientific events. Other notable entries in the series include: CHAOS;HEAD, STEINS;GATE, ROBOTICS;NOTES, and CHAOS;CHILD.

It should be noted that this game will be the first in the Science Adventure series to feature both English and Japanese voice over options. Previously all the games were only voiced in Japanese with English subtitles. Please see below for the entire cast of voice actors for the game: Max Mittelman,  Anairis Quiñones (AI: The Somnium Files - nirvanA Initiative English VA for Tama), and Y. Chang (AI: The Somnium Files - nirvanA Initiative English VA for Lien).

ANONYMOUS;CODE is coming to PC via Steam, Nintendo Switch, and PlayStation 4 on September 8, 2023. You can wishlist the game now on Steam to support the developers!

Check out the newest release date trailer:

Polyarc, the studio behind the highly-acclaimed VR platformers Moss and Moss: Book II revealed today that their next project is taking them in a new direction in the VR space – competitive multiplayer. They stopped short of fully revealing the game (we didn’t even get a name) but they did announce that a playtest is already scheduled to take place April 14^th through 16^th on Meta Quest 2. Sign-ups are now open over on their website, if you’re interested.

While the playtest is taking place exclusively on the Quest 2, it doesn’t appear that it will be exclusive to the headset when the game launches. I’m hoping it also makes its way to my shiny new PlayStation VR2 rig! Judging by what looks like concept art for the project, this new multiplayer title seems to me like it is staying in the Moss universe. And if I were a betting man, I’d put my money on this game being a VR platform fighter, which sounds pretty awesome.

It's been about 2.5 years since Virtuix first announced the Omni One, but it's finally being sent to backers. The Omni One is the second VR treadmill that Virtuix is shipping and it has a lot of improvements over the first.

For starters, there's no more ring around the unit as the way to keep the person in one place now consists of an arm and a vest. The arm can swing around 360 degrees and lets the user perform multiple actions that they couldn't do with the previous unit such as crouching and jumping.

via GIPHY

Because of the arm design, the unit has shrunk down in size and weight considerably compared to the original Virtuix Omni. It won't take up as much room and looks to be a lot more maneuverable. There's even a nice little storage area located under the step.

Included with the Omni One will be a Pico Neo3 Pro VR headset. This headset will include a UI that's used to launch Omni One apps and it's got the horsepower that the Meta Quest 2 has, but with a wider field of view.

Starting at $2,595, it's certainly going to cost you a bit to be able to move around in VR. But it does look like it's a great device to compliment your VR setup and could open up to a whole new way to interact with games by walking, running, and dodging physically rather than using thumbsticks to do these actions.

Oh how I wish I could trade my Virtuix Omni for the Omni One.