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Rain98 is a blue-hued, pre-Y2K, Serial Experiments Lain inspired visual novel about time travelling to the past to end the world

Picture this. You're me, and you boot up the demo for Rain98, an incredibly blue-looking, rainy visual novel set in Tokyo, 1998, about a woman who refers to herself as the Angolmois, a world-ending reference to the predictions of good ole Nostradamus. At one point you have to light this woman's cigarette in a lightly stylish sequence. You get to a bit where you're asked to put your name in, and you put it in because like its predecessors, this is surely a self-insert kind of situation. Only you get a Steam achievement for getting a game over for putting your name in. Rude! But curious, so you,

PC Gaming

Life has once again found a way in Athanasia, an "immersive" dinosaur FPS that feels like comfort food for Dino Crisis and System Shock players alike

Good news, people who figure they are going to die of old age before they get another Dino Crisis! Good news also, people who can't get enough throwback immersive sims! Even as Capcom forge ahead with their Resident Evil remake ouroboros, plucky Momentum Games and horror publishers Black Lantern Collective are releasing Athanasia - a first-person homage to both Dino Crisis and System Shock, in which you play intrepid researcher Carmen Flores, who has been sent to an ominous abandoned scientific facility in South America. One of these days, I'm going to turf up to a collapsing laboratory comple

PC Gaming

Penguin Colony is not messing around with its statement on the Palestinian genocide, banning sale in Israel and calling out the games industry in-game

You might remember 2021's Umurangi Generation, developed by Māori studio Origame Digital. It placed its focus on its first-person photography system as much as its very direct anti-colonial and anti-neoliberal criticism, stemming partly from the Australian government's mishandling of COVID and the bushfires that spread across the country in 2020. Origame's second game, the newly-released Penguin Colony, is just as direct in its anti-colonial theming, with its target being the ongoing Palestinian genocide by Israel, and the games industry at large for its silence. Read more

PC Gaming

Abiotic Factor's second year of updates confirmed to include official mod support and a DLC taking science to the tropics

Following its 1.0 release last July, Half Life-esque sci-fi survival game Abiotic Factor has been having a pretty good run of post-early access updates. That run of is set to continue through to 2027, as developers Deep Field have announced the game's year two roadmap including full support for community mods, a winter update with smaller additions, and the previously teased paid DLC, Entropic Break. Read more

PC Gaming

Paralives' first major update slips to next year, but when it comes you can expect some pretty meaty improvements for all of its main features

Since launch back in May of this year, life sim Paralives appears to have been trucking along nicely, with the dev team offering up fairly regular updates with all sorts of tweaks big and small. Certainly confidence-inspiring for an early access game, especially one as systems-driven as it is. And now, the Paralives team have outlined their plans for the game's first major update, which seem very catered to improving the core experience. Read more

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PC Gaming

Dig through an infested planet with your giant drill-city and try not to die while you do it in the roguelite city-builder CitaDrill

You've heard of the drill that will pierce the heavens, so introducing: the drill that is attached to an entire city that will pierce the earth. That's the concept for CitaDrill, a roguelite city-builder where the city is encased in a big ole dome, a larger than life drill attached to its base that you dig through an infested planet. It's a lot, of course, but it's got some lush pixel art and a demo you can try out for yourself as part of this Steam Next Fest, too. Read more

PC Gaming

I have seen the future of sports games and it is called just volleyball

Earlier this year, I embarked on a pivotal journey, one that I'm sure upon finishing will change me for good: I started watching Haikyu!! It's my first sports anime (when you're a chubby little muffin like I was, you take more interest in Not Moving over Sports), an abscess in the lexicon of genres I've dipped my toes into, one I'm rectifying after all these years. And friends, it's good eatin'. I even, incredibly briefly, floated the idea of taking up volleyball. Yet now I don't have to, and it's all thanks to a delightful, incredibly Wii Sports coded game called just volleyball. Read more

PC Gaming

Reel out garbage from a flooded planet and make number go up as satisfyingly as you can in the incremental fishing game Selkie's Salvage&Co.

The wonderful thing about video games is that they can take something that is, quite frankly, terrible, and turn it into an experience where you can't help but think "just five more minutes." Incremental games often have that effect, and Selkie's Salvage&Co. is no different in that regard, it's just the funny thing is that it is essentially a game about taking your rubbish out. Read more

PC Gaming

"AI is a technofascist, anti-human and anti-art project", says creator of lefty tech satire Future? No Thanks!, before explaining why he used it anyway

Prominent capital-p Political game developer and left-wing academic Paolo "Molleindustria" Pedercini has revealed that he used generative AI tools for aspects of recent ecosocialist satire Future? No Thanks!. According to Pedercini, "a tiny fraction of its code was written with AI support" towards the end of the project, specifically to assess and fix bugs. The game also uses text-to-speech voice-acting for a couple of characters, generated with ElevenLab software, with Pedercini noting that the characters in question are intended as a spoof of wonky artificial intelligence. He insists that no

PC Gaming

"We made a very difficult decision": Australian indie showcase Freeplay reject antisemitism claims after delisting a Jewish sponsor who was allegedly accused of being a "zionist"

The organisers of Australian independent games showcase Parallels have rejected accusations of "prejudice" and say they've received "violent threats", after a Jewish developer had her sponsorship of the event refunded. The developer in question is Wren Brier, creative director at Witch Beam. She claims an unnamed speaker booked for the event has accused her of being a "zionist", following an article about her work from an Australian Jewish publication. Read more

PC Gaming

Dispatch celebrates its first anniversary with commentary and storyboard modes for every single episode, if you've got the deluxe edition anyway

I'm going to park my feelings of unease at the fact that it's somehow already been a year since Dispatch came out, as developer AdHoc Studio have revealed some pretty neat sounding additions to the game to commemorate its first anniversary. Well, if you have the deluxe edition anyway (sorry, regular edition owners). Read more

PC Gaming

A Line Held Tight is a charcoal visual novel about a miner's strike in the 32nd century and choosing your relationships wisely

We've had about roughly four decades of games as we generally know them now, and yet somehow, so often their stories feel so limited in scope. I'm not talking about a lack of big, bold ideas, in fact there might be too many of those. I more mean that there are aspects to life that often go uncovered in games. For example, when was the last time you saw a game about a workers strike? Citizen Sleeper 2 has one questline about such a thing, but it's just what the entire game is about. A Line Held Tight, a mecha visual novel about a sci-fi miner's strike, may bridge that gap. Read more

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PC Gaming

Factorio's final major update has rolled off the assembly line, adding "the things we wanted to do for 2.0 but didn't have time for"

In one of the happier endings to occur in games this week, impossibly enormous resource management sim Factorio has just released its last-ever major update – version 2.1 – on its stable branch. As previously heads-upped by developers Wube Software, 2.1 doesn’t make any big new additions to its planets or tech trees, but does sneak in more than 30 quality of life improvements and minor new features for both the base game and its Space Age expansion. Including, they say, "the things we wanted to do for 2.0 but didn't have time for." Nice to get a few final pieces out the door before it closes,

Topic: indie | Game2Wins News