Notably, the only mentioned Xbox consoles and PC, but given that other Minecraft games are on other platforms, it remains to be seen whether Legends will be as well.
Hamilton, Ontario-based indie developer Achimostawinan has revealed that its detective game, Hill Agency: Purity & Decay, will release on PC on August 31st.
In Hill Agency, you play as Meygeen Hill, an Indigenous private investigator looking into a woman’s murder. As Meygeen, you’ll travel through a Blade Runner-esque neon-drenched world filled with Cree language. In place of combat, the game is focused on exploration and conversations, with your dialogue choices affecting the trajectory of the narrative.
Notably, Achimostawinan is an Indigenous-owned Canadian indie developer focused on telling Indigenous stories. Hill Agency is the team’s first game, which has been in development for several years. Last month, Achimostawinan won top honour at the Ubisoft Indie Series for its work on Hill Agency.
Cuphead: The Delicious Course will be priced at $9.99 in Canada when it releases on June 30th.
Oakville, Ontario-based developer Studio MDHR confirmed the cost during a recent media preview attended by MobileSyrup.
The Delicious Last Course is the Canadian studio’s long-awaited downloadable expansion to its beloved 2017 run-and-gun game Cuphead. In the DLC, players can experience a previously undiscovered section of Inkwell featuring a new playable character, Ms. Chalice, as well as new bosses, weapons and more.
During the media event we attended, Studio MDHR also confirmed that The Delicious Last Course will take “between three and four hours” to beat, on average. That said, Eli Cymet, producer of the game, stressed that this could vary depending on the player, given the overall challenge:
“I think from our perspective, this varies even internally on the team. I think you’re going to have people who are diehard, ‘dyed in the wool,’ speedrun-quality Cuphead players, and I can’t speak to what their ability level might enable them to do. As somebody who — I’ll say just squeaked by and beat Elden Ring recently and was not an expert by any means — I’m still enjoying [the DLC] and playing it and going back and using Ms. Chalice in the main game right now and experiencing some of those fun new boss experiences in the DLC experience.
[That] ran me between about three and four hours of gameplay, but again, I want to really emphasize that there are certainly folks who may find it challenging enough to dig in for more time and there are folks that may find it something that is different for their skill level.”
Price and runtime were just a few of the many details that Studio MDHR shared during the event. For more from the hands-off preview, check out our full preview.
It’s been a long time coming, but Cuphead: The Delicious Last Course is nearly here.
First unveiled in 2018 for a 2019 release, the add-on to the beloved 2017 run-and-gun game has been delayed a number of times. Oakville, Ontario-based Studio MDHR, rather understandably, has wanted to maintain a “healthy and sustainable” development cycle, and then COVID-19 happened.
Thankfully, The Delicious Last Course is finally set to release — for sure this time — on June 30th, 2022.
Ahead of the highly anticipated launch, I got to attend a hands-off group media preview with Studio MDHR, and it looks even more stunning and imaginative than I expected.
“One of the things we like to think about with this expansion for the game is that we talked about it internally as a depth expansion more than a breath expansion,” says Studio MDHR producer Eli Cymet of The Delicious Last Course‘s scope. “Ultimately, we really spent so much time over these last few years, polishing every facet of our game development acumen in terms of the quality of our animation, the quality of our concept and game mechanic design, and, notably, the quality of the soundtrack.”
On that note, Cymet lets us sit for a moment and soak in part of the new score, which is once again composed by Toronto’s Kristofer Maddigan. Over 110 musicians performed on The Delicious Last Course soundtrack, but in smaller groups at a time due to COVID, which made recording especially difficult. Thankfully, you can already see the fruits of their labour; the new pieces we’ve heard so far are just as wonderful as you’d expect, coming off Maddigan’s sublime jazz-infused music for the base game.
“Christopher Maddigan really challenged himself this time around to sort of plumb the depths of the 1930s and ’40s for musical stylings, genres, inspirations, riffs [and] hooks that he hadn’t really touched on in the first game. And he calls it shorter but denser, his soundtrack — [fewer] tracks, just so much richness to each one,” says Cymet.
“Chris took influences that we haven’t heard in the core game, from rococo to western-themed, but all with an underlining similar jazz feel,” added Maja Moldenhauer, Studio MDHR executive producer and studio director. “And maybe I’m biased because it is our game, but the music, I frequently play it while I’m cooking dinner. It’s just a beautiful soundtrack!”
After hearing a bit of the lovely overture, Studio MDHR takes us into the actual DLC. To access it, you’ll need to have beaten at least one of the Mausoleums in the main game. These were the short stages that had you protecting an urn by parrying each of the incoming ghosts. Once you meet this requirement, you can take a boat ride in the overworld to bring you to a brand-new section of Inkwell Isle, which is where The Delicious Last Course takes place.
“We like to call this our biggest Isle yet — both in terms of size and secret scope. There are quests, goals, secrets [and] hidden sort of sundries everywhere to discover — we’re going to let folks do that at the game’s launch,” Cymet teases.
On “D.L.C. Isle,” you’re quickly introduced to your objective: rescuing Ms. Chalice from the astral plane. Chef Saltbaker, a new character introduced in the DLC, can bake a goodie to help her escape, but he needs Cuphead and Mugman to defeat a series of bosses to gather ingredients. This is easier said than done.
A new challenger approaches
Immediately, Ms. Chalice stands out for multiple reasons, starting with her adorable and unique design. “She contains tens of thousands of new frames of animation and is not built on any character skeleton from the previous game whatsoever,” notes Cymet. These carry over across her movement in the overworld, regular boss fights and the shoot ’em up plane sections. Studio MDHR confirmed that the boss-free run-and-gun levels will not return in The Delicious Last Course.
But Ms. Chalice has also got a great deal of utility to go with her snazzy looks — chief among this, a double jump and roll while crouched, unlike Cuphead/Mugman, to afford her added layers of maneuverability. On top of that, her dash doubles as a parry for further options, and she even starts off with an extra hit point (HP).
That all sounds great, but you probably think she’ll make Cuphead — a game almost as well-known for its challenge as its visuals — almost too easy. Thankfully, Studio MDHR says careful consideration has gone into designing not only her expanded repertoire but its usefulness among the DLC’s intricately crafted bosses.
“I see it as just kind of like two different angles of how you might play. Chalice’s moveset is advantageous only in specific situations,” explains co-game director Jared Moldenhauer. He notes that because she basically consists of an “amalgamation of aspects of a few different Charms,” the trade-offs are that she has fewer customization options than Cuphead and Mugman. Her ability to duck and roll also requires her to be grounded, while Cuphead and Mugman’s Smoke Dash can be used in the air.
“So I wouldn’t go as far as saying like she is some form of ‘Easy Mode’ — it’s just that a certain set of players may find it easier to control with a double jump [and other abilities], and some might not,” he says.
Adding on to that, Cymet says Ms. Chalice is meant to add “spice and variety” to the combat experience.
“It is really a risk-reward scenario to think about playing as Cuphead and Mugman with access to a more versatile array of charm enhancements. Or playing as Ms. Chalice, if you’re a player who perhaps doesn’t want to focus on parrying as much with the timing factor, you can dash into objects and parrying will be taken care of for you, but you have to do so knowing that you are limiting your charm access in that way.” Cymet also points out that she can even work well in co-op, as her additional HP lends her “extra survivability” that can be used to revive a teammate using Cuphead or Mugman.
If all of that wasn’t enough, Cymet says the actual bosses themselves will ensure that Ms. Chalice doesn’t “break” the game.
“We think they’re going to be super fun and really inventive and creative, and I just don’t think we can emphasize enough how some of these challenges are going to be different from what players have experienced in the original Cuphead game. So we think that will offset anything that might make Chalice an ‘easier’ player.”
New bosses and Shots and Charms, oh my!
In the demo, we got to see one of these bosses — a wizard known as Mortimer Freeze — in action, and everything that Cymet was saying proved quite true. (This same boss was later shown off briefly at Summer Game Fest on June 9th.)
Right off the bat, I was impressed by the scope of the boss fight, which seems larger than anything from the original game. In his first phase, Mortimer alternates between throwing cards, minions and a giant whale at you before summoning a giant snowman to envelope him, which gives him the ability to roll around in snowball form or turn into a sentient fridge that shoots ice cubes. All the while, his cultish followers cheer him on in the background. Naturally, this variety required even more of Studio MDHR’s signature painstaking hand drawing and animation.
“There are single boss phases in this game that contain more frames of animation and detail than entire boss fights in the original Cuphead,” says Cymet.
“Having touched almost every frame of animation in the inking process, I can attest to the fact that the mileage on the animation that you’re going to see in DLC is significantly greater than in singular bosses you would notice in the core game,” adds Maja Moldenhauer. “I would say what would take a lot of the mileage in a boss from the core game is, on average, probably double in DLC. There’s just a significant amount of more detail, more background layers — [it’s] a really beautiful body of work.”
But it also leads to each fight feeling grander and more dynamic.
“We really wanted these to feel like exciting multi-phase experiences, and we also experimented, not just with the bosses themselves transforming but with the stages transforming — which is new to Cuphead — and moving to different areas and arenas,” says Cymet.
As an example of this, the next phase of the Mortimer fight has you hopping up out of this arena using platforms to head outside, where he’ll greet you in a dastardly new snowflake form. From there, he’ll fire snowcone rockets, ghostly spirits and even his own eyeballs. Considering this was just one boss fight, I’m eager to see what Studio MDHR has cooked up for the rest. To further tease us, Studio MDHR elaborated on some of the inspirations and goals behind designing the bosses.
It’s no secret that Cuphead was heavily inspired by 1930s Disney and Fleischer animation, and co-director Chad Moldenhauer says the team further tapped into that Golden Age, including ’40s-era works, when developing The Delicious Last Course.
“It sounds funny to say, but almost in the same way that Disney kind of slowly led up and released Fantasia with everything they learned throughout the ’30s era, we kind of wanted to follow in those footsteps and really push ourselves creatively — the fidelity of the art, the craziness, the areas that we couldn’t go through in the first game due to time and cost and the nature of that,” he says. “So I think people will be excited to see some areas where even we pinch ourselves every day when we see some of the stuff we’ve pulled off.”
“We like to imagine that the first game was basically a series of last bosses from a normal game. And then DLC is almost like, “What if every boss was the equivalent of the last boss in Cuphead with just that much extra work and art and patterns and joy and just really push each individual one to a new heightened level?” notes Jared Moldenhauer.
There will also be new Shots and Charms to purchase and equip. While we didn’t get to see too many of them, Cymet did spotlight a personal favourite: the ‘Crackshot,’ which shoots higher-damaging little diamonds that can break out into faster but weaker bolts. Meanwhile, its EX Attack (super move) is a turret that shoots on its own or can be manually launched at the enemy by parrying it. Of course, both options free you up more to jump and dodge. On the flip side, ‘Converge,’ another new Shot, widely fires three electric bullets that can converge for a tighter spread if you hold the lock button and aim.
“The goal for all the weapons was always to just offer a different way to play a boss — like how you could position yourself or how much damage you can give. So with the new sets of weapons and charms, it does offer a new way that you may want to approach different battles,” says Jared Moldenhauer. He also mentioned a charm that lets you regain HP upon parrying instead of having a super metre, which would certainly suit more defensive playstyles.
“You can go back and experience original Cuphead game bosses with all of these new charms and weapons that we feel really add a layer of strategic depth to speedruns and to both high score attempts and general play overall,” adds Cymet. That should add even more value to the “between three and four hours” average time he expects the DLC campaign to take you to complete.
Ultimately, Cuphead: The Delicious Last Course is shaping up to be everything you could have wanted from an expansion to the original game. It’s clear that Studio MDHR has put a staggering amount of time and effort into creating its most technically impressive, visually distinct and appropriately challenging bosses, with oodles of charm, to boot. This is one meal I can’t wait to dig into.
Cuphead: The Delicious Last Course will launch on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, Steam and GOG on June 30th for $9.99. It’s also part of the Tribeca Games Showcase, which is spotlighting nine titles from around the world between June 11th and 19th. Those interested can play a demo from home during this time — learn more on that here.
Overall, it looks virtually identical to the original 2013 PS3 action-adventure title, just with prettier graphics. This means it will tell the same story: grizzled smuggler Joel escorting a teenager named Ellie across a post-apocalyptic America. However, previous reports suggested that the remake will feature the enhanced combat mechanics introduced in 2020’s The Last of Us Part II, which we don’t get to see in the trailer.
That said, the PlayStation Direct listing alludes to this with the following description:
“Enjoy a total overhaul of the original experience, faithfully reproduced but incorporating modernized gameplay, improved controls and expanded accessibility options. Plus, feel immersed with improved effects and enhanced exploration and combat.”
Of course, releasing The Last of Us remake also helps PlayStation further capitalize on HBO’s live-action adaptation of the series, which is set for a 2023 release. The show, which stars Pedro Pascal as Joel and Bella Ramsey as Ellie, has been filming in Calgary for the past year.
A few weeks ago, my girlfriend Alex attempted her first PC build in the highly sought-after Teenage Engineering PC Computer-1. The process was a lot more complex than we expected, but we’re in love with the finished product.
Alex selected this case for a few reasons but mainly for its small size and unique look. She says it’s both cute and industrial at the same time, and I have a hard time disagreeing with that. Not to mention that the bright orange paint job looks fantastic and is a nice departure from the sea of black and white boxes that dominate the home PC landscape.
The case is a Mini ITX form factor, which means that many of the parts we had to buy to fit inside it were small and very cute. It also means everything gets packed together tightly inside this little orange case, but we’ll get more into that later.
The first challenge is unboxing everything from the incredibly slender box it comes in and then unfolding it. Yes, you read that right. This PC case comes flat packed like a piece of Ikea furniture, and then you have to bend and screw the panels into place.
Look at that cute little power supply in Alex’s hands.
The case is made of aluminum, so it’s difficult to bend, but it’s also so thin that you can easily mess up and push it apart the wrong way. After a few minutes of analyzing our situation, we started bending pretty easily, and luckily, we didn’t push anything the wrong way.
Where we struggled was putting in all the parts correctly. Since the tiny PC comes disassembled, you need to affix several pieces to the walls of the case before screwing them together. This means every side looked like a basic rectangle, and we ended up attaching a lot of pieces upside down on our first try.
After a bit of trial and error, we got to a point where we could test the PC to make sure it was running before we more-or-less locked it into the case forever. This went well and we were able to assemble most of the PC into a rectangle.
Since the PC is so small, it’s assembled in a semi-unorthodox way with a tiny power supply at the bottom and the graphics card (GPU) on top. This means these components draw in air from outside of the case and expel it through their own methods out the rear. This is a little different from some traditional PC builds that might use more fans to cool the entire PC at once.
I’ll also mention here that Alex plans to use this build to video edit and create motion graphics, so we needed to make it as powerful as we could in this small size. This is tricky since the PC features sub-par cooling and most high-end GPUs are enormous. Luckily for us, we were able to find a small RTX 3060 with 12GB of RAM that seemed more geared for workstation builds rather than PC gaming. However, it’s only made with one large fan on the top that’s always running at 30 percent, so this isn’t the quietest build.
Inside we packed a 12-core Ryzen 9 5900x and the best cooler we could get in this small case was the Noctua NH-U9S with small 80mm fans on both sides. Initially, we were hoping to have one of the fans on the outtake hole on the side of the case, but its 20mm girth was too thick to fit in with our cooler. We’ve since ordered a smaller fan that we’re hoping to install soon. Overall cooling is fine, but it’s running hotter than a full-sized build with equivalent parts.
We also packed in 32GB of RAM, a 2TB Samsung 970 EVO SSD, and an Asus B550 Motherboard with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth built-in. We didn’t add any RGB since the case is relatively closed in, but Alex has considered getting a static orange light to put inside to make the edges glow softly.
We also ran into a few issues once we had the case mostly together. The GPU is a bit too tall, so the top of the case is bulging slightly. It’s difficult to see, but we had to force it down, and I wouldn’t want to remove it now. Further, since there’s so much jammed into this tiny case, a few screw holes didn’t line up. Most of the screws are in, and it feels solid, but we had to force them in.
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Overall, Alex is stoked with her new PC (she calls it Clementine), and it runs really well. Sure the fans are a little loud, but since it’s a custom PC, we can get a new GPU in a few years that hopefully solves this problem, or we can try and DIY it with more quiet fans.
My favourite part is the design, and specifically the little switch on the front. Hands-down it’s the best power toggle on any PC ever.
Alex made a video about the build on her own YouTube channel, and Shevon Salmon came down to build with us too since it was such a unique experience.
Sony unveils sales for Marvel’s Spider-Man for the first time since August 2019.
The 2018 game, based on Marvel’s infamous friendly neighbourhood web-slinger, sold 13.2 million units by August 2019. Since then, its sold 20 million more units between the original game, the remastered edition on PS5, and Miles Morales.
In total, sales reached more than 33 million according to Playstation.Blog.
However, Insomniac announced on June 2nd that a Remastered version of Marvel’s Spider-Man will release on PC on August 18th.
Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered is coming to PC! Experience our original Spider-Man story on August 12, 2022 when it launches on Steam and the Epic Games Store.#SpiderManPC#BeGreaterpic.twitter.com/69kqPy9O5W
Insomniac will follow up the PC version with the sequel to both Marvel’s Spider-Man and Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Moral in Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 sometime in 2023.
Square Enix has revealed a new trailer for its hotly anticipated Japanese role-playing game (JRPG), Final Fantasy XVI.
The trailer dropped during PlayStation’s June State of Play presentation alongside a summer 2023 release window.
In the three-minute footage, we see more of the game’s story, which follows Clive, the son of an archduke who embarks on a quest for revenge in the fantasy world of Valisthea. More of the action-RPG combat mechanics, as well as glimpses at classic Final Fantasy summons like Ifrit, Shiva, Bahamut and more, are also featured.
Notably, the game is being developed by Square Enix’s ‘Creative Business Unit III,’ the team behind the critically-acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV. Naoki Yoshida, the fan-favourite director of XIV, is a producer on XVI.
The last mainline entry in the Final Fantasy series, XV, was released in November 2016. Alongside XVI, Square Enix is also working on the sequel to 2020’s Final Fantasy VII Remake.
Diablo Immortal was released on mobile on both the App Store and Google Play Store.
The game released sometime this morning in both Canada and United States, a day before the expected date for the launch of the PC version, which will be released on June 2nd. In fact, North America is the only region so far, where the game is available for download on both iOS and Android. But that could change as the day moves forward, according to DigitalTrends.
#Diablo Immortal has already started showing up in app stores one day ahead of its official launch. https://t.co/iUH9lHr1uh
As for the PC version, Activision Blizzard sent out a tweet mapping out the estimated release times for each region, also mentioning that players “may see it populate on servers even sooner” than its June 2nd release date.
Notably, another message was pinned on the Diablo Immortal official Discord server on May 28th, in which it states:
“As we note in our blog iOS and Android players will start to see Diablo Immortal propagate on their respective stores on the morning of 6/1. We don’t exactly know who will see it first or in what order of those who will see it. We expect this to be fairly early in the morning that this process will start (Pacific Time).”
The game will include optional in-game purchases, cross-play and cross-progression between PC and mobile, and accessibility features.
Diablo Immortal is currently free to play on both Android and IOS stores.
Ahead of Diablo Immortal’s PC and mobile launch on June 2nd, Blizzard Entertainment outlines a number of accessibility features in the game.
Diablo Immortal is a spin-off of the quintessential dungeon crawler series from Blizzard. Developed not only for PC but iOS and Android, the team is including a number of features to enable more players to take a trip to hell.
In an accessibility blog post, Blizzard announces that controller support is available at launch. “You will be able to play Diablo Immortal with controllers on both mobile devices and on PC,” the team confirms. With controller support, Diablo Immortal also features button remapping, a feature that can go a long way for accessibility. “Many controls — including skills, accessing chat, and more — can be remapped from the controller tab of the settings menu.”
Additionally, the Diablo Immortal accessibility supports the ability to resize chat text. This includes the ability to scale up the size of text up to 200 percent. Up to three text size options are available for the chat interface. Voice chat transcription is also available. For those with vision impairments, Diablo Immortal includes text-to-speech options. This can narrate chat messages.
Finally, for graphics, Blizzard adds a World Brightness option in the Display tab. This can help brighten up the game and its environment. While not available at launch, the team states its commitment to add higher contrast and colour blindness options to the game as well.
Immediately, Ms. Chalice stands out for multiple reasons, starting with her adorable and unique design. “She contains tens of thousands of new frames of animation and is not built on any character skeleton from the previous game whatsoever,” notes Cymet. These carry over across her movement in the overworld, regular boss fights and the shoot ’em up plane sections. Studio MDHR confirmed that the boss-free run-and-gun levels will not return in The Delicious Last Course.
“So I wouldn’t go as far as saying like she is some form of ‘Easy Mode’ — it’s just that a certain set of players may find it easier to control with a double jump [and other abilities], and some might not,” he says.
The case is a Mini ITX form factor, which means that many of the parts we had to buy to fit inside it were small and very cute. It also means everything gets packed together tightly inside this little orange case, but we’ll get more into that later.
