Or rather, you should take it skating. I like to grab a brewery and sort of skim it over the landscape, like a skater describing dreamy arcs on the surface of a frozen pond. It’s capitalism - it’s potentially even empire-building - but at this stage it’s also speculative, a quiet thing of drooped eyelids and keen hearing. You are waiting for the land to speak to you. You are waiting for the land to tell you where the brewery should best be placed....

The recent release of the Maiden demo revealed snippets of Lady Dimitrescu’s backstory. Our Aoife also looked into what Resident Evil Village is all about in a fantastic video, below. Fans had noticed pretty early on that Lady Dimitrescu is very tall, but her exact height was a mystery until now. In a tweet thanking fans for their… enthusiastic reaction to internet sensation Lady Dimitrescu, Village’s art director Tomonori Takano said all the attention was “far more than we anticipated”....

That’s according to Montreal-based French-language publication Le Devoir (via Google Translate), which sheds a little more light on Haven’s ambitions - with accompanying quotes from Raymond and fellow co-founders - as part of a short profile piece on the studio. Speaking to Le Devoir, Raymond explains Sony had initially asked the studio to present three large-scale projects, with the intention of funding the idea it liked best. Ultimately, Sony showed interest in all three, but the one Haven opted to focus on to begin with is described as a “persistent and evolving online environment” that will seek to differentiate itself from other popular online games by promoting “inclusion and caring”....

Welcome to another weekly deals round-up from the Jelly Deals team. We scour the internet in search of all sorts of offers and good prices on gaming, tech and related stuff. We’ll bring a selection of these to you each week for your perusal, and hopefully save you some cash. Keep in mind that deals can change at any time, so by the time you read this, there’s a small chance they’ll be gone....

Kerbal Space Program 2 was first confirmed to be in development during Gamescom 2019, where it slapped with what would prove to be an extremely optimistic 2020 release date. Publisher Private Division later adjusted that to “fiscal 2021” - sometime between April 2020 and March 2021 - and then pushed it back once again to autumn 2021. That still wasn’t the end of the delays, however; as 2020 drew to a close, developer Intercept Games revealed it had made the decision to postpone release yet again, this time to some nebulous point in 2022, citing the “immense technical and creative challenge” of developing the sequel....

The announcement was made in a new video shown off during the Gamescom Opening Night Live pre-show. The video, below, confirms 39 playable characters and the return of the series’ classic 3v3 battle system. SNK fighting game King of Fighters 15 is due out on PC via the Epic Games Store and Steam, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X and S and Xbox One.

Inside each one resides a unique challenge, and the rewards completing them can be extremely useful. Looking for more help? Our Ultima Weapon guide can help you create the best weapon to take on these Battlegates, while there are also Lucky Emblems to help you unlock the Kingdom Hearts 3’s secret ending. Not only will you get powerful equipment and rare crafting materials for clearing each Battlegate, but you’ll also find a collection of Secret Report pages that contain intriguing information about many characters in Kingdom Hearts 3 and the potential future of the series....

The creator has recently set up a website, presumably for a new game, which features nothing more than a shadowy visage with the words “Who Am I?” written across the image. Clicking on this image then gives you the option to share said picture across various social media feeds, something that Geoff Keighly has done. As such, the internet now expects whatever this new project of Kojima’s is to be fully unveiled at The Game Awards this December....

Beginning today, players will no longer be able to make purchases within the game. Metal Gear Online-related DLC will then be withdrawn from sale from 30th November. Next year, the whole game will be removed from digital storefronts beginning on the 1st March 2022. All online services will then be switched off from the 31st May 2022. Even after this date, of course, you’ll still be able to play The Phantom Pain offline....

An important thing to note - what’s actually being sold to your is a code to download the Expansion Pass to your Nintendo Switch. That’s all well and good, but there’s two Expansion Passes available - one for Pokemon Sword and one for Pokemon Shield. They’re not compatible with the opposing game, so buying the Sword Expansion won’t do anything for your copy of Pokemon Shield. Fortunately, ShopTo has said that once you install the code on your Switch, you’ll have the choice on which version you want to download....

Almost the entire Digital Foundry team has an LG OLED at home, so it’s perhaps no surprise that the firm’s C1 and C2 OLEDs are our top 4K TV recommendation - the incredible contrast, beautiful HDR presentation and excellent motion clarity make these great choices for gaming or watching films in HDR. Today the LG C2 is on sale at AO, with a 15 percent discount available on models sized from 42 to 65 inches when you use the code LG15 at the checkout....

But in bringing Steph back, True Colors by necessity had to keep her slightly at arm’s length. The main game is not her story, and it is clearly pitched as a fresh entry point for newcomers who never visited Arcadia Bay. It has a weighty, emotional tale of its own to tell, and as I wrote in Eurogamer’s Life is Strange True Colors review, the game stays laser focused on exploring that, and particularly its core brother-sister relationship....

Researchers at the universities of Plymouth and Wolverhampton said loot boxes “are structurally and psychologically akin to gambling”. It also found that large numbers of children are opening loot boxes. Loot boxes are a controversial video game mechanic that encourages real-world spending on virtual goods. Loot boxes appear in a number of video games, but it is EA’s FIFA series, and in particular its money-spinning Ultimate Team mode, that has become the focal point of the debate around them....

“Our journey has been filled with late nights, creative problem solving, hopping into western servers to play together, and now, looking ahead at things to come. As we continue to learn from our players’ feedback and dive into data, our goal is to remain transparent (sometimes brutally so) with our players,” the developers wrote. This brought the narrative to Argos. “We never wanted players to feel rushed in their quest to hit item level 1370,” the developers wrote....

It was a shame because there’s a “potent” story about childhood there, Vikki wrote in her Lost Words review for Eurogamer. A story written by Rhianna Pratchett, about a girl whose tumultuous life unfolds in a diary as you play - playing a heroine character of her imagining in a platforming, fantasy world. It’s a roundabout way of saying I’m glad Lost Words is now finally getting a proper release, snarky though that may sound....

“Lucasfilm’s legacy in gaming stretches back decades,” says the company in its announcement post, “and with Lucasfilm and the galaxy far, far away entering a new and unprecedented phase of creativity, so will the world of Lucasfilm Games”. The Lucasfilm Games brand has a long and illustrious legacy, of course, being the original name given to the company’s gaming division by George Lucas in 1982 - a division that would go on to produce a string of seminal titles, from adventure classics such as the Monkey Island series and Day of the Tentacle to beloved Star Wars games including X-Wing and Jedi Knight....

As the name suggests, it revolves entirely round using a Dry Bones Shell - which has various clever uses that allows you to get past all manner of deadly traps. The level plays out as a series of rooms, each with their own challenges and ways of using the Dry Bones Shell to best them. The second area has a locked door on the right and a door you can enter in the middle....

The XP changes were originally detailed last week in a blog post on the Marvel’s Avengers website, along with a warning that any player who wanted to avoid the lengthier grind had until 18th March (the day these changes hit) to level up characters first. “While it’s tempting to read the increased grind as a cynical attempt at keeping players embroiled in the Avengers’ live service game for longer,” our reporter Matt Wales summarised last week, “Crystal Dynamics insists the goal is to fix pacing issues with the existing levelling system, arguing the speed the game currently awards skill points ‘may be confusing and overwhelming’ to newer players....

Metro: Last Light Redux, released in 2014, is the second game in developer 4A Games’ acclaimed FPS series set in the post-apocalyptic Russia of author Dmitry Glukhovsky’s novels. Or, more specifically, it’s 4A Games’ second attempt at that sequel, thoroughly remastering the studio’s original 2013 effort with a range of welcome visual and gameplay refinements. For the King, meanwhile, is a thoroughly enjoyable, optionally co-operative rogue-like adventure that successfully combines a raft of familiar RPG stables - dungeon crawling, questing, turn-based exploration and combat, loot acquisition, and more - with the luck-mitigation design of board games like Arkham Horror....

You can forgive long-time Metroid fans going into the first original game since 2010’s somewhat divisive Other M for having some nerves, then. But, after a couple of hours with the opening of Metroid Dread, I have wonderful news. This one looks set to be the real deal - a classic 2D Metroid, delivered with some serious production values and all the polish you’d hope for from a game that’s helping launch Nintendo’s latest Switch hardware, next month’s OLED refresh....