Month: October 2019

This might be the first episode of New Releases containing zero full-priced games, so your wallet won’t hurt as much if you decide to pick up a few of this week’s big games. Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible lair is mixing things up with a different style of gameplay, while Trine 4: The Nightmare Prince is a return to form for the series. Killer Queen Black is a revamped version of the arcade cult classic, and Indivisible is combining action-RPG mechanics with platforming. Meanwhile, PS4 gets an exclusive this week with Concrete Genie.

Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair — October 8

Available on: PS4, Xbox One, PC, Switch

2017’s Yooka-Laylee was a 3D platformer inspired by the Banjo-Kazooie series, featuring many of the same developers. The sequel, however, is more like Donkey Kong Country, with 2.5D levels to conquer. They’re all connected by an overworld with its own set of puzzles to solve and secrets to uncover.

More Coverage:

• Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair – 2D Platforming Gameplay | PAX West 2019

• E3 2019: New Yooka-Laylee Game Has A Donkey Kong Country Vibe

Concrete Genie — October 8

Available on: PS4

Concrete Genie sees you playing as Ash, a young boy whose town has been taken over by a force called the Darkness. To take it back, you’ll use your graffiti skills to create artsy monsters that actually come to life as “genies.” You can also freely paint to your heart’s content in PlayStation VR.

More Coverage:

• PS4 Puzzle-Adventure Concrete Genie Is About Creating Art In A Perilous Place

• Concrete Genie Makes A Dark World Your Canvas | E3 2018

Indivisible — October 8

Available on: PS4, Xbox One, PC, Switch

Indivisible might remind you of Skullgirls, and that’s because it’s made by the same team, using its signature hand-drawn art. The world of Indivisible is inspired by multiple cultures and mythologies, and it combines platforming with strategic RPG battles. How you arrange your party is key to winning each fight.

More Coverage:

• Skullgirls Studio’s Upcoming Anime-Like RPG Gets A Kill La Kill-Looking Trailer

• Skullgirls Dev’s New Action-RPG, Indivisible, Shows Promising Fighter-RPG Fusion

Trine 4: The Nightmare Prince — October 8

Available on: PS4, Xbox One, PC, Switch

Trine 3 took the series into a full 3D world, but the fourth game is a return to 2.5D form. Pontius the Knight, Amadeus the Wizard, and Zoya the Thief are back, each with new skill trees full of special abilities. You’ll have to use them all to solve puzzles, fight bosses, and complete each stage. You can play through them solo or with friends in co-op.

More Coverage:

• Trine 4 Is A Return For The Series

• Trine 4: 13 Minutes Of Single-Player And Co-Op Gameplay | E3 2019

Killer Queen Black — October 11

Available on: PC, Switch

This is the home version of the arcade cult classic, where two teams compete for victory in one of three ways. You can win by collecting enough berries, riding the snail to the goal, or killing the enemy queen enough times. For the first time, you can take the competition online.

More Coverage:

• Killer Queen Black – Nintendo Switch Release Date Trailer

• Nintendo Switch Gets A Beloved Multiplayer Game Next Month

October has more video games on the way. Next week, New Releases will take a look at The Witcher 3 and Overwatch on Switch, plus the return of an old favorite with Plants vs. Zombies: Battle for Neighborville.

Freddy Krueger may be a work of fiction,but did you know that he was based on a very real nightmare that claimed the lives of many in their sleep?

In episode three of True Fiction, we’re delving into the realm of dreams and nightmares to look at the origins of a beloved horror movie franchise: Nightmare on Elm Street. The series introduced Freddy Kruger–now an iconic horror movie villain–into pop culture, but the birth of the character–and the horrors he inflicted–are rooted in tragedies that occurred in the real world.

As you can imagine, exploring the subject matter that inspired the movie series and charting its transformation into a pop culture entertainment is tricky. And that’s what host and writer Kurt Indovina discusses below. You can check out True Fiction episode three below and on the GameSpot Universe YouTube channel, where new episodes will be released every Sunday.

Kurt: While making True Fiction I was faced with a lot of challenges I hadn’t dealt with in previous projects. Challenges like, ‘How do I tell the history of hundreds of Hmong refugees who escaped a mass genocide after the crippling end of the Vietnam War only to die in their sleep after thinking they had finally reached salvation’ in a way that is respectful, but also entertaining, fun, and charming viewing experience for you.

Sure, movies aren’t real–Freddy Krueger, Godzilla, and Twin Peaks are, to us, just things of make-believe. But as I peeled back the layers, and found their inspirations, the results are, well, not the most uplifting stories.

So for this episode, I wanted to push the team to tell this miserably sad real story in the most captivating and cinematic way possible. A way that was tasteful to the real history, while also paying homage to the movie it inspired.

But along with those ambitions came other challenges that I, again, hadn’t been graced with before. One being our filming location. To match the Nightmare on Elm Street vibe, we wanted a boiler room–something gross, dark, and scary. And oh, did we find the right place. In the basement of an old abandoned restaurant was a maze of concrete halls, dark corners, and yes, a massive and rusty boiler room.

It was exactly what we wanted–maybe too much so. Covering the concrete floors were dozens, if not hundreds of dead cockroaches and indistinguishable liquids. There’s one particular shot where the camera follows me down a corridor while I sporadically move my eyebrows around my forehead and deliver my lines. But beneath my feet, with every step, I felt and heard the crunch of cockroaches being crushed under the soles of my shoes. It was vile and remains the most vivid sensation from the shoot. And the best part is that we did that take over and over again, and every time stepping all over crushed cockroaches.

Also, our producer Adam Mason (bless his heart), endured an eye injury when a spec of an unknown substance fell from the ceiling and directly into his eye, putting him out of commission for several hours. Oh, and on the second day of shooting, when we filmed in a hotel room fit to look like a sleeping clinic, we set the fire alarm off by using too much smoke from a fog machine. (Frankly, I ignorantly didn’t believe that’d set it off. But, now I know: don’t use a fog machine in hotel rooms–you’ll cause a great panic.)

At the end of it all, I’m very proud of this episode. And despite the dark source material, I think we managed to fulfill the expectation of making something fun and engaging to watch.

It’s easy to love Yooka-Laylee and the Impossible Lair when you start. The platformer is bursting with bright, saturated hues at every turn, with a whimsical soundtrack that’s as catchy as it is cheery. It’s a delightful veneer that quickly gives way to an otherwise predictable and unremarkable platformer. Despite changing its formula from full 3D to 2.5D, Yooka-Laylee is still too firmly rooted in a bygone era for platformers.

This shortcoming is hard to see at first, especially with Impossible Lair’s intriguing setup. In theory, the Impossible Lair is an endgame challenge you can attempt in the opening moments of the game. It’s a gauntlet of spike traps and moving platforms, populated to the brim with enemies ready to chew you up and spit you back out. Each stage outside of the Lair is meant to help you with this. You’re rewarded with a bee when you complete a stage, each acting as an additional hit point when you attempt the Lair once more. Gathering as many bees as you can lets you push further in while affording you more mistakes. This entices you to check back in with the Impossible Lair from time to time, seeing how well your new health pool holds up and if that (combined with your improving platforming skills) are enough to best it.

In practice, though, you’re going to need pretty much every bee Yooka and Laylee can find, mostly due to how ridiculously difficult the Impossible Lair is compared to the rest of the game. It lives up to its name almost too closely, with no checkpoints throughout and long stretches of deadly chasms that will reset your progress significantly should you fall. It’s completely different from the rest of the game’s stages, which are well-paced with checkpoints and feature options to skip entire segments if you just can’t get them right. The shift from accessible, pleasant platforming to a poorly balanced test of skill isn’t an inviting one, and it sullies the otherwise interesting idea of having the Impossible Lair accessible at all times.

Outside of the Lair itself, this half-sequel, half-reinvention splits up into two distinctly different types of games. Individual stages are standard 2.5D platforming fare, tasking you with moving from start to finish, while a handful revolve around hunting down collectible items for completion. You navigate through spike traps, swinging ropes, rotating platforms, and dangerous cannons; everything feels familiar enough if you’ve played a platformer before. Enemies come in different varieties–some will hop in the air, others will charge at you on sight, and still others will simply move between ledges–but their designs aren’t visually exciting enough to be memorable.

As familiar as they are, it’s not long before stages start to feel like chores. Part of the problem is the merely serviceable platforming at its core. Yooka and his companion Laylee don’t feel bad to control per se, but there’s nothing exceptional about their move set either. Jumps feel a little floaty and it’s annoying that your only attack is mapped to the same button as your roll (any hint of directional movement initiates the latter, and there’s no way to change the control scheme), but outside of that there’s really nothing remarkably good or bad about making your way through stages. It just feels far too routine, which quickly becomes boring no matter how varied the stages get as you progress.

There are technically 20 distinct stages, but in practice it’s double that. Each stage can be manipulated in the hub world to alter both their makeup and challenge. For example, one level entrance on land can be submerged in water, flooding it and making new routes accessible via swimming. The changes are sometimes substantial, like introducing massive gusts of wind to help you float through the air or lasers that chase you through a route that was otherwise safe before. There are routes you’ll see on your first run through a stage that are clearly meant for your inevitable return visit under different circumstances, which is a nice touch to their overall design.

Outside of these stages, the game transforms into an isometric 3D platformer, which lets you navigate through a relatively large world as you hop between individual stages. This area is more than just a hub for the real platforming awaiting; it’s a self-contained stage unto itself, filled with its own puzzles, secret areas to uncover, and characters to interact with. Each part of the map is themed–there’s one with large sentient fans that block paths with gusts of wind and an arid desert with a winding pipe system encroaching on its sparse wilderness, for example–which keeps things fresh as you travel between them.

Solving puzzles in this hub world rewards you with some additional bees for the Impossible Lair, but also with quills and tonics. You collect thousands of quills throughout your time in the game, using them to unlock the abilities that tonics offer, which can be incredibly useful in some tricky stages. One will force Laylee to stick around longer after getting hit, giving you more time to recover her and regain both her abilities and an additional hit point. Others let you glide for longer after a jump or lets Laylee emit a sonar pulse to reveal nearby collectibles. Others are just cosmetic. You can drench the screen in a variety of filters using FX tonics, or marvel at what a modern platformer would look like in a 4:3 aspect ratio before switching it back. They’re good for a giggle or two, but not much beyond that.

Finding tonics is more fun than messing around with the abilities they offer. Secret paths are obscured slightly with the fixed camera angle, which makes picking apart your surroundings and uncovering them a treat. Others require some lightly skilled platforming to reach entrances to small caves (which themselves are sometimes locked away behind rocks you need to demolish or prickly shrubs you need to burn away) or the deciphering of clues from other characters to find keys to locked chests. It gives you more reasons to interact with the hub world behind just shepherding yourself from one stage to the next and lets you tackle them in your own time.

The Impossible Lair is definitely a better attempt at capturing the magic of platformers than Yooka-Laylee’s first crack at it, but it’s still not remarkable.

What isn’t as engrossing is the progression system that governs how you move between each part of the hub world. Gates, jokingly referred to as paywalls, are erected throughout the world, and each requires T.W.I.T coins to unlock. There are five T.W.I.T coins in each stage, hidden in shrewdly obscured rooms or located at the end of particularly challenging platforming routes, both of which are satisfying. Initially it’s pretty easy to get by using the few you find naturally through playing. But the high requirement for later gates means replaying stages you’ve already completed is unavoidable, which quickly introduces an unpleasant pattern of repetition. It’s a slog to have to slowly comb through levels you’ve finished to find one or two coins at a time just so that you can continue on the game’s main path.

Having to backtrack through stages to eventually reach and tackle the Impossible Lair would be more tolerable if the final encounter wasn’t such a steep difficulty spike, but in truth it’s likely you’ll tire of its routine platforming well before that disappointment sets in. The Impossible Lair is definitely a better attempt at capturing the magic of platformers than Yooka-Laylee’s first crack at it, but it’s still not remarkable. If you’re itching to return to a bygone era, then The Impossible Lair might scratch it. Just don’t expect much beyond that.

Here’s exactly what you need to do to find directions for inside the Wind Fish’s Egg. They’re different for each person!

What do you do when a cage match simply isn’t extreme enough? That’s where Hell in a Cell comes in. WWE’s signature demonic structure if back for the 2019 Hell in a Cell pay-per-view, which will see two championship matches happening inside of the steel menace.

Of course, that’s not all you’ll see at Hell in a Cell. Thus far, eight matches have been announced for the show. The notable absence is a Cruiserweight Championship match. However, it has already been confirmed that the Cruiserweight Championship will be on the line on the next episode of NXT on USA. It’s also worth noting neither show’s men’s Tag Team Championships, nor the United States or Intercontinental titles are currently scheduled to be defended. You can see the announced match card below.

• Seth Rollins (c) vs. “The Fiend” Bray Wyatt–Hell in a Cell match for the Universal Championship
• Becky Lynch (c) vs. Sasha Banks–Hell in a Cell match for the Raw Women’s Championship
• Bayley (c) vs. Charlotte Flair–SmackDown Women’s Championship Match
• Roman Reigns & Daniel Bryan vs. Erick Rowan & Luke Harper
• Alexa Bliss & Nikki Cross (c) vs. The Kabuki Warriors–Women’s Tag Team Championship Match
• Chad Gable vs. King Corbin
• The Vikings Raiders and a mystery partner vs. The OC
• Natalya vs. Lacey Evans–Kickoff show match

Hell in a Cell begins at 7 PM ET, with the kickoff show launching one hour earlier at 6 PM ET. The show will be available via traditional pay-per-view, as well as on the WWE Network. You can also follow along as GameSpot tracks the winners and losers of each match below. Make sure to join us for the start of Hell in a Cell Kickoff at 6 PM ET.