Just Cause 4

How could we not mention Just Cause 4, especially when the entire hook of the game is its extreme weather? Tornadoes emerge naturally, swallowing up nearby foes and debris; thunderstorms will strike down enemy helicopters and a stray Rico if he’s caught unaware; and sandstorms will be rough, coarse, irritating and so on. It’d be amazing to sit back and watch the destruction unfold if you weren’t at risk of being destroyed yourself.

Continuing with the weekly free games schedule on the Epic Games Store, Tequila Gameworks’ RiME is now free on the storefront for PC. All you need is an Epic Games account and to claim the game for free. It will be available until May 30th so act fast.

RiME is an atmospheric puzzle platformer set on a mysterious island. You play a boy who awakens on the island and must reach the peak of the tower. Meanwhile, there’s a cute fox who will help guide you. Check out our review for RiME here to learn more about the gameplay and how it all feels.

The next free game, which goes live on May 30th and remains free till June 6th, is Uppercut Games Pty Ltd’s City of Brass. This first person roguelite inspired by Arabian Nights sees players infiltrating a city teeming with traps, enemies, and treasure. Your goal is to get the treasure and get out. Like most roguelites, there’s a procedurally generated world, a variety of loot, and different buffs that can be gained in a single run.

After Cyberpunk 2077’s associate design director Kyle Rowley left CD Projekt RED last week to join up with Control developers Remedy, the Polish studio has now welcomed a new member to its team. Manual Mendiluce, who worked at indie studio Tequila Works as lead level designer for eight years, having worked on games like RiME and Deadlight, will be joining the Cyberpunk 2077 team at CD Projekt RED in January, he has announced.

Cyberpunk 2077’s official Twitter, of course, responded to Mendiluce’s tweet, saying that they’ll take good care of him, which is nice to see.

Meanwhile, in related news, if you’re curious about when exactly Cyberpunk 2077 will be out, while there’s no official word from CDPR itself, recent speculation has pegged the RPG for a release in Q4 of 2019. If you want even more Cyberpunk 2077 information, from its level design and open world to player choice, side quests, and much, much more, we recently conducted an interview with level designer Miles Tost. Read the full interview through here.

After 8 awesome years, developing @DeadlightGame, @SexyBrutale and @RiMEGame, I will leave @TequilaWorks this week with a big lot sad feel. But in January I will join in the @CDProjektRed with a lot ilusion and humility for the development of @CyberpunkGame

— Manuel Mendiluce (@ManuelMendiluce) December 17, 2018

¡Te cuidaremos muy bien! <3

— Cyberpunk 2077 (@CyberpunkGame) December 18, 2018

RIME launched after a very long and troubled development period last year, and was mostly worth the long wait, being a good puzzle adventure game with a startling art style and meditative gameplay. However, because of the way the game was, it is also hard to see how a follow up to it would ever happen- can there even be a narrative sequel to RIME?

There cannot- at least, developers Tequila are not considering one, anyway. In an interview with Eurogamer, CEO, Creative Director and Co-Founder of Tequila Works Raúl Rubio Munárriz said that were a follow up to RIME ever happen, it would be a spiritual successor rather than a direct follow up. The point, in any case, is moot for now, since Tequila doesn’t intend to get started on it any time soon.

“We know how to make a sequel to Rime, but it wouldn’t literally be Rime 2 – more like a spiritual successor to Rime,” he said. “But are we going to make it? I don’t know. Maybe one day we can come back but for now it’s too soon – anyone who has finished Rime, maybe they’ll understand why. For us, it was a very very big journey and it was very intense.”

Which makes sense- as I said, and as Munárriz says, a direct follow up to RIME doesn’t actually make that much sense. I would be interested to see what a spiritual follow up to the game would look like at all. RIME is available now on PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC.

Whether jokingly or not, many PS4 owners have long asked for Knack, the middling platformer brawler that released alongside the PS4 back in 2013, to be put on Sony’s PS Plus service. In February, they finally get their wish fulfilled- Sony has confirmed that Knack will be available to all PS Plus subscribers next month.

Knack will be accompanied by RIME, the excellent puzzle platformer released by Tequila last year. RIME stands out instantly for its quiet ambience and its excellent art, and is likely to appeal to many. PS4 owners will also get Grand Kingdom, a game that will be shared with PS Vita- which will also be getting Exiles End in addition.

Meanwhile, PS3 owners can expect Mugen Souls Z, while PSVR owners can look forward to StarBlood Arena. You can check out the video confirming and announcing this lineup for yourself below. Is this a better showing than Xbox’s Games with Gold next month? Let us know in the comments.

Rime originally launched earlier this year, but just this week makes its way to the Nintendo Switch as promised. However, previews of this version of the game have raised many concerns among would be Switch players who noticed a choppy frame-rate and long loading times in previews.

During an AMA on Reddit last night, developer Tequila Works detailed the technical challenges it faced when condensing the game to Nintendo’s hybrid system, and the choices it had to make to have it work. While Gamingbolt loved the game back in May, technical issues also cropped up on the reviewed PS4 version as well.

“The open nature of Rime in many of the in game locations turned out to be the biggest problem, and the developers when faced with the choice of adding loading screens through the stages, rebuilding the game completely to be more closed in and undermining the original vision, or just optimizing the best they could and living with small hiccups to show the game as intended, they went with just dealing with the technical issues,” the developer stated.

“RiME runs at 30 FPS in 720p throughout most of the game while docked. This is a considerable improvement from where the game was at earlier this year when we announced the first delay. While we have done an excellent job at bringing the standard frame rate up, the one problem we were unable to address completely were loading hitches. RiME uses a technique called streaming which allows us to have portions of the level loaded and unloaded in order to save on memory utilization.”

“With RiME being very open in many locations, it’s incredibly difficult to get these level segments small enough to not cause a hiccup in performance. We were faced with the choice of adding loading screens throughout the stages, rebuilding the game completely to be more closed in (undermining the product vision in the process), or living with these small hiccups to preserve what the game was intended to be. We chose the latter,” the developer further added.

It’s worth noting that these hiccups do occur on the other platforms as well, though slightly less irritating.

Tequila Works’ atmospheric puzzle platformer RIME will be heading to the Nintendo Switch on November 14th in North America and November 17th in Europe. It’s already available for Xbox One, PS4 and PC, having released back in May. RIME will be available digitally for $29.99/€34.99/£29.99 and physically for $39.99/€44.99/£39.99 with the latter including the game’s original soundtrack.

RIME had quite the extensive development process and faced several delays before finally releasing this year. It was originally meant to be an exclusive for PlayStation 4 before Sony backed out. From there, RIME went multi-platform and garnered a fair amount of critical praise at launch. On Metacritic, the PS4 version has garnered 80 Metascore while the Xbox One version is at 82 Metascore.

You can check out our review of the game here where we praised the game for leaving an impression even with its share of flaws and technical problems (which have likely been ironed out by now).

Tequila Works’ RIME has received some pretty good reviews despite its long production cycle and development hurdles. It ruffled quite a few feathers when it was revealed that the game was running on the anti-piracy DRM called Denuvo.

When this was discovered, the developer noted that it would remove Denuvo if the game was cracked. Such a thing has occurred and now community manager Tim Slager is confirming that Denuvo has been removed in a recent update.

In a statement on the forums, Slager said, “Today, we got word that there was a crack which would bypass Denuvo. Upon receiving this news, we worked to test this and verify that it was, in fact, the case. We have now confirmed that it is. As such, we at Team Grey Box will be replacing the current build of Rime with one that does not contain Denuvo. Please make sure your PC version of Rime has been updated, if it has not done so automatically.”

Grey Box noted that Denuvo was a “sensitive topic” among gamers. It said that it always intended to remove the DRM from RIME if a crack surfaced and won’t patch in a new version of Denuvo in the meantime. There will be a “traditional” patch coming next week which fixes a bug with VR initialization and several specific instances of hardware-related crashes.

What are your thoughts on RIME losing Denuvo? Let us know in the comments.

RIME is finally out- the gorgeous puzzle platforming adventure game has been a long time coming, but now that it is finally here, players can, at last, play the game and experience for themselves a game that has been long in the making.

Of course, unlike so many other games today, RIME is not afraid to challenge the player, or to let the player get lost, or to let the player discover things for themselves. In fact, that is one of the best parts of the game, the sense of discovery, and the ensuing personal journey. So it is highly advisable that, should you feel stuck, lost, or frustrated in RIME, you take your time to figure things out for yourself. However, should you find yourself unable to progress, and it comes down to either playing the game with help, or not playing it at all, you’ll want a walkthrough.

That’s where we come in here. Just… remember to only use this as a last resort, okay?

RIME is an entirely visual game- everything that it does, from storytelling to characterization to even its primary gameplay, relies entirely on what it shows the player. You glean about the story from the island you find yourself on, and observation of said island. Characterization is primarily through interaction of your character with other things around him, which hint at his personality. And gameplay relies on the player seeing things. You need to see where you see beacons of light. You need to see where you might not have gone already. You need to shift perspective to be able to open pathways on. You need to see if there is anything pulsating that catches your attention. You need to see where your adorably lovely fox companion is going. You need to see if there is something in the environment that hints at how you may be able to move ahead. And most of all, you need to see where a mysterious figure, garbed in red, never speaking in red, is- because whoever they are, they appear to be leading you to the conclusion of your quest.

It’s just as well that RIME looks as thoroughly gorgeous as it does, then. And it really is a beautiful game. Its gorgeous, striking art evokes flattering comparisons to games such as ICO, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, and Shadow of the Colossus, as does its almost bleak atmosphere- for you are the only person, apart from that mysterious other entity, on this island, the best that you can see, for the better part of the game. As colorful as RIME looks, and as happy as Enu, the boy you are controlling, is, happily humming and singing along, ecstatic at the company of the fox who is his lone companion on this island, there is no question that there is a melancholy that pervades the very texture and fibre of RIME.

"RIME is an entirely visual game- everything that it does, from storytelling to characterization to even its primary gameplay, relies entirely on what it shows the player."

However, it is not an oppressive melancholy, and it cedes and gives way to your sense of curiosity, which is what Tequila is relying on with this game. You are shown just enough, and encouraged to figure things out for yourself- and deviously, for this is actually a rather linear game. It gives the illusion of openness and freedom, but you are always being led down one very obvious path. The game is just great at masking that, like the Zelda games of old.

The actual gameplay part is, as mentioned before, fairly basic, relying mostly on your visual acuity. You’ll be platforming, climbing walls, jumping, walking, running, and solving some very basic puzzles. Most of them don’t require much thought, but then again, this is not a puzzle game, and they are never the point. The point of RIME is the story that the game is telling you, very slowly. The puzzles are just a part of the language the game uses to tell you that story. That story, and the way the game uses its interactive elements to tell it, will definitely, however, leave an impact on you.

As gorgeous and wonderful as this game is, however, there are definitely some problems that hold RIME back. The biggest one that I encountered while playing on a standard PS4 was the framerate- there are severe drops, and maybe owing to a narrower FoV, they can induce motion sickness (much like The Witness, which was another game about the player waking up on an island without explanation, and having to figure their way through it).

There is also something to be said for the game’s simplicity- minimalism is a virtue, especially the way RIME uses it, but some times, that minimalism can hurt the game. RIME certainly suffers from its almost too basic puzzles, which fail to hold your attention a lot of times (and which can lead to the player losing interest in the game altogether, if wanderlust is not their thing).

"There is also something to be said for the game’s simplicity- minimalism is a virtue, especially the way RIME uses it."

On the other hand, a masterful exercise in minimalism is the game’s soundtrack. Sparingly used, it is nevertheless impactful, and is wonderfully utilized for maximum effect in the game, much like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, another game from earlier this year that held back from using too much of its soundtrack at any given time. The result is that when its stirring, soulful melodies do play, RIME feels that much more impactful.

It is a flawed game, and there is certainly much that could have used some improvement- notably, the gameplay loop could have been kept more engaging, and the technical issues could have been ironed out. But even with all of that said, RIME leaves such an impression, that it is hard to hold those failings against it too much. It manages to live up to the years of hype and expectation, and it delivers an unforgettable experience along the way.

This game was reviewed on PS4.