The showcase will include new announcements and updates on the following upcoming titles. DON’T NOD is confirmed, which means we’ll likely see more of Lost Records: Bloom and Rage. Similarly, 11 bit studios will appear so its sci-fi social survival title The Alters is likely to show up. Other confirmed studios include Raw Fury, Team17, and Curve Games. You can find a full list below.

Meanwhile, IGN’s post also confirms that the showcase will reveal Balatro’s next big collaboration DLC.

As per leaks, a State of Play presentation and a Nintendo Direct focused on upcoming Switch 1 games are also allegedly coming this month. The next few weeks are thus likely to be packed with new announcements. Stay tuned for more updates.

List of studios confirmed for ID@Xbox Showcase:

• 11 bit studios
• BigFan
• Critical Reflex
• Daedalic Entertainment
• Game Source Entertainment
• No More Robots
• Panic
• Playstack
• Raw Fury
• Cult Games
• Team17
• Curve Games
• Akapura
• DON’T NOD
  

Published by Team17, Conscript focuses on Andre, a French soldier in World War 1, searching for his brother in Verdun. The ongoing battle has turned France’s Western Front into a no man’s land, and players must traverse grimy trenches and other locations. Alongside firearms, you can leverage melee weapons to take out threats.

What makes Conscript even more interesting is the pixel art style, which captures the depressing atmosphere of the war front while channeling old-school horror titles. Much like a Resident Evil title, it even has several difficulty options and extra costumes and weapons to unlock.

It may not provide scares in the traditional sense, but the experience is still harrowing. Check out our review here – we gave it an eight of 10.

Set in 1916 during World War 1, Conscript puts you in the shoes of Andre, a lone French soldier who must navigate the trenches of the Battle of Verdun in search of Pierre, his brother and fellow soldier who’s gone missing. A survival horror game set during the First World War isn’t something that we see all too often, but the setting is used excellently in Conscript. The game depicts the horrors of war to great effect, and does an incredibly job of creating an intense, oppressive atmosphere that feels appropriate for the nightmarish setting.

"Borrowing heavily from classic Resident Evil and Silent Hill games in particular, Conscript, which is largely a one-person effort, isn’t a game that is going to deliver too many scares – in fact, if true horror is what you want, it’s likely to leave you disappointed – but from a design perspective, and thanks to its setting, it’s a game well worth checking out, especially for fans of the genre."

Of course, the fact that it uses a historical setting and has you facing entirely human threats and challenges means Conscript is constantly fighting an uphill battle in actually managing to scare the player. Though it does an undeniably great job of building up incredible atmosphere and setting a grim tone for the entire experience, it doesn’t actually do much to legitimately scare you. Survival horror games have at times found great success with relying on building tension rather than eliciting scares over the years, and I’d say Conscript very much falls in that category- though if you’re looking for a survival horror game that doesn’t de-emphasize the horror, Conscript might let you down.

If you’re looking for a game to scratch the survival horror itch from a gameplay and design perspective, however, Conscript is well worth diving into. It almost feels like a purist’s vision of a survival horror game in all the genre tropes it uses, and more importantly, uses well- from a focus on backtracking, exploration, and puzzles to inventory management, resource conservation, and more. Unlike with its setting and narrative and thematic ambitions, in the design and gameplay department, Conscript chooses to stick to the genre’s blueprint, and is stronger for it, thanks to a solid understanding of what makes survival horror games tick.

Take, for instance, the exploration. Conscript will have you navigating a number of maps that are not only surprisingly large, but layered and complex in their design. In typical survival horror fashion, there are shortcuts to unlock, interconnected pathways and loops to discover, and plenty of backtracking to do. The latter in particular will often drive your experience, because, again, in classic survival horror style, Conscript places a heavy amount of emphasis on inventory management. You always have limited inventory slots, and figuring out which items to keep with you and which ones to put in your storage box – which you’ll find in save rooms – is important. If you’ve played a Resident Evil game, it’s going to be more than a little familiar to you.

"If you’re looking for a game to scratch the survival horror itch from a gameplay and design perspective, however, Conscript is well worth diving into."

Exploration also remains rewarding throughout the experience, because if you’re not finding a new key item or crucial resources or ammo, you’re either discovering new notes and story tidbits, finding crafting resources, unlocking shortcuts, and what have you. In every save room, you’ll also find a merchant with whom you can trade cigarettes – which act as a currency in this game – in exchange for ammo, resources, consumables, and more, while using gun parts, he can also upgrade your weapons for you, with upgrades entailing things such as damage, fire rate, reload speed, magazine capacity, and more.

Conscript’s level design and exploration being as strong as they are also comes as a blessing for the game from time to time, because it struggles with feeling a little aimless at times. Like survival horror games of old, Conscript doesn’t like to give out too much information on what you’re supposed to do or where you’re supposed to go at any given time, with the idea being to encourage exploration and get players to stumble upon solutions at their own pace. The freedom that that this enables is obviously great, but at the same time, the game can also feel slightly obtuse at times. It’s almost a bit too uncommunicative for its own good.

Combat is another area where I felt the game falters. Conscript is played from a top-down perspective, which means it doesn’t quite replicate the tank controls of classic Resident Evil games, but it does attempt to emulate their combat by not allowing you to move while shooting, making aiming require patience, and making it so that even the most powerful guns don’t feel too overpowered. Whether due to the rate of fire of a weapon or its reloading speed, with the number of enemies you’re facing at a time or with the different challenges different enemy types pose, Conscript keeps finding ways to force players to keep frantically moving about the battlefield in an attempt to maintain distance from enemies.

On paper, that sounds great, and even in practice, it can build genuine tension. There are legitimately thrilling moments and sequences in games that rely entirely on combat, but often, Conscript’s combat feels a bit too rough. Managing your stamina while you run and roll about to create some distance between yourself and an enemy ends up feeling cumbersome quickly, while melee combat in particular feels rather clunky. I get that some of the roughness of combat is very much on purpose, but ultimately, I think it detracts from the experience.

"The top-down look in and of itself is one that gives the game a unique look, but add to that its retro-inspired pixel art, and you get a game with a very particular look and style, one that works quite well in conjunction with the grittiness of its World War 1 setting."

Thankfully, Conscript gives you the option to avoid combat quite often, while generally, the core loop is much more reliant on exploration, backtracking, and puzzles- the latter of which will, again, be familiar to anyone who has played classic survival horror games. Puzzles rely around figuring out which items to use in which places to unlock previous blocked paths, or finding clues or items that you can then use to access previously inaccessible areas. It’s all familiarly designed, but much like other aspects of the game, it’s also very well executed, exhibiting a strong understanding of the genre and its strengths.

Another area where Conscript stands out is its visuals. The top-down look in and of itself is one that gives the game a unique look, but add to that its retro-inspired pixel art, and you get a game with a very particular look and style, one that works quite well in conjunction with the grittiness of its World War 1 setting.

Conscript is not a game that will haunt your nightmares, nor is it a game that treads revolutionary new ground for the survival horror genre, but it’s got a strong, coherent vision that it brings to life in impressive fashion nonetheless. A gorgeous pixel aesthetic, an oppressive and atmospheric World War 1 setting, excellent level design and rewarding exploration, smart puzzle design, and more come together in an engaging survival horror experience that fans of the genre shouldn’t miss.

This game was reviewed on the PlayStation 5.

Available at any time during the story, the premise involves working with Ironhaven Corporation on its oil rig. However, things go wrong, impacting previous areas with a dark liquid originating from the “primordial depths.” Players must revisit previous areas, collecting over 50 new fish to assess the damage and save the region.

As you build up the new base, a new tier of fishing equipment is available alongside gadgets, abilities and more. There are also new characters, hazards and world events to experience, with two to five hours of playtime in total.

Team17 has also announced that pre-orders are available for a physical Collector’s Edition of the game on PS5 and Nintendo Switch, including all the DLC and a special box for $99.99. Extra goodies include a Sign of Ruin replica, a poster, a compendium of the many fish and variants, a doubloon coin, a map and a message in a bottle. Pre-orders are limited to specific countries, but more are coming soon.

Titled Conscript, developed by Catchweight Studio, and published by Team17, it is billed as a retro survival horror game inspired by the classics, promising old-school mechanics, an intense and atmospheric World War 1 setting, and pixel-art visuals that fans of 2022 indie survival horror game Signalis will find familiar.

Players will play as a French soldier who sets out to look for his missing brother and finds himself caught in the horrors of the Battle of Verdun, one of the First World War’s most brutal battles. Check out the game’s announcement trailer below.

Conscript will launch sometime this year for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC. A demo of the game will launch for Steam on June 10.

If you’ve played resource management games before, you’ll be familiar with the kind of gameplay Undead Inc. offers. The three different map biomes are divided into cells comprising the various properties you build and manage. As a director of an Endswell Medical subsidiary, you rent property and hire medical staff to sell pharmaceutical treatments and diagnose patients. There’s a feeling of pride when you hit a point in the gameplay loop when the cash flow from your operations overtakes the cost of building it all. Sitting back and watching your doctors and patients successfully generate profit in the well-oiled machine you’ve established provides a sense of accomplishment and joy that occasionally rivals the highs of other management sims. But the feeling of accomplishment is always short-lived in Undead Inc. due to the entropy of its risk/reward roguelike loop, and because of its modest quantity of content.

"Raking in cash is fun and rewarding, but very short-lived."

Undead Inc. expects you to engage in black market operations after establishing the basic above-board medical facilities. I tried avoiding the black market entirely during several runs, but the lack of available properties and rental space above-ground, in addition to the large franchise fee, rendered it a fruitless endeavor every time. The game funnels the player into performing a very specific routine to succeed, and there’s not much freedom or creativity left for the player to come up with unique solutions.

You must excavate and risk fighting gangs underground to establish black market money flow to succeed. Just as there’s no way to avoid black market deals in Undead Inc., there’s no way to avoid the pressure of the law and the need to do extraction. The cops will discover your underground base and catch employees in their transit to and from work, ultimately leading to employee casualties and large fines. This comprises Undead Inc.’s roguelike loop: establish above-board operations, expand into the black market, and extract what you can to start a new loop. It’s a fun loop, but it offers very little flexibility in playstyle and a shallow content pool.

"Black Market operations are fun to research and employ."

Despite all the covert underground activities like researching bio-weapons and manufacturing mutant gorillas, what you see is what you get, with very little new to explore after the first handful of successful campaigns. Career Mode mitigates this lack of content with randomized biome maps instead of the pre-set maps in Scenario Mode, but randomization can only do so much when there’s not a lot of content to play with in the first place.

The dozens of perks and goals add replayability by giving you checklists to work toward, sure, but they don’t vary up the gameplay much, instead providing an achievement system that rewards you with buffs and advantages during a campaign. I built 90% of the legal facilities in my first couple of hours of play and researched all the above-board pharmaceuticals in no time. There’s only one basic doctor’s office and one pharmacy you’ll be building the entire game with no variations on them whatsoever. The scant amount of above-board facilities is likely a design decision intended to funnel the player into the black market, yet this intention renders the basic phase underbaked and redundant.

The game could’ve done a better job of giving the player some creative tools like color schemes or custom names for employees to vary up the content. As it stands, there’s almost nothing you can customize in Undead Inc. If you want a more streamlined, linear sim experience, Undead Inc., does a good job supplying that.

"You cannot customize your workers, and the lack of at-a-glance info is a bummer."

But at the end of the day, if it feels great to control, lack of customization can be overlooked, right? Well, unfortunately, Undead Inc. is hit-and-miss when it comes to its interface and controls. One great thing about Undead Inc. is how easy its systems are to understand. The tutorial is optional and well-explained with story tidbits to keep one entertained throughout. I don’t play a ton of management sims, and even I felt at home with the familiar information overlays and drag-and-click gameplay of Undead Inc. Undead Inc. runs at a smooth 120 FPS on mid-powered PCs, to the point where even my five-year-old laptop could run it smoothly. The game is optimized well for a variety of setups and plays silky smooth with intuitive mouse and keyboard controls.

It’s a shame then, that there’s not more convenience features in some of the menus and overlays. I can’t count the number of times I wanted to highlight multiple workers to send them to a single location, either to mount a collective assault against the gangs or to gather maintenance workers to fix a bunch of rooms. You cannot control more than one worker at a time, which causes problems when you need multiple people for a situation ASAP.

What compounds this issue the inability to tell what a character is doing at a glance. You have to either manually find them on the map, or click on the Characters tab and then individually click on each character’s profile. That’s a total of three separate clicks just to see what your characters are doing, which is a tad much for multi-task-centered games like Undead Inc. There really should be a quick overlay that gives you character status at a glance like other management sims. The game has three fast-forward toggles and conveniently placed facility tabs, so it’s disappointing that controlling your workers is so clunky in comparison to the other intuitive menu designs within Undead Inc.

"Each mode has a limit of one save file accompanied by consistent autosaving."

By far, the biggest convenience flaw in Undead Inc. is the forced ironman mode limiting you to a single save file per mode. It belwilders me why a game that encourages trying out the different Directors and biomes would lock you to a single save file per mode where choices are set in stone with constant autosaving. People love experimenting with different scenarios and campaigns in management sim games, so I have no idea why this forced single save system exists in Undead Inc.

That leads me to the thing that makes me loathe loading up Undead Inc. the most: the bugs. The pre-launch bugs were bad in Undead Inc., breaking my save files multiple times and crashing the game consistently.  Kudos to the devs for being transparent about existing bugs such as the one mentioned, but the mere existence of these pre-launch bugs just magnifies the cons of a single save file auto-save system even more. Team17 has assured us that these known bugs are being fixed ahead of launch, but these problems should still be addressed here since it’s the version being reviewed.

"Bugs permeated my time with Undead Inc., but thankfully most of these should be patched ahead of launch."

Undead Inc. Is a fun and engaging management sim that provides a roguelike loop rife with future potential. Despite all the criticisms I have with the single-save system or the bugs, I was consistently engaged throughout the entire experience. The multi-tasking is fun and there’s a great satisfaction in those rarified moments when you feel on top of everything. I look forward to returning to Endswell Medical, but not until it gets a makeover with some patches. What we have with Undead Inc. are the beginnings of a great game with some novel ideas and a fun gameplay loop. I’m looking forward to the customization that modders will inevitably add to the game, as well as future expansions including more content. But as it stands, Undead Inc. is an underbaked management sim with a unique and promising roguelike structure.

This game was reviewed on the PC.

The extent of the new content and whether Dredge will see anything from Dave the Diver is unknown. However, some aberrations include a hammerhead shark with demonic eyes, a translucent fish that can munch on Dave and much more. You’ll also explore from a unique perspective that channels Black Salt Games’ title, adding to the spookiness.

The free content update goes live on December 15th for Nintendo Switch and PC. Stay tuned for more details next week, and check out our review of Dave the Diver here. You can also read our review for Dredge, which is available for Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, PS5, PC and Nintendo Switch.

The story involves investigating the previous crew that ventured into the biome. You’ll meet some familiar characters (like the Photographer) and unlock four new equipment pieces, an icebreaker-style boat and ice blocks for preserving catches. There are also 11 fish and crab species, a menacing Narwhal to flee from and eight Achievements to earn.

The Pale Reach is estimated to add one to three hours of new content for $5.99. Dredge has another paid DLC, The Iron Rig, launching in 2024, so stay tuned for more details. The cosmic horror fishing game has sold over one million copies since launching in March and garnered critical acclaim. Check out our review here.

The newest addition to the game is a survival mode, where you will be completing escalating challenges through a series of maps all while keeping tabs on a hunger meter that must be replenished by consuming pick-ups. It looks pretty fun, and should be a perfect fit for players wanting more out of the amazing core gameplay loop of Trepang2.

In addition to this, the DLC also features new weapon skins, player outfits, throwables, and cheat codes to give players something to work towards. Such content additions are always welcome especially for a single-player game, and more so at a time when games like Mortal Kombat 1 are charging players for premium Fatalities.

To say that this went beyond internal expectations would be an understatement. “We hoped to maybe sell 100,000 copies in our first year. That would have been amazing. That was a top estimate when we were setting our expectations. We smashed through those targets,” per Thorne.

Back then, selling one million copies within a year felt like a “crazy” target. When Dredge launched, it sold over 100,000 units in the first 24 hours. Bastiaens revealed, “We actually had our launch party on a boat,” says Bastiaens, “and we were just refreshing the [sales page] going ‘oh my god, oh my god.'”

Black Salt Games’ next major update for Dredge is a paid expansion, The Pale Reach. It’s out on November 16th and introduces a new icy biome with 11 fish and crabs with new aberrations. As for The Iron Rig, it’s planned to release in 2024. Stay tuned for more updates and check out our review for the base game, which is available now for Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, PS4, PS5, PC and Nintendo Switch.