Tomorrow, July 19th, the recursive puzzler Maquette will be playable for consoles and PC. Then there’s Figment 2: Creed Valley, another adventure title, and city-builder The Wandering Village, on July 20th for cloud, consoles and PC. Serious Sam: Siberian Mayhem, a standalone expansion to Serious Sam 4, also joins the service on July 25th for cloud, PC and Xbox Series X/S.

Closing out the month is the narrative cooking title Venba, which launches on July 31st for consoles and PC. Acclaimed platformer Celeste returns to the library on August 1st for cloud, consoles and PC.

Check out the titles leaving Game Pass on July 31st, and play them now while you still can.

• Dreamscaper (Cloud, Console, and PC)
• Expeditions: Rome (PC)
• Marvel’s Avengers (Cloud, Console, and PC)
• The Ascent (Cloud, Console, and PC)
• Two Point Campus (Cloud, Console, and PC)

On July 6th, Devolver Digital’s McPixel 3 is available, providing a save-the-world scenario with chaotic solutions. Common’hood, a settlement simulation, goes live on July 11th. Both titles will be playable on consoles, PC and the cloud. Military shooter Insurgency: Sandstorm is also coming to the service via PC on July 11th.

The other big release in this wave is Exoprimal, which is playable on July 14th for consoles, PC and the cloud. It sees players controlling Exosuits and tackling hordes of dinosaurs in PvEvP scenarios. On July 18th, factory-building title Techtonica launches in Game Preview for cloud, consoles and PC, while The Cave from Ron Gilbert and Double Fine Productions is available on cloud and consoles.

Three titles are leaving on July 15th. Check them out below:

• Exo One (Cloud, Console, and PC)
• PAW Patrol The Movie: Adventure City Calls (Cloud, Console, and PC)
• Spelunky 2 (Cloud, Console, and PC)

It’s a New Year for all but especially a new month for Xbox Live Gold members. That means free games thanks to the Games With Gold promotion starting from January 1st.

The free games that can be picked up right now include Deathtrap: World of Van Helsing on Xbox One, which takes the tower defense missions of the Van Helsing titles and models an entire game around them, and Double Fine’s 2D adventure title The Cave on Xbox 360, a charming adventure with multiple playable characters and the studio’s signature humour.

While Deathtrap will be available till January 30th, The Cave can only be picked up by January 15th. Currently, there’s still one game remaining from December’s Games With Gold – Outlast on the Xbox One. This will be available till January 15th.

Other titles set to arrive this month include Killer Instinct: Season 2 for Xbox One and Rayman Origins for Xbox 360. What are your thoughts on the current free titles? Let us know in the comments below.

The Cave, Double Fine’s puzzle action adventure game, is now available for free for Android users on the Amazon App Store, Polygon reports.

The title ordinarily retails for $4.99 (in fact that is the price that it’s still listed on Google Play for), and with a requirement of only Android 2.3 (that’s Gingerbread, and really, no new Android device is sold lower than Android 4.0) to run, is a pretty low resource intensive game that is recommended to everyone because of how generally good it is. It runs on all Android tablets and phones which meet the minimum requirements.

Cave Story is also available for iOS devices (iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch), along with Windows PCs, Mac OSX, Linux, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Wii U, and Ouya, so really, you’re not exactly hard pressed to find an avenue to play the game.

Stay tuned to GamingBolt for more of the latest on great gaming deals you can find on your gaming platform of choice.

Ahead of the upcoming E3, Sega has revealed the titles that it plans to show and make available on the show floor. These include new entries in beloved PC exclusive RTS franchises Total War and Company of Heroes, as well as the latest Sonic game, Sonic: Lost Worlds, available exclusively on Nintendo systems. The full list of Sega games, as well as the accompanying press release, may be found after the break.

Sega’s full line-up includes:

• Sonic Lost World
• Castle of Illusion
• Company of Heroes 2
• Total War: ROME II
• The Cave

Are you looking forward to these games? Let us know in the comments section below.

Stay tuned to GamingBolt for more news and updates.

In a blog post, he said, “Now that The Cave is done and unleashed on an unsuspecting world (ok, we did do a bunch of PR, so it wasn’t exactly unsuspecting), it’s time for me to move on from Double Fine and plot my next move.

“I want to thank all the amazing people at Double Fine for all their hard work on The Cave. It was a true pleasure to work with every one of them over the past two years. So much fun. I will miss them all. And of course to Tim for creating the opportunity to come there and make The Cave.”

Gilbert won’t be off the radar completely though. He’s currently working with DeathSpank co-creator Clayton Kauzlaric on Scurvy Scallywags in The Voyage to Discover the Ultimate Sea Shanty: A Musical Match-3 Pirate RPG for iOS.

Source: GIBiz

So what happens when you mix Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert together to make a game? You get a side-scrolling platformer with plenty of humorous narrative and puzzle solving called The Cave. The Cave is a nice break from other games that have been coming out for the past few months. If your in a mood for humorous, interesting quirky characters, a lot of puzzle solving and you enjoy side-scrollers then this is the game for you.

At the beginning of the game you are introduced to 7 different stereotypical characters. There is the Knight, Scientist, Time-Traveler, Adventure Girl, Twins, Hillbilly and the Monk. The Cave has general levels that you play-through regardless of the combination of the 3 characters you choose. However, each character also has their own personal story levels, with new puzzles and content.

For example the castle level is a level that is only available to the Knight. This is where the Knight gets his own personal story, his goal is too make the princess fall in love with him and prove the king that his daughter loves him by providing the king with an amulet that she gives you as a sign of her love.  There are different puzzles that you have to go through in order to achieve this goal.

The addition of these character-specific levels is great because not only are you playing through the general cave levels, but you also exploring new personal stories and puzzles. This adds more content to the game and the levels themselves are actually really unique, fun and don’t feel tacked on.

The puzzles in The Cave are not too hard or easy, which is a good thing in my book. They’re fun to figure out, some may take more time to figure out than others. Also, each character gets a special ability that no other characters can which makes the puzzle aspect more interesting, especially in the character-specific levels. My personal favorite is the “Mine” level, where you are tasked with figuring out how to get the mining carts back to the miner so you can keep on moving to explore the cave. The miner asks you to retrieve 3 different carts, 1 with food, gold and the last one being an empty cart, each cart is it’s own puzzle that involves multiple characters to work together.

The entire game can be played via co-op with up to a total of 3 players online, each player controlling different character. This game me the feeling of Trine, Trine was a beautiful looking side-scroller, with a lot of puzzle elements and actual combat. However, Trine was best played with other players, The Cave co-op is online which makes things a lot easier. Playing The Cave with other players makes things go a lot faster, since you don’t have to switch different characters anymore while playing solo to try to solve a specific puzzle by positioning the character in a proper area.

However, the game does have some technical issues when I was playing it on the PS3. There are some areas where you have to swim underwater to get to another spot, when your character goes underwater the framerate starts to dip down very noticeably. The game is not even that amazing looking, or heavy on the graphical side, I absolutely do not understand how a game like this can have any framerate loss whatsoever.

I personally think this is unacceptable, this is a side-scrolling platforming game that looks nowhere near as good as other side-scrolling platforming games and it has framerate issues in a lot of the parts throughout the game. While this is not a deal-breaker I still think this should not be happening, especially this late in the console generation.

The Cave overall is a good addition, it has different characters to play with, each character having a “good” and “bad” endings, good puzzles and a great style. I highly recommend this game to anyone that enjoys platforming and puzzles that contains multiple play-throughs. However, if you’re looking for a eye candy side-scroller your not going to find it here, but you will find a enjoyable, humorous and fun co-op experience.

The game was reviewed on the PlayStation 3.

While the former will release their recent 2D side-scrolling adventurer The Cave for the console, along with their recently funded Kickstarter adventure game (codenamed “Reds”) while the latter is reportedly planning his own titles for the same which will be handled by a new development studio called Verse. Verse will focus specifically on OUYA development after setting up shop.

The amazing thing is Uhrman stated that more than 450 games will be releasing for the OUYA. Of course, this is a very subjective figure – it doesn’t indicate whether they’d be arriving at launch or within the first year or the OUYA’s entire lifespan. Still, it’ll be good to see some familiar faces when the console launches in June.

Source: AndroidHeadlines via GIBiz

The premise of the story is that you get to pick three characters from seven available to descend into a cave. The game’s title and content are in harmony with each other.

It was released on PS3, Xbox 360, Steam, Linux, Mac OS X on their online stores, and Double Fine also released the game on the Wii U.

The game requires co-ordination to complete and is puzzle based. Each character has unique abilities and the game is said to require multiplle playthroughs to complete. PSN and Steam charges for the game were  $14.99/€12.99/£9.99 with Xbox Live Arcade charging 1200 Microsoft Points.

It was released in January 2013. The cave contains a lot of different locations for the player to explore. The game sets a very interesting mood with its graphics – one that is both serene yet disturbing. [reference]

• 1. Development
• 2. Gameplay
• 3. Story
• 4. Characters

Development

The game is designed with a very unique artstyle in mind, and the story is also quite different with a talking cave that holds a lot of secrets. Ron Gilbert has revealed a lot of things in a Q&A with fans which was held by Sega.

The story is about a sentient talking cave that draws people to it so they can enter and hopefully discover something about themselves. Of course, we should all be careful what we ask about ourselves,” he revealed.

He also said that there’s a thing that separates the game from his previous one that he released some time ago called Maniac Mansion: “One nice thing The Cave does that Maniac Mansion didn’t is co-op.”

He revealed that they didn’t go with realism but the game isn’t too cartoony either. He also spoke about the art-style as being “not too cartoony. We didn’t want to go with realism because that brings with it a lot of problems (having to make all the animations realistic) with it, plus it’s just not as interesting as being about the have some fun with the style.

We also wanted a style that really allow the fun animations of the characters to come out. The seven characters you play with don’t ever talk, so relied on the animators to bring out their personality, and having a fun art style really helps.” [reference]

The game does not have an inventory system and Gilbert revealed why that is the case.

“That was a very challenging part of the design,” he said. “I think if there was any one ‘most challenging’ part to making this it would be designing a classical adventure game with no inventory.

He believes that scrolling through your inventory is boring. “You don’t have the ability to just load people up with crap and call it a puzzle – when you just had to scroll through your inventory to find something. That’s not a puzzle, that’s just boring. But we did that a lot back then.”

“It was one of the core tenets of this design, and we were stuck with that.” [reference]

The game will have replayable value and players can expect some unique gameplay he revealed: “The changes are quite significant, it’s not like you play it again and 95 per cent is the same. You’ll get into completely different areas and entire groups of puzzles that are different.

“Once you get into the Knight’s area there’s an entire medieval castle with catacombs and a dragon – they’re quite big. It’s not just one little drawbridge with a puzzle.” [reference]

Gameplay

As the player controls the trio to explore the Cave, they collect objects and interact with the environment in a manner similar to an adventure game.

The game is presented and based on a 2.5D gameplay mechanic, but relies on 3D graphics. This helps to lend a sense of depth to the overall exploration.

Exploration is described as being “Metroidvania”-like, where more of the Cave’s tunnels and chambers become accessible as players collect objects in a manner similar to Metroid or Castlevania.

You can switch between the 3 characters, in cooperation with each other, and solve physical and adventure puzzles as you learn the truth behind why they are here. You can also share the cave exploring adventure with friends in local co-op.

Story

The Cave is a new adventure game from Monkey Island and Maniac Mansion creator Ron Gilbert, and Double Fine Productions, the award-winning studio behind Psychonauts and Brütal Legend.

Characters

Double Fine revealed the various characters you can choose in the game in a new trailer which you can check out below.

The Hillbilly, The Scientist, The Monk and The Twins, each with their own seemingly different abilities and segments.

The game sets a very interesting mood with its graphics – one that is both serene yet disturbing.

The player will need to work with all three characters, switching between them typically to activate multiple parts of a puzzle.

Each character has a unique ability to aid in maneuvering the cave tunnels, leaving some areas inaccessible if the appropriate characters aren’t chosen at the start.

The Cave, directed by legendary designer Ron Gilbert of Maniac Mansion and Monkey Island fame, features seven playable characters that can be used to form teams of three. These three then combine their abilities to solve the mystery of The Cave, so to speak.

Of course, The Cave is more than that as the individuals exploring it “learn something about themselves and who they might become”, while fighting against the darkness that gnaws them from within. The game will utilize a Metroidvania style of exploratory play, puzzle solving and item collection for its mechanics.

The Cave has already been released worldwide for PSN and the Nintendo eShop. Releases for Steam and Xbox Live Arcade will occur on January 23rd.