Don t Starve: 10 Best Mobs

Rust has been around the survival gaming scene for quite some time now, offering up a raw and unfiltered take on the genre. The only real objective in Rust is simply to survive by any means necessary. This can mean taking on player opponents with the victor getting all of the spoils to hopefully survive another day.


There are many variations of pigs to encounter. Players can stumble upon the hostile guardian pigs, the terrifying werepigs, and even the pig king. Providing offerings to the king, such as food, will grant the player gold nuggets in ret


Amnesia: The Dark Descent was a popular horror title that also utilized sanity mechanics. Again, a meter is at the core of the gameplay, with time spent in darkness causing the protagonist’s sanity reserves to plummet at an alarming rate. Developer Frictional Games wanted to give the player a strong incentive to maintain their sanity s

The Fullbright case is no different - in fact, it is perhaps even more sinister than many others. Despite publisher Annapurna Interactive having to independently intervene in the development of Open Roads by contracting an external human resources firm, Steve Gaynor has not been taken off the project. This is, after all, the man whose own Twitter handle bore the company’s namesake for over a decade, only recently having been changed from "Fullbright" to "SteveGaynorPDX." - at the time of writing, searching for @Fullbright will still offer you the choice to be redirected to the studio’s actual handle or Gaynor’s new one. In this instance, Gaynor didn’t just see himself as the auteur behind Fullbright games behind closed doors - he was, publicly, Fullbright itself, with his social media presence juxtaposing his own personal views with those supposedly intended to represent the entire studio. Even the statement he released in the wake of Polygon’s report merely states that his "leadership style" was "hurtful," implying that it’s a subjective, stylistic issue as opposed to yet another example of a decades-old problem. How can people speak out against their self-proclaimed auteur boss when he has full control over the company’s relationship with the world? Yes, they can be granted anonymity to speak with journalists, but is that enough? No.

One of the newest entries into the survival genre is the juggernaut, Valheim . Taking place in a Viking world, Valheim tasks you with exploration and pure survival. This is a brutal game in which solo players and multiple players can enjoy at any given time. Focusing on Viking culture, exploration in Valheim will lead to narrative discoveries.


Darkest Dungeon is a roguelike RPG, developed and published by Red Hook Studios in 2016 for the PC before being ported to consoles and iOS soon after. It received positive reviews, praised for its gothic setting and oppressive atmosphere, distinctive artwork, and punishing gameplay l

Ark: Survival Evolved is a very challenging genre staple taking place across a remote and ever-changing tropical landscape. Releasing back in 2017 and now available on pretty much every platform, Ark: Survival Evolved offers a meaty experience for those players looking to challenge themselves.


There are many other examples of excellent and creative use of sanity meters in games. In a famous masterstroke, Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem trolled players with a fake message declaring that their memory card had been wiped. It’s clear that the titles that use the mechanic best avoid simply adding a ‘second health bar’ for players to manage, and instead seek to toy with their players’ minds. It's therefore likely that horror developers will continue to push the boundaries of these mechanics as more and more immersive games are develo

Jessica Howard recently spoke to a similar issue for Paste Magazine , importantly noting that the games industry’s co-option of the term "director’s cut" only reinforces what is already a misrepresented and frankly toxic depiction of how games are made. While Sucker Punch doesn’t necessarily have a face-of-the-company figure for Ghost of Tsushima , Hideo Kojima - whose infamous Twitter bio purports that he is "70 percent made of movies" - certainly sees things differently. For the sake of transparency, I wrote in favour of the Death Stranding director’s cut not that long ago. I like Kojima, although I too can see that the way Kojima Productions centres itself around him - right down to the name - is detrimental to offering a realistic view of video game development. Aside from maybe Yoji Shinkawa, how many other devs can you name from KojiPro? Can you name a single woman who works there? Remember that these are the devs who wrote Quiet in MGS 5, a woman who will literally die if she wears clothes.

Yet this pervasive presence of auteurism - this hangover from what should, but is evidently not, a bygone era of male-dominated game development - continues to perpetuate systemic harassment in the industry. Despite the fact that every modern job listing touts diversity as a core tenet of its respective company, reports of harassment - almost always targeted directly at marginalised people - are not only commonplace, but worryingly so. In the last two weeks alone, the government lawsuit filed against Activision Blizzard has revealed horrific and dehumanising accounts of misogyny , sexual harassment , and systemic racism . All of these issues were, until now, swept under the rug by rosters of predominantly male members of the fps games pro tips industry old guard. When asked by a female fan if Blizzard would ever consider creating female characters that don’t look as if they would appear in a Victoria’s Secret catalogue, an entirely male panel of developers publicly laughed at her suggestion, attempting to embarrass her for making a completely reasonable request in front of an enormous BlizzCon audience. They then asked what catalogue she’d prefer them to step out of. Not one of the reports on workplace misconduct against female developers is singular, and yet too often they are laser-focused on instead of being considered in tandem with every prior and subsequent report of the same abuse and toxicity. This, again, is compounded by the concept of auteurship - the man in charge calls the shots, even when the shots in question have nothing to do with a man’s perspective.