#playstack

[zarathesilentgamer]

For people who might not know, Playstack won the award for their indie game AK-xolotl at Gamescom 2023. The devs worked really hard and were rewarded with the above pictured trophy. However, before the team went to leave Gamescom they noticed that their trophy had been stolen.

They're asking for whoever took it, to please just return it. And if anyone has any leads, to please contact the team.

This is disgusting. Stealing is bad enough but to steal from an indie studio that's just pathetic.

[lapsedgamer]

The Case of the Golden Idol (iPhone)

I got myself one of those "Backbone" controllers for my iPhone this week, because I missed using my PS Vita to remote-play games while watching TV (it isn't compatible with PS5) The first-gen Backbone was on a deep discount and fit my phone, and for remote play it works great. In turn this prompted me to see what exciting premium games are available on Apple Arcade.

Turns out it's bupkis.

So I hopped over to Netflix, which has treated me to some excellent narrative games recently, and was pleasantly surprised to see they've added The Case of the Golden Idol. I wasn't all that familiar with it except for a vague memory of its pleasingly grotesque artwork in an Edge "Time Extend" feature a year ago, and that recollection was enough to pique my interest.

It's proven to be a set of inventively structured and ironic murder mysteries. Each case is presented as a set of interconnected tableaux, frozen in time but with maybe a short cycling animation, such as the man in the screenshot above continuing his inexorable descent. Moving between the locales and prodding highlighted points-of-interest reveals clues in dialogue, documents and images hinting at the motive, means, and narrative context of the death(s). To progress to the next case, you must demonstrate your understanding by filling in in the blanks on text "Scroll" using a small directionary of terms also gathered from the environment.

Within this simple structure, the developers Color Gray carefully direct and misdirect the player. Optional Scrolls exist which can be solved to untangle the smaller puzzles which make up the bigger mystery. The text already in each Scroll, and the problems highlighted by the Optional ones, narrow the problem space give a the player a mental scaffolding upon which more challenging solutions can be built.

Conversely, the Scrolls and the dictionaries are written in such a way as to suggest alternative answers which look plausable at first glance but which, on deeper inspection and careful consideration, are deviously constructed red herrings. This is true even where a Scroll seems to be referring to something very specific. A sudden revelation might mean that a sentence relates to entirely different events at an entirely different time, or must involve a character who had previously been written off as an inconsequential conveyer of exposition.

The construction of the puzzles expertly recreates the rhythm of set-up, investigation, suspect, twist, and revelation of great mystery fiction. I boggled at the unexpected circumstances of one character's death, only to then laugh at the irony of it. An important twist about another came to me while I was falling asleep and then, upon waking, I realised how this had been set up - almost too obviously - by earlier dialogue.

The dozen-ish individual cases in this bumper edition link together satisfyingly to tell a story of the hunger for power, buffonery, and intrigue. It's all very colonial British, apparently uncritically at times but with a secret Swiftian edge. A pleasure from start to finish, and notwithstanding a few grammar errors and bugs, a rigorously fair and enthralling challenge.

(So actually I've spent the last week not really using my iPhone controller accessory much at all. Go figure. However it's going to prove very useful on the iPhone versions of Dead Cells and Death's Door, two more great little adventures I'd never quite got around to on console.)

[hardcoregamer]

Balatro's Poker-Themed, Deck-Building Premise is One of Incredible Replayability

It's shocking, but delightfully so, just how deep Balatro's hooks can sink. Once the pieces all figuratively line up -- regardless of whether you get past that next troublesome boss blind or not -- Balatro's slick, lightning-fast means of understanding its premise paves the way to the kind of roguelike-style experience whose seemingly endless possibilities are just the first of many reasons as to why you may be tempted to jump back in for another go. 

Read more!

[gebo4482]

The Entropy Centre - Launch Trailer | PS5 & PS4 Games

Website / Steam

[crazygamecommunity]

Playstack e lo sviluppatore LocalThunk pubblicheranno Balatro su iOS (App Store) e Android (Google Play) il 26 Settembre per €9,99, hanno annunciato le aziende.

[savingcontent]

Friends of Jimbo collaboration for Balatro adds cosmetic decks from The Witcher, Among Us, Vampire Survivors, and Dave the Diver

Continue reading Friends of Jimbo collaboration for Balatro adds cosmetic decks from The Witcher, Among Us, Vampire Survivors, and Dave the Diver

[everygame]

Balatro

Developed/Published by: LocalThunk / PlayStack Released: 20/02/2024 Completed: 22/02/2024 Completion: Finished it with the blue deck, then with the red deck… then with the yellow deck…

Balatro is the first game in a long time that I’ve picked up on a whim. I saw a screenshot (Wario64 posting a deal on it, actually) and it just… chimed. It looked like a screenshot of an Amiga poker game in a magazine, and on discovering it was a Roguelike-like deckbuilder, I thought, “well, I’m always game for one of those.”

As usual, I fell into this completely, playing it to the exclusion of all else, until I felt like I’d “solved” it in as much as I worked out a strategy that worked well enough for me that I doubted I’d spend time looking for others.

After which I still played it to completion one more time. But I’ve definitely gone cold turkey now!!!

Balatro is very, very good. To explain it: It is a Roguelike-like deckbuilder that unlike Cobalt Core, doesn’t slavishly follow the template of Slay The Spire. It’s more like Luck Be A Landlord, really, in that it takes something that previously existed (in this case, poker) and bends it into something largely unrecognisable.

The idea here is really quite unlike poker, to be honest, outside of the fact that you are trying to make up to five card poker hands. For one, you have your own deck, you draw eight cards at a time, and then have a limited number of hands to make scoring poker hands to beat a set amount of chips, with the twist that cards grant differing numbers of chips based on their rank, with poker hands conferring more chips and a multiplier. You also have a limited number of discards in which you can discard up to five cards at a time. 

So the idea is, basically, play the poker hand that gets you the most chips and multiplier each time, using discards to savvily maximise your chances of that. But more interestingly, you can also have up to 5 jokers on the table, who provide you wildly differing bonuses. As simple as “gain multiplier for playing a pair” but also more esoteric possibilities, like gaining a bonus for keeping kings in your hand, or even allowing straights to use non-consecutive numbers!

And then there’s also the fact that after every win, you get some money (disconnected from chips, sensibly for the design, weird for the metaphor) to visit a shop and buy cards. These can either add cards to your deck, or change the benefits of particular poker hands, or change the cards in your deck. You can turn a 3 of spades into another king of hearts, let’s say. Or make a card give you a multiplier, or even just turn it into a bit of stone that gives you 50 chips every time you play it (but won’t ever be able to help you score higher on flushes or straights… well unless you get that joker that lets you score flushes or straights with four cards instead of five?)

It’s complicated, and it’s going to take a while to get comfortable with, but once you do, it’s utterly captivating. It’s genius because it breaks the first thing you learn playing a Slay The Spire-like: you start with a 52 card deck, so trying to get your deck small and efficient by destroying cards isn’t going to be possible (I’ve never managed to kill more than 10 cards on a run) and not only that removing cards at random can seriously damage your chance of scoring straights! It instead becomes a matter of working out how to make the deck you have efficient by changing cards and shaping your success via joker modifiers.

There’s also a beautiful spot of risk reward in the design in that there’s no dungeon map or anything, so no chance for bonus granting events. Balatro boils those events down to “oh, you’re just skipping a battle for a bonus” and each “ante” (three games with progressively high scores to beat) you can skip one or both of the first two games to get a bonus. Maybe it’s to immediately add some cards to your deck, or to add a special joker to the next store. In some cases, it’s “ah, I’ll skip this, because I need these cards anyway and don’t have money.” In other cases it’s “oh, if I skip this, it’s a gamble, because my deck might not be good enough to beat the next game, but the reward is so high…”

It’s a bit of genius that adds another layer to the player’s decision making without being overwhelming, and it might be my favourite bit of the design to be honest.

The issue with Balatro, is, ultimately like the issue with most of these kinds of games. After you play it for a while, you find the way to play it that, as far as you can tell, is the optimum way to play it. When I think of Slay The Spire or Cobalt Core, it’s “defense!” with Balatro, for me at least, it seems to be “Flushes!” 

(In a 52 card deck, you only have 4 of any one card, but you also only have 4 suits. So it’s far easier to try and reduce the number of cards of a different suit you draw by changing cards suits/destroying “wrong” suit cards than to try and make more aces or anything.)

In addition, while the game does have different classes of decks, they don’t change the deck pool at all, and the more you play the more jokers and card you unlock, which may open up new combos, but it also makes combo you know seem harder to manufacture, and there’s a sense that you could end up with the same issue that I found with Luck Be A Landlord–that it becomes hard to hit a combo early and get to that point where you have an engine whirring away often enough that you’re having fun.

These issues, however, don’t really diminish what a triumph Balatro was for the time I spent playing it. It looks great (although the constantly moving pixels did make my eyes sort of hurt? I wish you could turn that off) and it does do something unique in a space that’s arguably got a bit samey, so it comes highly recommended.

Will I ever play it again? God I really want to actually. But I won’t. Probably.

Final Thought: Something I haven’t mentioned though is that even without unlocking all the jokers, the RNG in Balatro can be absolutely brutal. There’s another unique touch here that every ante’s “boss” gives a unique modifier to the game, and some are a nightmare–for example the one that makes every single card draw face down! (There’s a trick in that the game still presents hands in suit or rank order, though…) And this means that sometimes you’re just going to hit something that is unwinnable unless you made very different decisions significantly earlier (oh you built a deck full of clubs? Too bad, this boss debuffs your entire deck. And don’t get me started on the one that permanently levels your hands down, basically that fucking poison swamp from Shiren…) With huge decks, there’s a bit more frustration here I’d say when you feel like you didn’t manage to get anywhere (or did, and just got screwed) and I suspect it only gets worse on higher difficulties. So like the rest of these kinds of things I’d say: play it as long as you enjoy it, and not a second more.

Support Every Game I’ve Finished on ko-fi! You can pick up a digital copy of exp. 2600, a zine featuring all-exclusive writing at my shop, or join as a supporter at just $1 a month and get articles like this a week early.

[brutalgamer]

Dark and shrouded in gothic themes, metroidvania The Last Faith arrives next month

Fans of side-scrolling action and gothic horror will soon be able to sink their fangs into November’s The Last Faith.

[satoshi-mochida]

The Last Faith delayed to November, PC beta test now available

Gematsu Source

Publisher Playstack and developer Kumi Souls Games have delayed dark gothic Metroidvania game The Last Faith from its previously announced October release window to November, as well as launched the PC beta test via Steam. The full game will be available for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Switch, and PC via Steam.

Here is an overview of the game, via Playstack:

Often brutal, but always empowering, The Last Faith thrives on merciless and precise combat, with a huge range of custom executions to perform. Players will unearth a formidable variety of melee weapons, arcane spells, and long-range firearms, allowing them to carve a path in their own style. Explore rich, gothic environments in order to piece together the fractured history of Mythringal, and survive intense encounters against swathes of blood-thirsty enemies who will stop at nothing to put an end to Eryk. Use your extensive arsenal of weapons to bring your foes to their knees with surgical precision, and invoke the mysterious power of the Nycrux in order to level up your attributes and stay one step ahead. Weave between bullets, lightning and viscera as you lead a macabre dance with all manner of brutal bosses – intense battles that will test even the most seasoned Souls-like players. Converse with the mysterious denizens of Mythringal and, perhaps, even befriend some lost souls who will aid you on your journey. Go beyond the bounds of the city walls and traverse a plethora of hand-drawn locations ranging from dark, gnarled forests to frigid mountain peaks. Unlock new abilities that recontextualise previously explored areas and gradually expand your understanding of the world via a huge interconnected map. You are Eryk, and this is your battle.

Watch a new trailer below.

Beta Launch Trailer

[lazyajju]

AK-xolotl is the ultimate top-down roguelite shooter starring the most adorable amphibian.

Coming soon to PC, Xbox, PlayStation & Nintendo Switch. - Demo available on Steam.

[geekcavepodcast]

The Entropy Center Release Date Trailer

Playstack and Stubby Games’ The Entropy Center is a first person puzzle adventure where you are tasked with saving the Earth. No pressure.

The Entropy Center releases to PC, PlayStation 4/5, Xbox Series X/S, and Xbox One on November 3, 2022.

[chi-xu]

Been waiting so long to say this - we're working with Playstack to bring UNBEATABLE to Steam/PS5/Xbox, and you can wishlist it on Steam today!

[tomorrowedblog]

Balatro is out today

Balatro, the new game from LocalThunk and Playstack, is out today.

The poker roguelike. Balatro is a hypnotically satisfying deckbuilder where you play illegal poker hands, discover game-changing jokers, and trigger adrenaline-pumping, outrageous combos.

[govindhtech]

NBA 2K25 Arcade Edition, Balatro+ To Apple Arcade Games

Apple Arcade

Eight titles, including NBA 2K25 Arcade Edition and Balatro+, are added to Apple Arcade. Apple Arcade is expanding its library of over 200 entertaining games with eight new additions. With no in-app purchases or advertisements, the newest collection of games provides something for the whole family, from thrilling deck-building games to competitive sports titles.

Three new games have been added to the service today: Puzzle Sculpt, an Apple Vision Pro spatial puzzle, Monster Train+, and NFL Retro Bowl ’25, the first NFL-licensed game available on the platform.

Every month, the service is updated with new games and material. Starting on September 26th, users will have the opportunity to construct their dream deck and take on challenging tasks with the 2024 deck-building phenomenon Balatro+. Playable on iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV, and Apple Vision Pro, Balatro+ will be part of the Arcade subscription service.

NBA 2K returns on October 3rd, promising players another thrilling season as they step up their game in NBA 2K25 Arcade Edition. This year, 2K enthusiasts may check out the redesigned Greatest Mode and The Neighborhood. In addition, subscribers may operate their own cat café in Furistas Cat café+, cook up a good time with some adorable furry companions in Food Truck Pup+, and smash their way through realms beyond their wildest dreams in Smash Hit+.

A family of up to six people may enjoy unlimited access to every game in the Apple Arcade library with just one membership, so you can all play these fantastic games together.

Playstack and LocalThunk’s Balatro+

LocalThunk, a lone developer, produced this hypnotically delightful roguelike deck builder with a focus on poker, which Playstack released. Joker cards and poker hands are combined by players to create a variety of builds and synergies, each with their own special powers. The objective is to find secret bonus hands and decks while gathering enough chips to defeat cunning blinds. In Balatro+’s unique psychedelic environment, defeat the boss blind, uphold the last stand, and win all set to a surreal and retro-futuristic synthwave music.

NBA 2K25 Arcade Edition

Image Credit To Apple

NBA 2K25 Arcade Edition is where legends are built, as The Neighborhood makes its mobile premiere. Unlock side missions, meet the top players in the league, and compete against friends in one-on-one or three-on-three games on Game Center. As they advance in their professions and refine their talents via competitive play, Apple Arcade players have access to a brand-new space that blends indoor and outdoor streetball courts and businesses thanks to this completely navigable hoop culture paradise.

Not only will they rule the court, but The Neighborhood as well. New character customization options, upgrades to My career and The Association, and a redesigned Greatest Mode that lets players relive some of their favorite ballers’ career-defining moments are all included in the game.

GAME START’s Food Truck Pup+

With the top canine chefs in town, players can cook up a fantastic time. With the bright pixel visuals of the game, work hard to build a delicious worldwide crêpe company from the bottom up and see it come to life. In this heartwarming game, players may also take pleasure in creating their own stores, choosing fashionable clothing, and even employing other dogs as part-timers to support the growth of their companies.

Cat Cafe+ Furistas by Runaway Play

Image Credit To Apple

Gamers may add more cats to their collection by matching adorable kittens with the perfect foster parents and providing them with happiness. Because every café may be customized from top to bottom, gamers can let their imaginations run wild and create unique and welcoming environments. These adorable kittens will win over gamers’ hearts with every endearing exchange they have.

Smash Hit+ by Mediocre AB

Smash Hit+ is a game that uses force, concentration, and pure willpower to take players on immersive adventures where they must move in time with the music and discover new methods to use destructive physics. The game’s 50 distinct chambers and 11 graphic styles provide an unmatched visual experience that motivates players to commit to overcoming the difficult challenges that lie ahead of them.

Apple Arcade Games

Image Credit To Apple

Players may anticipate significant improvements to popular arcade games like Wylde Flowers, Sonic Dream Team, Outlanders 2: Second Nature, Hello Kitty Island Adventure, and many more in addition to new games.

Wylde Flowers by Studio Drydock: In today’s highly anticipated mystical Creatures update, players will endeavor to uncover the mystical mysteries concealed under Fairhaven’s lighthouse and restore it to its former splendor.

Sonic Dream Team by SEGA HARDlight: On September 12, players may get 16 new abilities, such as stomp and air slice, by running and jumping into new objectives and locations in the Tails Challenge. Jukebox mode, which enables users to unlock and gather music songs from all across the Dream World, is also included in this version.

Pomelo Games’ Outlanders 2: Second Nature: On September 17, players will get to know Jelena, the tenacious mayor of a little village in the Winterlands at the foot of a massive mountain. Together with three new levels with brand-new structures and crops, Jelena also delivers a fresh narrative.

The island adventure Hello Kitty by Sunblink and Sanrio: Players may reach the new City Town area on a separate island on September 18, when a mystery boat emerges off the coast of Friendship Island. There, a new character is ready to show everyone around.

Read more on Govindhtech.com

[hotnew-pt]

Balatro ganha parceria com The Witcher, Among Us e Vampire Survivor #ÚltimasNotícias #tecnologia

Hot News Créditos: Divulgação/Playstack Durante o Nintendo Direct realizado na última terça-feira (27), os criadores de Balatro anunciaram uma atualização gratuita que adicionou diversas parceiras ao título. Já disponível, ela introduz decks de cartas baseados em séries como The Witcher, Among Us, Vampire Survivors e Dave the Diver. Conhecido como “Friends of Jimbo”, o update para Steam e…

[crazygamecommunity]

Playstack e lo sviluppatore Color Gray Games pubblicheranno The Case of the Golden Idol su PS5 e PS4 il 23 Luglio, hanno annunciato le società.