We Happy Few, new crazy indie title.

Posted By: Gamerdating Team - February 27, 2015

Compulsion games have announced their title: We Happy Few, a game they've been developing since early 2014. With a very special theme and artwork the game feels freaky and I'm eager to get more information! We Happy Few will be at PAX East 2015 with a playable "build" for anyone to have a go. Check out the trailer here, its crazy, awesome and I cannot wait to get my hands on it!

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Warhammer 40,000 announce their PC MOBA

Posted By: Gamerdating Team - February 26, 2015

Games Workshop’s Warhammer 40,000 is at it again, Whitebox Interactive announce their latest game devloping Warhammer 40k: Dark Nexus Arena. Stated to have the heroes such as Space Marines, Orks, and the Tau in an assortment of four vs four player battles. Other races such as the Sisters of Battle, Dark Eldar, Eldar, and Chaos Space Marines will be added in the fullness of time. It is interesting to note the four vs four bat

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GTAV Heists releasing March 10th

Posted By: Gamerdating Team - February 25, 2015

Rockstar Games announced two updates yesterday with a date of March 10th for Online Heists and another delay for the eagerly awaited PC version to be released April 14th. Online Heists We are excited to announce that the launch of Heists for GTA Online is scheduled for March 10th. We know it’s been a wait, and appreciate your patience. Heists will bring a brand new 4-player cooperative gameplay experience to GTA Online, giving pl

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Steam now has over 125 million active accounts

Posted By: Gamerdating Team - February 24, 2015

Steam released a press release with the Steam VR.  GDC 2015 will mark the 13th anniversary of Valve's first public announcement of Steam, which has since become the leading platform for PC, Mac, and Linux games and software.  In the last year, Steam added new services and features - including In-Home Streaming, Broadcasting, Music, and user created stores - as it grew to over 125 million active accounts worldwide.  S

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Updates and Fixes

Posted By: Gamerdating Team - February 23, 2015

Hello all, Thank you for your continued support, reports and emails about errors, bugs and features. We take everything on board and strive to build the best service for all.  We've been busy this last week fixing some glaring bugs involving: Landing page game art. Landing page graphical bugs fixed and load speed improved. Game Library now pulls games correctly. Footer layout bugs fixed. Subscription displaying incorr

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UK's first dedicated eSports arena: The Gfinity Arena revealed

Posted By: Gamerdating Team - February 20, 2015

Next month the UK gets its first dedicated eSports Arena at the Vue Cinema, Fulham Broadway London. Within the Vue Cinema, the Gfinity Arena hosts three custom-built stages with capacity to house over 600 gaming fanatics, offering the comfiest seats found in eSports. Get your tickets through the Vue website when they go on sale, and what a better place to take your special someone on a special date. eSports Arena to watch our f

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GamersGate celebrate 10th Anniversary

Posted By: Gamerdating Team - February 19, 2015

GamersGate are celebrating 10 years of trading with exclusive 48 hours deals. You can pick up Valkyria Chronicles, Company of Heroes 2, Defiance, and Tom Clancy's games for 50-75% off. We always like to see successful gaming ventures last a while, and we'd like to salute GamersGate for 10 years of -as they call it- awesomeness. Some cracking games ideal for co-op play, and some amazing rpgs.

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Grow Home patched

Posted By: Gamerdating Team - February 18, 2015

Grow Home has been one of those games that slips easily under your radar. You play as BUD (Botanical Utility Droid), a robot on a mission to save his home planet by harvesting the seeds of a giant alien plant. Sure, sounds a little... dry, but it's a great 3D platformer with charm, and taste. With the latest update: Some rare flora and fauna has been recently detected on the alien planet. M.O.M has a new side quest for B.U.D to inv

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New Colorblind Support in WoW Patch 6.1

Posted By: Gamerdating Team - February 17, 2015

World of Warcraft patch 6.1 has revealed that you’ll find a new user interface system that we’ve designed to assist players who have common visual issues related to colorblindness. In the new ‘Accessibility’ interface configuration section, you’ll be able to enable both text and color enhancements that may improve your visual experience while playing WoW. ‘Enable UI Colorblind Mode’ (which was pre

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ESL reveals biggest UK tournament for CS:GO and LoL

Posted By: Gamerdating Team - February 16, 2015

The ESL UK Premiership, the company's largest tournament since 2010, has been announced today for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and League of Legends players to win £12,000. The tournaments will be spread over two months of online brackets to culminate in an offline finals at London MCM Comic Con over the 22-24 May weekend, in front of an expected 110,000 spectators. The first qualifiers are scheduled to begin on 23 February. Y

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Silly Stereotypes that Surround Gamers

Posted By: Melissa - February 15, 2015

When I opened my eyes the other morning to a pounding headache and an empty bed, I was instantly in a grumpy mood. Jordan had been out of bed for a couple hours, from what I could hear, his cough was getting worse. Now, I feared I was in the virus’ sights. Thoughts of having an excuse to make chicken soup would usually at least make me a little happy, but today would be a long day with no extra bandwidth. Sitting up, my fears were confirmed

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Why Super Mario 3D World might quite possibly saved my love life.

Posted By: Lacey - February 15, 2015

My husband doesn’t get me. I’ve known this… I’m a complicated stress ball of a woman and at times a bit demanding. Like any woman I appreciate romantic gestures or thoughtful gifts. Which is why last Christmas when my husband gifted me with a Wii U I was honestly a little confused. Please don’t get me wrong I knew how great of a gift it was! But I don’t game… I should have kept my confusion to myself

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GamerDating Launch

Posted By: Gamerdating Team - February 15, 2015

GamerDating has launched, congratulations and welcome to GamerDating.  To get started fill in your profile to reflect you, the person behind the screen. Hang up your gaming persona, because here we are all gaming fanatics, but we are people! Once you've finished filling in your profile (and remember the more detail, the more success), search the matching system for like minded people. If you like the look of someone, get in touc

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Why you need a picture

Posted By: Gamerdating Team - February 15, 2015

Yes, you will need to upload a picture of real-life you. Because you are awesome. Because you are beautiful. Because real people have real faces. Because relationships happen between people, not avatars. We created GamerDating.com with one goal in mind: to help gamers find other gamers to love them in game and out. To achieve this goal, we feel it is important that our community be made up not of anonymous avatars, but the amazing

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Ian's Story Part 1 - Success of Online Dating

Posted By: Ian - February 15, 2015

Hello, My name is Ian, and happily married to my wife Anne, whom I met through online dating. If you had of asked me some five or six years ago about online dating I may have scoffed at the idea and said it was for either sleazy men and desperate old women. However, times have changed and I now believe it to be one of the best ways to meat like minded individuals and some genuinely nice people. I've never been one for night clubs and

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Updates to come

Posted By: Gamerdating Team - February 14, 2015

Hello, Welcome to our first version of GamerDating, we have loads of updates, changes and new features to add as we progress.  We will be fixing and updating any bugs, issues and features daily. During your time if you encounter any bugs, please provide as much information as possible with screenshots. Every bug you report which leads to a fix you can earn free membership and time on your account because we know communities grow

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Subscription Rewards

Posted By: Gamerdating Team - February 14, 2015

Online dating can often be a long, daunting quest and we want to reward you for your valor. We are gamers, we LOVE games so we figured we could offer games for free in our paid subscriptions. This can do two things: Share and offer our favorite games Support and promote indie games, devs and spread beta access Regrettably the majority of offered games are for the PC, due to the nature of online keys.  We are always looking fo

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Albion Online - We came, claimed and conquered.

Posted By: Alexander Brown - February 14, 2015

We came. We claimed. We conquered. Albion Online is a Free-to-Play game in its alpha-testing stage which offers a cross-platform sandbox MMO on Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and iOS. Think of it as a living world with no NPC vendors, no questlines and no NPCs to report to. Instead you, your guild and your friends decide who owns what: it is an entirely player-driven economy with full-loot hardcore PvP. Towns, buildings and regions can all be co

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Mortal Kombat X will take more realistic approach to female form

Posted By: Gamerdating Team - February 14, 2015

Female characters in Mortal Kombat X will be more realistically proportioned than in previous games.   "The mantra for this game has always been realism, heading towards a more realistic look," production manager Spiro Anagnostakos said, as reported by GameSpot. "So the same thing applies to the proportions where we try to bring things back in per se to where they should be." It is nice to see some positive actio

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Apple Promoting “Great Games with No In-App Purchases” on App Store Front Page

Posted By: Gamerdating Team - February 14, 2015

Apple has started promoting games that don't have any In-App Purchases on the front page of the App Store. Currently featured in the UK App Store, the section is called 'Pay Once & Play' and it showcases “great games” that don't require users to pay for extra content through IAPs.   It’s been a long time coming for Apps to provide the old fashion, and simple “here is a game, now play it&rdquo

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>Observer_ Review

Posted By: Ryan - March 21, 2019

Game

>observer_ is a cyberpunk marvel built on the little stories of its all too human cast. Told through the eyes of KPD officer Daniel Lazarski (voiced by none other than Rutger Hauer himself), >observer_ is a short horror game drenched in the atmosphere one would expect from the minds behind Layers of Fear.

The 8 or so hours it took me to complete the main story (as well as some side cases) raised many questions concerning the nature of humanity, the lengths to which people will go to be happy in their own skin and the effects that our choices have on others.

As with Bloober Team’s well-known Layers of Fear, >observer_ is told entirely through first person exploration gameplay. Gone are the wood panelled halls haunted by memories of a family now lost, in their place are grime drenched, neon lit corridors. Holes are torn into the walls to make doorways, cables snake along the floor, powering the video intercoms attached to each door and the many advertisements hanging from the walls.

This is definitely a game to play docked. Whilst the handheld mode holds up, Unreal Engine 4 makes mincemeat of the Switch’s battery life (around 2 and a half hours) and many of the prompts presented in the near invisible UI are very difficult to see on the tiny screen. Docked, however, dust motes hang in the air of every cramped, concrete hallway illuminated by the bright teal glow that serves as the main accent for most of the game. Playing in docked mode also gives your screen the real estate to properly display the lavish visual effects, strobing and digital artefacting (the latter a sign that Daniel’s medication is running low) that are deployed to keep you on the edge of your seat.

 

Enjoy the view, you won’t be seeing it much


 On top of the visual treat, heavily inspired by films such as Blade Runner, a stellar soundtrack accompanies Daniel’s investigation into a series of murders perpetrated in a single apartment block in the late 21st century. Footsteps echo from the cracked concrete, or splash through the thick mud of the basement. NPCs, with the exception of a few characters, are spoken to through the doors of their sealed apartments and are a joy to talk with via >observer_’s simple dialogue trees. Even though no NPC (with the exception of two) is spoken to more than once, the handful of minutes the game devotes to each is more than enough to convey a compelling narrative. Many times, I found myself wanting to find out more about each character (especially the self-aware sexbot), only to get caught up in the next mini-drama played out in dialogue only.

Now, it’s probably worth stating that this isn’t a game for everybody. If you aren’t overly enamoured with “walking simulators” or games which use environmental hints to contribute to the narrative, this probably isn’t for you. As previously mentioned, Daniel’s solo jaunt through the building is broken only by the occasional conversation through a door (or face to face in a handful of cases), or a handful of stealth segments, leaving the main bulk of the story to be told through protracted memory sequences, Daniel’s inner monologue, or items scattered throughout the environment.

Exploration for said items is rewarded with extra objectives, interactions with NPCs who would otherwise brush you off or one of the sixty-nine collectibles to be found (on one memorable occasion, my exploration yielded a code to a locked door which I opened to reveal a P.T. easter egg complete with bleeding walls, looping hallway and freaky posters). That’s not to say the entire game is a permanent treasure hunt (although there are a handful of crime scenes you are encouraged to investigate to their fullest).

 

The Lost Woods this isn’t, but there are clues for those who seek to leave the maze


Daniel is a special member of the Krakow Police Department known as an Observer. He is equipped with an augmentation (the usual cyberpunk questions surrounding what is humanity, are augmentations a boon or a bane etc. are definitely being explored by the game) which allows him to plug into the neural jacks of the victims he encounters. Without wishing to delve too deeply into each one, suffice it to say Layers of Fear’s influence is felt strongly during these sequences, played out to a riot of disturbing visual effects, discordant ambience and pulse-pounding soundtrack. The game shows a warning about photo-sensitive seizures every time it is started and it’s warranted. A couple of times I found the visual effects to be too much for me to make any conscious progress and stumbled into the correct level triggers more through intuition and luck than by correctly interpreting the clues seeded throughout the environment (although the developers deserve much credit for the inventiveness of the clues they provide).

 

Everyone needs a Journal

 

This speaks to a lot of the problems I found during my playthrough. Solid ideas were implemented largely successfully, but with just enough niggles to be a problem. Messy visuals, somewhat unclear stealth segments (aided massively by a generous checkpoint system) and a tiny prompt when able to interact with an object caused my progress to stumble a few times (this is all in addition to a minor bug where I couldn’t select a certain object and a few periods of noticeable frame rate loss followed by the game crashing). In the vast majority of cases, I resolved the problem by exploring the same room over and over for a few minutes before finally looking directly at the right spot, or moving through rooms I could barely distinguish through the textures being used to amp up the tension, or, on one memorable occasion, realising I had just completed a stealth section without first noticing it was a stealth section. I largely enjoyed my time with the game, but it meant that when a problem like this came up, I really noticed it.


It’s a shame too, because the stuff Bloober Team experimented with worked really well. As I’ve mentioned, Daniel is reliant on medication to continue functioning and without it his vision starts distorting in a distinctly unhelpful manner (although there doesn’t appear to be any downside, apart from this and an irritating audio prompt, to not taking the meds), which helps build the illusion of a man whose body is fighting against the augmentations which allow him to do his job. Similarly, when his medication is running out, or in times of stress, the Joy-Con’s HD rumble is used to great effect, beating in time with his heart, grounding what in other games would be merely a sound effect, with a tactile, visceral sensation. As the game progresses, this small touch becomes very important, serving as a prominent tool during the stealth sections as a sort of proximity alarm.


I’ve mentioned augmentations a few times now and that’s with good cause. Possibly my favourite feature of the game (aside from the titular observations) are Daniel’s forensic vision modes. Using a combination EM-vision to find electronic clues, Bio-vision to find biological clues and good old-fashioned night-vision (because boy howdy does the game get dark in places), Daniel is perhaps at his best when searching crime scenes for evidence. Few games go into this level of detail and I found myself wishing more would. A clever combination of colour palette changing and the ability to swap with the press of a button really helped nail the feeling of a cybernetic detective doing their job.

 

He’s dead, Jim

 

At £26.99/$29.99, you’re getting a decent amount game for the price.

Sure, it might be short, but I was invested in every minute of playtime, caught up in the atmosphere of a place so similar to our own, yet so alien. The game does boast two endings, and sixty-nine collectibles (of which I found about a quarter), but with no real way to reload the last checkpoint, you’re looking at around 15 hours (or less if you focus on the main story) to see both endings, plus however long it takes to find all the collectibles.

Whilst I feel like the endings will only have slight differences, the branching dialogue trees hold more of my interest and I’m curious to see if several of the conversations I had could have ended differently.

Whilst narrative driven games like this are subjective, I wholeheartedly recommend it. The sub-text ever present in the cyberpunk genre is present (along with no small amount of body horror) and I’m a sucker for any game that has an atmosphere crafted with so much care and attention.

It’s not perfect, but it’s an excellent way to spend a few hours and you might learn something about the human condition along the way.

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