Here's a demo for Phantom Line, the paranormal military FPS that mixes S.T.A.L.K.E.R. with Control - Related to assassination, control, review, game, keep

Here's a demo for Phantom Line, the paranormal military FPS that mixes S.T.A.L.K.E.R. with Control

Open world spec op gun-brandisher Phantom Line takes place during a paranormal crisis of such intensity that the outbreak of nuclear war gets relegated to bullet point five on the latest press email. Atomic apocalypse? Ehhh. That's a roadside picnic compared to what [website] this alternately Lynchian and Tarkovskian battlefield. You'll wish you'd been dusted by nuclear fire when you're being torn open by some kind of demon puppet in a labyrinth of red curtains.

If you do get torn open by a demon puppet, the good news is that players have a range of artificial bodies to choose from. Among Phantom Line's headline elements is the HUSK system, which lets you switch between members of your squad right in the middle of combat. Unless, presumably, the body in question is already occupied by one of your co-op partners. If all this sounds appealing, the even-gooder news is that there's now a demo available via the developer Discord.

"Crashland on Jantar Island together with up to 3 of your friends (1 - 4 player co-op)," explains the announcement post on Steam. "Plan, prepare, and adjust tactics to the open world with dynamic events. Gear up with new guns, weapon attachments, and night vision to be ready for any danger you encounter. Discover new captivating locations as you navigate towards the Black Forest Research Facility and fight the anomalies once contained there."

When playing the game solo, you can command other husks to serve as decoys or scouts and any other roles your supposed 'human friends' consider beneath them, or are too dense to execute correctly (that's me, hello). The NPC opposition appears split between regular soldiers, whom you're encouraged to regard as distractions, animals, whom you're encouraged to kill and eat, and invaders from other dimensions, whom you're encouraged to both slaughter and, er, become.

"Humanity is at war - to fight the anomalous horror, you must turn into one yourself," explains the mailout. This is done by augmenting your body with "exotic elements". Surely no downsides there. "Go die again," adds the press release, reassuringly.

Between jaunts to the battlezone, you get to hang out in a nuclear submarine, customise your artificial body, and trick out your cabin with all the phat weaponry you've acquired. Fingers crossed that it also contains a cheerful stove and a sit-down button. My husks deserve to put their feet up, now and then.

The basic game flow here reminds me more of Hunt: Showdown than [website], except that instead of boss lairs full of rotten hay you're diving into gobbets of spacey sci-fi horror game - in particular, I'm reminded of the backrooms of The Evil Within 2. There's no PvP element, seemingly, so you at least don't have to worry about other teams camping the exits. Anyway, you can read more on Steam.

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Keep Driving review

A free-wheeling RPG road trip that pushes all the right buttons. Manage spare tires and drink endless coffee while you trundle to the other side of a pixel pleasant country. Developer: YCJY Games.

£15/$18/€18 Reviewed on: Intel Core-i7-11700F, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060, Windows 10.

It's not the destination, they say, it's the pickled eggs we slurped along the way. In Keep Driving, a turn-based RPG of swishing scenery and smooshed roadkill, you are on a road trip in the early 2000s that will see you gulping coffee and stuffing cheap snacks into your mouth, all in an effort to get to the other side of the country in time for the big concert. It is a hypnotically involving game of picking up hitchhikers and battling tailgaters, a pixel art drivealong with tactile, chunky buttons and perfectly suited sound effects, as much fuelled by nostalgia as it is by gasoline. At first, I thought it was too loose and open-ended to elicit any deep feelings. But then I had to sell my guitar for half a tank of petrol, just to visit my dying grandmother. Dude, this is a game that goes places.

Before we get to poor granny, let's take stock. It's day one of your trip, and you create a simple character. Maybe you're unemployed, or a part-time car mechanic. I chose to be a student (more options unlock when you complete the game). You also choose some items to bring with you. Maybe mum's care package, with its sensible jerrycan of gas? Nope. I took the case of beer and my prized guitar. All this squeezes into the boxy inventory of your car's boot. As for the car itself, you might like the look of the characterful muscle car or hefty truck, but I went with the hideously average 1981 Sedan. Unlike the other vehicles on offer, it can hold four passengers. This, for me, would become massively key.

The actual driving is (mostly) done automatically. You tell the car where to go using a road map and handy signposts at each rest stop, small town, or city. In these nodes of commerce you'll have to stock up on items for the journey and slot them into the grid-based trunk. You can lower the middle seat to make even more storage space for beer, crisps, nuts, books, gas cans, spray paint, hot dogs, noodles, stoves, car parts, spare tires... There's a lot on offer and money isn't always forthcoming, so you'll often have to make hard decisions about what to buy and what to leave on the shelf. It's like if the bloke from Neo Scavenger owned a station wagon. Each item is useful in its own way. But you might not see how until you get into a scrape on the road.

These are called "road events" - basically turn-based battles against tractors, potholes, cyclists, or kids playing in the middle of the god damn road. Each encounter is unveiled with a stylish flourish of text scrolling past you like any other car that whooshes by on the motorway. "ABANDONED CAR," it might say, before you approach a rusty old wreck. Or "ROAD KILL" before bringing you to a halt in front of an unidentifiable animal corpse. Speed cameras, cops, tailgaters, even arguments between your hitchhiking companions qualify as events. Some of them made me laugh out loud. "BEE IN THE CAR" deadpans one pre-battle message. "BIRDS THAT WON'T MOVE," warns another as you approach a bunch of crows who refuse to clear a path.

What unfolds is a kind of card-based battle. Some polaroid snapshots hang from your rearview mirror, each a draggable skill that will neutralise an incoming attack. It's a simple enough game of matching icons and avoiding status effects. Red gasoline attacks will lower your petrol tank. Green social attacks will lower your personal energy. Blue durability attacks will put a dent in your car's physical health meter. You won't always be able to guard all attacks at once, and have to minimise incoming damage . If you're low on fuel, for example, maybe it's superior to take a hit to your chassis.

Those items from the store will help. Use duct tape to avoid damage to the car, smoke a cigarette to avoid losing a pip of energy. You might also get status ailments as you travel. I once drank a late night bottle of wine at a rest stop only to wake with a "headache" status. It meant any future attack would do double damage. Normally, you wait for this headache to pass. But I had been carrying aspirin from the beginning of the trip precisely for this moment. I wouldn't have drunk the stupid wine anyway, if it weren't for a peer pressuring friend - a hitchhiker nicknamed "The Hurricane".

These hitchhikers slot into the car seats and offer extra skills to use in battle. They also level up alongside you in interesting ways. The Punk will fend off gasoline threats with aggressive abandon, and comes with a dog who takes up an extra space in the car. But at level three he suddenly becomes vegan, and you become unable to buy meat or dairy products from shops. Another passenger, the Mechanic, will smoke any cigarettes you leave in your glove box. My wine-sipping friend, the Hurricane, leaves litter in the car that takes up space, causing you to clean it out at every stop. She's dreadful.

These are thematic annoyances that give the game its flavour. But there is less intentional friction when it comes to managing inventory. It's fiddly to rotate items, for example, and I never figured out a way to easily transfer objects between the trunk and my nice roof rack (a shopping trolley strapped to the top of the sedan).

But neither this nor the occasional bug on the windshield killed the strong atmosphere of the game's premise. It's an absorbing road trip not just in the pixel scenery that passes by (fields of lavender, forests, mountain ranges, distant lakes) but also in the random chit-chat your passengers make with one another. Their idle thoughts on books, comments on the state of your car, bite-sized anecdotes of their adventures on the road. There's a loving amount of detail to this trip, right down to the music that you collect and play along the way.

Your CD player can only queue six songs at a time, so you have to manually eject and choose another set of songs every time the music runs out. This periodic pushing of the eject and shuffle buttons became, for me, a kind of ritual. It adds absolutely nothing to your stats. It offers you no pre-battle benefits. And yet I felt compelled to prod my finger into this chonky pixel machinery every half a dozen songs. God. I think I'm a little bit in love with this thing.

It's unexpectedly heartfelt at times, too. My opening quest - to reach the Way Out music festival - eventually became a secondary destination, supplanted by my punk friend's desire to find a rare club in the big city. The game's open-ended rhythm reflects the forking paths of want that crop up in any road trip tale. At one point, I received a letter (somehow) from my grandmother. She wrote that she was dying. She wanted to see me one last time.

Okay, the quest was titled "Inheritance", so my money-starved pockets led the way. But when we reached grandma, she blessed me not with cash, but with a plot of land. The trouble? It was way back west. Just a few miles from the one horse town I started in. It's implied that grandma died shortly afterwards.

I ended up staying in that midwestern city far longer than anywhere else. I took temp job after temp job at an employment office, my negative debuffs stacking up. I was tired (energy bars can't be refilled). I was hungry (energy costs increased by 1). I was dirty (hitchhikers gain less XP). The game recognised what I was doing and labelled me with the trait "workaholic" poking fun with a description that reads: "Aren't you supposed to be on a road trip?"

In another game, this might feel like manipulating the game's systems. But here the soulless gig economy stopover felt appropriate. If this was a road trip movie, I realised, this would be the struggling lowlight of the trip. Two of my three buddies have gone their own way. My only remaining car pal was a dude who kept falling asleep in the passenger seat, and the hairy, silent dog. We were broke, knackered, low on gas, and even lower on spirit. I drove across the country for this? I sold my guitar in a pawn shop in Bumfuck, Nowhere.... FOR THIS?

Three days pass without us driving anywhere. Just: sleep, work, sleep, work, sleep, work. The game's calendar tracks the days that pass with an almost Persona-like attention, the quest to get to the music festival has a deadline circled in red ink three weeks from now. I have given up on that dream. Not out of time constraints, but because I have become dedicated to roleplaying dejection and loss. Dude, my grandmother just died.

But her last wishes remain. She wanted me to go back home. To find that plot of land and see what I can do with it. Hmmm. The calendar says I have two whole months to get there. I could take my time. We could see the country, go on hiking trails! I'm not being colourful here, the hikes are small first-person dungeon-crawly walkabouts that offer bits of loot, sometimes found in country stopovers. The road trip is not over yet.

I would later learn that fulfilling granny's dying wishes is just one of nine possible endings for the game (a summary of your trip gets scribbled into a notebook alongside a photo of the old banger that took you everywhere). And you can start the game again with all your car's upgrades installed (shopping trolley roof included). But right now, in the city, I'm not even thinking of that. I just want to be back on the road.

I rev the engine. I draw a red circle around a city to the north that I know nothing about. I retune my skills so I don't need to rely on the punk's gas-guzzling breath to survive encounters anymore. Leaving the city, I get another message: wait, says a business firm, we can offer you a permanent position! You were working so hard!

I mentally stuff the letter into my glove box with all the candy wrapper trash, where it belongs, and turn to my sleepy friend, out like a light. The dog behind me watches in the rearview. This city sucks. Time to go home.

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Sniper At Work is a game of crafty first-person assassination with a touch of Hitman's sandboxing

Sniper At Work is the work of Cherrypick Games, hitherto known for "soothing merge-2 experiences" featuring puppy-eyed princes. The only "twos" you shall be "merging" in Sniper At Work are bullets and faces. The only "cherries" you shall be "picking" are hoodlums in sore need of a skullful of lead. The only princes you shall acknowledge are their royal highnesses Distance, Wind, and Timing.

You may or may not find all that "soothing" - I won't judge. I will only repeat Nic's observation from the Maw that Sniper At Work look "a bit like Commandos, a bit like Hitman", which I would translate to "my comrade in PC gaming, if historic audience trends are any indication you shall do well here". Right, that's enough quotation marks for one article. There won't be any left for the next interview feature at this rate. Here's the trailer.

And here's the Steam page. Elevator pitch: this is a stealthy-sandboxy urban execution sim with changeable environments and a heavy emphasis on both planning and plans going awry. Why are you in an elevator? Because you are heading to the roof with your rifle, of course. Mind the CCTV. Here are some capabilities.

Tactical Planning: Scout your targets, choose your vantage points, and get creative with traps, distractions, and tools. Precision Sniping: Feel the thrill of the perfect shot with realistic ballistics, wind physics, and breathing control. Upgradable Arsenal: Unlock and customize sniper rifles, gadgets, and tools to handle any situation--or make them worse in the most entertaining way possible. Dynamic Scenarios: Missions adapt to your decisions (and occasional missteps), keeping keeping every playthrough unpredictable. Creative Freedom: Choose your approach--subtle, explosive, or delightfully ridiculous--and leave your mark in style.

I'm not wholly convinced by the switches to elevated third-person in the trailer. I can't figure out how they fit into the rest of the game. Beyond that, yeah, more of this please. It's not as conceptually ambitious as Children Of The Sun, and the developers have an uphill challenge crafting scenarios as ingenious as those of Hitman, let alone besting a direct rival like Sniper Elite, but it feels like a game you shouldn't turn your back on. Especially given that it doesn't have a release date yet. They could strike at any moment.

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