Striking Distance Studios announced its follow-up to the action horror game The Callisto Protocol at Gamescom 2024, and it’s a roguelike dungeon crawler set in the same universe.
Redacted, stylized as [REDACTED], which is set to release on October 31 for Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5, and PC, follows a security guard who’s trying to escape Black Iron Prison, the setting from the first game, by any means necessary. As per the roguelike formula, you’ll die over and over again trying to get out, but along your journey to the last escape pod, you’ll collect weapons, suits, skills, and what are called experiments.
The developers have added a few twists. For one, you won’t just be fighting against mutated inmates and alien monsters. There are other people trying to get to the escape pod that you’ll have to contend with as well. The trailer shows off three other blue-collar, forgotten workers in the prison, including a lunch lady and a custodian. There’s yet another foe you’ll have to fight: your own corpse. When you die during a run, your corpse, complete with all your collected gear and upgrades, will try and attack you. Roguelikes typically have some in-story reason why you get to come back to life repeatedly, and this is certainly a way to do it.
Redacted which is apparently the real name and not a placeholder title, looks very different from The Callisto Protocol. While that first game was photorealistic and dark, Redacted is bright and colorful, with bold outlines, a comic book-inspired aesthetic, and superfast gameplay.
The Callisto Protocol was the first game from Striking Distance Studios, a Krafton developer led by Glen Schofield, and it was meant to be a spiritual successor to Schofield’s most famous game, Dead Space. It shipped in December 2022, although according to some recent Schofield comments, it could’ve used at least three more months to cook. He has since left the studio, although the team has been working on another AAA project alongside Redacted.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Gaming laptops and I have a complicated relationship. One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it. I was a broke college kid, and that was the best I could afford. So trying out high-end gaming laptops is always fun. But ASUS' ROG Zephyrus G14 is a lot more than a laptop that can run AAA games. It is portable, so you're not lugging around a 2.5kg machine everywhere you go. It is built well, none of that plastic chassis, and can even function as a normal laptop outside of just gaming.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.