Quirky Puzzle Game I Am Dead is Releasing This October on Switch and PC

I am dead switch feature

Publisher Annapurna Interactive has announced that puzzle game I Am Dead is releasing on October 8 on PC and Nintendo Switch.

I Am Dead follows Morris Lupton, a deceased museum curator who's living on an island called Shelmerston. He later reunites with his dog Sparky in the afterlife as his island is on the brink of destruction. It's up to Morris and Sparky to uncover mysteries in the island in order to save it. Throughout the game, you'll solve puzzles that relate to connecting objects from people that are deceased.

The game was announced back in March during Nintendo's Indie World presentation. It's the latest game from developer Hollow Ponds and Richard Hogg, who are known for games like Wilmot's Warehouse and Hohokum. DualShockers' own Charlie Wachloz got a chance to play it back in August. From its unique art style, story, and quirky puzzles, I Am Dead looks like another great addition to Annapurna Interactive's lineup.

Speaking of Annapurna Interactive, this isn't the only game they're releasing this holiday. Later this year, they'll release The Pathless, the latest game from the developers of Abzu. The game recently released a new gameplay trailer before it launches on the PS4, PS5, Apple Arcade, and PC. Another game coming from them is 12 Minutes, an interactive thriller starring Willem Defoe, Daisy Ridley, and James McAvoy. Additionally, games like Solar Ash and Stray will release in 2021. For those like me that love buying physical games, Annapurna Interactive has partnered with iam8bit on a collection of eight games. The games in the collection include Donut County, Outer Wilds, What Remains of Edith Finch, and Sayonara Wild Hearts.

I Am Dead launches on October 8 on PC and Nintendo Switch. You can watch a trailer below. As more news comes about upcoming Annapurna games, we'll be sure to let you know.

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Animal Crossing: New Horizons Limited Edition Switch Back in Stock at Target

Animal Crossing: Horizons

Animal Crossing: New Horizons is the best selling game to have come out this year raking it 22.40 units sold and becoming the second most sold switch title since the console's release in 2017. Along with its release earlier this year, it was a highly sought-after Nintendo Switch that was themed off the title and after being sold out for months it seems that a new wave is starting to hit retailers.

First found via Nintendo Wire, the publication posted a Twitter on their official page showing a new shipment of the popular switch console being displayed at a Target store. Following that, a user on Twitter posted a picture of the Animal Crossing Switch that they picked up from their own Target stating that apparently, stores are getting around 10 units each. As of writing none of the major retailers, including Target have listings of the console at the $299.99 retail price. Target is also the only retailer I have seen yet that has the consoles back on store shelves, but it wouldn't hurt to check out your local Walmart or Best Buy to see if they have any too.

It is worth noting that the Animal Crossing Switch does not include a copy of Animal Crossing: New Horizons so you would have to pick that up as well. You can purchase New Horizons over on Amazon.

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You Can Now Preload Games Before Inserting a Disc on Xbox

Xbox App

So many of you out there have gone through the struggle before when opening up a shiny new video game. You get home, ready to pop that sucker in and get lost in it. However, you have to wait for the disk to install to the console, and then usually there is a day one update of some kind. Rather than getting home and playing a new game, you are stuck waiting for the download to end. If you have slow internet, it might even be until the next day. The team over at Xbox recognized this and has released a new feature to the Xbox (beta) app that will definitely help those who buy physical games.

The newly designed app comes with a new feature that allows users to preload games before inserting a disk. You don't even have to own the game to preload it. Of course, the only way to start the game though will be to insert the disk or to purchase it digitally.

To access the new feature, install the Android Xbox (beta) app, and search for a game. There should be a new option "Download To Console." If you have more than one Xbox One, you will need to select which console to download to. Boom, that's it! The title should download to your console and whenever you do decide to purchase it, the game is ready to go.

I have to say, the last year or so, Xbox has been releasing stellar features that really benefit consumers. With the recent acquisition of Bethesda, xCloud being part of the Game Pass Ultimate subscription, and a new console just a couple of months away, I think it is safe to say that it is a pretty sweet time to be an Xbox fan.

The Xbox Series X and Series S are set to launch on November 10 for $499.99 and $299.99. Pre-orders have been largely taken but should be coming back into stock soon.

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Get Left 4 Dead 2 for $2 Alongside The Last Stand Update

Left 4 Dead 2

Today Left 4 Dead 2 got a big new update ten years after its original launch. The Last Stand is the latest update that was made from a group of around 30 community members who were given the ok by Valve themself. It includes a heap ton of new content including 20 new survival maps, new melee weapons, PVP adjustments, new voice lines as well as general bug fixes.

The Last Stand update is free for all PC players, but unfortunately, there is no word as to it coming to the Xbox 360 version of the game despite it being backward compatible on Xbox One and the upcoming Xbox Series X and S. Left 4 Dead 2 will be free to play this weekend on Steam to celebrate the release of The Last Stand and for those who have yet to purchase the game on Steam, it is currently on sale for only $2. That is an insane deal for one of the best co-op shooters ever made.

Earlier in the game's life, Valve brought all the original campaigns from Left 4 Dead over to Left 4 Dead 2 making it the ultimate collection for the series. This seemingly final update might be the closest taste fans will ever get to a Left 4 Dead 3. Turtle Rock Studios who helped with the development of the Left 4 Dead series is currently making their own take on the franchise and genre with Back 4 Blood, so there may be some hope yet.

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Hideo Kojima, Geoff Keighley, and Sam Lake Among Members of Tribeca Film Festival's New Gaming Board

The Tribeca Film Festival is one of the most well-regarded film festivals held annually in New York City. Over the years, TFF has been a locale in which many filmmakers debut their projects for the first time to larger audiences. As the festival moves forward into 2021, however, a larger emphasis is now being placed on video games. As such, the organization has brought aboard some high-profile members to help oversee the expansion.

Announced via a press release today, Tribeca Games is expanding its offering during the show's 20th edition next year and will begin accommodating gaming submissions. Those that submit their own games will then be eligible to receive the Tribeca Games Award, "which will honor upcoming games from the selections that demonstrate artistic excellence in storytelling in a game." Submissions for this have opened as of today.

"Tribeca Games is expanding in response to the enthusiasm we have seen from the games community and our audiences," said Tribeca Games Vice President Casey Baltes. "Games have proven to be one of the most sophisticated storytelling vehicles today — not only with narrative but also with incredible artistic mastery, the creation of highly immersive worlds and providing meaningful connections to communities all over the world. We're excited to celebrate games and game creators alongside film, immersive, music, art, and more at next year's Festival."

As for who will be helping to guide the festival's further expansion into gaming, Tribeca has put together quite the advisory board to help oversee things. Popular gaming creators and industry figures such as Hideo Kojima, Sam Lake, Bing Gordon, and Kiki Wolfkill join the likes of The Game Awards host and producer Geoff Keighley and filmmakers Nia DaCosta and Jon Favreau. It's quite the group that Tribeca Games has assembled overall. It should be interesting to see what this results in next year.

The Tribeca Film Festival's 20th showing will take place next summer from June 9 until the 20th.

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Amazon Announces Luna; A New Cloud Gaming Service

Luna

As early as last year it has been rumored that Amazon has been working on its own cloud gaming service similar to Google Stadia which released late last year to little success at this point. The service is known as Luna which has the potential to give players a 4K 60FPS experience across a myriad of devices. Amazon has been trying to get its foot into the gaming space for a while with developing games like Crucible a free-to-play third-person shooter, but have found little success as the game was brought back to closed beta less than two months after its official release.

According to The Verge, Luna will work as a monthly subscription service where the platform will have over 100 titles available to play including Resident Evil VII, Control, and A Plague Tale: Innocence. Ubisoft will have their own dedicated channel where owners will be able to play upcoming games like Assassin's Creed: Valhalla, Far Cry 6, and Immortals: Fenyx Rising on launch day. Amazon also says that there will be more channels similar to Ubisoft's that focus on a specific genre, developer, or publisher.

With Amazon owning Twitch, the service will naturally have an integration feature with the streaming platform where those who are watching a game on Twitch that is available on Luna, they will be able to instantly jump into that game to play it for themselves. Along with the service will be a Luna controller that is "Alexa-enabled" which Amazon explains more on how its features will work into the service.

Luna Controller is Alexa-enabled and connects directly to the cloud to effortlessly control your game, featuring a multiple-antenna design that prioritizes un-interrupted Wi-Fi for lower latency gaming. In fact, our testing showed a reduction in roundtrip latency when playing Luna Controller with Cloud Direct vs. Luna Controller via Bluetooth, with reductions of between 17 to 30 milliseconds among PC, Fire TV, and Mac. Because the Luna Controller connects directly to cloud servers, players can easily switch between screens — such as Fire TV to mobile phone — without additional pairing or configuration changes.

There is currently no launch for Luna, but it will be going into early access before a proper launch down the line. During early access, the service will cost $5.99 a month and for those interested, you can request entry to early access over on Amazon. The Luna controller will cost $49.99 which is cheaper than most controllers, to say the least. There is currently no information regarding what the subscription price will be once Luna eventually leaves early access.

After the release of Google Stadia, Luna does look more promising with being a subscription-based service instead of having to buy every game you want to play separately as Stadia does. In simple terms, it's Amazon's attempt at a cloud-only version of Xbox Game Pass, but in my opinion, it won't be able to compete. Game Pass has more games and better ones at that along with exclusive titles that they currently have and will have in the coming years. Granted, being able to play Ubisoft's catalog at launch is a pretty big get. It will be interesting to see how the platform evolves over time.

Once launched, Luna will be available on PC, Mac, Fire TV, and iOS with Android coming at a later time.

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Serious Sam 4 Brings Back Bullets, Enemies, and Bad One-Liners

Serious Sam 4, Devolver Digital, Croteam

Outside of a brief foray into the world of puzzlers with The Talos Principle, the wizards at Croteam have been working on the Serious Sam franchise consistently since 1996. That's a surprisingly long time to put into what's more of a niche series. Certainly, the larger public doesn't go as wild for Serious Sam 4 as they will when id Software announces the next Doom game. That said, if you're a fan of the franchise, Sam's latest journey seems like even more of what you love.

To be clear, I'm still relatively early in Serious Sam 4. So far though, I'm enjoying both the overwhelming fights and the off-brand Duke Nukem humor. It's far from a perfect game, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a higher rate of murder per minute than this.

The big thing with this latest Sam game is how many enemies they're able to get on screen at one time. In the first fight, there are literally thousands of them. I'm not sure if that's some kind of technical trick. but who knows? What I am sure of is that it's a super rad scene.

In the follow-up missions I've done, that enemy count has gone down quite a bit. So, I'm not completely sure if the first mission is just an arbitration. That said, it's slowly ramping back up, so I'm hopeful it gets back into at least the hundreds. However, I am a bit worried that it will melt my computer if it does happen.

Because the thing about putting tons of enemies on the screen at once means that Serious Sam 4 has some technical problems. You can watch me play the first few missions in the video above. There, you'll see for yourself that the game hitches quite a bit in bigger fights. And my PC rig has a 2070 in it, so I'm not rocking ridiculously old tech either. Maybe a better card would get you better performance, but it's still worth noting that some concessions had to be made to pump up the monster count.

Serious Sam 4: Planet Badass

However, what is there is quite fun. Again, I'm early, but the way Croteam constantly throws new enemy types at you keeps things fresh. Each of them has its own mechanics that force you to quickly prioritize in the middle of a firefight. I mean, sure, the shotgun absolutely wrecks most enemies but having to quickly scan a battlefield and make a plan of attack has yet to get old.

Outside of the moment-to-moment combat, you can tell Croteam wants to deliver big moments. There have already been a few that left me momentarily mesmerized. That very first encounter where you're fighting off thousands of bad guys is the definition of jaw-dropping. But, while they do have those big moments, the actual story and writing is mostly ridiculous.

Every time someone opens their mouth, I had immediate flashbacks to early Duke Nukem games. It's not as aggressively bad as Duke Nukem Forever, but if you don't like that brand of gruff-talking bad one-liners, this probably isn't for you. About half of the jokes landed for me, but I wouldn't be surprised if someone told me they found none of them funny. It's that style of humor that you're more laughing at than with.

All told, my early time with Serious Sam 4 definitely has me wanting to play more. I'll probably turn the difficulty down and just rip through it to see what happens. Croteam's latest is definitely worth a look. Though, I might suggest you wait for a sale unless you're already a fan of the series.

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As Fall Guys Lore Continues to Be Fleshed Out, I Continue to be Freaked Out

fall guys lore

In the last update to the Fall Guys lore book, we learned that the titular Fall Guys stand at a whopping 6 feet tall (that's 183 cm for our metric system using readers.) That was all I needed to know about Fall Guys' lore for me to decide that perhaps we should keep the genie in that particular bottle. The official Fall Guys Twitter account had other ideas, however.

In a tweet last night, the account posted these images and I still see it staring at me every time I close my eyes:

According to the tweet, the image is canonical and I'm not really sure what to do about it. It's unsettling for so many reasons: the space between bones in its hands, the ostrich-like neck shape, the fact that the knees are inside its torso, but the most upsetting feature is the eyes. What's wrong with its eyes? Why are they like that? Why does it have a human skull if it doesn't have a human head?

The Fall Guys lore that the Twitter account has been posting has divided the development team according to another recent tweet. According to the tweet, the anatomy of the Fall Guy is up for debate within Mediatonic, so they posted another anatomical image created by another concept artist to try and debunk the first, more horrifying one:

In addition to debating the bone structure (or lack thereof), the size of the Fall Guy is also up for debate. Prinicipal concept artist for Fall Guys Ash Kerins argues that instead of being 6 feet tall, they're knee height to the average sized human.

It's unclear when a final official verdict will come for the anatomy of the Fall Guy. Right now as it stands, I'm in the Ash Kerins camp of Fall Guys lore which sees the Fall Guys as cute jelly beans that are full of joy and not horrible ostrich monsters. Don't even get me started on what the twitter account canonically confirmed happens to the Fall Guys when they fall off their platforms.

For more on Fall Guys lore make sure to stay right here on DualShockers and check out our Fall Guys feed right here.

The post As Fall Guys Lore Continues to Be Fleshed Out, I Continue to be Freaked Out by Peter Hunt Szpytek appeared first on DualShockers.

Gamestop Will Have a New Batch of PS5 Pre-orders Tomorrow

PS5 PS4 Backward Compatibility Cross Generation New PlayStation

Look, I don't have to tell you that trying to pre-order a PS5 or Xbox Series X has been a bit of a nightmare. Regardless of how the two console manufacturers handled the initial pre-order rollout, the internet melted down, leading to tons of frustrated players. Fortunately, if you missed out on the first run of PS5 pre-orders, you're about to have another chance to grab one tomorrow via Gamestop. Good luck. You're probably going to need it.

It's not immediately clear if Gamestop is the only retailer putting out a new batch of PS5 pre-orders tomorrow. Sony did announce last week that they're releasing more units to retailers. So, over the course of today, we might hear about other stores like Wal-Mart and Target opening their allotment up as well. That said, for now, it looks like Gamestop is your best bet if you're hoping to get a PS5 this weekend.

It'll be interesting to see how retailers handle this second wave of pre-orders. Both next-gen consoles had terrible initial pre-order runs. You'd hope to see stores find a way to smooth out the process. Personally, I got my PS5 pre-order directly from Sony through their "exclusive offer" program. For that one, you were entered in a queue and it seemed to work relatively well from my perspective.

Only time will tell if Gamestop has any plans to make this a more customer-friendly process. Their initial tweet didn't mention anything, so, at this point, I would expect another round of madness. Make sure to keep your eyes on Twitter. If any other stores open their pre-orders, that will likely be the first place you can find out about it. Good luck out there!

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Rocket League Hits One Million Concurrent Players After Going Free To Play

Rocket League One Million

Rocket League has been one of gaming's biggest success stories over the last console generation. The game launched as a free download on PS Plus over five years ago now and has gone from strength to strength since. Over that five year period, the game has had over 75 million different players and over five billion matches. Back in July, Psyonix confirmed that the game would be dropping its paid model in favour of moving to Free to Play. A move, which after a day, is already looking wise.

Since dropping the purchase fee and the requirement for a PS Plus and Nintendo Switch Online membership only yesterday, the game has achieved a massive milestone. For the first time ever, Rocket League reached over one million concurrent players.

The impressive feat was confirmed on Twitter by Psyonix Co-Studio Head, Corey Davis, earlier today. The tweet was capped off with a well deserved "Let's go!!!!" And rightly so. Only a handful of games can say they have over one million concurrent players, especially after being around for more than five years.

The move to the Free to Play model also bought some more changes to Rocket League which were detailed in the most recent patch notes. The main changes saw the launch of Season One on all platforms, the release of the new challenge system and the availability of the game on the Epic Games Store.

The release onto the Epic Games Store, and the move to Free to Play, also saw the announcement of an interesting crossover event. Starting this Saturday, September 26, Rocket League and Fortnite will be teaming up for the Llama-Rama event. The event, which runs until October 12, will allow Rocket League players to unlock Fortnite themed items and vice-a-versa.

Rocket League is available now and free to download on Nintendo Switch, PC, PS4 and Xbox One.

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