Fantasy medieval game Blacktail, Krakow-based studio The Parasight’s debut, lets you play as folktale witch Baba Yaga in her bow-and-arrow-carrying youth. You command her fate, if she’s a good witch or a bad witch, depending on how you navigate the magical, dangerous forest she roams.
“When living memories of her past return as foul, walking spirits,” Blacktail’s website says. “Yaga is faced with no other option than to hunt them down in hopes of unraveling her own mystery.”
I’m excited by Blacktail’s premise—I’m a former little kid with vivid imagined memories of Baba Yaga’s gnarled hands and battered cabin in the woods. Though, I am a little annoyed that Yaga’s voice actress sounds British despite the character growing up isolated from everyone except, like, early Belarusians. I’m hoping the game’s story is so mythic and compelling that I’m distracted by the Anglo-Saxon intrusion.
Release date: December 15
Compatible with: PC, Xbox Series X/S, PS5
What 2022 game release are you most looking forward to? Or are you keeping your sights set squarely on next year?
Image: Microsoft / Twitch / Kotaku / NurPhoto (Getty Images)
Here’s something you might want to know: For the next week, Twitch is partnering up with Microsoft and offering three-month PC Game Pass trials to Twitch users who purchase two subscriptions.
From November 3 until November 11, Twitch viewers who purchase two subscriptions or gift subs from their preferred streamers (usually $4.99 a pop, so about $10) will receive a three-month trial for Microsoft’s wildly popular games-on-demand service. Note, though, that the three-month trial is only good for the PC version of Game Pass.
If you do the thing, you’ll get a code sent to your Twitch notification inbox to redeem for the three-month Game Pass trial on Xbox’s website. Fair warning, the offer is only valid for new Game Pass members, and won’t be available for Twitch viewers in every county. To see if your spawn point makes you eligible for this free trial, as well as other nitty-gritty details, be sure to check out Twitch’s official blog post about the promotion.
“This is just one of the ways we’re experimenting with giving you more for watching and streaming on Twitch,” Twitch wrote in the blog. “This is an added benefit to everything you already receive from subbing to your favorite streamers, including custom emotes, badges, Channel Points multipliers, as well as ad-free viewing and sub-only chat—when enabled.”
For those still feeling the Halloween spirit, Twitch’s giveaway comes at an opportune time considering this month’s Game Pass offerings will include the likes of Ebb Software’s Cronenberg-esque first-person horror adventure Scorn, the rat-infested puzzle game, A Plague Tale: Requiem, and the first two seasons of Telltale Games and Skybound Games’ The Walking Dead. It also probably doesn’t hurt to show your favorite streamers some love by throwing them a couple of bucks ahead of Twitch’s parent company, Amazon, taking a bigger cut out of streamers’ ad revenue. (Twitch president Dan Clancy attributes the coming pay nerf to increased server costs.)
Twitch’s Game Pass three-month trial codes will expire at midnight on November 18, so if you get one, don’t waste any time before redeeming.
If you’ve held off on building up a digital library of games, the original Red Dead Redemption is here to remind you that you might not be missing out after all. Rockstar’s 2010 open world Western was just removed from PS Now/Plus after six years. And as the industry moves to include more subscription and streaming services, it’s not likely to get any better.
As first spotted by Twitter news account @videotech_, the original Red Dead Redemption evaporated from Sony’s PlayStation streaming titles under PS Plus. First included in 2016 as part of the formerly-named PS Now service, Red Dead is notable for having never received a remaster, despite the celebration it and its zombified expansion earned. Sony’s streaming service remained the only way to play the game on PlayStation consoles after the PS3. Gamers will now have to hunt down a disc for a compatible Xbox console or dive into the waters of emulation to enjoy John Marston’s debut story.
Playing the original Red Dead Redemption via backwards compatibility on Xbox is perhaps the most direct and best way to play it currently. The game received an enhanced update on Microsoft’s console a few years ago, upping the resolution to 4K on Xbox Series X and 1440p on Series S. That said, hopefully you’ve got access to a good physical copy if you don’t want the digital version, which is still only available in Xbox’s storefront (who could blame you at this point?). With an initial release date of 2010, scratches might be the least of your concern given how susceptible aging DVDs are to disc rot.
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For those willing to roll up their sleeves with a totally legal copy of the game, RPCS3 offers a path to emulating the experience on PC. For everyone else, this is a reminder that hanging onto the games you like is sometimes worth it. While we’d like to hope these digital services we pay into every month will keep these games accessible, today iss a reminder that such hopes can be dashed real fast.
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It’s almost as if these services are more about ongoing profit streams than legacy preservation. Hmm.
