An urban-mystical grand-strategy RPG? Domains of Dusk certainly has an interesting description from Critique Gaming and it looks very interesting. This is the third game from Critique Gaming following on from the very good Interrogation: You will be deceived in 2019 and Brain Please Don't earlier this year. Seems like they're being a lot more ambitious this time too.

Coming to Linux in 2021, the developer says you will take on the role of either a Mage Club Founder, a Vampire Lord, a Werewolf Pack Alpha, a Head of a Unit of Hunters or a leader of any other faction of supernatural creatures, fighting for influence over a city. It's a turn-based strategy game that can be played against AI or online against others. One where you balance the wants, needs and more of your agents as you try to spread control across a city with each faction having a different style of play.

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Features at a glance:

• Gritty urban vibes, with dark humour, hard decisions and supernatural clashes
• High replayability strategy gameplay with multiple factions and maps
• RPG decision-making and new stories emerging every playthrough
• Multiplayer and upcoming expansive content

You can wishlist / follow on Steam .

Skellboy Refractured from UmaikiGames is one you need to keep on your radar for early next year, as they've announced it's going to release on January 13. This is the PC version of a game that originally released for the Nintendo Switch along with several enhancements the developers have put in like local co-op, a new randomized dungeon, a New Game+ mode and plenty of new items to use and more technical improvements.

"Sometimes, when there is nobody up to the task, old heroes have to rise from the grave to save the day! Crush your enemies and make good use of their guts - literally, as you can augment Skippy with your foe's body parts and weapons!

Help Skippy, the cubic skeleton, to fight off Squaruman's endless forces of undead and vicious foes in this rectangular action packed cardboard adventure!"

Check out the new trailer:

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We tried the demo out during the Steam Autumn Festival and found it to be an absolute delight. Thanks to the camera positioning, along with the mixture of graphical styles with 3D environments and flat-looking characters and objects it's genuinely great to look at when you're running around.

You can wishlist / follow on Steam , plus it looks like the demo is still up to try.

Currently in development and not yet considered a full game but still very impressive anyway, Veloren is a free and open source multiplayer voxel RPG. Inspired by the likes of Cube World, Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Dwarf Fortress and Minecraft it's a very exciting project to be following. Written in the popular Rust programming language it fully supports Linux, macOS and Windows.

This latest release is the biggest yet, with overhauls to various parts of the game as well as introducing plenty of new features to keep players busy.

Highlights of the 0.8 release include:

• New level of detail feature, letting you see all the world's terrain at any view distance.
• Block-based voxel lighting.
• Point and directional lights now cast realistic shadows, using shadow mapping.
• Added leaf and chimney particles.
• Some more combat sound effects.
• New creatures and habitats including: beehives and bees, fireflies, several new animals and bosses.
• Animals now have customized attacks and AI
• Travellers that explore the world
• Lots of new sound effects.
• Lots of UI improvements.
• New forest types with Birch and Willow.
• And the list goes on…

You can check out about 15 minutes of gameplay from the latest release below, which shows off lots of new bits:

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If you missed it, we interviewed one of the developers involved in creating Veloren back in June 2020 which is a great read worth a few minutes. Another excellent example of open source in action, with Veloren shaping up to be one of the most promising modern FOSS games available.

You can download for free from the website . The full source code is up on GitLab .

Rain Games, creator of Teslagrad and World to the West recently released a new title called Mesmer, which is a unique social survival game where 'every encounter matters' they say. Note : key provided by a reader.

This was a pretty quiet release that I haven't seen many talk about, which can be attributed to many reasons including not a lot of marketing and tons of games releasing all the time. It's easy to end up buried but here we are! Mesmer has you take part in a revolution, where you run around an open city to influence people and factions to try and get them to follow you all while you're keeping a low profile.

"Mesmer. The pearl of the old world. At least it used to be... But the King has failed his people. He’s turned his nation into a police state, his citizens struggling under rationing and curfews."

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Rain Games have managed to craft a game here that doesn't really have an equal, it's not really like anything else I've played any time recently. It's a game about quests, and lots of them. Trying to get one person to join you leads to another and another and…you get the idea. Most of this revolves around the conversations you have.

It's thoroughly intriguing and actually quite difficult too due to the conversation and convincing mechanics when you try to get people to join you. You might end up in quite a pickle through these conversations, where you have to spin wheels to get enough points and try to bribe people into serving your cause. There's absolutely tons of options but the key is being careful, I constantly ended up biting off far more than I could chew and a lot of people really hated me for not providing the sandwiches I promised for joining my riot.

After all your dodgy dealing, conversations, sneaking around and searching in bins you then need to hold public speeches to try to get various factions on your side. The main thing is, you need influence and a whole lot of it. Otherwise, you will get horsed as the authorities put a great big mask on you which contains Paciflowers, a substance they use to mind control people.

Feature Highlight:

• Deep, narrative driven gameplay, where your choices matter
• An enticing blend of social manipulation, stealth and riot gameplay
• Unique survival mechanics, where social influence is your main resource
• Leverage multiple social factions, each with their own goals
• Open world with multiple methods of traversal and world interaction (You can even ride a pig)
• Multiple endings based on your choices

For the Linux release, there is one issue with their special Paint Effect that I had to turn off otherwise it caused graphical issues. Unsure if that's NVIDIA specific and Rain Games are aware and mentioned they do want to get it working on Linux too. Apart from that, it works well enough (performance could be better) and offers a very quirky take on revolution. It's rough around the edges but worth your time if you like things a bit different.

You can buy it from GOG and Steam .

The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind is a true classic for many reasons, and it continues living on with the OpenMW free and open source game engine. It's been a while since the 0.46 release of OpenMW back in June 2020 but plenty of work has been going on since.

In a new blog post they did a round-up of work done during September-October and it all sounds pretty awesome. Here's a quick run over what's been going on:

• A modern 3rd-person camera view is coming, along with optional first-person head bobbing and a smooth movement feature to make animations look better.
• OpenMW is going to get Async Physics, which moved the game's physics from the main thread to one or more other threads, making OpenMW even better at using multiple cores.
• Work has continued on supporting groundcover with better performance, which adds grass and all sorts.
• The LZ4 format is now supported by OpenMW, which is used in later Bethesda games like Skyrim Special Edition. Supporting that game is a long way off, right now it might just help modders.
• Levelled items in untouched containers are now randomly generated from their respective lists when the game is loaded, mimicking the original engine.
• Automatic builds for Windows, Linux, Mac, and even Android on GitLab for every merge request that is opened.
• Work is ongoing to support the COLLADA 3D model format to work in OpenMW's rendering engine (OpenSceneGraph)

Amazing to see how much effort goes into open source game engine reimplementations. It's a very complicated job but one appreciated by thousands of players, as it keeps games alive on modern platforms and enables them to run better.

See more and download OpenMW from the official site . As you do need the Morrowind data files to play it, you do need a copy. You can pick up a copy of Morrowind easily from GOG.com .

If you didn't see it, here's the trailer for the last release of OpenMW:

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Wildermyth is the character-driven, procedurally-generated tactical RPG with an art style resembling papercraft and it's brilliant. Now it's also bigger with a big campaign update out.

In Wildermyth you play through various generated campaigns, each of which mixes things up like characters and events and so every play-through is different. You're supposed to see it as something resembling a classic tabletop RPG experience. Mixing together a party-based RPG with overworld exploration, random events and tactical turn-based combat there's a lot to love about it.

They just recently released version 0.29 "Eluna and the Moth", a brand new campaign that mixes things up:

To fit with the story, the first chapter takes a more structured approach with less of a focus on overland management. Many of the battles and events throughout the campaign happen at less expected points. The campaign happens over a smaller span of time, allowing the player’s starting heroes to make it all the way to the end -- if they survive!

Lots more came with it other than a new campaign to play through like new character faces, new victory conditions and the usual blend of balancing fixes and bugs being squashed. Here's some new snaps they shared:

In other news, the recent Kickstarter campaign to produce a high-quality live-instrument soundtrack that we wrote about managed to succeed. So some great tunes are coming to Wildermyth too which I'm quite excited for, as that's the sort of thing that can really help your enjoyment of a game.

The game itself can be purchased from Steam and itch.io .

Graveyard Keeper - Game Of Crone is an expansion to the medieval graveyard building and management sim that's like a morbid take on Stardew. This fresh expansion adds in another bunch of hours (6-12 they said approximately) to play through, along with a whole new story to follow where you help a bunch of escaped prisoners build up a camp.

"You’ll have to help the escaped prisoners of the Inquisition survive in the wilderness by providing them with everything they need. To develop their camp to a fortified settlement while keeping in mind its benefits. To protect those who entrusted you with their lives, from the sword and fire. And also - to untangle the circumstances of the cruel game, which turned into the Great Blast and the return of the Ancient Curse."

Check out the launcher trailer below:

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Feature Highlight:

• Build your own refugee camp and bring it to prosperity
• Brand new bag mechanics
• Get access to new dishes, gravestones, fences, and to teleportation scrolls
• Deal with a vampire terrorizing a peaceful Village
• Unravel the secret of the mysterious death of your predecessor
• Find out even more terrible secrets of your old and new friends
• Become an ally of Comrade Donkey and take part in the Revolution

They said that the DLC can be access from both the beginning and end of the game, so you can't miss out on it by accident or by where you are in the game with current saves. There's also new achievements, bug fixes and improvements to the main game have been released in a patch, and there's some new music too which they've added to the existing soundtrack.

You can buy the game and the DLC from GOG , Humble Store and Steam .

Vaporum: Lockdown is a rather gorgeous steampunk dungeon crawler from Fatbot Games, which serves as a prequel to the original and it's now supported on Linux.

In this latest release you follow the story of Ellie Teller, a scientist who is a part of a mysterious research project in the middle of an ocean. After disastrous events, she struggles to survive and escape the tower of Arx Vaporum. While it's a prequel, the developer noted that it "expands on everything that made the original game good".

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Feature Highlight:

• Old-school grid-based dungeon crawler with modern audiovisuals and controls.
• First-person real-time combat with deadly foes with varied abilities and behaviors.
• Stop time mode where time only passes when you act, giving you unlimited time to reason about your next best move.
• Intriguing story following a fully voiced female protagonist.
• Unique gadget-based RPG system with tons of customization, tons of loot, and tons of synergies to find.
• Mind-bending puzzles and hazards.
• Immersive steampunk setting.
• Full controller support.
• Localized in 8 languages: English, German, Spanish, French, Russian, Polish, Japanese, and Chinese.

Their PR team already sent over a key a while ago, and checking on the Linux release today everything appears to work just fine. Even when turning up the Supersampling Scale to "1.5x", the performance seemed to be great so it looks like they did another great job on their Linux version.

Pictured - Vaporum: Lockdown on Linux with "1.5x Supersampling", performance check with MangoHud .

We had a short wait of a month to get the actual Linux version but it looks like it was worth it. I'll be taking a proper look at it when time allows, as I very much enjoyed the original Vaporum.

Available for Linux now from Humble Store and Steam . It seems GOG do not yet have a Linux build for it.

Werewolf: The Apocalypse — Heart of the Forest is a strikingly beautiful visual novel from Different Tales and Walkabout out now. With Different Tales continuing their Linux support just like with their previous games.

Set in the same big fantasy universe as Vampire: The Masquerade, it's set in the centre of modern Europe where you play as Maia, who comes to Poland hoping to trace their family roots. As you do so, you uncover dark family secrets and hidden truths about the last wilderness of Central Europe.

As someone who doesn't follow World of Darkness, I appreciated that Werewolf: The Apocalypse — Heart of the Forest is a pretty welcoming game to newcomers because it's a properly self-contained story. So it's suitable for pretty much anyone who enjoys a good choice-based visual novel. A genre I tend to struggle with but in this case with the seriously rich artwork, along with the compelling writing it made for quite an engrossing experience.

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If you've played the Vampire titles from Draw Distance like Vampire: The Masquerade - Shadows of New York and enjoyed the atmosphere and the way it's presnted, you can't really go wrong with Werewolf: The Apocalypse — Heart of the Forest. Honestly though, I found Heart of the Forest to be a much more engaging game.

What makes it interesting is you get a clear idea of who (and what) Maia really is, the game certainly doesn't even try to hide it or stretch it out in any way. That's what makes it so slick as a story as it's all about the journey, what horrors you will face and how you plan to react to it as your character grows and changes with your decisions. The decisions you choose reduce points from a few main statistics like Rage, Willpower and Health - while others will build them back up. Each of them being essential in their own way.

Even though some parts are clear from the intro, the way the story unfolds still caught me by surprise. The story and what happens may be fantasy but it's very much grounded in real life and current events, for better or worse. Forests being destroyed, protests, dealing with police and more with it being inspired by real-life protests from back in 2016. When it truly started breaking into the fantasy elements, things get very exciting and at one point I will admit to getting the chills and I could feel the hairs standing on the back of my neck - such a brilliant atmosphere unmatched by many other visual novels.

How it actually explores the idea of Werewolves is certainly…different. The way it describes transformations and different forms in detail, it's as much a learning experience about the World of Darkness as it is a story. It doesn't over-do it on the fantasy naming though, and when it does you get a nice tool-tip if you need it to explain what a few special words mean.

At one point I was a Werewolf carrying a bag of explosives. What more do you need in a novel?

Sadly, when you're really getting into it, you realise it's over. It's only a few hours long overall on a first play-through and I feel like I just need more. I want to test out more of the Rage mechanic and see what else you can do, and what decisions really change how conversations go and who sticks with you. Walkabout Games mentioned in an email to us that there's "200,000" different paths due to the extensive branching narrative and 5 main endings. It's pretty clear that from some of my actions, there were drastically different paths that could I could have gone through and I'm definitely temped to load it up again to do so.

Overall, it was genuinely great! Werewolf: The Apocalypse — Heart of the Forest was a brilliant stepping stone into the World of Darkness. I can only hope they plan to expand on from this. Well written, visually fantastic and it had some good ambient background audio along with certain audio-action that really comes together perfectly to round-out the experience. Headphones on, audio up, curtains drawn — it's a great way to spend your time. An example of how to do a visual novel to appeal to everyone who loves a good story. I'm glad there's teams like Different Tales and Walkabout creating experiences like this.

Available to buy from GOG.com and Steam .