Zachtronics’ puzzle game Opus Magnum is almost 9 years old, but it just got a new “mini-campaign” for $13 called De Re Metallica and a Nintendo Switch port that includes it for $30. All of the above are currently discounted.
This is surprising since most of the Zachtronics crew moved on to Coincidence Games after their finale, Last Call BBS.
De Re Metallica‘s mini-campaign is set before the story in Opus Magnum and alongside this news, the main Opus Magnum game was updated with new features.
Bungie’s Marathon shipped earlier this month and on a whim I picked it up when there wasn’t another multiplayer game that was working for me. As with almost any Bungie game, they’ve nailed the style and tone with fantastic designs and a wonderful dynamic soundtrack.
Playing Marathon isn’t terrible, either. It’s a modern “extraction shooter” that takes the hide and seek of a battle royale and replaces the circle with a time limit to escape and loot that you can bring with you, if you survive the match.
Faction-based missions without time limits (outside of grouped objectives that have to be completed in one match) add a little structure and you can play solo, duos or three-runner groups.
There are roles in Marathon selected by picking a shell that gets sent on a run to Tau Ceti and obliterated in 25 minutes or less.
A few times I’ve had the fun experience of getting a terrific group of random players who will help accomplish your missions, but it’s probably better with a dedicated squad. Marathon is a lot more difficult if you’re on your own, but that can be fun to not feel like you’ve got to stay with the rest of the group. A choice you can make every time you go out.
Each faction has its own representative and goals. NuCaloric’s Gaius wants to find out what went wrong with the colony on Tau Ceti, Arachne wants you to murder other runners. Another group is rep’d by a sort-of-cute looking, but also gross, talking worm.
Easily one of my favorite parts of this game is that it almost feels like the least evil online multiplayer game from a big corporation. Sony also publishes Helldivers 2, and with both of these games there aren’t a lot of time locked things that force you to come back daily. As far as I’ve seen, the only time limited stuff in Marathon is either an underlying ARG or some seasonal-based ranks and unlocks through the upgrade tiers each faction has. I haven’t seen any “daily rewards” or other time abusive junk I expect from modern games. Part of that may be down to Marathon being a $40 game instead of a free-to-play nightmare that needs you back every day to pump up the analytics and maybe buy something from the FOMO shop.
The Marathon series was originally a Doom-era first-person-shooter from when Bungie was a Mac-exclusive developer. Disappointingly, Marathon (2026) has no macOS or Linux version. Thanks to the anti-cheat software that Bungie chose, Marathon won’t even work on Linux via Windows emulation.
However, you can at least play on PlayStation, Windows (Steam), or Xbox platforms.
One final note in closing here. If you heard about a pre-release issue where art was clearly ripped from someone, Bungie later on did something to make that person whole again. This was the only thing that made me wary of Marathon but what the artist posted made me satisfied this was eventually at least resolved to their satisfaction.
There has been a lot of bad news around the world already this year, but one good part has been this stirring performance of Bread and Roses by Lucy Dacus during the inauguration of Zohran Mamdani that’s been stuck in my head for days.
I took a look at News Tower today which will soon exit Steam’s Early Access program. The easy answer is that yes, News Tower is indeed Sparrow Night’s Sim Tower plus journalism, with a side hint of „oh… that’s the direction you chose to go in.“
If you’re not familiar with SimTower, it was a 2D, side-on view of a skyscraper that you fill with colorful shops, and homes, and more, originally made in Japan as The Tower in 1994 and re-localized for the United States under Maxis’ Sim… lineup. With only one sequel and few other games in this genre, people who enjoyed SimTower haven’t had a lot of choices for anything similar.
In News Tower you’ve inherited the “publisher” role from your Uncle who left your father’s newspaper (that you name…) in a bad way. Unlike a real publisher who shouldn’t be making editorial decisions, or managing individual reporters, you hire all of the staff, furnish and build their offices, and pick which stories they pursue. This is in addition to building (or ruining) relationships with in-game factions, managing the layout of the paper to a limited extent, and even building out the printing press and paper supplies that the newspaper needs to get into the hands of your readers.
Some of the choices the News Tower developers made are odd. Instead of using a fictional world, the game takes place in the real world United States during the 1930. Though, with maybe a romanticized viewpoint where there is almost 0 inequality in the publication you run (should you choose to staff it that way), but there are reports of very real and sometimes horrible incidents that actual people had to deal with at the time.
There’s a stark contrast between unrealistic 2D animated and almost cartoonish mobsters beating your newspaper staff up for not fulfilling the goals of the local Mafia (publish more crime stories, they demand) and then seeing potentially real headlines about lynchings while your security personal go outside to push protesters further down the street so that your reporters can get inside to publish their reports.
All of this at a newspaper I foolishly and unseriously named The Nuclear Times, before realizing what an odd contrast News Tower is, so far.
This isn’t a review, because I’ve only played the first three hours of News Tower so far and the developers say the game lasts about 20 hours. I want to play more News Tower because there are so few games in the genre of 2D games where you build up towards some goals. Most people today might think of games like Fallout Shelter, or the somewhat recent Tiny Tower games from NimbleBit, but News Tower doesn’t have any microtransactions, enticements to watch an advertisement in order to skip time, or other nonsense from those. News Tower is just one purchase and doing its own thing with the journalism bent. More importantly, I haven’t seen enough of the game to fully judge where it is going.
News Tower is on $25 Steam for Windows. The 1.0 release will be available on the 18th of November, 2025.
The News Tower build I had access to was a pre-release of 1.0 and was offered as a review version that’s more complete than the News Tower that has been available for the past 18 months in Steam’s Early Access program. Some aspects of the game may change from what I experienced, but none of the notes I received indicate that there will be any changes to the tone of the game.
Jacob Ridley for PC Gamer has a ton of new details on Valve’s announcements, including this bit that confirms a hardware translation layer for running x86-64 games on ARM64 using a translation layer:
Though if a game isn’t natively developed for Android/Arm, there’s a chance it’ll still run on the Steam Frame through a translation layer called FEX. In a similar way to what Proton does for Windows games, in order to run them on Linux, FEX takes x86 games and emulates them on Arm chips. There’s a performance hit from this conversion, some games more so than others, and Valve tells me it will create something aking to a Frame Verified program similar to the Steam Deck’s Deck Verified program to make game support as clear as possible for users.
Also in the article are details on Valve’s SteamOS for ARM and that Valve will allow developers to ship Android apps on Steam. This could mean that games for Oculus/Meta headsets will have an easier time to run on the Steam Frame.
Updating here to note that the translation layer isn’t exclusive to Valve, FEX has been in development for years now and you can find it at this website and the source code is here.
