MCV/DEVELOP News, events, research and jobs from the games industry
Here are the key upcoming events and releases to mark in your calendar for December 2022.
The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners – Chapter 2: Retribution
December 1, 2022
The first Saints & Sinners was easily the best Walking Dead game since the debut of Clementine more than ten years ago (yes, ten years!). Even more impressive was that, for those that like their VR games to be every bit as expansive and immersive as their flat screen ones, it was up there with the likes of Half-Life: Alyx in terms of impact and importance. We’ve not had much time to get our heads into the latest adventure, but we’ve been expecting good things from the sequel, especially with it due to make a belated appearance on PSVR2 next year.
Africa Games Week Conference
December 1 – December 3, 2022
Established in 2018 as Make Games Africa, this annual conference aims to connect and promote game and business development across Africa and has grown to encompass Games For Change Africa, Africa StreamCon and Mobile Growth Summit Africa. Taking place this year in Cape Town, South Africa, the likes of Epic Games, Google and Xbox Games Studios were in attendance, with speakers, panellists and showcase studios travelling in from Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Tunisia, South Africa and elsewhere.
Marvel’s Midnight Suns
December 2, 2022
Coming from the studio that brought the X-COM series back from the dead and single-handedly re-popularised the turn-based tactical genre (to the degree that Mario and Luigi got in on the action again recently for Sparks of Hope), Midnight Suns represents something of a departure for Firaxis. Yes, it’s essentially XCOM in the Marvel universe, which is in many ways a safe bet, but the studio hasn’t made things easy for itself by bringing together a busy roster of comic book characters in the orbit of an entirely new one.
The Callisto Protocol
December 2, 2022
2022 is probably not going to be looked back on as a vintage year for video games, but it has given us two big new blockbuster franchises at both ends, namely Elden Ring at the start of the year and The Callisto Protocol at the end. Okay, so one of them owes much of its existence and popularity to Dark Souls and the other to Dead Space (the remake of which is being released next month), but both would have been genuine highlights in any year you’d care to mention.
Kynseed
December 6, 2022
Does the world need another farming-based life sim inspired by Stardew Valley? Probably not. The thing is, there have been quite a few of them this year, but as much as we roll our eyes as they come into view in ever increasing numbers, we can’t help but enjoy them all the same. Kynseed is the latest, and is notable for being a distinct delight. The fact that it comes from a team that helped bring us the Fable series is evident from the off, as is the benevolent guiding hand of Sir Ian Livingstone.
High on Life
December 13, 2022
From Justin Roiland’s Squanch Games comes another memorable off-beat slice of interactive comedy in the form of High on Life. Following broadly on from Accounting+ and Trover Saves the Universe (not to mention Rick and Morty), the game is a single-player shooter where the outlandish weapons voice their opinions. Since the game was revealed at gamescom earlier in the year, the MCV/DEVELOP team has been bitterly divided between those that felt the jokes landed badly and the gunplay seemed basic (Richie) and those that have played shooters other than Quake and Half-Life (Vince).
