Interested in checking out a fresh upcoming pixel-art turn-based RPG? Of Blades & Tails looks pretty great and there's now a demo available to try.

The developer explains that it's inspired by Diablo, Tales of Maj'Eyal and Stoneshard but there's no permadeath so you don't need to worry about any brutal difficulty here. That's not to say it will be easy but it will regularly give you a save so that's nice. On top of that the lore is inspired by the classic point & click adventure Inherit the Earth. Made with Godot Engine , you can see a trailer below:

Watch video on YouTube.com

Game Features:

• Turn-based Combat that allows for quick action or strategic planning
• An Open World with lots of places to discover
• A fresh, animalistic setting in a vibrant pixel art look
• Procedural generated dungeons and caves
• A Main Storyline and various side quests
• Classless Character Development with many abilities to unlock
• Equipment of different qualities and Unique Items with special powers
• Hunt giant bugs or gather herbs and other useful resources
• Many Enemy Types with different skills that may require tactical decisions
• Trade with rats and other profit-seeking animals
• ... and more to come!

Try out the demo on itch.io and Steam .

Want to play with some real-time path tracing in Half-Life? Well, a modder is doing just that and has released a small teaser to show it off.

The work is actually based on an existing effort , which will bring Vulkan Ray Tracing into Xash3D FWGS, a game engine that's compatible with classic Valve games designed for modding. The modder going by sultim_t, mentions their work will see the source code released when the mod is ready. They said it will provide hardware accelerated ray tracing with the possibility to "calculate global illumination, reflections, refractions, soft shadows and other visual effects with interactive framerates".

Until it's out, you can see what they showed off below:

They say Half-Life: RAY TRACED will be out in 2022 for "Windows", but that's never stopped us before has it? Given the source code will be out, it hopefully won't be too difficult to get it working, especially as the existing work it's based upon is cross-platform.

As if I could get any more excited? Selaco just looks simply incredible in the footage we've seen previously, this new GZDoom-powered FPS is going to kick-ass.

One of the big features is the FEAR-inspired AI system, where the enemies actually work together properly to take you down. They're aware of each other, use different tactics depending on the situation and so on. It does sound exciting and the latest video shows it off a little more. Oh, you also get to flip things for cover which is clearly awesome.

Watch video on YouTube.com

Game Features:

• A lengthy story-driven campaign

Selaco is a story-driven experience, and we don't say that lightly. A dedicated writer has been brought on board to assist with creating an engaging and believable sci-fi story and world.

• Intense Action set pieces

Turn the entire world into confetti with the destructive power of your weapons. Every single bullet will react properly with any materials or objects you hit. Our artists have created many different variations for each (voxel)object to ensure that the aftermath of each encounter is palpable. That once lavish office space now nothing but a pile of rubble with broken paintings, smashed tables, screen, chairs, smoke, and chunks of debris.

• Custom AI

With our FEAR influence, writing proper AI was a goal from the get go. The enemy is fully aware of each other's presence and work together to take you down. They will keep their distance if you apply constant pressure on them, will rush you if you hide or run out of bullets, toss grenades if you use the same cover for too long, and much more. Hundreds of custom lines have been written and acted out, providing hints to the player about their current plans and tactics.

• Full soundtrack

Selaco is accompanied by a full length original soundtrack composed by an experienced musician who has worked on many games in the past.

• Professional voice-acting.

To help immerse players in the story and atmosphere of Selaco, professional voice actors have been brought on board. Dawn will be voiced by the incredibly talented Melissa Medina, with other casting choices revealed at a later date.

It's quite some time away from release yet but don't let that stop you heading over to Steam and hitting that wishlist button.

You can also support the developer on Patreon .

Ready for another run? Dead Cells: The Queen and the Sea DLC is out now and brings with it plenty of new enemies to hack and slash your way through.

The release came with a fancy animated trailer to feast your eyes on:

Watch video on YouTube.com

All the DLC purchases help to support the ongoing development of Dead Cells, with more free updates planned and it also goes towards Motion Twin's next project that's currently under development. We're expecting at least another year of free updates, which they announced previously. It may be longer, if sales keep up.

You can pick up Dead Cells from Humble Store , GOG and Steam .

Another brand new distribution release with Linux Mint 20.3 now officially available following the Beta release in December 2021. Not much has changed since the Beta, other than ensuring any nasty bugs didn't slip through to provide a pretty good desktop experience for both new and experienced users who want the simple life.

Linux Mint 20.3 Cinnamon Screenshot

The look and feel of Linux Mint has been tweaked with this release to have larger titlebar buttons, rounded corners and an overall "cleaner" theme with better dark mode support - plus a bunch of new rather lush looking backgrounds to pick from. Accent colouring to grab your attention in places was also adjusted, and removed from some places. There's also the ability for some applications to have a dark theme while the desktop keeps its lighter theme. Only a few applications currently support this mixed theming.

Other changes include:

• Searching in the Sticky Notes app.
• A new Document Manager called Thingy.
• Hypnotix IPTV player gained a search feature.
• Multi-calendar events support in the Cinnamon Calendar.
• Workspace switcher applet: Option to disable scrolling.
• Notification applet: Option to hide the counter.
• Window list applet: Option to remove labels.
• Xreader PDF reader received better support for manga.
• Cinnamon has support for 3x fractional scaling when the hardware allows it.

Some of the internals includes: Kernel 5.4, a packaging base of Ubuntu 20.04, Flatpak 1.12, linux-firmware 1.187 and depending on what edition you go for there's Cinnamon 5.2, MATE 1.26 and Xfce 4.16.

Linux Mint 20.3 will receive security updates until 2025, with the distribution moving over to a newer Ubuntu package base later this year.

The announcements can be seen on the Mint Blog .

Linus Torvalds has announced the release of Linux Kernel 5.16, bringing with it the usual assortment of new hardware support and improvements everywhere. Plus, there's something big for Linux gaming fans.

The one many have no doubt been waiting for is the inclusion of Collabora's work on FUTEX2 with futex_waitv(). This is supposed to help Linux gaming with Proton / Wine and also Native Linux gaming too. As Collabora developer André Almeida previously described it: "The use case of this syscall is to allow low level locking libraries to wait for multiple locks at the same time. This is specially useful for emulating Windows' WaitForMultipleObjects. A futex_waitv()-based solution has been used for some time at Proton's Wine (a compatibility layer to run Windows games on Linux). Compared to a solution that uses eventfd(), futex was able to reduce CPU utilization for games, and even increase frames per second for some games. This happens because eventfd doesn't scale very well for a huge number of read, write and poll calls compared to futex. Native game engines will benefit of this as well, given that this wait pattern is common for games.".

So with this Kernel version, plus a version of Proton / Wine and any Native games / game engines that support it, you might be able to see better performance.

Masses of other changes as well of course, although plenty of it most normal consumers won't be too excited about just yet. However a few noteworthy interesting bits for desktop / laptop users and gamers (more on KernelNewbies ) like:

• The addition of DisplayPort 2.0 for AMD GPU
• Initial USB4 DP tunnelling support for AMD GPU
• More work towards supporting Intel Xe discrete GPUs
• Improvements for the PlayStation 5 DualSense controller
• Better support of HP Omen laptops
• A small fix for the Steam Deck screen
• Nintendo Joy-Con and Pro Controller support

Well, that didn't take long now did it? After hitting a new high on January 2 that was very close to the big milestone, just today Steam officially passed 28 million users online.

The fun thing is while preparing this article, the record got smashed repeatedly again. It went from 28,091,667 to 28,122,386 and then 28,155,279 in the blink of an eye. This new all-time peak is with 7,908,863 people actually playing a game, which you can see confirmed on SteamDB .

Here's what was in the top most played at the time:

• Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
• Dota 2
• PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS
• Apex Legends
• Grand Theft Auto V
• NARAKA: BLADEPOINT
• Rust
• ARK: Survival Evolved
• Football Manager 2022
• Team Fortress 2

Just how many of those millions will buy a Steam Deck though? It's going to be fun to find out.

Even though Epic Games announced recently how they expanded support for Easy Anti-Cheat to have full support of native Linux, plus Wine / Proton (and so the Steam Deck), it seems it's not as easy as we hoped.

In the original announcement, Epic mentioned how it can be enabled with "a few clicks in the Epic Online Services Developer Portal" but the situation is never that simple. A developer of Warhammer: Vermintide 2 has written a post on Steam to explain, noting that there are two versions of EAC. There's the original and the newer version used via Epic Online Services. The majority of games are likely still with the old version, since the newer one needs SDK upgrades and newer integrations.

We already knew that developers needed the latest SDK from the original announcement, but this makes it simpler for us all to understand.

Here's what they said:

So we have looked in to this. It's far more complex than first suspected -- EAC has two versions. Non-EOS and EOS (Epic Online Services). Most games historically use Non-EOS EAC. It's the one Vermintide 2 uses as well. Epic only added Proton support for the EOS version of EAC. Therefor in order to implement proton support for Vermintide 2, a huge amount of reworking of the EAC implementation would be required, which may also require all players to authenticate with Epic Online Services as well -- perhaps even logging in to the Epic environment (to be confirmed, however).

So the "just a few clicks" statement made in the original announcement wasn't entirely accurate, and would only apply to titles using the EOS version of EAC, which simply hasn't been many games aside from either pretty new ones, and likely predominantly Epic exclusive titles.

We are still looking at what is or isn't going to be possible, but it's not as easy as it was made out to be -- far from it in fact.

There may be other solutions or workarounds, but ripping out the old EAC and rewriting everything to implement "NuEAC" and potentially asking our entire playerbase to connect through and sign through EOS for an honestly tiny market share that was (and would remain) unsupported from the get go might be a deal breaker.

Time will tell.

One part we already know not to be true, is a requirement of Epic Online Services authentication, as the developers of Brawlhalla showed in their own testing with the new integration which worked without users touching Epic's services directly.  The other point remains though, as developers won't upgrade from the older implementation to the newer without a good reason, due to extra work involved when the older one is still getting the latest EAC updates as normal (as confirmed in a later post ). Although, there may come a time Epic force EOS for it, but it stands to reason they haven't currently as it would have been a big upheaval for so many developers using it and likely caused plenty of developer backlash there.

Tripwire Interactive also hinted towards the exact same thing, when asked about hooking up support for
Rising Storm 2: Vietnam, a developer noted back in September 2021, "The version of EAC used on RS 2 is not the version that is advertised in this, and it is not something that will work for RS 2 players.".

Hopefully the actual work involved in moving from old EAC to new isn't too much, but it's a reason why we've yet to see any really look to do it. Once the Steam Deck is out though, it should improve, if enough players ask developers to get it sorted, otherwise players may have to resort to a manual install of Windows on the Steam Deck instead of SteamOS 3 to play some of the most popular multiplayer titles.

Tiny Life is an upcoming game trying to capture the essence of games like The Sims, but in an isometric pixelart style. If you've played The Sims before, you mostly know sort-of what to expect from it. Build a house, have a family and take care of all their needs - or totally mess with them. You're basically god watching over a few select people.

Tiny Life's creator, the solo indie developer Ellpeck, has always loved casual life simulation games like The Sims, Harvest Moon and Stardew Valley. For multiple years, he deemed the prospect of making a complex life simulation game similar to The Sims too difficult, until he started working on Tiny Life and realized that it is, indeed, quite the task. Nevertheless, he has been working on the game regularly for over a year and considers it his passion project.

Watch video on YouTube.com

Game Features:

• Create your own characters with unique personalities and skills and dress them however you like
• Build houses and community spaces like parks and cafés and watch households inhabit them
• Control your household and tell your characters what to do, from cooking food to learning complex skills like programming and painting
• Have your characters interact, build relationships, grow families and live unique lives
• Share your creations with the community by exporting lots and households from your game
• Create additional content through the game's built-in C# modding API

I have to admit I've not played The Sims since probably the second one released back in 2004. Some fond memories though, there's not much out there like it and so it's quite fun to see someone else do a take on it.

Want to try it out? There's a free Alpha on itch.io and you can wishlist on Steam .