THREE TO PLAY

PSN games you might have missed

Every month, loads of games come to the PS Store. You’d be hard pressed to play them all, so we take a look at some that didn’t quite make the cut. This month things get blocky as we set out on retro-inspired adventures, from the gleefully bloody to fantastical, erm, golf…?

Drawing inspiration from the likes of Resident Evil, Eternal Darkness, and Dark Souls, Skautfold: Shrouded In

Sanity takes survival horror in a pixel-based direction. The first in Steve Gal’s series (which is now four games strong on PC), it tasks you with exploring strange goings-on in fog-shrouded Berelai Manor. Set in an alternative 1897, in the Angelic Empire of Britannia, it’s a gothic adventure where snowy cemeteries, rooms with huge cogs, and ritual circles drawn in blood await. With only a cane and handgun for protection, you must fight your way through the halls (chugging healing juice while you go).

From one crusade against the unholy to another! The similarly retro-inspired

Infernax takes a side-on approach that harkens back to classics like Ghosts ’N Goblins, Castlevania, and Mega Man – and don’t all those titles make you prick up your ears? The action platformer approach taken here means this game’s more straightforward than Berzerk Studio’s previous title, Just Shapes & Beats, but there’s a similar approach to responsive crunchiness in the controls. It makes it satisfying in the hands, though if you’re not into the idea of taking on super-tough bosses and gore rendered in high-pixel glory you might not find it quite as approachable as the dev’s last outing. But if you’re looking to scratch a retro itch, you could do a lot worse.

Shifting the retro camera once again, we find ourselves ready to tee off in RPGolf

Legends, a refined version of ArticNet’s original PCexclusive RPGolf concept. The mix of golf and RPG might sound similar to the Switchexclusive Golf Story, but on the green the results are quite different. The game combines top-down golfing with Zelda-like dungeon crawling, and you must journey the world to help unseal the world’s golf holes while smacking monsters around. The two apparently disparate genres merge into one, and while at times the push and pull can be inelegant, more often than not it works better than it should, thanks in part to how the worlds of fantasy and sprawling golf courses combine.