Enlarge / Are you enticed by this kind of orderly madness with a clean graphical layout? Then I suggest you… settle in. (credit: Goblinz Studio)

You can't buy Mini Settlers right now, but I think you should play the free "Prologue" demo and wishlist the full game if you dig it. It's not quite like any other city builder I've played.

Mini Settlers is "mini" like minimalism. It is in the same genre, but quite far from, games like Cities: Skylines 2 (a choice with some proven merit ). Your buildings are not 3D-rendered with real-time lighting. Your buildings are colored squares, sometimes with a few disc tokens stacked on them, tabletop-style. Your roads don't have traffic, but they have drivers (tiny squares) that take resources between nodes. When things go wrong, you don't get depressing news about pollution and riots; some people just leave their homes, but they'll come back if you fix what's wrong.

Mini Settlers is not the game to play to satisfy your long-running suspicion that urban planning was your missed calling. In the (non-progress-saving) Prologue-free demo out this week, the mines and quarries have infinite resources. There is no "money" to speak of, so far as I can tell. Apple farms must be placed near apple orchards and water pumps by water, and the rest is up to you. The interface looks like a thought experiment in how far you can get from traditional city sim HUDs, but then someone implemented it.

Enlarge / Like the Beach Properties DLC itself, this property looks a bit unfinished and in need of some focus. (credit: Paradox Interactive)

Perhaps the first clue that something was not quite right about Beach Properties , the first $10 DLC "expansion" for the already off-kilter city-building sim Cities: Skylines 2 , was that it did not contain a real beach house, which one might consider a key beach property. The oversight seemed indicative of a content pack that lacked for content.

C:S2 's developers and publisher now agree and have published a letter to Cities fans , in which they offer apologies, updates, and refunds. Beach Properties is now a free add-on, individual buyers will be refunded (with details at a FAQ page ), and Ultimate Edition owners will receive additional Creator Packs and Radio Stations, since partial refunds are tricky across different game stores.

"We thought we could make up for the shortcomings of the game in a timeframe that was unrealistic, and rushed out a DLC that should not have been published in its current form. For all this, we are truly sorry," reads the letter, signed by the CEOs of developer Colossal Order and publisher Paradox Interactive. "When we’ve made statements like this one before, it’s included a pledge to keep making improvements, and while we are working on these updates, they haven’t happened at a speed or magnitude that is acceptable, and it pains us that we've now lost the trust of many of you. We want to do better."

Enlarge / See that fortress over there? You can explore it. And then die, when someone in your party remembers a tragic incident involving meat and perishes of sadness. (credit: Bay 12 Games/Kitfox)

"I'm crying for some reason," says Tarn Adams, demonstrating Dwarf Fortress ' "Adventure Mode" for a Discord stream full of games writers and PR folk. His adventurer is crying, that is. "Something must have upset me. Probably the dead bodies… I have great grouchiness, though."

Adventure Mode, out today, builds on the graphical version of Dwarf Fortress and the work you've put into it. The adventurers you create and send out into the world traverse the overland and underground places you yourself crafted. This allows you to both appreciate the realms carved out by your imagination and also be a kind of dungeon master for other adventurers (with, hopefully, an easier fortress-swapping mechanic to come soon). You can also generate a new world if you prefer the simulation's weird choices to your own.

Everything about the standard simulation version of playing Dwarf Fortress applies to playing it as a hardcore CRPG. Everything has layers, all is described, and the combination of deep logic and utter silliness is unmatched.

Enlarge / Not pictured: the things that are far more dangerous to fortress-dwelling dwarves, like poor site planning, miasma, and a lack of drink.

After a long night of playing Dwarf Fortress , I had a concerned look on my face when I finally went to bed. My wife asked what was wrong. "I think I actually want to keep playing this," I said. I felt a nagging concern for many weeknights to come.

Available tomorrow on Steam and itch.io , the new version of Dwarf Fortress updates the legendary (and legendarily arcane) colony-building roguelike with new pixel-art graphics, music, some (default) keyboard shortcuts, and a beginners' tutorial. The commercial release aims to do two things: make the game somewhat more accessible and provide Tarn and Zach Adams, the brothers who maintained the game as a free download for 20 years, some financial security .

It may look simple, but these tips on how to cut down wood and where to stash it will probably save the average player at least an hour and maybe a couple of failed playthroughs. (credit: Kevin Purdy / Kitfox Games)

I know it has succeeded at its first job, and I suspect it will hit the second mark, too. I approached the game as a head-first review expedition into likely frustrating territory. Now I find myself distracted from writing about it because I keep thinking about my goblin defense and whether the fisherdwarf might be better assigned to gem crafting.

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  The Space Anomaly gathering place has gotten a visual overhaul. [credit: Hello Games ]

Today was a red-letter day for space exploration and crafting game No Man's Sky . The game released on Nintendo Switch, first of all, but that release was accompanied by a major overhaul to many of the game's menus and systems. Developer Hello Games has dubbed it " No Man's Sky 4.0," or the "Waypoint" update .

Since its launch in 2016, No Man's Sky has been through numerous changes and iterations, to the point that today's Minecraft - or Valheim -esque experience barely resembles the ambient, aimless exploration of the original release. Today's update isn't as major as the one that turned an exploration game into a crafting one, but it's probably the runner-up, in that it offers a sweeping array of quality-of-life improvements.

Many of these are related to either the game's inventory system or its difficulty levels. Neither of these things is necessarily as flashy as new features like space whales, horror-like abandoned cruiser expeditions, trainable alien animals, or pilotable mechs, all of which (and more) were added in one update or another since launch. But anyone who has played No Man's Sky at any point will know that the game can be a little rough around the edges in those two areas, so sweeping changes there may be welcome.