Double Fine literally sing the praises of Hack 'n' Slash in new video

To celebrate/promote the fact its new game Hack 'n' Slash is headed for Steam Early Access and playable at PAX East this weekend, Double Fine has released this trailer. It's a little heavy on the Lonely Island-style skit/song stuff and light on actual gameplay, but still as charming and whimsical as you've probably come to expect from the house that Schafer built.

Hack 'n' Slash was birthed during Double Fine's 'Amnesia Fortnight' protoyping session in 2012, and looks like a cyber riff on the classic Zelda games, with the game's main character, Alice, wielding a USB-compatible Master Sword-alike. Gameplay will involve hacking enemies (she'll be able to alter their movement speed, for example) and bringing up a debugger to discover info about how objects in the work behave.

"Developing the full version of the game has been very rewarding because we've been able to take the hacking mechanics and make them real," says project lead Brandon Dillon. "You'll mess with the game's actual variables and dismantle the game's actual code."

We've got men patrolling the floor at PAX East, so hopefully one of them will fire back a hands-on report. I also hope someone notices I squeezed two slashes into this story. The medium is the message, people.

Tim Clark

With over two decades covering videogames, Tim has been there from the beginning. In his case, that meant playing Elite in 'co-op' on a BBC Micro (one player uses the movement keys, the other shoots) until his parents finally caved and bought an Amstrad CPC 6128. These days, when not steering the good ship PC Gamer, Tim spends his time complaining that all Priest mains in Hearthstone are degenerates and raiding in Destiny 2. He's almost certainly doing one of these right now.