Co-op dungeon crawler Blightbound gets bots and a pirate

Blightbound is a three-player dungeon crawler with a grim and spooky aesthetic, but its latest update is called Helping Hands and it's making things less lonely down there in the dark. It adds AI adventurers who can fill any gaps in your party, so that Blightbound can be played by a duo or even a solo player. Also new in this update is a pirate hero named Seirinne, with an ability called Shadow Statue that lets her stall enemies and deal damage to them over time.

New elite enemies in the Helping Hands update have the on-brand names Gravesteel, Assailant Gijs, and Bloodmaster Krux, and a change has been made to their drops. Elite enemies no longer reward players with the crafting resource Aetheri Crystals—now they come from bounties taken from the bounty board, which will apparently make earning them more predictable. Seven new items and their crafting recipes have also been added, as well as localizations for French, German, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Korean, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese.

Blightbound is currently in Early Access on Steam, and developer Ronimo Games (also responsible for Awesomenauts) estimate that it'll reach 1.0 next year. Here are the full patch notes for the Helping Hands update.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.