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Project Totem, the puzzle-platformer from Press Play, has been renamed Kalimba and is coming to Xbox One on December 17, the developer has announced. A new trailer showing the formerly titular totems platforming across various color-coded stages was released alongside the announcement.

Kalimba, which features both single-player and a co-op modes, has players controlling living totems that are stacked on top of each other to form poles. Creative Director Asger Strandby calls the co-op mode a “friendship tester.” XBLA Fans can speak to that point; our preview recounts some of the difficulties the team had in coordinating with each other to overcome the game’s obstacles. Shouting at your co-op partner is an inevitability.

Each totem pole piece is a different color, which is more of a design choice than it is an aesthetic one. Each stage in Kalimba‘s three worlds is filled with colored barriers that can only be passed through by a totem of the same hue. To progress through the game, players need to stack and align their totems so that each one is set to pass through barriers with their corresponding colors. Check the trailer after the jump to see this mechanic in action.

Players start with a limited number of totem pieces, but they’re given more to work with as they move deeper into the game and come closer to rescuing the island of Kalimba from an evil shaman.

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In case you missed the recent news, the first Microsoft Garage title has been rather sneakily released into the wild as a free download on Xbox One. Voice Commander is a single-screen shooter in the style of the arcade classic Asteroids, with a few notable twists which between them make the most of the Kinect technology and add an additional layer of strategy. Players are invited to defend their home planet from wave after wave of alien attackers, whilst the titular voice commands are used to deploy defensive structures in specific quadrants or to deploy smart bombs and other secondary weapons.

Microsoft Garage games are made by various Microsoft Studio employees in their spare time, and Voice Commander has set the bar pretty high considering that it’s free to download. Currently, it can only be located via a Bing search on your Xbox One, and your console must also be set to the US region. Non-US players can still download and play Voice Commander, but will need to change their home region to US, download the game and then change back.

For more on Voice Commander, check out the gameplay video after the jump.

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This year, masters of storytelling Telltale Games released two critically acclaimed episodic series on XBLA, and soon they’ll be telling those tales on Xbox One. Both The Walking Dead Season 2 and The Wolf Among Us will be getting next-gen retail releases this fall. Each game will be the complete experience, so you can play the story from beginning to end without all that pesky waiting between episodes. If disks aren’t your thing, both seasons will also be available to download.

For those of you wanting to continue Clementine’s story in the zombie apocalypse, The Walking Dead Season 2 will get its retail release on October 21. If you’re not caught up on the series, the first season is already available for Xbox One. If noir crime stories and magical creatures are up your alley, The Wolf Among Us will arrive a little later November 4. You can check out the dark and moody trailers for both games after the jump.

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It may sound like a joke, but it’s super cereal: a pack of South Park-themed tables will be coming to Pinball FX2 very soon. South Park Pinball captures the essence of the construction paper cartoon in two new tables centered around our favorite foul-mouthed fourth graders. South Park: Super Sweet Pinball recreates the insanity of the small Colorado town with Stan, Kyle, Cartman and Kenny. This table features many fan-favorite faces and some memorable moments from the show. Butters’ Very Own Pinball Game is all about the boy who could laugh at a storm cloud recreating his best moments, including saving Imaginationland and his exploits as Professor Chaos.

South Park: Super Sweet Pinball is coming to Xbox 360 on October 15 and Xbox One on October 16. The pack will cost $4.99 on either platform. If you want to see both new tables in action, just check out the trailer after the jump, m’kay?

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Almost two and a half years after its original PC release, puzzle-platformer Thomas Was Alone will make its way to Xbox One this November. Developer Mike Bithell made the announcement on Twitter today and later confirmed to Polygon that his game will release on PlayStation 4 and Wii U in addition to Xbox One during the same yet-to-be-revealed week next month.

Bithell wrote that he was “Rather excited to announce that Thomas Was Alone will be coming to PS4, WiiU and XB1 this November,” before noting his affinity for a certain geometric shape. “Rectangles are cool.”

His rectangles call-out was a nod to the Thomas‘ protagonist and a group of companions he meets over the course of the game. The titular Thomas is a self-aware artificial intelligence that sees the world around himself as a 2D space in which he is represented by a red rectangle. Each of Thomas’ friends has a unique shape and ability set of his or her own, and players must rely on all of their skills in order to overcome the game’s puzzles.

Developer Curve Studios will handle Thomas Was Alone‘s next-gen console port. Curve previously worked on the game’s PlayStation 3 and Vita ports, which released in April of 2013.

“One day a home console will come out and I won’t port my silly little game to it,” continued Bithell on Twitter. “But today is not that day.”

For more details on how the deal to bring Thomas to next-gen systems came about, check out the satirical video documenting the partnership between Bithell and Curve after the jump. The “#Mike Trailer” jokingly finds a correlation between next-gen polygon counts and Metacritic review scores, shows the team’s faux stresses and displays fake plans for an expensive outdoor banner advertisement bearing Bithell’s face near the site of the games industry’s annual Electronic Entertainment Expo.

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Canadian studio Frima’s couch co-op platformer Chariot will release on Xbox One October 1, and it won’t cost Xbox Live Gold members anything to download it, Frima and Microsoft have announced. While the ID@Xbox game won’t cost XBLG members anything, it will set non-Gold subscribers back $14.99.

Chariot is October’s Xbox One Games with Gold title and will replace Capy Games’ Super Time Force, which remains free for the next two days as September’s title. Meanwhile, Xbox 360 owners with Gold subscriptions will be able to get Battlefield: Bad Company 2 for free from October 1 through the 15th and Darksiders II from the 16th through the 31st.

A launch trailer for Chariot depicts the game’s hook: a princess and her fiancè guide the titular chariot through the game’s environments, all of which are set in “the royal catacombs.” Players will need to push, pull, ride and swing with the carriage, which is actually more of a coffin on wheels. Inside the chariot resides the ghost of the deceased king, and the goal is to locate a suitable burial location for the deceased. Click inside to catch the launch trailer.

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XBLA veterans The Behemoth teased their fourth game last week, aptly dubbed Game 4 for now, which takes place during the apparent aftermath of a bear hitting a planet. …
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The next project from NeocoreGames, the studio responsible for The Amazing Adventures of Van Helsing, is a tower-defense game called Deathtrap. The developer announced that Deathtrap will offer gamers …
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Microsoft held their Gamescom press conference this morning, and among the announcements was a new ID@Xbox trailer that was jam-packed with games. Microsoft had a similar trailer back at E3 this year, but this updated version has plenty of new blood. A wide variety of titles were revealed, including third-person MOBA Smite and spaceship builder Space Engineers. There’s also The Escapist, a prison break game from Worms developer Team 17, SuperHot, a time-bending FPS, and Ghost of a Tale, where you explore dungeons as an adorable mouse. Craziest of all is the reveal that Xbox One will soon be getting Goat Simulator, the most accurate farm animal simulator game ever made. Some of the new announcements have trailers of their own, which you can check out after the jump. Previously announced but still unreleased titles like Inside, Cuphead, and Gunscape are also featured in the montage, showcasing the large library of games coming soon to Xbox One. If you want to discover more about games coming to ID@Xbox, check out our profiles on games shown at E3 2014.

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By now you’ve probably heard Marvel’s cosmic comedy Guardians of the Galaxy released on Friday and became a huge box office hit. Maybe you were one of the many who saw movie over the weekend. If you loved the blockbuster film, and also love Minecraft, you’ll be pleased to know that you can literally bust blocks with Star-Lord and company. The Guardians of the Galaxy skin pack is available now for $1.99, featuring 24 skins inspired by both the movie and the comics. Check out the complete character list, complete with screenshots, after the jump.

Source: PlayXBLA

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