Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom

Game Republic, developer of meme-generating Genji: Days of the Blade, has quietly shut its doors.

The Majin is everything that Ico's Yorda is not. In Fumito Ueda's classic, you lead the waif-like girl-child along a castle's craggy ramparts, crying out to her to follow your footsteps, catching her by her wrist when she falls, and batting away the black ghouls that tug at her bright white dress. It is a game about custody, about caring for someone weaker than yourself at the expense of the speed of your progress – a rare theme in a medium obsessed with the relentless exertion of power and dominance over others in search of the quickest route to a goal.

Ostensibly, Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom shares the theme. Here too you play as a gangly boy, Tepeu, thrust into a hazy pastoral world beset by fighters made of wispy blackness. Within 20 minutes you've freed a companion from captivity and begun the work of guiding him to safety.

But in contrast to Ico's Yorda, the Majin, a Muppet-like rendition of one of Shadow of the Colossus' moss-covered giants, is a physical powerhouse. For all his loveable stupidity and lumbering gait, he heightens your effectiveness with his thumping arms, which are able to prise open 10-ton gates and hurl your character over ramparts. Yorda's brilliant uselessness is overturned: rather than holding you back, the Majin is a companion without whom you could not progress.

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Dev talks London-based composition.

Enslaved: Odyssey to the West has fallen short of Namco Bandai's sales targets.

Andriasang reports that the publisher had hoped Ninja Theory's action epic would have shifted a million units by now, but it has only managed 800,000.

And that's only the start of Namco's woes. Its latest financial report reveals that Dead to Rights Retribution has sold only half of the 700,000 units anticipated, while movie tie-in Clash of the Titans struggled to 250,000 - well shy of the 750,000 hoped for.

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Dev speaks on Forsaken Kingdom

The vast guardian.

Extended gameplay from the demo.

You can try four new games for free on the PlayStation Store today.

An Xbox 360 demo for Game Republic's Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom is available to download now.

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One boy and his giant woodland monster.

Namco-Bandai's boldly beautiful adventure takes shape.

Barcelona is a city of cpalm trees and distressed concrete; a city where hardcore religious mania has delivered on some top-quality joke architecture.

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Namco Bandai and Game Republic have unveiled a brand new game titled Maijin: The Fallen Realm (working title).

A trailer shown at gamescom began with a warrior character wandering round the ruins of a castle. It wasn't long before he came across some spikey demon types and started battering them with a big stick.

The message "A young thief stumbles across a being of legend" scrolled across the screen. A hill in the background turned out to be a huge monster which lumbered towards the demons and started bashing them. The final shots were of the warrior and the monster wandering peacefully in the grounds of a huge castle.

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