Hello there, loyal regulars and filthy, fickle drop-ins! A merry New Week to you, wherever you are. Thanks for feeding the Maw while we were away last Monday. You were mostly successful in sating the creature’s hunger and preventing cosmic disturbances, though we didn’t get off scot-free: the Maw appears to have eaten one of the more popular videogame genres.
Naturally, I can no longer remember which genre it was, but perhaps we can discern the contours of the rupture and repair the continuum by making deductions from still-existing games and the current make-up of videogame publishing generally. Or if that fails, maybe just by huffing a lot of banana fumes? I leave it to you to choose a method. In the meantime, here’s the latest list of new PC games.
Monday 7th September
- The Well has gone dry. Please investigate. Here’s your rusty spoon. Disregard the Noises. Don’t let the lights go off.
- Port of Jumanah is a 2D action roguelike in which you, a pearl diver, get to beat up a shark in a pinstripe suit with a Tommy gun.
Tuesday 8th September
- SPRAWL zero (pictured) is a noughties-style FPS inspired by Halo and F.E.A.R. and featuring the requisite bullet time and goofy gravity powers.
- Thousand Hells: The Underworld Heists is a party-based Orphic tactical narrative experience from the designers of King of Dragon Pass and Six Ages. Those were excellent, and this also looks great.
- Acceptable Losses is a phase-based World War 1 management game in which you are an officer brooding over paperwork in a dugout, deciding which procedurally generated soldiers to send on missions.
Wednesday 9th September
- In Falsus is a swizzy action-narrative hybrid. Five high school girls embroiled in a secret government experiment have to play what looks like Guitar Hero a la WipEout’s old Zone mode… with card gaming elements.
Thursday 10th September
- Ex Sanguis (early access) is the new grid-based tactics RPG from the makers of Othercide. Kick the enemy pieces around! Mess with the running order! Get red on everything!
- Wardogs (early access) is the new 100-player military FPS from Battalion devs Bulkhead, with destructible buildings.
- Shroom and Gloom is a fungal dungeon crawler featuring two decks of cards, one for navigation, the other combat. I enjoy the mucky hand-drawn art.
- The Alighieri Circle: Dante’s Bloodline is a literary first-person spooker in which you alternate between a sinister Italian villa and a bunch of demon dimensions. You’re trying to seal the gate to hell by collecting loose pages of the Divine Comedy.
Friday 11th September
- The Loopler is a roguelite in which you ornament a model car racecourse to spit out points. It makes me want to play a roguelite based on the Large Hadron Collider.
As for goings-on in the Treehouse this week: James has something hardware-ish in the works, while Julian is interviewing one of the better-known company executives. Jeremy is completing the guide team’s conquest of The Dawn of Bloodwalker/The Blood of Dawnwalker/The Walk of Blooddawner, etc etc. I’ve been having fun in that game myself, but I always trip over the title.
As for Mark, Dion, and Ollie, they were all absent from the morning meeting, for various reasons, so you’ll have to imagine what they’re up to while you’re trying to remember which videogame genre the Maw has eaten. Once again, a very good week to you!