I have played my fair share of platformers—although, the last one I played was Hollow Knight: Silksong, and thanks to the ass-kicking I received in that game I haven't been able to look another one in the eyes since. But you know what helps subdue the fear of getting stomped on? Ducks in hats.

Dodo Duckie has just that. It's a cute platformer where you play as a duck called Dodo who's trying to rescue his kidnapped chicken friends from some greedy aliens. But the catch with this platformer is that you have to play in different dimensions—I'm not talking about a multiverse—I mean 3D and 2D, which you can cycle between with the help of a very stylish magical propeller hat, courtesy of Capie the capybara.

You can flip between 2D and 3D whenever you want. Exploring the world in 2D allows you to traverse greater distances, jumping from one terrain to another, while 3D lets you discover more secrets hidden in the map and let you line yourself up for your next jump.

There's also plenty of puzzles scattered throughout the map in which you'll need to utilise both 2D and 3D perspectives to complete. Sometimes—to get from one area to another—you need to use a stone cube and place it on a weighted slab. The catch is that you can only pick the cube up while in 3D and you can only jump in 2D, so there's some juggling dimensions to do to figure the puzzle out.

It can sound a little complicated, but dealing with both dimensions is welcomingly straightforward. Even just over the course of the short demo I was switching between the two instinctively whenever it was warranted. The platforming itself is also quite forgiving, meaning you can focus on changing perspectives, solving puzzles, and taking pictures with all the cute capybaras found across the world—it's certainly a welcome break from the horrors of Silksong.

Pasokon Retro is our regular look back at the early years of Japanese PC gaming, encompassing everything from specialist '80s computers to the happy days of Windows XP.

The contrasting blue/yellow tones often make it look like an optician's colour blindness test, the frame rate is what I would generously describe as "present", and the hardware it was designed for is now old enough to have a mid-life crisis. In spite of these admittedly tough-to-love qualities, the unexpected appearance of the thoroughly ancient action-adventure Relics on Steam today is definitely one of my PC gaming highlights of the year.

A lot of games are very good at showing me a strange land, but few are as capable of convincing me I’m actually standing in one as this one does. The slim manual spends more time talking about how mysterious everything is than it does saying anything useful. There's the briefest bit of vague introductory fluff about the cosmic struggle between two forces, and after a quick skim I start the game and appear as a humanoid shadow floating within… I honestly have no idea.

A crumbling wall to the left reveals the shining sunset behind as an effective approximation of waves crashing against rocks plays over my speakers. There's a hole in the floor. Everything I can see is all I know.

With all guidance deliberately withheld, I have no choice but to stumble about and see what happens, "spirit riding" from body to body as I go. I am a skeletal rabbit inspired by H.R. Giger. I am an armoured soldier with a gun. I am a sorcerer clad in gold. I am perpetually bewildered but never annoyed, because I can see there's a consistent if alien sort of logic at work here, a bigger story I'm glimpsing a tiny part of, told in fragmented notes guarded by potentially deadly statues and by powerful beings who disappear without warning or explanation.

Happily, most of these messages are in English (and have been since Relic's first release in the '80s), and the few that aren't are written in an English cypher I must puzzle out using an in-game key and good old-fashioned pen and paper.

Shifting from body to body doesn't just grant me new attacks or tougher forms but also offers a little abstracted insight into how everything I see interconnects, allies and enemies determined by an ambitious tangle of relationships and behaviours. So that nightmare bunny I started out as is viewed as an annoying pest by the soldiers, something to be eradicated if it doesn't "GO AWAY" when yelled at. Soldiers stop to greet each other with a relatively friendly "NO TROUBLE", as equals stuck in the same weird boat. If I possess one of their superiors a "SIR" will appear at the end of that greeting, as a sign of respect… or perhaps fear, after experiencing officers attacking soldiers who refuse to return to their positions when gruffly requested first hand.

The combat that can follow these encounters is as unexplained and intricate as everything else I'm pleasantly puzzled by. My health is always ???, vaguely represented by a beating organ that is neither quite a heart nor a brain. The number of beings I have to kill in cold blood to reach one of the game's multiple endings is zero, making violence an active choice on my part. And I'd rather not fight, because my opponents are so reactive and well animated (for the era, of course), that it does feel uncomfortably messy and brutal.

Heavy blows can cause either of us to stumble, to the point of getting caught off-balance and ending up on our hands and knees, attempting to crawl away or get back up. They can decide they'd rather not fight at all, and try to run away, and whether I chase them down or not is left up to my conscience. Sneakily attacking an enemy's knees from behind brings them down faster than hitting them from the front. That's positional attack damage in a decades old game whose everything is smaller than most modern screenshots—singular.

I'd expect that sort of mechanic in a modern FPS, not a game old enough to buy its own beers (or be sold on cassette tape).

The game only gets weirder and more impressive the longer it goes on. People shout at me in code before sprinting across a room lined with golden figures, ready to fight. There's a woman held in some kind of stasis pod, who I may or may not free from her imprisonment. Hell's covered in organic pulsating walls. I barely have time to register the five screen high statue of something as I drop down a hole, but whatever it is looks a bit like an exposed skull-like face with a single teal eye, and holds a sword as tall as a house. I have no idea why it exists—but I do know I can't stop thinking about it.

Under these strange circumstances the game’s, ahem, “interpretive” graphics help rather than hinder the mood, presenting another fascinating inkling of a truth I can’t quite grasp even though the object in question is right in front of my face.

Exposing myself to these barely comprehensible wonders/horrors inevitably leads to many, many deaths, forcing me to restart the technically quite short game (it can be comfortably cleared in under an hour if you know what you're doing) from the beginning every time—and run headfirst into another of the game's many clever tricks. Unless I'm very careful, no two runs are alike. Depending on a wide variety of silently noted factors directly linked to my curiosity and behaviour, what were once mortal enemies might appear on their hands and knees, seemingly willing to be possessed, or not appear at all. Sometimes key items just don't show up. Attacking people who need help or would give their assistance freely always has wider, unspoken consequences beyond altering who wants to hit me back.

And the brilliant thing is that my repeat runs and fatal mistakes are all part of the game's master plan. There is no such thing as a perfect, complete run here. It is by design impossible to learn everything I need to succeed in one deathless go and then head directly for the best ending—I'm expected to prod and poke and piece it all together, a code learned in one "life" used in the next cycle, a document I risked everything for one run completely ignored the next, a map jotted down and kept safe for later use.

Beautifully, the game ends exactly where it begins, the entire experience forming a flawless loop. I was already in the right place, I just wasn't the right person back then. I didn't know who I could be or what I could do. The journey was the important bit. The journey made it special.

The journey still makes it special. Don't be put off by Relics' looks or its language warning. Give it a try now that it's on Steam, and you may be shocked by what the developers pulled off with 4 MHz, a handful of colors and a couple hundred kilobytes.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: cutscenes are the worst. There I am, sitting down to play a game, ready to tap some keys and wiggle some thumbsticks and click my mouse—when suddenly the game I'm playing decides it's actually a movie and all I can do for the next few minutes is watch.

You might think I'm too fidgety, too impatient, or that I simply don't have the attention span to sit there doing nothing while a cutscene plays. But you'd be wrong! It's the cutscenes that are the problem. They simply suck.

Except when they don't suck, of course, like in Dave the Diver, which is the only game I can remember playing where I was left wishing there were more cutscenes instead of zero cutscenes. Dave the Diver's cutscenes were so energetic, so fantastically animated, so surprising and funny and occasionally kinda horny that I loved every one of them and wished there were more.

Well, I got my wish. For the past week or so I've been playing Dave the Diver's new DLC, In the Jungle, which is not only completely rad but has some amazing cutscenes that are somehow even more wild, and more horny, than the cutscenes in the base game.

Rather than watching them, I'd urge you to actually play the DLC and discover them for yourself—but I'm not your boss, so sure, go and have a look below a few cutscenes I've selected from Dave's new adventure. First up, check out what a skeptical villager thought of the alligator tail meal Bancho cooked up for her:

I mean… Wow. That lady definitely had a massive orgasm while tasting that dish, right? It's not subtle, it's not subtext, that food was so good she straight-up nutted. That's not the only horny cutscene in Dave the Diver: In the Jungle, but it's definitely the horniest. It also made me realize I haven't really had a great meal in a long time. Maybe I need to try some new restaurants.

Aside from people climaxing while eating, there's a new character, Muna, sort of a gadget-maker who enjoys her work to an extremely high degree. From time to time Dave will have to approach her about upgrading his "jungle gun," which he uses to assassinate fish. Muna really dives into her work and her scenes are all incredibly animated and fun. Here's just one of several weapon upgrade scenes:

Dave's little shiver at the end. Do you think he… nah.

There are lots more excellent cutscenes in the DLC, which is surprisingly hefty for just a $10 price tag. There are naturally several scenes of Bancho dramatically enhancing recipes, there's a lovely boat ride scene at the start, a great car chase scene in the middle, and a rather dramatic cutscene near the end—but I won't show you any of those. I don't want to spoil any more than I have to!

OK, fine, here's one more of my favorites. I won't give you the context, all I'll say is you won't be able to guess what it signifies without playing the DLC, yet it makes perfect sense in the game itself. Enjoy!

Before I explain to you why Scarlet Deer Inn is one of my most anticipated games of this year, I urge you to download the demo on Steam and play it for yourself. It's hard to describe why I'm so excited by it without spoiling the very specific moment I realised it had serious juice, so I highly recommend you take 20 minutes to give it a try.

Alright, you've been warned. Scarlet Deer Inn is a side-scrolling adventure platformer created by Czech husband-and-wife team Attu games, distinguished from all the other games of its ilk by having an "embroidered" art style. This description is not entirely accurate. The backgrounds are actually hand-painted. But the characters—and every frame of their animation—have been created with a sewing machine rather than drawn, then scanned into the digital realm.

This is neat. But it also conjures images of a specific kind of experience. We're in the domain of cosy games, something that's warm, gentle, funny, maybe a little bit twee. Scarlet Deer Inn sounds like the kind of game you might show to your nanna in an attempt to convince her that you're growing up right.

And there are elements of that to it. The introduction to protagonist Elise presents you with an idyllic portrayal of medieval life. Rolling fields, sun-dappled woodlands, villagers chewing over the local gossip. It's a pleasant space to roam around. It's a surprisingly funny game, too. Not in a Monkey Island way, squeezing jokes into every possible crevice, but in a way that emerges naturally from the characters and their situations.

I enjoyed all of this in isolation. But then, eventually, comes the turn. At a certain point, it becomes clear that Scarlet Deer Inn is a game with teeth. And bones, and…other things. It's one of the more effective dramatic twists I've encountered in a game for a while, and it happens very early on, which makes me very curious about what else the game might have in store.

As you can probably tell, I was impressed by it, and have been looking forward to getting my hands on the full game for a while. Naturally, then, I was thrilled to see Attu announce a release date that's fairly imminent—July 17.

There's also a new trailer for the game that you can watch above, though again, I'd recommend downloading and playing the demo instead, as the trailer gives a fair amount away. I know there's an absolute avalanche of games headed our way in the next couple of months, but I'm confident that Scarlet Deer Inn will prove worthy of your attention.

Thanks to the Steam Release Bot on Bluesky, I am now aware of Kryonull, a game that bums me the hell out. Not only were a majority of its assets AI-generated, but the visual novel is being sold on Steam for a ludicrous $100 US, or £90 in the UK.

Kryonull is a particular bummer because its core idea is actually quite interesting, and the one thing about it that isn't AI generated⁠—at least if you take its disclosure at face value⁠—is the script. The visual novel's plot sounds like a bit of hard sci-fi goodness: A small, manned mission to Europa has to make snap decisions with major consequences as it makes first contact with something under the ice.

That's rad. Unfortunately, it all falls apart from there. Under the AI-Generated Content Disclosure section of the store page, developer NovelkaGames offers the following whammy: "All images and voices in the game, as well as on the store page, were generated using AI." AI slop and wasted potential⁠—often in the same project⁠—are far from unique on Steam. What makes Kryonull particularly repulsive is that price tag.

Kryonull is translated in English and Russian, perhaps providing an indication to its country of origin. But according to SteamDB, its price in rubles still converts to $53 US. I don't think I'd want to exchange any money for an AI-generated game, but 50 bucks is well into "I'm insulted by the suggestion" territory⁠. There's no benefit of the doubt to make Kryonull make sense.

As it stands, Kryonull gets to be an unfortunate example of the river of effluence coming out of Steam, the price of it being an open platform where anyone can share their game. Increasingly more open-ish, given Valve's compromises with payment processors and occasional unforced, confounding prudishness.

Kryonull did remind me of two, much better games you should check out instead: South Scrimshaw Part One, and Water Womb World. Both are experimental, short, sci-fi games like what Kryonull promises, but with actual effort and craft put into them.

South Scrimshaw is a Planet Earth-style nature documentary about whales on an alien planet, and I've always let myself overlook its AI-generated voiceovers on account of its brilliant writing, hand-drawn visuals, and the fact that its solo developer made it while working a day job as a dishwasher.

Water Womb World is a surreal horror game about a religious fanatic looking for proof of God at the bottom of the ocean. I haven't played it yet, but MandaloreGaming's review on YouTube got me to buy it. The former game is completely free, while the latter is just two bucks.

The Wolf Among Us 2 has been in the oven for a while. Either seven years—if you trace its start back to its announcement in 2019—or 12, if you go by the cliffhanger ending of The Wolf Among Us 1's final episode, which released in 2014.

Fans have been hanging on the telephone for news for a long, long time whichever way you slice it, so this year's Summer Game Fest announcement that we'd finally get the new chapter in Bigby Wolf's adventures next year was a pretty big deal. But a question remains: will The Wolf Among Us 2 hew to the original series' episodic release format? One last series of little waits after our years-long big wait?

A new interview with Telltale CEO Jamie Ottilie and PM Studio (The Wolf Among Us 2's co-publisher) CEO Michael Yum by GamesIndustry.biz gives us our best hint yet, and it sure sounds to me like we're gonna get all of the game at once.

"Publishing-wise, defending multiple release dates... We would probably approach it like the modern streaming model, where you drop all the episodes at the same time," said Ottilie. Though he does admit that Telltale likes the episodic model "philosophically".

Yum is more circumspect, but only very slightly: "We live in a Netflix era. People can't wait. We should probably give the people what they want all in one go." It sounds like something would have to come up for Telltale not to drop The Wolf Among Us 2 all at once—"It's whatever makes sense at the time. If there's a time crunch and we can't wait, we can pivot. I wouldn't say there's a definitive answer to this, but we'll try something that gives everyone something right off the bat."

After such a long wait, it's probably best not to make fans endure another, arbitrary series of waits right at the final stretch, but I do wonder just how terrible it'd be to get the long-awaited sequel in dribs and drabs. Dispatch's episodic structure (which had much shorter waits between episodes than the Telltale of old) went down a treat, and while Yum and Ottilie gesture at modern streaming's 'drop it all at once' model, it's not like there aren't well-loved exceptions to that rule.

When is a game about fishing not about fishing? When it's About Fishing, of course. The unsettling angling sim was revealed during 2025's PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted (hey, that's us!) and I absolutely loved it.

During tonight's PC Gaming Show, we got a closer look at how About Fishing's fishing mechanics actually work, and also peeked below the surface into the murky waters that hide many secrets—like mermaids.

Different lures and baits can be used to help your hook skim across the surface of the water or delve deep into lakes, rivers, and the ocean. It looks like you play as the hook itself, which is a pretty nifty mechanic. I love the way it lets you get up close and personal with the fish you're about to rip from their world. But, as I wrote above, there's more to this experience than fishing.

About Fishing strips away the whimsy of rod and bait and offers up a deeply unsettling PS1-looking (complimentary) tale. It's got a similar vibe to the Lovecraftian Dredge, only here you play as a woman in a bright yellow raincoat instead of a boat. A man, perhaps her father or mentor, is incarcerated, his orange jumpsuit and her coat contrasting with the otherworldly greens of the rest of the environment.

We also get a glimpse of people in a deliciously blue church, talking about how "I don't think she'll stop fishing," and we get some shots of our protagonist wandering about the town, popping to the shops to buy supplies or looking in her desk, fishing rod slung over her shoulder the whole time. There's a mystery to uncover here, one cast of the line at a time.

If you want to know more, you can download the About Fishing demo on Steam, out now.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

"Issy, I love the PC Gaming Show, but I get so excited about all the games that I want to play them right now! I don't want to wait months for them to come out." I hear you, dear reader. I hear you. I have the same problem, and I see the games even before you do. As a show of good faith, we bring you a new live-action trailer for Dave the Diver's In the Jungle DLC, which launches in just 11 days. Don't say we never treat you.

I'm a big fan of mixed media. I adored Immortality, and I've even got a soft spot for those cut scenes in the older Need For Speed games. So, it'll be no surprise to anyone that I love this new trailer for the In the Jungle DLC, launching June 18.

It's got the signature humour of Dave the Diver, and in it, we see Dave and the gang beating the hell out of a giant crocodile (alligator? I never could tell the difference) that's been terrorizing a tropical village nestled deep in the jungle. For some reason, the wildlife in the area has been going berserk.

But enough with the whimsy, you're here for games and by golly we give you games. There's a new look at what you'll actually be getting up to in the wilderness. Firstly, the new Utara Lake, with mangrove trees and loads of tropical fish. There are also areas with sunken ruins and nasty monsters to best. One has bigger jaws than that crocogator, and another is a viscous-looking fish that does a devastating spin attack. You don't want to get caught by that.

We also see more of the activities we'll be doing on land. There's photography, and a little green critter that looks a lot like Om Nom from Cut the Rope (remember the good old days when mobile games could be bought with a one-off payment?), a drumming rhythm game, and you'll also have to flee from a massive boar. There's even some time management and relationship building à la Stardew Valley.

You can wishlist the In the Jungle DLC on Steam, and if you've not played the base game, you should really give it a go—we gave it 91/100 in our review.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

Getting a lot of questions about ghosts already answered by the name There Are No Ghosts at the Grand. The musical decorating game set in a haunted English seaside town (which is all of them, really) just unveiled a new trailer and character at the PC Gaming Show. I bet no one had a reggae-singing cop on their bingo card. We knew about the talking cat already, though, so I guess this isn't surprising.

Meet Adam, a very Gen-Z police officer whose view of the force has been shaped by Hollywood movies rather than reality, so he seems pretty happy that you've come along to uncover the mysteries of the sleepy Kingswood on Sea. Too bad he's going to die in 30 days, I wonder if there's anything you can do about that? He's voiced by Josh Waters Rudge of reggae-punk band The Skints, and his song in the game is pretty catchy.

I played a demo a few months ago and it seems every character likes to burst into song which, in my humble opinion, more NPCs should do. The decorating mechanic is fun enough, but it's the exploration and mystery that really piqued my interest. This new trailer reveals far more than I got hands on with, too.

There's a whole investigative process that involves you gathering clues and working on Adam's crime board to help figure out how and why your father, the previous owner of the Grand hotel, disappeared. You'll take a boat out to sea, exploring nearby islands and bunkers—I spent a very spooky night in one reliving fragments of the past. You'll also be fighting weird spider-like creatures—gross—and blasting old signs off the pier. There's a lot more action than I saw in the demo, so expect a mix of genres when the full game comes out later this year.

If you want to dip your toes into this weird musical adventure, there's a Steam demo out now that you can try—wishlist There Are No Ghosts at the Grand while you're there.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

The next class coming to Warhammer 40,000: Darktide is none other than the cog boys: the Skitarii, members of the Adeptus Machanicus. It'll be available for players to check out pretty soon on June 23, but until then we've got a fresh trailer for you to gaze at courtesy of the PC Gaming Show.

The trailer is exactly what you'd expect to see, a bunch of Skitarii blasting and beating their way through grunts and looking sick as hell doing so. One of our resident 40k enjoyers Sean Martin already discussed what makes this class so special: "you can literally construct this class, choosing material types, augment patterns, and even apparently tweaking voice modulation—we'll no longer have to buy helmets just to achieve that electronic vox quality."

You'll also get a unique range of armaments including, arc weapons, phosphor blasters, galvanic rifles, and transonic blades. Its deluxe edition will also give you instant access to a deluxe class outfit, unique deluxe servo skull skin, six deluxe weapon skins, and a deluxe portrait frame.

When asked before, "Why Skitarii?" Fatshark has explained: "We have known from the start that we wanted to add some form of playable Adeptus Mechanicus presence to the game. We also know that players really resonate with Adeptus Mechanicus, our Tech-Priest Hadron Omega-7-7 being a good example.

"Many of you might ask why Skitarii, and not the more recognisable Tech-Priest? For us this really came down to two things. The first being that Tech-Priests don’t really operate on the strike team level of Darktide’s warband. The Skitarii are a better fit. They are the frontline warriors of the Adeptus Mechanicus, and we knew we could weave them into the scope and narrative of the game way better."

Fatshark goes on to explain how the Skitarii are also not widely explored in videogames and so the devs saw this as an opportunity to "delve deeper" into this lore. "The Skitarii that you will play in the game are called 'Alpha Primus', and they are a bit different from the standard Skitarii that you see go to war under the banner of the Adeptus Mechanicus in bigger battles. These specialist warriors can operate with more autonomy, and are more suited to the gameplay experience of Darktide."

If all of this sounds like it's up your street then you can wishlist this class right now on Steam in preparation for its launch in a few weeks.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

I guess Sea of Thieves is a pirate sim all about amassing treasure, griefing, and getting griefed, but I've always treated it like a hangout tool where I can play the hurdy-gurdy, get smashed, and stumble into a shark's mouth. As was announced at today's Xbox Games Showcase, developer Rare is catering to those sorts of casual sensibilities with a suite of new tools that might call to mind Fortnite, Warcraft 3, or even Roblox.

A new trailer announced "Custom Seas," a free update which lets players make their own modes, spawn in objects, and more. Examples of modes made in the new creator included Rowboat Royale, a cannoneering deathmatch mode played on the back of small rowboats, and Skeleton Snipe Hunt, a competitive sharpshooting minigame. It's hard to say how in-depth the tools will be, but it sounds like an interesting way to inject more gaminess into the decidedly freeform nautical sandbox.

The trailer also noted you can make a dedicated space to "hang out," presumably free from the dangers of monster attacks and PvP, though it's hard to say how different that will feel from the Safer Seas update which already provided a PvE-only mode. If nothing else, this continues a trend of Rare adding more and more customizability to the game—that's very in right now!

To that end, this update will also bring what sounds like a suite of machinima creation features. Inviting players to "create a cinematic masterpiece," the trailer showed some snippets of "new camera tools" which seemed ripe for making home movies on the high seas.

If this all intrigues you, you won't be waiting long; custom seas are slated to release June 18.

The Wolf Among Us was one of Telltale's most loved games, and when the studio returned to life under new management in 2019, one of the first things it did was announce that The Wolf Among Us 2 is happening.

And then we waited, and waited, and waited some more: A 2024 promise that yes, the game is still in development, was the most recent update on the situation—until now.

A new trailer for The Wolf Among Us 2 appeared at today's Summer Game Fest showcase, giving us a slight but pleasantly fresh look at Bigby's upcoming adventure, and some of the characters (and headaches) he'll face as he investigates a new mystery: "Homicide. Six total so far. Each case husband and wife found shredded. People are dying. Some monster is out there. Word around the precinct is you're the guy to call."

The wait for The Wolf Among Us 2 has been unexpectedly long. and occasionally peppered with rumors that the whole thing had been cancelled. As PC Gamer's Harvey Randall noted in 2024, "to say that The Wolf Among Us 2 has had a troubled development would be like saying that a highway pile up has had a mild impact on traffic." It was actually meant to be out in 2018, a full eight years ago, but Telltale's closure later that same year obviously had an impact on that.

Telltale has also finally committed to a release target, albeit one that's not very specific: 2027! Yeah, that's it. The good news for fans is that there's something closer to the moment: The Wolf Among Us Remastered is also in the pipe, and it's set to come out for the 2026 holiday season.

As up and down as I can be with Remedy games, I maintain that it's a studio to be treasured. Nobody is taking creative swings at its scale outside of Kojima, and Control Resonant may be its hardest swing ever. It takes guts to ditch the one throughline that all Remedy games shared—prominet primary pistols—and telekinetically chuck it out the window.

Resonant is, indeed, a character action game. It's got hot-swappable weapons, combos, air juggles, and a dizzying collection of skill trees. Dylan Faden's melee moveset—powered by a shapeshifting weapon called the Abberant—falls somewhere on the Devil May Cry or Platinum spectrum. It plays nothing like the first Control, a fact that somewhat worried me going into a hands-on demo in Los Angeles earlier this week. The new direction is fun, but will it still feel like Control?

For a while, not so much.

The 2-hour demo opened in the first act, with Dylan waking up to an unmitigated disaster—the Oldest House lockdown has broken and chaos has spilled onto the streets of Manhattan. He meets an FBC contact, Zoe, who initially wants to put him in cuffs and haul him back to his cell. But he proves his worth, and soon Zoe is directing Dylan to problems that need solving. There's a nice symmetry to Dylan's point of view compared to his sister Jesse (who is a larger part of this game than I anticipated): The first Control is all about Jesse leaving our world behind to accept her place in the Oldest House, while Dylan is venturing out into a world he hasn't seen since childhood. To him, the FBC is his captor—one that he's willing to form an alliance with if it means saving New York.

It's a great setup, but that first hour is bland to actually play. It's a lot of slicing through basic Hiss grunts, dead simple platforming, and getting acquainted with upgrade currencies, but not a lot of intrigue. It's a tutorial, so that's to be expected, but Resonant picks up a pulse once its larger, actually dangerous enemies show up. Encounters are set up almost like Doom 2016—grunts won't ever stop spawning until the big guys are gone, so it's about prioritizing the biggest threats and avoiding the little guys until you need an HP piñata to smash.

Dylan's weapon forms are excellent. I started with a combo of:

• A scythe that can cleave through everything in a 90-degree radius
• And drill that deals pointed, single-target damage in bursts

The Aberrant is Remedy tech indulgence reaching new heights—with every attack, the staff transforms and extends into the chosen weapon before snapping off at the hilt and flinging a dozen physics objects in every direction. There's a Sekiro-like stagger mechanic that plays a huge role in weapon choice, too. Some weapons, like the drill, put up weak damage but high stagger.

I wandered around an open Manhattan area checking off little side tasks. Getting around is cool—Dylan's double jump, air lift, and generous glide reminded me a bit of Infamous—but the activities present in the demo were mostly grindy combat arenas. Remedy emphasized that this won't be the case in the final game, as it removed most of the stuff that fills these open areas for the demo.

Still, it gave me an impression that Resonant's focus on larger areas and busier action might leave less room for aspects of the first game I loved, like combing over the notes of FBC scientists or learning new skills from a fiberglass merry-go-round horse recovered from an amusement park in 1998.

I finally got what I asked for with the Sinkhole, a story mission from later in the game that filled the last 40 minutes of my demo. We weren't given much context for why Dylan had to jump down a hole into a dimension of endless bedrooms not unlike the ending of Interstellar, but I think I was there to scan some weird stuff at the bottom. This whole episode was fantastic—I rode down a research probe approximately one billion miles underground, fighting off waves of Hiss while gaining the ability to shift gravity to any plane.

At the bottom was the second boss fight of the demo—a flying, spectral Hiss bastard with chest lasers that killed me twice. The difficulty jumped pretty dramatically here, though I think my weapon choice of axe and hammer were just a bad fit for fighting something airborne. Still, I eventually figured out a simple game plan: meet it in the air, blast it with my fire ability to boost stagger damage, then hit it with a heavy hammer slam.

Notably, Resonant doesn't have a deep combo or scoring system that I noticed. It's more about chaining abilities and cooldowns into stagger opportunities than memorizing dextrous button sequences. For that reason, I have a hunch that Resonant's combat will feel pedestrian to those who actually know ball with this genre, but I'm not one of them, so I appreciate the approachability.

The mission concluded with a sequence that gave me hope that Control's quieter moments will have a place in Resonant. With the beast slain and Dylan stranded at the bottom of the Sinkhole, he began a futile climb through a dizzying maze of living rooms, kitchens, and bedrooms. Dylan was presumed dead by the FBC, but Zoe hadn't given up yet. She began playing music, lighting a trail of TVs for Dylan to follow. Remedy's mastery of seamless geometry loading became the main character of the moment as the new rooms appeared and disappeared impossibility fast between camera pans.

As the distant music got further away, the gravity shift ability returned, allowing Dylan to turn walls into platforms and finally climb high enough to reach Zoe on the radio. "Let's never do that again," she said.

It was the longest stretch of the demo where I didn't kill anything, and it turned out to be the highlight. Control Resonant is out September 24.

It's a well-established tradition at this point and so it's maybe not the newsiest of news, but it's also one you may not have heard of previously and hey, a free game is a free game—and for the sixth year in a row, Dontnod's award-winning narrative adventure Tell Me Why is free for Pride Month.

Superficially, Tell Me Why sounds like what you'd expect from the creators of Life is Strange: "Reunited twins Tyler and Alyson Ronan use their supernatural bond to unravel the mysteries of their loving but troubled childhood. Set in beautiful small-town Alaska, Tell Me Why features true-to-life characters, mature themes and gripping choices."

And, like Life is Strange, Tell Me Why doesn't shy away from LGBTQ+ themes: One of the twins, Tyler, is trans, and his struggles with his identity and the prejudices he faces form an integral part of the story.

It's not great—we gave it a 69% score in our 2020 review, which for the record is still quite good on our scale—but "while there are missteps" in Tyler's character, reviewer Sam Greer wrote, "they're at least well meaning, and the game goes to great lengths to respect Tyler's identity like few games of this scope ever have—even if it de-fangs some of the realities you might expect him to be dealing with."

In what has become a much shittier Pride Month tradition, fuelled by (I'm just guessing here, but I'd put real money on it) ignorance, insecurity, and performative heterosexuality, it's also time for the annual Tell Me Why review bombing: It's an undersized thing, really, and happily dwarfed in comparison by the corresponding influx of positive reviews, but nonetheless a bit dismaying that some people still feel the need to do this.

As far as I can tell, Dontnod hasn't made a public announcement of the freebie just yet—maybe they don't reckon it's news at this point either—so we'll refer back to the studio's 2025 request: "As in past years, we ask that you give your money and support to trans creators, trans-inclusive charities in your community, and trans people in need."

Tell Me Why is free on Steam until June 30, and If you prefer, you can also pick it up on Xbox.

I'm a little bit behind on this one—it launched last week—but Phonopolis, the new game from Amanita Design, is out, and as a longtime fan of the studio I am very pleased to say that so far, it's pretty great.

I say "so far" because I haven't yet finished Phonopolis, and it's always possible that things will go seriously wrong in the second half. I doubt very much that's going to happen, but best to be clear about these things.

So far, though, Phonopolis shaping up to be another brilliant Amanta adventure, telling the tale of a hapless lad named Felix who, quite by accident, ends up on the wrong side of a totalitarian regime that's one step away from enslaving the minds of the people by stripping them of their humanity entirely through the power of the Absolute Tone.

It's silly and slapstick, as Amanita games generally are: The regime enforcers are more Keystone Kops than KGB, and there's no real fail state for any of the puzzles: During a prison break sequence, for instance (and yes, I went to prison), running afoul of a roaming spotlight triggers a klaxon and sends Felix scurrying for cover, but otherwise there's no real penalty—puzzle progress doesn't even reset.

The puzzles in Phonopolis (again, so far) are pretty straightforward, and often feel more like interactive toys than adventure game-style brain teasers. In another segment aboard a big float in a parade for The Leader, I escaped the cops (and yes, I was running from the cops) by dicking around with various switches and buttons. But while escape was the goal, the fun—much like Amanita's extremely funny comedy romp Chuchel—was mostly in just seeing what everything did.

Amanita says Phonopolis is "loosely inspired by the works of Karel Čapek and George Orwell," and the game is not exactly subtle in that regard. Class is strictly enforced in the world of Phonopolis, the population is kept docile (and relentlessly monitored) by telescreens, wrongthink is ruthlessly punished, and the whole thing is shot through with the presence of The Leader, a near-mythical Big Brother figure to whom everyone owes everything.

It's reflected in the game's visual style, too:

Music plays a central role in Phonopolis, as it does in pretty much all Amanita games. But it's of particular significance in this one, a game in which music is all but forgotten, and all thought is drowned out by blaring loudspeakers. The soundtrack, by longtime Amanita Design composer Tomáš Dvořák (aka Floex), is another banger (yes, so far): A gentle, dreamy lullaby that stands in sharp contrast to the ugly cacophony of the game world itself.

The one thing that puts me off Phonopolis just a little bit is that it's kind of on the nose right now. Machinarium is set in a pretty rough town and Botanicula is literally about finding a new home after the old one is annihilated, but neither of those games feel as grim or unhappy as Phonopolis. That's more a reflection of the times in which we live than anything inherent in the game itself, and could even be taken as a tribute to Amanita's success in engendering the sort of world it aims to depict. But it also leaves Phonopolis ever so slightly less joyous than many of its predecessors. (Yes, again, and for the last time, so far. Maybe a happy ending will turn me around on that.)

Phonopolis is available now on Steam, Epic, and GOG for $22.49/£18/€19.79, or slightly more for a collector's edition that includes a digital art book and soundtrack. (You do you, but when it comes to Amanita Design games, I always recommend going for the soundtrack.) If you'd like to sample the goods first, a Phonopolis demo is also available on Steam.

The studios behind Peak, Aggro Crab and Landfall Games, originally threw the game together at a breakneck pace during a 4-week game jam. In a recent interview at GDC, Aggro Crab studio head Nick Kamant told PC Gamer editor Ted Litchfield it didn't just help them switch gears to smaller projects—it also helped them realize co-op was "very much our thing now."

"We worked on this game with another dev studio, which is pretty uncommon, right," said Kaman. "This is way more in their wheelhouse. They made a game the previous year called Content Warning that also did super well, and was kind of one of the first friendslops out there."

When the two teams decided to collaborate on a follow-up, Aggro Crab did so with the assumption that it'd be a one-off learning experience. "It was just kind of a side hustle to see where it goes and learn from them," Kaman explained. "I consider [Peak] very much our thing now, whereas before, it wasn't our thing at all. We thought we were a character action studio."

Aggro Crab's previous game, a soulslike/3D platformer mashup called Another Crab's Treasure, was well-received but left the team burned out after three years of development. After Peak, on the other hand, Kaman felt energized: "There's so much that hasn't been explored yet, and there's so many interesting things you can do in the context of social games."

That feeling led to an expanded scope for the upcoming Crashout Crew, which releases later this week. Kaman says it's more Overcooked-inspired than friendslop, but there are some aspects carried over from that style: examples he gave include proximity voice chat, an unorthodox choice for a top-down game, and mouth animations that trigger when players use their mics. "It's kind of an experiment. Can we push it a little more toward friendslop, and does that enhance the experience?"

Kaman said he understands that not everyone will prefer the studio's new style. "If people miss Another Crab's Treasure and are like, 'Why are you guys a friendslop studio now?' I'm sorry, I get it, you guys want that side of us. But right now for us, this is just more exciting."

2025 was the year of friendslop: bite-sized, inexpensive games that center co-op and proximity voice chat as vehicles for silliness, scares, and slapstick. One of the genre's biggest smash hits, Peak, is a poster child for the slightly maligned, kind of derogatory label. But in an interview at GDC, Aggro Crab studio head Nick Kaman told PC Gamer associate editor Ted Litchfield he had a question for players and developers who are sour on the term. "Why not?"

"It's fun. It's technically derogatory. But why not lean into that? Because that's what people are saying," Kaman said. "Even if it is kind of mean, I can take it."

He said it's useful as a developer to have a term that serves as a lightning rod for discourse, even if some of the talk is negative. He brought up examples like metroidvania, souls, boomer shooter, and wholesome, all of which are the subject of debate online. (I'd also submit "bullet heaven," which has really got people in a tizzy lately.)

Whether the term is particularly respectful comes second to the fact that "we didn't have a label for this type of game before," Kaman said—and even if it is used in a pejorative way, Kaman said that he "[gets] where those people are coming from."

"The original tweet said, 'friendfarming,' right? It's less of an experience on its own and more of a scaffold for you to hang out with your friends. But what's more beautiful than that," he said. "Why not make a game where the point is to hang out with your friends? Isn't that kind of what a lot of games are about? These are games that just focus on that and make mechanical choices that encourage that behavior."

He went on to argue that Peak succeeds, in part, because of its social aspect and that was no mistake. "When you get to the peak, and you only got there because your friends helped. That's a pretty good feeling. A lot of people just tell me this: that they've rekindled relationships, friendships through playing this game. I think that's exciting."

Kaman also said the "vibe shift" that led to friendslop's dominance "probably started with COVID." Isolated people who may not have monster rigs at the ready wanted a way to socialize with their friends via gaming, so they all got hooked on Among Us and things took off from there with games like Lethal Company and Peak. But he's not sure the genre's heyday is over just yet.

"I think there's a lot of design space in friendslop that hasn't been explored. And I want to see other developers' takes on it, and have them see success with that." If the sizable sales numbers put up by Gamble With Your Friends earlier this month are any indication, it's certainly true that friendslop ain't dead just yet.

I played a demo of My Arms Are Longer Now at PAX Australia and it was a real good time. It's a stealth-comedy game, though not in the sense that you're surprised to find out it's funny. It's funny from the first second you twist your upsettingly wiggly arm across the floor of a train carriage then get caught trying to steal someone's bike right in front of them.

But it is a stealth-comedy game in the sense that it's a stealth game as well as a comedy one, with a detective who apparently learns of your bizarre wiggly crimes, and witnesses who will notice when you try to, say, pinch their bike right in front of them.

My Arms Are Longer Now is being published by Jackbox Games. Yes, the people who make the Jackbox games are called Jackbox Games, and this is their first step into publishing a game developed by other people. Those other people are Toot Games, a studio founded by Matthew Jackson and Millie Holten, who you may know from the Aunty Donna-adjacent actual-play series Trope RPG and the reality-adjacent web animation Long Head.

I love stealth games because I played Thief: The Dark Project at a young and impressionable age and it made me long for a life of crimes I could experience from behind a computer screen, but without having to commit identity fraud or trick people into downloading malware. Stealth games are a bit of a cursed genre though, because decades later most games about leaning around corners in the dark still aren't as good as the ones from the '90s.

Which is why I'm looking forward to a game that does something more drastic with the idea of thievery than "adding multiplayer" or "what if you were also really good at just killing people and then stealing from them." Which is exactly what My Arms Are Longer Now promises to do when it comes out this year. You can wishlist it now on Steam.

Adventure game royalty Broken Sword is the latest videogame to get a movie adaptation, with a film being co-developed by series creators Revolution Software and producer Story Kitchen, which has worked on numerous videogame adaptations for screen, including the (generally liked) Sonic the Hedgehog films and Amazon's upcoming Life is Strange TV show.

Reported by Variety, details about the film are currently thin on the ground, but we do know that the script is being penned by Evan Spiliotopolos, whose writing credits include the live action Beauty and the Beast adaptation, The Huntsman: Winter's War, and The Pope's Exorcist. I have not seen any of those films, so I can't tell you how good the scripts were. But the RottenTomatoes scores aren't exactly spectacular, with Beauty and the Beast ranking highest at 71%.

Alongside this one specific detail is a lot of vague assertions about remaining faithful to the series. "Very few franchises of this era have stayed relevant, premium and loyal to the intelligence of their audience. Broken Sword has done all three," said Story Kitchen founders Dmitri M. Johnson and Michael Lawrence in a statement. "Our work isn't to adapt a game into a film. It's to move a world that has been building for three decades into the next medium it deserves, working hand-in-hand with the people who built it." I don't know what it means for a franchise to stay premium, but the part about respecting the audience's intelligence is fair.

Broken Sword creator Charles Cecil, meanwhile, said that Story Kitchen approached him with a "deep passion for the IP" and that "the creative conversations have been about translating what Broken Sword is rather than what it can be made to look like."

It's an interesting one. On the one hand, Broken Sword seems like a natural fit for a film adaptation, given how it borrows from the adventure serial heritage in a similar manner to Indiana Jones. On the other hand, Hollywood has very recently proved it can absolutely biff it in adapting this type of story, with the dreadful Uncharted movie miraculously spinning gold into shit.

Either way, there's a decent chance of this actually happening, given how Hollywood has eyes for videogames at the moment. Both A Minecraft Movie and the two Mario flicks were massive box office hits despite their varying quality (A Minecraft Movie was alright, actually, certainly more interesting than either of the Mario films). I don't see Broken Sword breaking a billion dollars, personally, but it definitely has a better chance of being a decent film.

Ever since a study theorized that around 87 percent of videogames are not playable without finding a physical copy or nabbing a digital one via piracy or an archive, I stopped feigning shock when a game gets delisted. Games with licensed characters or music have an especially rough time staying on digital storefronts: Star Trek: Resurgence and 29 Disney games have been vaporized since the year began.

If you've been worried that Mixtape, the narrative adventure game which launched earlier this month and has become the target of every possible opinion, will suffer a similar fate due to all the licensed songs in its soundtrack—they thought of that. In an interview with Kotaku, the game's creative director Johnny Galvatron said developer Beethoven and Dinosaur paid extra "to keep Mixtape's licenses up in perpetuity."

Publisher Annapurna reiterated the point on X, saying in a post: "We heard some people say Mixtape would be delisted due to music licenses expiring. That was a lie. Have a great weekend, everyone."

Granted, games get delisted for all sorts of reasons—this doesn't protect the game from all of those reasons forever—but at the very least, it shouldn't be down to Stan Bush's legal team refusing to renew rights for The Touch. It's an impressive feat considering that Mixtape has over two dozen licensed songs, some of which are big hits like Iggy Pop's "Candy" and DEVO's "That's Good."

Regardless of what you think of the game (PC Gamer staff writer Harvey Randall scored it a respectable 74% in his review, calling it "lovely, beautiful, [and] heartwarming," but also noting it was "unable to convince me it needed my input as a player at all"), confidence in long-term preservation seems like a win for everyone.

Black Mirror's Bandersnatch was an ambitious and slickly produced experiment in interactive TV, presenting an episode of the series in the form of a choose-your-own adventure with multiple possible storylines and endings.

Aunty Donna's Bandersketch is… well, a lot sillier. The popular Australian comedy group's parody version invites you to help them write a new sketch under a looming deadline, without getting distracted by lunch, Gangnam Style, or sudden unexpected death.

It's not quite as elaborate as I was hoping, but it's still well worth playing through to see how many bizarre game overs you can get. One of the choices you can make just sends you off on a 40-minute unskippable walk around Melbourne and you've got respect the sheer stupidity of that.

If you're not familiar with Aunty Donna, they do great work—not only producing their own sketch comedy, but also running Grouse House, a platform for other comedians in the Australian alternative comedy scene. I'm particularly fond of their excruciatingly impossible guessing game MUGG, which mines laughs out of what is essentially a series of mental breakdowns.

It's clear as well that games are a big inspiration for them—a previous video saw them playing through a live-action videogame that somehow turned into an excuse to drink an inadvisable amount of milkshakes.

Bandersketch seems to have been made to help promote their new Grouse House TV subscription service—very much following in the footsteps of Dropout in attempting to fund comedy videos away from YouTube. If you enjoy it, maybe check out what they've got on offer. If not… well, frankly, I hope YouTube sends an evil entity to steal your soul and add it to their collection of the damned.

All Will Rise is the only deck-builder I know of that can run on vibes alone.

It has complex rules—so many that it can feel overwhelming—but during its three-hour demo I simply played whichever card felt right. I pointed out an Oil Spill then Spoke For The River, asserted my Right To Sue, argued that the Media Is Biased (naturally), cleared my Crystalline Mind to make my cards more powerful, and ended up dancing with a god on hot coals as a frenzied crowd swayed as one.

It's interactive fiction at heart. Half the game is card "battles" spiked with reactive dialogue, the other is choice-based conversations set to lavish illustrations. It's written by Meghna Jayanth, of 80 Days, Sable and Thirsty Suitors, whose direct, lyrical style—"Oil-slicked birds and pearl-spot fish swing amongst the horrified crows, mangrove trees wrench their roots up to escape the flames"—splatters every screen.

It flickers with rage. Your ultimate goal is to build a strong enough deck to put an exec on trial for murdering a river, but alongside ecocide it confronts corporate greed, inequality, poverty, and corruption, sometimes all at once. It reflects the views and the real-world anger of its creators at "powerful people behaving with absolute ugliness and impunity", says Jayanth, who is narrative director on the project.

"The rage is the fuel in a way," says design director Hugo Bille, of Fe, Ultros, and Stick it to the Man. "And it's inescapable, and we expect a lot of our audience to feel it already. The game is not there to boost that, but more to address it, or to play with it."

It's also deliberately silly. It pokes fun at itself, at the left, at the climate activists and lawyers it venerates.

Between battles and missions that reward you with new cards, your group of three Indian volunteers banter and self-deprecate the absurdity of their "non-hierarchical workplace based on mutual co-operation and affinity". An NPC you meet tells you that "normal people don't find suing others very interesting", and one of the characters must periodically visit dad or face a guilt trip.

It's about finding joy and humour in the horror and corruption, Jayanth says. "Making something that is leftist, that is progressive in this way, you can just get put into the woke, liberal bucket. We really want to make sure that no, we're doing something a bit more interesting here."

The full game is expected later this year, but the Steam demo starts you in court, convincing a judge that a river should be treated like a person. Soon that river is dying and on fire, and you plot your murder case.

Each day you assign your volunteers to tasks throughout the Keralan city of Muziris, named after a real-world ancient port—you might cultivate a source in the local government, help locals clear up after an oil spill, or put on a play with local children. These tasks net you cards that Kuyili, a lawyer and the main character, can deploy during card battles.

And those battles are unlike anything else I've played before.

You share the board with your opponent—although that's a misnomer. Encounters can be combative, such as when you face the exec you intend to put on trial, but you're also playing with potential allies and friends. Together, you place cards to create a backwater of arguments, each claim flowing into the next.

"We break a couple of taboos in card games," says Bille. "You can only play cards next to other cards that make sense narratively, and those links are not printed on the cards in any way. It's in large part an intuitive thing, which is in a way anathema to the sort of extreme transparency that the card genre expects. But since we're also doing a narrative game, I think it meshes a lot better."

"The thing we really wanted to preserve," Jayanth says, "was that sense of back and forth conversation, and that you're building a shared narrative together."

My battle with Kottavai, a ritually-painted folk performer possessed by the river god, shows how loudly it can sing. Kottavai is mystical and unpredictable, dancing with abandon and unfocused eyes; we agree then argue, egging each other on before denying each other's key points. She laughs then ridicules me, declaring that strategic violence is the right path. I limp away having failed to gain her backing.

As well as forming narratives that might help your overarching goal, each card adds or subtracts from the three emotional energies of both you and your opponent: guts, hearts and minds. Drain one and you enter a "crisis", fill one and you go "on fire", and both states grant access to new cards. They can also change the story. For example, Jayanth says that if you can light the conspiracy-filled fisherman Shabeer's guts on fire he'll run for mayor, presumably with narrative implications.

And the strength of your cards, or claims, can be upgraded as supporting evidence arises, taking them from mere speculation to proven fact.

It's already a lot to hold in your head before you consider that the success of your arguments, and even who will talk to you, depends on a trust mechanic. You can earn trust by completing missions and delivering specific arguments in battles—you can also boost trust with powerful and unique rhetoric cards that have a range of effects.

And if you need to, denial cards wipe an opponent's card off the board, reversing its effects.

When I tell Bille I felt a little overwhelmed playing it, he doesn't seem concerned. The final game will ease players in gentler, he says, but the complexity is necessary because of the constant overlapping of mechanics and narrative.

"It's kind of the bare minimum that we need to convey the story. It is complex and it definitely threatens to be daunting, especially to the more narrative-minded audience. So we're aiming for something kind of like Baldur's Gate 3, where there are a lot of complex systems, but you don't necessarily need to interact deeply with all of them," he says.

"If you play it on vibes, it's still kind of narratively interesting," Jayanth says. "You will accidentally make some arguments and move forward. But there's a lot of richness … the more strategic you are at the game, the more complex the game becomes and the more of the game you see. I think it works really well."

The systems start to click as I near the end of my demo and, sure enough, when it's over I immediately feel compelled to start another so that I can revisit Kottavai and win her over using tactics I've learned. The full game will last around eight hours, Bille says, but I can imagine its branching narrative and mechanical complexity will reward multiple runs.

I'm intrigued to learn where the story goes. Jayanth hints that you'll be able to charm, persuade, or suborn Rishabh, the exec on trial, or remain his nemesis throughout. From talking to the developers I can't foresee many clean, unambiguous endings: while the game's roots are firmly in climate activism—most of its development team have been activists in one form or another—it is not trying to prescribe a specific message, Bille says.

Instead its goal, he says, is to "instil a sense of, other futures are possible and there are pathways to them", and perhaps even convince players that they can make a difference in the real world.

"Climate is often thought of as a crisis of imagination: it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism," he says. "Games are so well positioned to address that and to help open up people's imaginations about other potential futures and worlds."

It feels like a lofty goal, but Jayanth agrees: "It can open people up to the idea that the world doesn't have to be as it is," she says. "And actually that's one of the early lines of the game: 'Reality is more malleable than you think.' Your actions can make an impact."

She says that whenever she has dark days in the industry, she thinks about a player who told her that they were usually too shy to speak to strangers while on holiday, but that 80 Days inspired them to approach somebody in Istanbul and have a conversation.

"And that's a really small real-world change to take from the game. And it's not necessarily something that we prescribed for you, but it felt really beautiful," she says.

"It's the same here, we want to model a type of agency, or a way of looking at or being in the world more than anything else. The world is interesting and it's worth getting amongst it and trying to be in it."

So, Mixtape. In case you've been wisely keeping out of the loop, Mixtape released last week to a series of rave reviews online. I went ahead and played it, giving it a 74 in our Mixtape review (which I would like to take a moment to remind people is a good score) but it didn't connect with me in the same way as other reviewers.

Just rattling down the list, IGN gave it a 10 alongside VGC's five-star review. GameSpot gave it a nine, Nintendo Life gave it a nine—it's been critically well-received, is what I'm saying. Others, like our friends at GamesRadar+, gave it four stars. A little more in-line with the mixed bag I'd denoted it as.

Rather than a game simply being allowed to release and be somewhat divisive, however, Mixtape has found itself in the unenviable position of being wrapped up in another one of those tedious culture war things.

Rewind, repeat

Now, some critiques levelled are somewhat rooted in reasonable stances. Annapurna Interactive (which published the game, rather than developed it) was founded by Megan Ellison, the daughter of billionaire and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison—who, among other things (he is a billionaire) has been vocally and financially supportive of the Israeli Defense Forces.

If you don't want to put money towards Annapurna on those grounds then, hey—fair enough. I wouldn't resent anybody for doing that any more than I would, say, boycotting Microsoft over its business relationship with the Israeli government. Everyone has a right to decide where their money does and doesn't go.

What doesn't make sense to me are the accusations that this is evidence that Mixtape has somehow been astroturfed for positive reviews (Annapurna's listed as a publisher on the store page, this is all publicly available information), or, more bafflingly, that developer Beethoven & Dinosaur is somehow trying to be a "fake indie."

Speaking bluntly, I don't think that a game developer making zero effort to hide the fact they've got a publisher, in a game with a huge amount of expensive licensed music, can be reasonably accused of any sort of duplicity. Sometimes coming-of-age stories come from expensive places.

And, as ever, the "it's too woke!" Angles are also tedious. Particularly because Mixtape isn't even that socially progressive, and I'm saying that as someone with more pronouns than productive follicles on my head. Stacy Rockford is clearly bi-curious (there's even a compelling argument that she's just gay, given the disaster of her first and only kiss with a boy) though her sexuality is never "explicitly" confirmed.

The closest Mixtape comes to making a point on social issues is in Morino's relationship with her dad—he's a strict cop and, the game implies, a second-generation immigrant who grew up in 1950s America. This is something the story nudges at, but Morino's resolution with her dad happens almost entirely off-screen aside from her initial blow-up moment, and it's less of a focal point than Rockford's parting with Slater.

No, I don't think Mixtape's been astroturfed, or that the praise for it is insincere. What I think is occurring has more to do with the kind of game that Mixtape is. It's what makes it interesting, but it's also what means I might give it a 74 while IGN calls it a "Masterpiece".

Mixtape's a game about nostalgia. That's it. That's as complicated as it gets.

Good old days

I'm not saying it's "nostalgia bait" or "nostalgiaslop" or whatever nuance-stripping label someone might hypothetically slap on it. I mean to say that it is a story about nostalgia, and stories about nostalgia are, to state the obvious, allowed to exist.

Mixtape is a videogame that'll either speak directly to your heart, or it'll clash with your lived experiences. There's an argument to be made that it's deliberately saccharine—a representation of a fantastical '90s suburban America so idealistic that it borders on, and could even be read as, a heartfelt parody.

I, for one, am from the UK, but I also had a much less wild and wonderful teenage experience. My late teens were characterised by cosy house parties with cider our parents bought us just so they knew where we'd be chundering (told you I was from the UK). As a result, Mixtape only charmed me insofar as I think it's a beautiful, lovely little character drama. One that pulled some laughs and "awws" out of me.

Other reviewers might think differently, and that's kind of the point. I'm not sitting here secretly grinding my teeth because I don't think it's a masterpiece and IGN's Simon Cardy does. Just as I'm not letting my blood pressure rise at scathing criticism of the thing—some of it's even very fun to read.

In other words, some disparity between what you think of a game and what a reviewer might say about it, or a disagreement between outlets, is not the sign of some broader conspiracy.

I think the spread of reviews for Mixtape are exactly a consequence of the kind of game it is, of the nostalgia it's trying to capture—that some people think it's an all-time great, and that some (like me) think it's just okay? That's about as shocking as finding a fork in a kitchen.

"Mixtape is a good movie." That's the only thought I had rattling around in my head as I—and this is part of the problem—played Mixtape.

This isn't an issue for me because I'm some understimulated capital-g gamer that needs a constant feed of dopamine to feel something, but because I think our medium can, broadly speaking, do more interesting things with itself.

Published by Annapurna Interactive and developed by Beethoven & Dinosaur, Mixtape is a '90s nostalgia trip that sees you playing music enthusiast and imminent high school graduate Stacy Rockford, who is friends with the emotionally centered chill dude Van Slater and Cassandra Morino, who herself languishes under the thumb of a deeply strict cop dad.

It's a coming-of-age teen drama set to a superb soundtrack that's delivered diegetically via Stacy, who'll look to the camera and dispense charming Anderson-esque dialogues looping us into the tracks themselves. Stacy curated this mixtape for a perfect last day—she's going to New York to pursue her dreams, leaving Slater and Cass in the lurch because they had a roadtrip planned. Bummer.

I'm only harsh on Mixtape, because what it does well is deeply distracted by its need to make me push buttons sometimes. Removed from its context as a videogame, Mixtape is an absolutely gorgeous, darling passion project. It's sharply-written, and by the end of its swift three-hour runtime, I found myself deeply charmed by Stacy and her trio of misfits.

Tuning in

Mixtape dodges the "Life is Strange" issue of trying to make them all sound appropriately youth-like with effusive slang. Like most teenagers, Stacy and her crew are far smarter than the adults around them give them credit for—they have deep conversations about the existential horrors of entering the big, bad world. They're good kids, about as messy and as reckless as you're meant to be.

Meet the cast of Mixtape

This vision of a '90s nostalgia bath really takes off in segments where the fabric of reality frays, and we see the world through a teenager's imagination. A betrayal from a friend sends you into a drifting fugue state where you float lazily through a monochrome world until you're curled up in your bed; a romp around an abandoned theme park comes to life as you talk nonsense on the back of a stegosaurus witnessing the end of the dinosaurs; a sports stadium erupts with phantom crowds as you find out the girl you've got a crush on is really good at softball.

The onset of nostalgia is a great touch, too. Young Rockford is constantly drifting off into charming vignette flashbacks, pre-empting the post high school malaise that's normally meant to hit in your mid 20s. You can tell that Mixtape was made with an enduring and burning love of the '90s, of the messiness of adolescence, of the impermanence of youth.

But I need to stick to my guns here and say that I don't think it's a particularly notable videogame—not because there wasn't enough action to keep my little thumbs sore and my number-go-up brain motivated, but because Mixtape only occasionally uses the medium itself to its advantage.

Unharmonized

Disconnected from any nostalgia for the 90s, Mixtape is a gorgeous coming-of-age story that's interrupted by a series of minigames and walkabout sections.

There are a few stand-outs that I think work perfectly to sell a feeling—like a disgusting tongue-slathering session that properly reflects the biological awkwardness of teenage kissing—but most of the time you're either skating with rudimentary controls that drag on just a little too long, or walking around and interacting with stuff.

My problem isn't that these mechanical interludes aren't exciting enough, rather, I think Mixtape is only passingly interested in the power that interactivity can bring to stories. I didn't need this game to give me a high score and a skill tree, or even to offer me multiple choices—I needed its interactivity to draw me in as much as the writing, direction, and soundtrack did.

In a three-hour runtime, I can think of exactly two moments in which I felt like the inclusion of my hands had actually pulled me deeper into the story. One of them was that kissing scene, the other happens right at the end as Rockford starts a new chapter of her life.

That's not a very good batting average, and (speaking of), sometimes these mandatory minigames yanked me right out of the narrative. I kept messing up the softball minigame, which was meant to drive home how good Cass is at a sport she doesn't even really care about—a key establishing beat of her character, completely spoiled by my fumbling.

And while it's enjoyable to, say, see just how many parade floats you can bump into during Rockford's heartbreak scene, or stumble through entire racks of movies in a drunken fugue state as Slater, the impulse to do so isn't really an indication that I'm being absorbed by the narrative as much as it is a chance for me to muck around with a physics engine.

Sometimes, Mixtape gets it right, but repeats the same trick enough times that it horseshoes back around to getting it wrong: There are a few teen spirit flying sessions that are absolutely gorgeous and capture the feeling of liberation at first glance, but by the second time you're put in one, you realise it's on rails which… isn't how freedom works.

See you tomorrow

I point this out not as a blithe little gotcha, but because it's indicative of Mixtape's entire issue: Mixtape fights with its existence as a videogame more than it benefits from it. I kept thinking to myself 'Man, I would probably be more invested in this if I could just sit back and take it all in.'

Instead, Mixtape interrupts itself to invite you to see how much destruction you can wreak while moving a sofa, or to skim a rock, or to meticulously sweep leaves out of a painted video-gamey circle on the ground.

Rockford is obsessed with perfectly matching music to the moment, and for Mixtape to be an all-timer, it needed to do the same with its mechanical interludes—to be as clever as its script or visual direction is at a design level. A few standout moments isn't gonna cut it, you need to play hit after hit.

I am by no means rallying against the concept of a "walking simulator", or even a game where interactivity is minimal—What Remains of Edith Finch is a good counter-example. The cannery uses the monotony of repeatedly beheading fish, juxtaposes it with an increasingly-detailed adventure that bleeds into the foreground. You're forced to do both, right up until the fantasy world completely consumes the real.

It justifies the inclusion of those game mechanics by using them to drive home a story. But there's no cannery moment in Mixtape, no masterstroke that suddenly makes the fact I'm pushing buttons feel contributive.

If you want a dose of liquid '90s nostalgia with excellent character writing, sharp direction, a killer soundtrack, and a charming sense of wonder? Mixtape is three hours of exactly that. But it's not going to change the way you think about videogames, and it hasn't left me feeling like my input served any real purpose or helped reel me into the (otherwise very lovely) story it was telling.

In another b-side universe, there's a version of Mixtape where every moment of interactivity is built to pull you into a specific feeling, not just a scant handful. Maybe tomorrow someone'll nail it, just not today.

Mina the Hollower was announced in 2022 and originally slated to launch the following year. It's a top-down adventure in the style of older Zelda games, and as far as I can tell there's no grand twist: it's a very orthodox take on the genre, just as Shovel Knight was for the NES-era platformer. The same developer, Yacht Club Games, is responsible for both.

The star attraction is the pixel art, which wends very closely to 8-bit orthodoxy, but does so with modern smoothness and fluency. When it hit Kickstarter in 2022, Bloodborne was mentioned as an inspiration, and it's definitely true that Mina the Hollower looks more Castlevania than it does Link's Awakening. Whatever the case, I'm excited to play it.

And it won't be long before I do: Mina the Hollower, after a storied history of last-minute delays, is finally hitting Steam on May 29.

Yacht Club Games confirmed as much on X with a brief vertical video showing Mina—the mousy protagonist—in a series of volatile situations: elevated by a column of rushing water, nearly stomped by a giant brain, and shooting electrical currents at various baddies.

"Prepare yourself for one of the greatest top-down adventures ever to be delivered directly to your soul for less than 20 bucks," the post reads, confirming the price.

Development of Mina the Hollower hasn't been smooth sailing: it's been in development since 2020, but the Covid-19 pandemic proved problematic, as did the ensuing post-Covid industry crash. It really needs to be a hit. "It’s make-or-break for sure," Velasco said. "If we sold 500,000 copies, then we would be golden," studio founder Cris Velsaco said late last year. "If we sold even 200,000, that would be really, really great. If we sold, like, 100,000, that’s not so good."

It's a pretty safe time to release an indie: the second half of May is very quiet save for 007 First Light.

If you're a vampire, you know the two most beautiful words in the English language: free blood. And if you caught the recent Assassin's Creed: Black Flag Resynced reveal and were left uneasy by the lack of cherry syrup, you'll be extra pleased to know that blood is coming, and it will be free.

Producer at Ubisoft Singapore Justin Ng took to X to get in front of fan concerns that the game's violence had been toned down. In a post Thursday, he said "A few things to quickly address I guess (without getting into trouble hopefully). There WILL be blood in the final game, and it will not be a paid DLC. We hear the feedback on the VFX and audio cues on fights. It's being toned down."

If you're wondering where this is coming from, players have voiced concerns on social media this past week, worrying that the new game's combat might have a squeaky-clean sheen. Reddit user decimus_87 said of the reveal, "I hope they get rid of or at least change the cartoony sparks during fighting." In a reply on the same thread, Minute_Tomorrow_7935 commented "I hope they add blood. Shadows has quite satisfying blood animations so it seems odd if they've fully removed that from this game."

While it's impossible to appraise the full game from some brief footage, it seems natural that people are scrutinizing the fights. An overhaul to combat is one of the remake's big selling points, so without a multiplayer revival to round things out (yes, I'm bitter about it, can't you tell?), it's hard to say how appealing Resynced will be without some top shelf sword-swinging.

Ng assured fans further down in the aforementioned X thread that non-combat systems should feel familiar, too. When asked if social stealth would be back, Ng simply said "It's still there. #Faithful." It should be welcome news to any fans of AC's swashbucklingest entry.

And while it might sound ridiculous to even suggest that blood might come in the form of a paid DLC, there is certainly precedent.

In The Simpsons: Treehouse of Horror X segment 'Life's a Glitch, Then you Die', Homer fails to fix the Y2K problem in the computers of Springfield's Nuclear Power Plant, triggering the apocalypse. The segment features some of my favourite Simpsons gags, like Krusty's pacemaker getting stuck on hummingbird mode, and Homer's plaintive cry of "Oh no, Rosie O'Donnell!" inside the rocket ship full of B-listers as it cruises toward immolation in the sun.

Incredibly, Life's a Glitch is not the only work of fiction in which Homer's voice actor Dan Castellenetta grapples with the Y2K problem. There is another, and some might say more culturally significant, artwork featuring both the world's most famous voice actor and narrowly averted digital Armageddon. Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce Y2K: The Game, the greatest and, indeed, only game specifically about the Millennium Bug ever made.

Why am I digging up this PC gaming fossil? Well, I've been thinking a lot about the Millennium bug lately. This is partly because I am 38 years old, and the idea of being 13 years old again grows more appealing with every passing day. But it's also because the Y2K problem represents a time when computer experts worked to save the world, rather than going out of their way to make it worse as today's tech magnates seem hellbent on doing.

Anyway, I was curious whether the tech anxieties of the late nineties had been addressed directly in video game form. Turns out the answer is "not really", but Y2K: The Game wins by default.

Y2K: The Game sees you play as Buster, a sentient white pudding squeezed into a university lecturer's jacket who, prior to the game's commencement, just so happens to have won the lottery. With his winnings, he buys a mansion which just so happens to have been owned by a recently deceased robotics genius, who just so happens to have filled his mansion with all manner of computer gizmos and talking automata. Oh, and Buster just so happens to move into his new digs on New Year's Eve, 1999.

Any story premise that involves this many layers of happenstance probably needs a rework, by which I mean setting fire to the script and starting again. But developer Runecraft sallies boldly forth with this bizarre jumble of nonsense. As Buster collapses onto his bed in a stupor induced by a $100 bottle of wine, the clock strikes midnight. Immediately, Buster's freshly acquired smart house loses 500 IQ points and turns evil. The game represents this through the computer's voice switching from a cool, detached HAL 9000 intonation to an aggressive caricature of a Noo Yoik dialect.

Your sole objective in Y2K is to patch out the Millennium Bug from the supercomputer that runs the house. The challenge in achieving this derives from the fact that Buster's house makes no sense whatsoever. Imagine if the island from Myst was lifted out of the ocean by a gigantic tsunami, then driven into the Spencer Mansion from Resident Evil at a speed so fast the two instantly fused together.

If you think I'm exaggerating, here's a brief rundown of spaces you can explore in Y2K: The Game.

• A room filled with ancient relics
• An elevator with the score for three blind mice etched into the wall, and elevator music that is not three-blind mice
• A dining room with three AI-powered stuffed animal heads who speak in British accents (including a rhinoceros referred to as 'The Colonel')
• A basement housing a recycling robot that gets so angry at Buster for not bringing trash for it to recycle that it tries to kill him (this robot also has a New York accent)
• A dungeon prowled by a murderous robotic executioner, which is somehow less aggressive than the recycling robot (accent not specified)

I will say that the pre-rendered backgrounds and robot animations are quite detailed for 1999, even if it is all wholly incoherent. Unfortunately, the thing you look at the most—Buster—is also the least visually appealing part in the game, a slouching, shuffling blob so offputtingly pasty he looks like he stepped out of a Softmints advert.

In fact, calling it "shuffling" is probably generous. Even if everything else about Y2K: The Game was brilliant, it would still be interminable simply because Buster is so. Goddamn. Slow. He's such a tortoise that, if a solution to a puzzle suddenly clicks into place for you, you should write it down, because there is a non-zero chance you will have forgotten it by the time Buster arrives at his destination.

There are two things I like about Y2K: The Game, the first is, obviously, the voice acting. Castellaneta puts the effort in, and he isn't the only heavy-hitting voice actor in Y2K either. Candace is played by Grey DeLisle—only a year into her career at this point—with other actors including Danny Mann and John Mariano. Unfortunately, they are all let down by a weak script riddled with non-liners such as "I'm glad I'm smart enough to use the extension cord" and "Like Candace says, you'll never know when you'll need some batteries!"

Comfortably the best thing in the game, though, is the music. Every room has its own specific theme, each of which is so much more artistically accomplished than anything contained in the room itself. The antiques room, for example, is accompanied by a sitar-led melody that's quintessentially adventure game. One corridor theme wouldn't be out of place on a Pure Moods CD, while Corridor 3 starts like Laura Palmer's theme and slides into some Tangerine Dream. And then there's the music for the dining room, which could happily accompany a boss fight in a Souls game. I repeat, this is for a dining room.

Even the elevator music sucks in exactly the way elevator music is supposed to suck. I was going to suggest that composers Craig Beattie and Matt Sugden deserve more credit for their work here. But to be honest, what they really deserve is for Y2K: The Game to be much better than it actually is.

At the same time, it's hard to get mad at Y2K. It completely wastes its premise, but it's so absurd and goofy that it stumbles inadvertently into being oddly charming. It's also short enough that even Buster's ponderous gait doesn't extend the running time that much.

It also makes me wonder what the developers of today would do with the Y2K premise if it was in any way marketable. I imagine we'd end up with some kind of Sam Barlow-esque detective game where you're chasing the bug through a labyrinth of computer files, stumbling upon narratively enlightening notes and documents as you go. It's either that or a hero shooter. This is the games industry, after all.

Star Trek: Resurgence released in May 2023, and by all reports it's a decent narrative-driven adventure in the style of older Telltale Games. Our reviewer called it "the perfect mash-up of dramatic Star Trek storytelling and Telltale-style decision making". If that sounds appealing to you, then you'd better act fast, because it's about to be delisted forever.

Spotted by BlueSky user LewieP, the announcement was made on Steam with very little fanfare. Worse, the short note doesn't even specify an exact date for when the delisting will happen, which is presumably not today because it's still available at time of writing.

"Our license to distribute Star Trek: Resurgence has come to an end, so the game will no longer be offered for sale," the announcement reads. "Existing customers can continue to access the game via their Steam library. Thanks to everyone who was able to enjoy the game! LLAP!"

I've reached out to publisher Bruner House for more details on whether the license might be renewed in the future.

As for the game's exact delisting date, I'd hazard a guess it'll be May 23, or in other words, exactly three years after its initial May 23, 2023 release date. It didn't come to Steam until 2024 due to an Epic Games Store exclusivity period (remember those?). That said, users on Reddit and Resetera are reporting that the Xbox version of the game has already been delisted.

Star Trek games do tend to have a short shelf life: Star Trek: Bridge Crew lasted five years before it was delisted. And remember that poorly received Star Trek third-person shooter from 2013? Gone just three years after its launch, never to return (though I'm surprised to discover that some grey market key sellers still have it). Never fear though: there are still heaps of Star Trek games on Steam, including Interplay's classic FMV-laden Starfleet Academy, and the ye olde 1992 point 'n' click adventure.

Resurgence was developed by Dramatic Labs, which was founded by former Telltale Games CEO Kevin Bruner, among other alumni from the studio responsible for The Walking Dead, A Wolf Among Us and much more. The publisher was Bruner House, founded by Kevin Bruner. Neither concern has announced a new game following Resurgence's 2023 release.

Find Your Words is a heartwarming adventure game that pushed me to discover new means of communication with my fellow campers, and it's made me realise how much I've been taking standard dialogue for granted. When you're clicking through screens and screens of dialogue and picking responses and options that are listed on the screen, you don't think twice. But, Find Your Words helps you to slow down and appreciate how even the most basic conversation can lead to a friendship.

At the start of the game, once you've picked your character, you're dropped off at a sunny camp—appropriately called Camp Pals—by your mum. As she speaks to the camp counsellor, it's revealed that your character is non-speaking, so usually communicates with sounds and gestures rather than words. The counsellor, Ian, is quick to accommodate this, reassuring you that other members of the camp are also non-speaking and giving you a Communication Binder, and your first few binder symbols, to help you interact with the other campers.

This binder is your key to conversation. To make it easier to navigate, it's divided into four sections: your core phrases, places around the camp, items you pick up along the way, and your fellow campers. Using this binder, you can go around speaking to everyone and asking them to play. To trigger a conversation you need to drag the symbols you want to use into the bar at the bottom before presenting them to your conversation partner.

The more time you spend with different characters, the more symbols you collect, so at first conversation does feel limited. But that's exactly what I think Find Your Words is trying to represent: the challenges of not being able to converse as expected and instead thinking outside the box to communicate in ways that would often be seen as unconventional.

Fortunately, everyone is more than willing to adjust to this at Camp Pals, which is certainly a feeling I appreciated, having struggled at times to use the right symbols to get the answer I wanted. The "play" symbol is the key here anyway. After all, you're a kid at a summer camp—playing is what you're there to do. Asking every character to play is what pushes you through Find Your Words.

Each of the six campers has a different "minigame" for you, like trivia, hide and seek, a treasure hunt, and most importantly for me: bird watching. They each make use of the skills you've learnt and the symbols you've picked up during the day, such as locations, and a few of the item cards you'll discover.

Birdwatching particularly stood out to me, not only as an avid birdwatcher anyway, but because it really challenges your knowledge of the map. You're given a pair of binoculars and told to report back to your pal and tell them what bird you saw and where you saw it. The different locations aren't exactly signposted, apart from the obvious landmarks like the lodge, the tower, and the board, which meant I definitely mentioned the wrong location an embarrassing number of times. But this trial and error is all part of the charm, and you're never punished for making the wrong choice which is more than enough motivation for me to try again.

As you spend more time with your fellow campers, you'll unlock new symbols too, which does make conversation easier. In a way, this feels symbolic of the playable character coming out of their shell and wanting to be more involved with their games. The same goes for how it feels playing the game too, as I started feeling a little unsure if what I was doing and how I was using the symbols was technically correct, but by the end I was far more confident in how I could communicate.

As a result, I felt a sort of bond with my chosen camper in a way I really didn't expect to. Find Your Words doesn't need to be driven by dialogue to make it an emotional journey about coming out of your shell, in fact it's quite the opposite, but the ways it pushes you to explore a world of words you might not have any experience in otherwise is what makes it a game I will think about for a while.

With Life is Strange: Reunion recently wrapping up the decade-long story of Max Caulfield and Chloe Price, I've spent the last couple of weeks thinking a lot about the game that started it all. 2015's Life is Strange came during a hugely formative time in my life—going through some big changes, returning to college after a three-year gap and in that stage of life where you realise you don't actually have everything figured out the second you leave school.

I would wait up until ungodly hours waiting for its next episode to drop, desperate for just a few hours more of Max's rewind powers and Chloe's bombastic personality. Seriously, I stayed up until 4am waiting for the second episode to actually hit the PlayStation store. I was truly a sicko for this game.

More than its janky dialogue (I will forever remind you the lines "welcome to the moshpit, shaka brah" and "go fuck yourselfie" exist), and even more than its heartbreaking tale of queer love and teenagehood, the thing that has stuck with me in Life is Strange is its music.

I do a lot of yapping about original scores in videogames, but I don't do nearly as much about all of the work that goes behind hand-plucking licensed tracks—though I wrote about BioShock's excellent use of real-world music as a narrative tool, if you're interested.

That's partly because licensed music in videogames was largely utilised for immersion purposes. Think ripping guitar to your favourite metal tracks in Guitar Hero, or tuning into a radio in Grand Theft Auto to tracks befitting of each game's era and setting. Or they simply existed to be cool, like the absolute mountain of licensed music in sports and racing games.

But when episodic videogames boomed in popularity in the mid-2010s, the place licensed music had in them felt distinctly different. Spreading one videogame into five or six instalments made them feel more like a TV show, which meant that their music was used in a similar manner. I think a lot about the way Scrubs utilised its music choice to perfection: using tracks like The Fray's How to Save a Life to punctuate emotional moments, or even the revival's most recent episode making use of Jamiroquai's Virtual Insanity for a silly cold open sequence.

Got Well Soon

Developers like Telltale were using licensed music like a TV show to absolute perfection. Picking tracks to open up episodes and set their tone excellently—Tales from the Borderlands is my favourite example of this, especially the episode they open up with Jungle's Busy Earnin'.

But to me, no game does it better than Life is Strange. Despite the fact that it sometimes feels like Dontnod is an alien being told what American high school life is like (the developer is French, so I can't be too harsh) it managed to tie everything together with its music choice.

Walking Max through the halls of Blackwell Academy while Syd Matters crooned "to all of you American girls…" was the pinnacle of indie, coming-of-age movie chic. It immediately clued me into what type of game I was getting into: an unapologetically dramatic teenage adventure, surprisingly grounded despite leaning heavily on supernatural elements.

Life is Strange uses tons of this sort of moody or cosy indie rock. Distorted acoustic guitars, sad men, angsty men. A vibe that feels authentic even when deeply manufactured. An experimental vibe. Just some sad people making sad music in their sad studio. But that experimental flavour fit so perfectly with Life is Strange, a game that also felt like Dontnod figuring stuff out.

The game's excellent soundtrack choices culminate in the very final song, Foals' Spanish Sahara. A song so incredibly loaded with angst and emotion that I genuinely couldn't imagine a more fitting ending track. It works no matter the choices you've made—whether you're attending funerals, driving away from a town destroyed, or reflecting on things you could have done better. It's a song so good and so encapsulating of the game that current series developer Deck Nine brought it back for Reunion, if you come face-to-face with the Dead Timeline Chloe.

I think that subsequent Life is Strange games have some pretty stellar song selections, too—I got very giddy hearing Girl in Red's I'll Die Anyway towards the beginning of Reunion—but nothing will ever come close to how meticulously curated the first game's soundtrack felt. Scrappy, emotional, and heartfelt. Just like the very game each song starred in.

You've been playing 1000xResist for half a dozen chapters, enjoying changes in perspective and mechanics with each chapter shift. Yet the sudden jump to video still feels unusual when it happens—recorded footage of Hong Kong suddenly taking the place of a cutscene in the middle of the game. As creative director Remy Siu says, that decision came about "really out of desperation."

Sunset Visitor, the studio behind 1000xResist, was founded by performers with backgrounds in the arts. Siu just happened to have some footage for a documentary product that turned out to perfectly fill a gap in his game project. "It's like, oh, let me reach into my archives and see what I have."

When the studio began thinking about the follow-up project that would eventually become Prove You're Human, a game about convincing an AI she's not a real person, they identified FMV as a useful thing to be proficient in. "Like, we feel comfortable doing lots of voiceover, because that's where we think we can make an interesting contribution," Sui says. "We're making very narrative-forward games, largely because we think that's where we can make a special contribution. And these full-motion videos and film things, that's something I think we can continue to explore."

In Prove You're Human, players embody a digital copy who has been downloaded into a virtual world to interact with an artificial intelligence—meanwhile, the original person is out there living her best life thanks to the payout she was given for consenting to be copied. That half of the game is depicted in video.

FMV may have a bad name in some circles, but there are plenty of indie studios looking past the reputation it was given by games like Mad Dog McCree (which we gave a score of 4% in our review back in the day). Games from Her Story to the flood of Asian dating sims on Steam show there's room for all kinds of videogame storytelling that involves putting actors in front of cameras.

"There's a lot of exciting movement in that direction right now," says Tony Howard-Arias of Black Tabby Games, who are publishing Prove You're Human. "I mean, Immortality was a handful of years ago. I really enjoyed Road to Empress last year, which was a Chinese choice-driven FMV game that was exploring a historical empress in a very dramatized fashion."

"It was so high-budget," adds his partner Abby Howard. "The locations were crazy."

Though FMV has risen from the grave, it's still not that common, even in the narrative games space. "It's something that as a genre, I do think we get to jump in there and put our own little stamp on it," Siu says. "And it made a lot of sense for the kind of science fiction scenario that we're in in this game, where there's a very clear split between the physical world and the virtual world."

Prove You're Human will be available on Steam.

Ursula K. Le Guin once said, "Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive." Sci-fi is about today as much as it's about tomorrow, and behind all its clones and aliens and time machines are metaphors for the times those stories were written in. Looking back at 1000xResist, the first game from indie studio Sunset Visitor, it's easy to see its story about the sole survivor of an epidemic cloning an entire society as being about Covid isolation. Sunset Visitor announced its latest game at the Triple-i Initiative showcase, and the contemporary issue it's grappling with is AI.

Now is an interesting time to be writing about the imaginary artificial intelligence of the future, when the people trying to sell us on AI are relying on the version of AI we're familiar with from science fiction to paper over the reality they're actually hawking. Which is mostly just chatbots who can help you summarize your reports or video calls.

"There's a very long tradition of science fiction storytelling that engages with artificial intelligence," says Remy Sui, creative director of Sunset Visitor, whose next game, Prove You're Human, is set to join their ranks. "All of that tradition is something that we want to contribute to—but specifically in this time, when working in that space crashes right into the very real and dank experience of some of these things actualizing in 2026 in one way or another."

In Prove You're Human, you're hired by a corporation working on artificial general intelligence, because they have a problem. Their groundbreaking new artificial intelligence called Mesa thinks she's human. It's your job to convince her she's not.

"This exact pitch, this exact game presented 10 years ago, reads very differently as the same thing presented now," says Tony Howard-Arias of Black Tabby, which is publishing Prove You're Human. "I think there's this instinct before this current era of generative AI being shoved down everyone's throats, of sympathies, right?"

The example he gives is of the 2013 Spike Jonze movie Her, in which Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with an AI operating system voiced by Scarlett Johansson. "If you watch it when it first releases there is an immediate compassion and empathy for the humanity of this fictional character," Howard-Arias says. "The entire language of the film changes in the present moment. I rewatched it a year ago, just in the context of current events, and my reaction the whole time was, 'Oh, my God, this guy is in love with a fake chatbot that's mirroring things back at him.'"

Black Tabby Games is an indie studio as well, having released the narrative games Slay the Princess and Scarlet Hollow. They're careful to clarify that generative AI wasn't used to make Prove You're Human, and that as publishers they wouldn't work with a developer that used it. "Tony and I, we have a very hard line about AI that's for sure," says Abby Howard, the other half of Black Tabby. "But I also think that talking about it should not be forbidden."

1000xResist left plenty of room for its audience to interpret things, and Prove You're Human will likewise explore its theme as a conversation with its players. "For us, it really was just to look at labor, the way in which nuance and ambiguity and continuity can be lost, the way in which we're asked to make choices that we don't always want to make," Siu says. "Yeah, all of these things. I guess just being alive in 2026, you know?"

Prove You're Human will be available on Steam.

An easy way to feel insecure as a Pokopia player is to just hop onto Reddit and see all the spectacular creations other players are cooking up. There are some seriously impressive builds to be seen, like Resident Evil 2's RPD.

My favourite so far is a Cyberpunk underground city by Pokopia player No-Communication7040. Heading into an elevator, the doors suddenly open to reveal a huge underground Cyberpunk dystopia. Complete with neon lights and TV screens everywhere, you could fool me that I was actually stepping into Night City or even perhaps Sanabi as another player suggested.

Pokopia Cyberpunk Underground City from r/Pokopia

Creations like this make me wonder if there's actually some secret creative mode in Pokopia, but in reality it's just hard work and having the help of Magnemite's Magnet Rise ability. No-Communication7040 revealed that they've spent 260 hours so far in Pokopia, since the game's launch on March 5.

One equally impressed onlooker figured out that this means No-Communication7040 has spent almost "the same amount of time inside the game as outside" and that if you add in eight hours for sleeping and two hours for eating each day that just leaves a total of 48 hours to do anything else, not a lot of time.

Others are just plain confused how this is even possible for one player to create: "This game has me convinced I'm one of the least creative people on the planet". While another player simply says: "I swear to god you people aren’t human! This is absurd even if it ends just beyond what we see in the video." For context, I've only just tidied up Bleak Beach and am currently up to my neck in volcanic ash, god help me.

Meanwhile, another Pokopia player managed to turn Rocky Ridges into the Raccoon City, including the Raccoon City Police department, complete with a sleeping Machamp who's passed out in the corner of the building.

There seems to be no limit to how creative you can be in Pokopia, and as time passes players will only create bigger and better builds. You could probably recreate Stardew Valley's Pelican Town pretty easily in the Withered Wasteland or maybe even Delfino Plaza from Mario Sunshine in Bleak Beach, although I'll leave that task to a more skilled player than myself.

We will never get a game quite like 2015's Life is Strange ever again. Ready for the mosh pit, shaka brah? Go fuck yourselfie? I was eating those beans, are you fucking insane? I was eating… those BEANS!? Iconic. Equally as cringe a decade ago as they are now, but it just worked. A small, relatively unknown French studio doing its best to hella capture the essence of American high school life.

At the core of it all was the game's two main characters: Max Caulfield and Chloe Price. Specifically, their relationship (as sapphic or platonic as you well wish) and the ravelling and unravelling of a single week together as Max's newly-unlocked rewind power danced along the timeline of their lives. All of this culminates in the choice for Max to either save their hometown at the expense of Chloe's life, or defy fate forever and see Arcadia Bay destroyed.

Life is Strange is a game that, despite its shortcomings, was an incredibly earnest and heartwrenching tale of teenagehood, tragedy, and consequence. A perfect storm.

One which Deck Nine—who has developed all but one Life is Strange game since Don't Nod's initial debut—has spent the last two years trying to recreate. First with Double Exposure, which brought Max back with new friends, romance options, and time-adjacent powers to explore.

It was a tough job narratively, one I personally found serviceable enough as a staunch Bay over Bae chooser. But it was one which upset many of Pricefield's fans, who felt their decision to save Chloe over Arcadia Bay was minimised. Reduced to a relationship that had drifted apart over a decade, nary a text or occasional hookup to be seen. Something that, to me, feels rather realistic, especially as someone who has journeyed through these games the same age as these two women. But this is also a videogame with magical rewind powers, we can loosen up a little.

And now we're here with Life is Strange: Reunion, the first game to feature Max and Chloe side-by-side since that very first outing 11 years ago. A game that is so clearly Deck Nine's desperate attempt to claw back any good grace with the Pricefield enjoyers that it comes at the expense of every narrative beat set up at the end of Double Exposure, and reduces almost every supporting character to a prop in service of setting up and moving along moments between my two OGs.

Reunited and it feels… okay

This is coming from a fellow Pricefield enjoyer, mind. Did I foolishly direct my romantic interests towards Warren in my very first playthrough of Life is Strange all those years ago? Sure, but I've long since seen the light.

I'm also someone who has never wavered in my decision to sacrifice Chloe. Not all stories have a happy ending. It gives the original game so much more emotional weight, and makes Max's reunion with her in this one far more interesting. A person that she's spent a decade grieving, carving a space out in her heart for, suddenly standing in front of her. It's an incredibly poignant moment—and I admittedly welled up a little when Foals' Spanish Sahara started playing, a reminder of the choice both myself and Max made all those years ago.

The scene gave me high hopes for what Reunion was going to deliver. I'd anticipated fan service and manufactured cutesy Pricefield moments, sure. And they're certainly there. But in pursuit of them, Deck Nine forgot about everything else.

Reunion feels like two stories. The one Deck Nine originally wanted to tell, and the one it felt it had to. The foundations laid with Double Exposure's ending have been demolished. Where I expected Safi's quest to find other people with powers like herself and Max, she instead stropped around campus, hiding her real self in favour of shapeshifting as students and faculty. She toes the line of being interesting—criticising Max's reckless power usage, blind to her love for Chloe to see any external damage she's causing. To Safi included.

Instead it's a bunch of passive-aggressive comments (I rejected her plea for support at the end of Double Exposure, my bad I guess!) that lead nowhere, before the end of the game ties everything up in an incredibly sloppy bow and has her back to her old self.

Where Diamond's nosebleed had hinted towards further cool power-related character development, she's actually entirely absent from Reunion. Relegated to a single (optional) phone call at the very end of the game.

It's all shafted in favour of a mysterious fire that sees the demise of Max's nouveau bestie Moses. And, once again, Chloe. It's admittedly another interesting premise, but one that goes nowhere in Reunion. The eventual climax to who is responsible is awful and nonsensical. A culprit given diabolically little screentime and character development, which makes the reveal a total nothing burger.

But hey! Chloe and Max get to go out on the lake in a little boat at sunset and wax lyrical about their time together as teens. And break into stuff just like they used to. And hold hands. And finally share a little reunion smooch.

They're important moments, don't get me wrong. Ones I loved. But I couldn't help but feel like Deck Nine was carefully tip-toeing towards me to present them. Pricefield kisses in one hand, a white flag waving back and forth in the other.

For me, Reunion's most interesting narrative moments don't even involve Max. Chloe and Moses, and their interactions, are the star of the game. For starters, Moses is perhaps the only Double Exposure character who doesn't feel completely gutted—probably because he fits nice and neatly into Reunion's story—but his dynamic with Chloe is where I got to see the biggest indication of her character growth. Where I get the biggest sense of the kind of woman she's become over on the "alive Chloe" timeline.

And then I'm taken back to a poorly woven story. Attempts to intertwine Safi and Chloe's shared situation. Haphazardly slotting together a fire that has nothing to do with either of them, while also exploring and bringing a critical lens to Max's rewinding, and simultaneously figuring out how to bring it all back to the two who started it all.

Unfortunately, I'm not sold on it. I will always love Max and Chloe, but the characters Deck Nine crafted for Double Exposure deserved better. It's not entirely the developer's fault—the studio is far smaller than it was for the previous game, and I would bet there was a whole lot of narrative pivoting that took place before Reunion's release which has led to a sloppy final product. I just wish Pricefield's farewell had been given the time and care it deserved.

Peak was one of the surprise successes of last year. What was originally meant as just a simple game jam project turned into a huge hit as hundreds of thousands of players gathered around the foot of the mountain with their friends with the aspirations of scaling it and escaping the deserted island.

Since then the game has gone through some updates and changes with the recent update adding a bunch of custom settings including an option to turn on "Grapple Mode (stupid)", alongside an April Fool's update that replaces the help reaction with a Spartan kick. But apparently not even Grapple Mode (stupid) isn't enough for some players.

"Y'all are mad at Landfall for not releasing a game, I'm mad at Landfall for their lazy dev cycle for Peak when they could be doing so much more with it considering they're ending development of it this year," one player says (via GamesRadar).

Because apparently three major updates, over 30 patches, nine hotfixes, and four minor updates is completely outrageous for a game that's been out for less than a year, costs $8 (but is regularly on discount), and was made by two non-live service studios just trying to have a bit of fun.

"Peak has had sooo many updates tho," one of the developers, Landfall replied. "Neither us or Aggro Crab are live service studios, any update is a bonus not a right. We just made a huge update for customising runs, but full customisation is a big ask. However if there are specific suggestions we'd love to hear them. [Redgarding] modding, we have a great connection with the modding community, when asking if we should add [a] workshop etc they didn't want it."

I understand wanting more from your favourite games, but I think this is also an example of the bad side of gaming fandom, an unreasonable entitlement to game developers' time and hard work. It's easy to forget that there's actual people behind the scenes, who mostly don't have the funding to be able to just focus on one game. There's a danger that as a small studio you can spread yourself too thin.

"Last year was our busiest ever, with the PEAK release, Haste, TABS: Pocket Edition, and ROUNDS ports," Landfall explains in a different post. "We worked on something new for this year, but in the end, it didn't work out. We've stretched ourselves too thin, and the pressure to deliver a new game every year can be a lot on such a small team."

There's a limit on how much players should expect from small indie studios for a game less than $10, that's just it. It would be different if both studios made a huge song and dance about how Peak will essentially be a live service game from the get go, but that's not the case.

While Peak may be winding down, Landfall doesn't want players to think they're being taken to a farm upstate: "Don't worry, we'll still be working on new projects, just maybe at a more reasonable pace."

Here's my problem with Peak: I love the climb as much as the next person, but I don't have the patience for waiting out the snow storm or hiding until the wind settles. Reaching the top of the mountain is hard enough without the elements themselves fighting you. And that's why I'll be turning those off in Peak's new "Play It Your Way Update".

Nothing is off the table when it comes to the custom settings the developers of Peak have delivered in today's update. Dangers such as fall damage, spiders, and even hunger can simply be turned off. Don't trust your friends? Remove the blowgun from the item pool entirely by unchecking the box. Trust your friends a little too much? Leave the blowgun as the only item available and see which one of you isn't invited to the next hangout.

These custom expeditions live separate from the normal mode, which is to say they're purely for fun and don't reward you with any badges. That is probably why one of the options is just called "Grapple Mode (Stupid)" where each of you are given a rescue claw with unlimited uses. No mods needed: The tools to break the game are in everyone's hands now.

I don't know what the actual peak of Peak looks like because my friends and I are adults who have to go to bed at a reasonable time, but thankfully developers Aggro Crab and Landfall made a mode for boring people like us called a mini run. Instead of braving all six biomes in succession, mini runs let you sample just one of them and pretend you beat the game. Now, nobody has to know you skipped the desert because you can't be trusted around cacti.

I could be persuaded to take on a full climb now that campfires save your progress as long as you return before the daily map changes, though. Some biomes are especially arduous and have me sweating all the way until the end. The Dark Souls fan in me appreciates having the opportunity to rest for a while before facing the horrors again.

Like most Peak updates, Aggro Crab and Landfall say there are "a few fun surprises" along with all the known changes. It also says more updates to the custom expedition menu are coming in the future, and now I'm curious how wild it's going to get with it. One of the most popular mods already breaks the four player limit by allowing up to 20 players, but maybe Aggro Crab can go even higher. It would also be neat to see a Call of Duty-style zombies mode become possible by having the option to spawn hordes of them while you climb. Or just give me a free-for-all mode where everyone rushes to the top as the deadly fog rises like it's Fall Guys.

Peak continues to earn its $8 price—or I should say five bucks, because eight bucks is basically five bucks, much like twelve bucks is ten bucks… or whatever Peak co-creator Nick Kaman said in January.

Never trust a tree with a name like "Draken Oak". That is the lesson I took away from Lost Wiki: Kozlovka, a game where you solve a mystery by reading Wikipedia-like database entries. I took one look at that tree and knew nothing good was going on in the little Eastern European town I was investigating.

After a little over two hours, I had learned exactly what was up with that tree and the generational deceit that has haunted Kozlovka since the late 1800s. I knew this wasn't a normal job the moment my client told me I wasn't looking deep enough and sent me instructions on how to access entries redacted by the government. What I found was a story happening in between the lines of each wiki entry, one that would span decades and eventually come right back around to me, a journalist investigating the town in the '90s.

Lost Wiki: Kozlovka is a mystery game in the style of The Case of the Golden Idol or The Roottrees are Dead, where the objective is to fill in the blanks on reports with the names of people and things you've learned about. It starts by testing you on pretty basic information, like what the town of Kozlovka is known for (agriculture) and what's so special about the forest it borders (the weird tree). But then it asks you to piece together a family tree and a timeline of the horrific events that have occurred over the years.

I think describing this game as "Wikipedia-like" is more generous than it sounds. While there is a whole web of database entries to read, there's a noticeable lack of miscellaneous information or red herrings—which is to say that solving each report isn't particularly hard as long as you're thorough. I only felt like I was heading down a wiki rabbit hole in the first hour as I clicked every hyperlink trying to get a sense of Kozlovka's history and the people involved. After that, I mostly searched for pages I hadn't unlocked yet and specific details I needed, like dates and names.

Every page is organized into a web that you can use to quickly jump to things you've read before. It was a convenience I appreciated when I had to flip back and forth between emails and database pages to figure out the format of the various passwords you need to unlock the classified information. However, most of them are extremely obvious to the point that I found it a little hard to believe evidence of corruption and murder would be locked behind the kind of passwords I came up with when I was 12. But I guess if real U.S. government officials can leak classified information in group chats, a fictional European government could be just as inept.

If I wasn't so easily swayed by its fuzzy retro computer interface and the foreboding music, Lost Wiki: Kozlovka's simplicity might've disappointed me. But it isn't about the mystery so much as it's about the act of solving it. I slipped into a satisfying routine where I'd read through the report I needed to fill in and let it guide me to each page looking for relevant information. A few clues aren't even written on the pages themselves but hidden in the blurry photos attached to them. Faces and symbols reappear in different contexts which help you connect the dots on a larger timeline of events. And by the end, the reports become email replies to an increasingly desperate client who has secrets of their own to share.

Lost Wiki: Kozlovka manages to raise the stakes of the mystery without overaggrandizing its complexity. I had a general idea of what was going on about halfway through and yet I wasn't bothered when my theories were basically confirmed at the end. I think that's a testament to the game's tight focus and well-placed breadcrumbs rather than a flaw.

Even though the game is pitched as purely a mystery, it's also an exercise in identifying the gaps in public information and the context that's erased when people have the power to control it—a disturbing reminder of the very thing Wikipedia is fighting to prevent right now.

Lost Wiki: Kozlovka might not be a hard mystery to solve, but it had me eagerly clicking my way to the solution just to get the full picture of Kozlovka, its secrets, and that weird tree. It's $5 on Steam and worth every penny.

As far as Telltale-likes go, Dispatch is one of the prettiest. Lovely animation, some great character designs, and a strong visual artstyle. It might surprise you to find out, then, that the main character and concept artist for Dispatch, Lap Pun Cheung, was picked up on ArtStation as a last resort to get developer AdHoc Studio through the pitching phase.

That's per a Dispatch panel at this year's GDC, attended by PC Gamer's own Christopher Livingston. "At the very start of things, we needed some good looking art to play in the pitch deck," explains co-founder Dennis Lenart.

"But," continues Nick Herman, "We had no artist in-house, and as we went out to raise money for a game (that we only had the script for) we needed some help. We started with a shotgun approach, working with a bunch of talented artists to help us find a style that felt right."

This process of discovery led to a realisation on behalf of the studio, Herman says: "What we were after was threading a very tight needle between comedy and drama." Shopping around, however, both devs realised they weren't striking that balance in time for pitching season.

"Some styles lended themselves really well to the comedy," says Lenart, "but we had a hard time seeing how the dramatic beats would land, while other approaches explored a more serious and mature tone, which felt right for parts of the story, but didn't really capture everything we were going for."

So what's an indie developer in 2022 to do? "So as a last resort, we did what every artistically challenged indie developer did," says Herman. "We went to ArtStation."

For context, ArtStation's a station, as you might imagine, for artists. It's been a little skewiff since the advent of AI made looking for art online horrible and annoying ("I don't know if anyone's goin' there anymore," Herman says in an aside) but you can think of it as a slightly more professionally-angled DeviantArt.

The team "thought [it] would be a temporary solution to get us through the pitch phase. But our co-founder, [Pierre Shorette], found this artist Lap Pun Cheung, who was doing some cool stuff."

Lenart chimes in: "We thought he might be able to do some quick and dirty concepts for a few characters we've been kicking around. And all these are the actual first things he drew," before showing a concept for the game's most-shared promotional image: Robert Robertson III sharing a quiet moment at a urinal between Phenomaman and Royd.

I'm reminded of how Clair Obscur, another gorgeous looking game, found several of its most important creatives on Reddit and Soundcloud. Honestly, I'm half expecting the next great videogame to come from a visionary picked up on Bumble—still, it's great that the AdHoc team found Cheung, because they set AdHoc on the right foot to one of the most successful games of the year.

Aaron Paul's performance as Dispatch's Robert "Mecha Man" Robertson III could hit a lot of notes. Robert could be sarcastic and cynical, but surprisingly compassionate; his story offers romance and chances for heroism. But what Dispatch developer AdHoc didn't offer was any opportunities to derail conversations by deliberately choosing to stay silent, something players could regularly choose in the games that AdHoc's co-founders had worked on as former Telltale devs.

In a talk at GDC 2026, Dispatch creative directors Nick Herman and Dennis Lenart said they had a good reason for nixing the traditional "..." option: Nobody ever chose it.

"We love to be able to play like an absolute weirdo, responding to every choice with a blank stare," Herman said. "But from our time at Telltale, we knew the numbers behind the scenes. Silent options were triggered either intentionally or unintentionally less than 1% of the time across all users globally."

AdHoc still considered supporting the 'say nothing' playstyle, but after running the numbers, Lenart said offering a silent option for each of Dispatch's roughly 120 dialogue choices would mean "almost 15 full minutes of Robert not saying anything."

While a character saying nothing might seem like the easiest thing for a developer to accomplish, that silence doesn't come free when there's another character on the receiving end of Robert suddenly going nonverbal.

"It doesn't sound like a lot, but we still had to write other characters reacting to that silence. We have to record voice. We had to storyboard, animate, light, and polish all of this," Herman said. "All this to support less than 1% of situations, especially as a new studio, really felt not worth it. So we killed it."

It's an unfortunate development reality for those who prefer to roleplay as a sort of human ellipsis, but maybe selling more than 3 million copies of Dispatch will mean AdHoc can enable a bit more voluntary awkwardness in its next outing. After all, Dispatch writer and AdHoc co-founder Pierre Shorette did say in November that the studio "was going to have to at least think about season 2 now." What better chance could there be for playing like an absolute weirdo?

I'll admit, I didn't expect much from Dispatch's gameplay before I played it. After all, it's more or less a Telltale game, which were always more concerned with dialogue choices and story sequences than they ever were with gameplay. But, somehow, AdHoc managed to make Dispatch more fun to play than it is to watch.

There's the incredible dispatching minigame that sees you managing your team of heroes (well, ex-villains), a surprisingly challenging hacking puzzle, and quick time events. The mere thought of QTEs, which were all the rage back in the 2010s, makes me shudder today, but Dispatch is one of the very few games to do them well.

In a GDC talk with Dispatch creative directors and AdHoc Studio cofounders Nick Herman and Dennis Lenart, they discussed how the game's puzzle mechanics developed. And most notably, how they managed to make QTEs actually fun.

Early in development, the team wanted to focus on light puzzling minigames that would directly tie into Robert's job at SDN—dispatching. This didn't begin with a dispatching minigame, but one thing was for certain in Lenart's eyes: "We are definitely not doing QTEs."

Herman used an example of helping Invisigal through a security camera feed (an early version of the robbery section, I assume), where you'd switch cameras to navigate the space, interact with objects, and call things out to her.

"We weren't really sure it was actually fun. It was kind of cool and different. But was it fun? With the games we used to make [at Telltale], we were so conditioned to gameplay being a thing you had to do to check a box… We just needed it to not suck," Herman said, describing the concepts for Dispatch's gameplay.

Returning to the drawing board with these thoughts in mind, Lenart recalls a game called This is the Police, which ended up having a big influence on the direction AdHoc would take. In This is the Police, you manage a team of police officers; in Dispatch, those are superheroes. It's a management sim, in many ways, and it's fun.

The Z Team was then created to give you a team to manage, as it was just a story of mentorship with Invisigal up until this point, and the dispatching minigame was born.

So where did the QTEs come from? Feeling it would be weird to have cinematic action but not an interaction, AdHoc decided to "just embrace QTEs and set the very low bar of trying to not make them suck," as Lenart described. The team came to the realisation that people don't hate QTEs, just bad ones.

And there were a few rules they settled on to avoid the curse:

• No jumpscaring with prompts
• Don't make players feel like missing them was unfair if it was unexpected
• Limit QTEs to two types: a timed prompt and a directional swipe

"We learned that as long as people hit 80% or more of the prompts, they reported back that it actually felt good," Lenart explained. "So to make our lives easier, we made it so that you could just mash any button you wanted and weren't penalised for pressing it multiple times or too early."

Anticipating that some players would hate QTEs, no exceptions (the team did at first, remember), AdHoc decided to make them entirely optional: "This was not a hill we wanted to die on", said Herman.

I never thought I'd say it, but you know what, QTEs can be fun, at least when they're not annoying or invasive. Dispatch certainly hit the right balance for me. Ironically, it was the hacking minigame that wore on me the most (mainly because it's actually quite hard).

One of Dispatch's most praised aspects is its impeccable style. Even more so than something like the Invincible TV show, Dispatch truly feels like a proper superhero cartoon of yesteryear. At least in vibes anyway—ignore the profanity, violence, and raunchiness.

In a GDC talk with Dispatch creative directors and Adhoc Studio cofounders Nick Herman and Dennis Lenart, they revealed that this style almost didn't happen. Early on, the issue they ran into was that they had no artist in-house, so they worked with "a bunch of talented artists" in a "shotgun approach", as Herman explains it, to find the style that felt right, balancing the drama and comedy of the script.

Unable to find the perfect fit, "we did what every artistically challenged indie developer did in 2022—we went to Art Station," Herman joked, saying the team just wanted to find a temporary solution to get through the pitching phase with publishers and investors. It's here they found inspiration, artist Lap Pun Cheung, who would go on to create concepts that would serve as the basis for the game's style, not just pitch materials.

"We wanted our game to look like a premium animated television show. So instead of trying to do that as game developers, we decided it was important to find an animation studio," Herman explains. As he puts it, most of the well-known studios they pitched to either weren't interested or couldn't accommodate the game development aspects. 3D characters with 2D backgrounds was ambitious, but AdHoc had already settled on this style.

They eventually came across a small animation studio in Thailand called Igloo Studios, "who made these really cool apple juice commercials," of all things: "We could kind of squint and start to see Dispatch for the first time," Lenart said.

"We knew working with them would be a risk, because they weren't a large established studio, and this would also be the biggest project they'd ever undertaken, but we felt like we'd be in it together, so we hired them to do a test."

AdHoc's design approach was vastly different to the developer's work under Telltale Games, since they were essentially making an animated TV show, but it worked out after a lot of trial and error. Frankly, I couldn't imagine Dispatch looking any other way. Now I just need a second season to reunite me with my superhero crew.

By just about any metric, Dispatch was a wild success. After launching at the tail end of October 2025, it sold more than 3 million copies before the year's end, and at time of writing 97% of its over 165,000 reviews on Steam are positive. But in a GDC talk today, Dispatch creative directors and Adhoc Studio cofounders Nick Herman and Dennis Lenart said their narrative superhero game's development was an act of hubris, because the industry was convinced their game was dead in the water.

Along with fellow co-founders Pierre Shorette and Michael Chung, Herman and Lenart formed AdHoc in 2018 after having left Telltale games—which, "by sheer coincidence," had shut down within a month of AdHoc's founding. Even before leaving Telltale, Herman said he and Lenart had "spent years discussing how we'd innovate and improve on the formula" of choice-driven narrative games.

As AdHoc started seeking funding for new projects, however, it seemed like they might not get the chance. The live service era was ascendant, and potential partners were skeptical that singleplayer games in the Telltale model could turn enough of a profit to make the effort worthwhile.

"When we'd go and pitch potential investors and publishers, they'd point to the data and say there weren't enough recent successes to feel confident investing money," Lenart said. "The common sentiment was that the genre of games we like to make are niche—or worse, dead."

"We thought they were wrong, which was definitely a mix of arrogance and stupidity," Herman said.

While it might have been propelled by a healthy amount of stubborn defiance, AdHoc's confidence wasn't baseless: After Telltale's closure, the studio boasted one of the industry's most experienced teams working in their specific lane of game development.

"We felt like, if we wouldn't push back, who would?" Herman said. "And while we didn't yet know how we were going to do it, we were aligned on the right things."

According to Lenart, chief among those "right things" was a commitment to across-the-board quality. AdHoc was going to focus solely on its strengths. If it didn't think it would nail something, it wasn't going in the game—a commitment that might not have been possible if it had found a receptive publisher.

"Just because we can make an open world action RPG doesn't mean we should. Whatever we do, we want it to be great and across the entire project," Lenart said. "We didn't want to have any caveats."

However much arrogance and stupidity was involved in Dispatch's development, the results indicate it was just the right amount.

Daedalic was widely viewed as the inheritor of LucasArts' point-and-click adventure crown a decade or so ago, back when it was putting out some truly great point-and-click adventure games. Whether Deponia is one of them is a matter of some debate, but I think it is, and more importantly I know that you can pick it up for free right now on Steam.

The Deponia trilogy tailed off pretty sharply through the sequels and I honestly wouldn't recommend them, but I really enjoyed the first: A slapstick farce featuring a deeply unlikable clown who suffers a number of amusingly unpleasant outcomes as he tries to save a woman who's fallen into his literal garbage dump world from the Utopian space station in orbit above. It's a bit like Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner, except Rufus—the unlikable character in question—has none of the coyote's charisma or intellect.

Also, as mentioned, it's literally free until March 16, and as selling features go that's a tough one to beat.

But that's not the only reason we're here: Daedalic is holding a whole big publisher sale on Steam, with major markdowns on all kinds of stuff. If point-and-clickers are your thing, you will be well fed here. Night of the Rabbit, probably my favorite Daedalic joint ever, is 90% off ($2.49), as are the delightfully unhinged Edna and Harvey: Harvey's New Eyes and the grim fantasy The Dark Eye: Memoria, both of which are on for $2. (Chains of Satinav is good too, although not quite up to Memoria—but hey, two bucks.)

Keeping at that deep discount, Ken Follet's The Pillars of the Earth is also down to $2, The Whispered World Special Edition is $2, and its followup Silence, which I did not care for at all but lots of other people did, is—you guessed it—$2. There's plenty of newer stuff to choose from as well, but honestly I'm just here for the adventures. Don't dawdle, it all ends on March 16.

You may not have heard of Cookie's Bustle. That's partly because it's an obscure Japanese point-and-click released by a small studio called Rodik in 1999. It's also because of the efforts of a copyright troll, who kept playthrough videos, screenshots, fan art, and even Discord mentions of Cookie's Bustle offline for years.

Cookie's Bustle has finally been brought to light thanks to the efforts of the Video Game History Foundation, which recently documented its victory in preserving Cookie's Bustle in the face of claims by a company called Graceware. As the VGHF posted on Bluesky, "For years, Graceware has gotten away with abusing the DMCA because they've targeted large platforms that comply quickly with takedowns, or individuals without the resources to push back. Then they fucked with us, a non-profit organization with a special interest and an expert legal team."

First, what is Cookie's Bustle? Well, it's a game about a five-year-old girl who has been transformed into a teddy bear, who travels to a South American island nation with the unlikely name of Bombo World to take part in a sporting competition. It gets weirder from there. Aliens are involved, there's a song in what is allegedly English, and Cookie does jail time.

Let's Play videos of Cookie's Bustle, like this recently restored one from Vinesauce, were regularly taken offline following Graceware's DMCA complaints, with little in the way of pushback. Until, that is, the VGHF obtained a physical CD-ROM of Cookie's Bustle and began adding it to their digital archive, including a three-and-a-half hour longplay video. When they received the inevitable takedown notices—three of them—they pushed back. As the saying goes, if you come for the VGHF, you best not miss.

VGHF library director Phil Salvador's exhaustive article shows that Graceware's claim of owning the Cookie's Bustle copyright—it's technically an "orphan work" because Rodik no longer exists and nobody from the studio has been contactable—is based on registrations for the source code, game concept, and character designs lodged with an organization called Interoco. But as Salvador put it, Interoco is "effectively a digital version of mailing yourself a letter to get it date-stamped by the Post Office, a comparison that INTEROCO explicitly makes on their About Us page."

It's simply an official-looking name that looks good on a letterhead, like those of the DMCA notices sent to the VGHF, including one for a page that simply mentioned the organization now owned a physical copy of Cookie's Bustle. "This page explicitly says that the game files are 'Not Available' and does not show any copyrighted material—even images—yet it was still targeted for a takedown," Salvador says. "Graceware seems to be suggesting that non-profit archives even describing the existence of the game Cookie's Bustle is copyright infringement."

Graceware also applied for a trademark on the name Cookie's Bustle in December 2022. "Since then," Salvador writes, "they’ve had to file four extensions on their deadline to prove that they have actually used the name 'Cookie's Bustle' in commerce."

The VGHF legal team contacted Ukie, the organization sending takedown notices on behalf of Graceware, and pointed out their lack of validity. "We're not sure exactly what transpired between Ukie and Graceware," Salvador says, "but it sounds like Graceware was unable to provide sufficient proof of their ownership. We hoped this would persuade Ukie to take action—and it did."

Ukie will no longer be providing its automated DMCA takedown service to Graceware, and the internet has responded with fan art and video clips of the strangest parts of Cookie's Bustle. My favorite is one that was stricken from YouTube, though it managed to dodge the takedown notice when it was posted to BlueSky in July, simply showing what happens when Cookie tries to catch a bus in this baffling game. What a loss it would be if oddities like this couldn't be documented.

There's a good feeling when you earn an achievement in a game and see that fewer than 1% of players have also earned it. It makes you feel like you've got some real gamer cred, like you're made of sterner stuff than almost everyone else playing.

A couple of gamers—and only a couple—are basking in that type of pride after last Saturday, when the first ever "Adventure Game Aptitude Test" was administered. Designed by developer Woe Industries, the AGAT challenged players to complete an '80s adventure game without using a walkthrough. Players weren't told what adventure game they'd be playing in advance, and they were monitored via webcam and microphone by a legitimate online proctoring software to determine if they were looking up hints on a second window, using their phones to cheat, or getting help from someone off-screen.

Over 800 participants had four hours to complete Lucasfilm Games 1987 graphic adventure Maniac Mansion, and… it was an absolute bloodbath. According to Woe Industries, there were 831 attempts (plus an additional 168 who began the test too late and were thus disqualified) and only two people actually passed the exam.

"A 0.24% pass rate makes the AGAT one of the most prestigious and rigorous exams in the world," said Woe Industries proudly on Bluesky. "The SAT, MCAT and most forklift operator certifications lie prostrate at our feet."

I asked Woe Industries for more statistics about the test, which began between 1 and 2 pm EST on Saturday. Hey, it's a standardized test, you can't just take it whenever the heck you want—but that rigid start time meant a lot of players weren't free to spend four hours on a Saturday playing an old adventure game.

"While we had 831 attempts we also had about 4,500 people sign up for a reminder of the test date. We lost a few of those people due to the exam time," Woe Industries said in an email. "This project was always going to be a push and pull between fun and restriction. Asking people to play this game under very unconventional and ridiculous circumstances to see what kind of gameplay that elicited from them. Maintaining a fixed start time was a big part of that. But if we ever do it again, maybe we’ll try to find a more universally accessible time."

There were a few oddities reported. "We also had one person send us a bribe (we assume joking)," the developer said. "Test takers are instructed to send a screenshot of their win screen when submitting the test. But they sent us a screenshot of a potential bank transfer of 1,000 dollars."

As any respected institute for higher learning surely would, Woe Industries "respectfully declined."

That wasn't the only unusual offering. "Two people also submitted Fallout 4 screenshots instead of a win screen. Not sure why," Woe Industries said.

As for the winners: "Our two champs actually beat the game relatively fast, which does make us wonder if they just knew the game very well already," the developer said. "But hey, no crime studying for a test. They didn’t know the game ahead of time, so they must have amazing memories."

Woe Industries also noted that two additional students technically completed the exam, but were disqualified: "One for cheating and the other for starting the test well after our allowed start time. A tough decision, but we have to maintain AGAT’s rigorous standards. It wouldn’t be fair to everyone else."

A couple of players were given permission to stream on Twitch, so if you're curious about the AGAT, you can find a nice long recording of it here via streamer New2DinoSourXL. Woe Industries tuned into a couple of the test streams and found "A lot of bright eyed initial enthusiasm" that eventually led to "a gradual descent into frustration." Hey, that's what '80s adventure games were all about.

Was the AGAT just too darn hard?

"As far as pass rate, we honestly weren’t sure if anyone would pass. We did a couple practice runs while building the site and, well, let’s just say we are definitely not AGAT certified gamers," the developer said. "But we were hoping we’d get at least one winner, seeing as we’d already put together the diploma. So it was nice to see two winners with clean proctor logs."

You can find Woe Industries' other projects here on Itch. Maniac Mansion, meanwhile, is on Steam.

I absolutely adore the satisfaction of virtual cleaning. I love scrubbing grime and dirt from structures in PowerWash Simulator, and especially adored cleaning up the ocean in Loddlenaut. So naturally, it's no surprise that Muri: Wildwoods, an adventure game set on a mysterious island where you embark on your first solo mission as a cleaner, struck a chord with me. Now, having made my way through the demo, I am more excited to continue cleaning than ever—a phrase I never thought I'd say.

At the start of the demo, you're introduced to Pelle, a mouse-like creature called a Muri who's also conveniently armed with a water gun and an almost incessant need to clean. After spotting a bird flying overhead that seems to be covered in a black mass, Pelle decides to chase after it, ending up on an entirely new island which none of the team has seen before. As you can probably expect, the island is doused in the same black substance as the bird—the corruption. It becomes our job to make our way around the island and bring life back to the world by cleaning up the corruption. Nice and simple.

However, it's not just rocks, shells, and coral you have to clean. Along the way, you'll meet a number of the island's wildlife, too, like Shruppies (my personal favourite, and a combination of puppies and shrimp), which have fallen victim to the corruption. After a blast with your water gun, their colour returns and they run up to you, which is particularly adorable. And yes, before you ask, you can pet most of the creatures.

As you spray and clean up, returning the world to its former glory, new pathways reveal themselves. You're not really told where to go, but the world does a fantastic job at getting you warmed up in a fairly empty area and giving you a few patches of corrupted land to clean before moving you onto the next. Before long, I was trusted with deep cleaning an entire ship, and with my new water gun skills, quite happy to accept the task.

Unlike games like PowerWash Simulator though, you're given a visual representation of your progress by the world literally springing to life underneath your paws once you've cleared all of the corruption from an area. Don't get me wrong, I love seeing the time lapse at the end of a powerwashing session to show all your hard work, but being subconsciously reminded of why you're cleaning in the first place makes it a lot easier to want to progress through Muri: Wildwoods.

While you work, Pelle's team, appropriately called Teamsqueak, chats away via messages in the bottom right corner. For the most part, this chatter doesn't offer much outside of introducing you to the team, but it certainly helps you feel less alone. Occasionally, you'll be given a helpful hint toward what the objective for the area is, such as tracking down all of the corruption-riddled Squawk Birds, but for the demo at least, you can take it or leave it. I imagine the further you get in the game, the more interaction Pelle will need to have with the team, though.

I found myself utterly absorbed in the world of Muri: Wildwoods, as I made my way around the island and cleaned up both creature and environment. Before long, I was gently reminded that I was only playing a slice rather than the full game, but I can already feel myself keen to play through the demo again. You get about an hour's worth of content, but when you become so engrossed in cleaning like me, enough is never enough.

Watching the coral and grass spring up beneath you as you track down the last pesky bit of corruption really feels rewarding, and the creatures you find are so adorable it's hard not to want to spend as much time as possible rescuing them. I very much look forward to seeing what's next for Pelle, Teamsqueak, and my beloved Shruppies, but with only a "coming soon" label on Steam, I dread to think how long it'll be before we're reunited.

Amanita Design is one of my long-standing favorites. It was the studio's 2009 robot adventure Machinarium that hooked me, but Botanicula, the Samorost games, the madcap Chuchel—they're all brilliantly creative works. So when I saw that a demo for its next game, Phonopolis, had dropped into the Steam Next Fest, I was all over it.

Phonopolis is a point-and-click adventure that tells the tale of Felix, a garbage collector living in a city ruled by an authoritarian 'Leader' who controls the populace with messages blared through omnipresent loudspeakers. Felix one day discovers a headset that enables him to blot out the noise and break free of the Leader's influence; he quickly comes to recognize the threat it presents, and thus sets out—somewhat reluctantly—to thwart the Leader's ambitions before the arrival of the Absolute Tone, which will strip every citizen of their minds, freedom, and humanity forever.

If that all sounds a bit on the nose, well, yeah, but Amanita makes no bones about it: The studio says Phonopolis is "loosely inspired by the works of Karel Čapek and George Orwell" and "explores themes of social manipulation and individualism," and it may not be subtle but in this era of social media meltdown and rising authoritarianism in the US and beyond, it sure feels timely.

But "the overall experience is playful and lighthearted," the Steam page states, and it really is. The most prominent puzzle in the demo involves using a broken smokestack, bad plumbing, and a building's unexpectedly malleable architecture to convince a sunbather and the landlord to have sex so you can sneak into a meeting with three of the city's foremost dissidents. That's an admittedly vague description (no spoilers here) but it is also 100% true.

The Phonopolis demo has all the hallmarks of an Amanita Design game: A strong, distinct visual style, really good music (the soundtrack comes from Amanita stalwart Tomáš Dvořák, aka Floex, who previously provided music for games including Machinarium, Samorost 3, and Creaks), and a hapless, not-happy-to-be-here hero who's just doin' his best in a bad situation.

There is also, despite the obvious comedy—and again, like most Amanita games—a subtle darkness lying underneath it all. My meeting with the dissidents was interrupted by a pair of regime thugs, who chuckled grimly as they destroyed a room filled with art and treasures from the time before the Leader's ascendance. It was slapstick, but I felt a gentle sense of sadness throughout, watching these artifacts from a better era be smashed to pieces by thick-headed goons who wield the power of the state as a weapon to claim payback for all the ways they've come up short in life.

Is that feeling amplified by the state of the world in which I live, where events like that happen every day except, you know, for real? No doubt. I wouldn't say Phonopolis is a direct commentary on the current state of things: It was announced in 2022, before things really went to shit, although that sense of a society in chaos is at least somewhat a matter of visibility and perception and some of us are merely experiencing the world now as others have been forced to deal with it for generations. But anyway, it is interesting how a game inspired by works like 1984 lines up so well with the world we've built and continue to build, isn't it?

I admit, that's a lot of weight to put on a 30-minute demo of a point-and-clicker that plays for laughs and is genuinely fun. And Phonopolis is fun: One of the things I like most about Amanita games is that they're built to encourage exploration without inflicting punishment for failure, and that's the case in Phonopolis: You'll be chased by regime enforcers in the demo, for instance, but they can't actually catch you, so you can play around with different things to see what they do while your not-too-bright pursuers do a sort of low-level Keystone Cops routine in the background.

There's only so much I can say based on impressions from a short demo, but Phonopolis looks set to be a classic Amanita Design adventure that benefits (insofar as you're inclined to describe it that way) from more overtly reflecting the world around it than any of the studio's previous releases. I think that's important—not every game has to say something, even if some of them should—but for those who don't, it's also not a necessary part of the equation: Strip away the politics and the Phonopolis demo is still clever, funny, and visually arresting. I say with confidence that if you like Amanita Design games, you're going to like this one—and if you're not familiar with the studio's work, it's a great opportunity to change that. You can play the demo now on Steam.

Few things are more healing than biting into a buttery, flaky croissant fresh out of the oven and sipping on a coffee while the warm sun hits your face. It's a feeling I've been sorely missing in these dark and gloomy winter months, but it's one that The Witch's Bakery has managed to capture excellently in its Next Fest demo, and I'm already in dire knead (I will not apologise) of more.

It's a game clearly steeped in some heavy Studio Ghibli inspiration—an art style constantly basked in a warm glow, adorable and strange creatures as companions and allies, and an emotional narrative that the demo gives a very small glimpse of. I get to step into the adorable sneakers of witch-slash-baker Lunne who, alongside aforementioned strange creature companion Orio, has just moved to Paris and opened a brand-new boulangerie.

Of course, as a witch, Lunne's goods have that extra little pizzazz to them. They can dive into the troubled hearts of her Parisian customers, healing their emotions and helping them to come to terms with anything particularly troubling they're going through. The first instance I get to see of this in the demo is when I meet Judith Tessier, owner of the decoration shop.

She's clearly got something weighing on her—and not just the spectral being snaking around her, invisible to everyone but mages. One croissant bite and a maze minigame later and she's having a wee cry. That's a good thing, promise! It sends the emotional spectre hanging around her away, and it's only one of the many times Lunne's baked goods heal souls.

The actual bakery part of the demo is pretty minimal—Orio actually does the bulk of the work. All I have to do is knead the odd bit of dough and then grab whatever the customer wants. It's simple and initially I found myself yearning for a little bit more, but The Witch's Bakery dresses the game up in so many other activities that I understand why it doesn't lean into full chaotic management sim shenanigans.

That's because, once the bakery is closed, Lunne has the chance to befriend her neighbours and explore the beauty Paris has to offer. Eating at restaurants, strolling through the park, and catching a film are some of the evening activities that I can get up to. And once the day is done, I'm treated to a gorgeous view of Paris from above as Lunne peacefully sips on her tea.

Nighttime was where I ended up having the most fun with The Witch's Bakery. I was able to venture to the Atelier and concoct some pastry designs. Putting smiley cat faces on TKTK or jazzing up a pan au chocolat with a lovely cocoa-coloured swirl pattern.

My main gripe right now is that the entire process is kinda obtuse—every time I attempted to make a new baked good I was only awarded two out of three stars without the game actually telling me why. It's a little unintuitive all round, especially when the game's UI as a whole is a little half-baked, but it's stuff I am sure can be cleaned up beyond what is its first public demo.

Though it's not a perfect demo, The Witch's Bakery has me delighted for what this game can become. It certainly helps that it's been on my radar for almost a year now, so really I'm just kinda jazzed I actually get to play the thing now.

The Witch's Bakery is set to release sometime this year (hopefully!), and you can check out the first chapter of the game (around one to two hours) during Steam Next Fest. That's right now up until March 2.

When Gecko Gods was revealed in 2022, it instantly became one of those games I simply had to play. The very idea of being a little gecko scampering around ancient ruins and using the world as my climbing frame appeals more than I can really express in words, but I didn't realise just how long it would be before I could embark on this epic adventure.

Thankfully, after almost four years of waiting, Gecko Gods has finally revealed a release date rather than a window, and now I only have to wait until April 16 to become my true gecko self.

Alongside its long-awaited release date, an entirely new trailer has been uploaded to the PlayStation YouTube channel, spotlightting different areas of the game, including sections where you sail a little boat (as geckos canonically love to do) and some of the elaborate puzzle-solving we've already experienced in the demo.

Compared to the previous announcement trailers for the game, it looks like the world has been refined, with brighter colours and sharpened details, which is particularly thrilling as exploring the world is what I enjoyed most from the demo. I imagine there are still plenty of secrets outside of the areas shown in the trailer to uncover while you wander around the world, and I can't wait to scour every single inch of the map trying to find them all.

What's even more exciting is the fact it looks like you can customise your gecko, and by the looks of the different critters in the trailer, there are plenty of customisation options to choose from. It'll by no means affect your abilities as a gecko, it's just a nice touch, and I cannot wait to try and recreate my real life giant day geckos the second I can.

There's not long left until we get to embark on the reptilian adventure, which is a huge relief given how rocky the release schedule has been since the game was first announced in 2022. After the 2023 release date was delayed, alongside the Fall 2025 window, I'm practically counting down the days until April 16, and it cannot come soon enough.

If you could have one magical power, what would it be? For me, it would be the ability to instantly fix anything. Washing machine broken? Zap! Not anymore. Boiler on the blink? Let's Fantasia that shit. PC giving you some random error you've been struggling to solve all morning? Just point your finger at it and get it running again, maybe with a new graphics card installed for good measure.

I doubt magical maintenance will appear in Rhell: Warped Worlds & Troubled Times, but with developer SlugGlove (what a name) promising over 102 million spell combinations in its fantastical puzzler, I certainly can't rule it out.

Rhell sees you play as a "loud-mouthed, hot-headed mage" who is trying to figure out why everybody in the world has suddenly disappeared. I feel this is a mystery answered by the phrases "loud-mouthed" and "hot-headed". Certainly, I would scarper if someone like that began walking in my direction.

Anyway, Rhell takes place in a semi-open world, with you combining spells to solve puzzles and bypass obstacles as you explore. Publisher Yogscast recently published a video that explains how Rhell's spellcasting works. The system is built upon 40 foundational spells, ranging from basic object manipulation like pushing, pulling, and twisting, to elemental spells like fire, ice, smoke and goo (Rhell's world clearly has different fundamental properties to ours).

Crucially, though, you can combine any number of these spells together. You could combine a push spell with a goo spell to move an object onto a button and have it repeatedly bounce in that spot. Some combinations simply stack effects together, while others yield more specific results. Casting fire, smoke, and goo on yourself, for example, will transform you into a cloud. You can even squash every single spell together, though that may not necessarily be a good idea.

This amounts to a total of 102,400,000 potential combinations, intended to facilitate a highly open-ended approach to puzzle solving. "The core ethos when it comes to solving puzzles is to do it your way," the video explains.

To me, Rhell seems reminiscent of the Scribblenauts games, albeit with a focus on combination rather than conjuration. The art is also a lot more sophisticated than Scribblenauts' papercraft doodles, blending 3D environments with 2D characters.

If Rhell sounds to your liking, you can take the demo for a spin right now. There isn't long to wait until the full game launches either. Rhell: Warped Worlds & Troubled Times releases on March 12.