"Don't stoop to their level, be the bigger man. Use your words, not your fists." That's what my mum always said to me when I got in trouble for fighting in the playground at school. I've been to therapy, I use my words these days, and honestly, I'm better off for it because I can't punch to save my life.

Sometimes I'd rather solve my problems with a sledgehammer instead of my words, though.

In Virtue and a Sledgehammer—developed by Deconstructeam and Selkie Harbour and published by Devolver—you forgo therapy and instead return to your hometown, construction tool/weapon in hand, and get to smashing. The reveal trailer showed off its Pacific Northwest setting, eerie vibes, android residents, and the smashing. The trailer we just saw on the PC Gaming Show also includes some heavy hits, but mostly delves deeper into the mind of the game, just like a therapist would do. Hey, wait a minute!

There's a montage of surreal, gorgeously lit scenes interspersed with questions such as "who is the most important person in your life?" and "how often do you masturbate?" Please don't answer any of these in the comment section below this article, thanks. It's clear there's more to Virtue and a Sledgehammer than just the sledgehammer, even though it's got quite a large role.

It's a seriously cool trailer, and it's made me even more excited for the game than I was when I first heard about it. I'm a sucker for the PNW and its gloomy beauty, and I love the soundtrack and art style we've been shown so far. I'm also curious as to exactly how the game's story is going to weave through me bashing androids and houses into tiny little pieces. Luckily, there's a demo out now on Steam so we can all dive in and answer that therapist's questions.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

As the old saying goes: In space, no one can hear you have a pleasant time with a small cohort of your pals. Unless you have in-game voice chat. Or Discord. Or I guess you could just call each other. Do people still call each other in the space age?

Well, you can find out in Starseeker: Astroneer Expeditions, which just popped its head up at the PC Gaming Show to show off some co-op planetary exploration and remind us of its imminent early access release date.

Starseeker is, as you might already have deduced, System Era's followup to the really quite good Astroneer, its spacey exploration and crafting game that itself hit early access all the way back in—God help us—2016 (it came out properly in 2019). Starseeker seems a bit more chaotic, from what I've seen, and centres around an upgradable hub space station you can upgrade and hang out on with your pals before undertaking missions on various planets.

When you're down on those planets, you'll be fighting aliens and foraging/pillaging for loot. In true Astroneer style, you'll also be deforming the absolute heck out of the terrain—shaping planets like putty to ease your way across them or to plunder their depths for treasures.

Personally, I want to know how long it would take a full team of four players to completely erase a planet from existence like some kind of artisan-labour Death Star, but that doesn't come up in the trailer. Weird.

I guess I won't have to wait long to find out. Starseeker: Astroneer Expeditions hits Steam June 11 in early access. "Although it is hard to give a solid date, based on the goals we have, we estimate that the campaign will last around 1 year. We want to work sustainably while leaving enough time to respond to player feedback," says System Era. Well, that and I assume someone has to figure out this whole 'how long to delete a planet' thing?

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

I've got a big soft spot for Serious Sam. Back in the day, a young Josh really marvelled at that one bit—you know the one—where what-felt-like-a-million Beheaded Kamikazes pour over the sand dunes and begin charging directly at your position. It was probably the first game I played that made fun of games, that mucked about with familiar tropes to create something that felt like a long piece of affectionate mockery.

All this to say I am glad Sam is still here and still Serious, and we just got a glimpse of his latest adventure—Serious Sam: Shatterverse—at the PC Gaming Show. This is Behaviour Digital's co-op roguelite take on the Sam Saga. Samga. Anyway, the point is you'll be charging into runs over and over, creating different builds through modifiers, and generally dying a fair bit until you crack 'em. You know, a roguelite.

From the PCGS trailer, Shatterverse is an appropriately blood-speckled affair filled with myriad recognisable enemies from Sam's many other games. Gnaars? Check. Kamikazes? Check. Did I see a Walker in there? Entirely possible! It was hard to see through the sheets of gore.

Shatterverse also looks like, uh, a 'verse. That is to say, it's bringing together all manner of Sams and art styles to render you and your pals' playable characters. There's polygonal Sam, lizard Sam, portly dad Sam. A lot of Sams, in essence. I rather like it. This is a series that's now been going for (I'm sorry) a quarter of a century. It's fun to mix and mash its legacy like this.

We didn't get a full release date at PCGS, save a wink that the game is due out this year, but there is a Steam playtest upcoming in the relatively near future. If you're interested in shattering Sam's 'verse, you can sign up to check it out over on Steam.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

The Talos Principle 3 is coming, and I'm very excited: What initially attracted my attention as a sideshow curiosity from the Serious Sam guys quickly proved itself a clever puzzle game powered by an unexpectedly compelling and thoughtful narrative. I like it a lot! And so it's kind of a bummer that Croteam insists, with absolute certainty, that the third will be the last.

It's unusual in the world of videogames (or movies, or television, or any other popular media built for consumption) to say "no more," but writer Jonas Kyratzes told me during a recent chat that Croteam doesn't think of Talos Principle as "a franchise that will go on and on and on." Instead, the studio had a broad concept of how it wanted to tell the story across three games, and now, "This is the end. This is the last Talos Principle."

"We might do some small spinoff one day or something like that, but the story of Talos Principle ends with three," Kyratzes said.

"So many videogames just don't end, and then you have an endless kind of cliffhanger or whatever, and there's no satisfying conclusion to the story. And then at some point the company closes, and this story is never completed. And with Talos Principle, that's not what we want to do. We want to tell the story and then be done with it ... Really, the idea is to have a complete work—the way that we look at it is that this is one thing. It's one story in three parts. And when it's done, I think that will also kind of be visible. That was the kind of the intent."

Game director Davor Hunski said that if Talos Principle 3 is on par with the first two games in the series—and I don't think there's any expectation it won't be, but you never want to be overconfident about these things—it will make The Talos Principle "one of the best" videogame trilogies, and more broadly, "really, really special in gaming," even though puzzle games are a relatively niche genre.

"We have Serious Sam, right? We've been developing Serious Sam for 20 years," Hunski said. "But Talos Principle is on a different level of emotion, and people's engagement and reaction. Life-changing stuff actually gets reported to us through feedback, through emails—very personal life-changing, moving stuff."

Serious Sam, the 'other' Croteam game, is indeed a very different sort of experience—a hyper-violent FPS that revels in excessive bloodshed and the preternaturally thick skull of its hero. I've been a Serious Sam fan since the original in 2001 and remain so to this day, but on a deeper, this game matters level, The Talos Principle is the one that's stuck with me.

"It is a very particular game. It is a very unique kind of thing, and people have very powerful responses to it," Kyratzes added. "I mean, it's not the only game that has that, but it's certainly very gratifying and beautiful that people respond very strongly to this kind of humanist spirit of it, and that they're moved by it and they care about it. And again, that's why you don't want to treat it as a franchise, where it's a burger, and you make another burger, and then you make another burger.

"The story is told. The things that we wanted to do are accomplished. Hopefully it's satisfying as an arc, from the beginning of new humanity to its distant future. And that's that. And then you can play it, and you can have this beautiful experience. You can be happy with it."

The Talos Principle 3, the third and final chapter of one of the least-expected videogame series of all time, was made official today, and much like the jump from the first game to the second, it promises a familiar slate of puzzles wrapped in a very different sort of narrative experience.

The teaser doesn't reveal much about what's in store for the third game, except that this is a conclusion, of sorts: "Every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Birth, life, death," the narrator intones. "But we are not stories."

That's some serious Talos Principle teasing, alright, and as a fan of the series, it hits. That opening shot of the boundless cosmos seems pretty meaningful too, and I should probably point out that if you haven't played the previous Talos Principle games and want to enjoy them without spoilers, now would be a good time to go read something else.

A hiddenish Talos Principle 2 ending reveals the existence of an anomaly, billions of light years from Earth, whose existence defies the otherwise complete and infallible "theory of everything" discovered by Athena. The cutscene for that conclusion includes an image of distant stars identical to the one seen in today's teaser. It's no great surprise, then, that we're going to be learning more about that in Talos Principle 3.

From today's announcement: "As if awakening from a troubled sleep, you find yourself in a strange, contradictory world of crumbling temples and abandoned science outposts: the Anomaly, the only place in the universe where the laws of physics don't work as they should. Your memories are fragmented, but you know you came here for a reason."

Big stuff, clearly, and it will lead players across more than 12 worlds in an exploration of "the remains of the world that humanity once built," which sounds kind of ominous depending on which version of humanity we're talking about—but, as with the first two games, The Talos Principle 3 will tell its tale of a foundational moment in human history "as lived through a person's life."

"It's about your life, the character that you play. And so you will see many different places based on that," lead writer Jonas Kyratzes told me in a recent interview. "It's a historical moment seen through the eyes of a person. So it's the rebirth of humanity in the first game, and then it's this turning point in their history in the second one, but lived through the life of 1K and his friends. And this is about what came after that, lived again through the life, seen through the life of a character. And with the anomaly—the exploration of the anomaly is a significant part of that.

"So it does have a kind of a wide scope, and in some ways—while remaining still focused on this character and characters around them, these stories are all character driven—but together, they form this bigger picture of humanity, from its kind of resurrection to the distant future."

Experience with the first two games isn't necessary to play and enjoy Talos Principle 3, but writer Verena Kyratzes said it will definitely land with more impact if you're familiar with them, comparing it to her own experience with Star Trek. "The shows exist independently of each other," she said. "But I watched TNG before I'd seen the original series, and there was the episode where Scotty showed up, and I was like, 'Who is that?' So yeah, you will always get a little bit more if you played the previous games."

I can attest to this: The opening of Talos Principle 2 is laden with callbacks to the original, none more powerful than the voice of Elohim welcoming you to his garden—a moment that just won't carry the same kind of weight if it's your first time hearing it. And yes, Elohim will be back for The Talos Principle 3.

"It was very important to us emotionally, because the fact that he's there, that after that ending there is still hope for him—that what he was afraid of, which was a world without purpose, is still something where he can thrive," Jonas told me. "And the fact that you then see in the DLC Isle of the blessed, you see an Elohim who was kind of born from the algorithm, and you get the idea there's probably going to be more of him, even just existing in the in the outside world, that's incredibly significant to us.

"He is a thread through all of these games, and he has a significant part to play in this game too, and that was kind of like, it had to be there."

A release date for The Talos Principle 3 wasn't announced but it's "coming soon," and is up for wishlisting now on Steam.

The sky is broken. Anyone who looks at it turns into something out of Call of Cthulhu. Fortunately, the authorities say they'll have it fixed in 15 days. Maybe they're going to turn it off and then on again? Until then, you just have to hunker down in your apartment building with your baseball bat and your videogames and wait the whole thing out.

Of course, you venture out and explore that apartment building. Your neighbours keep knocking at the door, and sometimes slithering. Some of them might have ignored the warnings and looked outside a little bit.

Look Outside is a cross between Yume Nikki, Fear and Hunger, and World of Horror, a cosmic horror RPG with Earthbound-style menu combat, but one that every real CRPG head should try. It's full of surprising interactions and unexpected quest solutions and companions you didn't realize you could recruit until you tried that One Weird Thing. It's a bottomless well of horror and delight.

Though it was shadowdropped out of the blue last year, Look Outside has continued being updated. Version 2.3 is out now with a substantial list of changes, including a huge amount of balance tweaks. The strangeness of Look Outside comes across in some of these, like "The rat child's Copy Dad ability no longer copies gun skills for free" and "Made Col Squeakums' bites not have a chance to remove sleep, confusion or charm effects from the target."

Enemies that have been improved include "Shrimp Knight, the Shark, the Starfish and Lethargy" and Monty's pyromania skill "now does much less damage to the party than what it does to enemies." That's good, I guess?

Some of the patch notes deal with spoiler-territory stuff, and boy howdy there are a lot of them. Just trust me that it's cool an indie horror oddity like Look Outside is still being updated. If you need another reason to check it out, it was cowritten by CBoyardee of Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden fame, and if that doesn't intrigue you I don't know what will. Look Outside is available on Steam and GOG.

Devolver Digital lifted the lid on a new Serious Sam game during today's Xbox showcase, and it's a little bit different from the ones that have come before. Serious Sam: Shatterverse is a run-based multiplayer FPS for up to five players, each of them a Sam from a different dimension, who travel through a multiverse torn to pieces by the villainous Mental and try to put things right.

Serious Sam games have a fairly distinct style: Huge, open battlefields, massive waves of enemies, and a large arsenal of weapons (many of them not particularly practical) with which to dispatch them. They support various co-op and versus multiplayer modes, which are fun if not especially memorable, but singleplayer is the real name of the game—even though the campaigns are really just paper-thin excuses to blast the bejeezus out of everything.

Superficially, Shatterverse follows the pattern, with an "irresponsible arsenal" of old and new weapons and gadgets, and huge amounts of guys rushing straight at you, eager to be turned into goo. (There's also a lot of old Egypt in it, because that's what the first game did and they've just stuck with it ever since.)

The difference is that rather than playing through a conventional campaign, Shatterverse takes players through "procedurally shifted runs across hand-crafted arenas set in previously unexplored worlds," with "unstable anomalies, hidden portals and high-risk opportunities that can supercharge a run—or end it instantly." The further you go, the better the rewards and modifiers, and you'll also earn permanent character upgrades as you progress.

When I first ran across Serious Sam: Shatterverse, my mind flashed immediately to the new Painkiller that dropped last year, a "reimagining" of the classic People Can Fly shooter that turned it into a run-based multiplayer shooter that was really not great.

Upon further consideration, though, I'm inclined to give Shatterverse a bit more grace. The wide-open Serious Sam style is more conducive to multiplayer action, for one thing, and the series has always happily embraced the absurd, which makes this sort of take on it more palatable. Making every player a different variant of Sam is a clever twist too, and even though most of the voices in the trailer are unfamiliar, I was happy to confirm that original Serious Sam voice actor John J. Dick is back for this one too.

Another interesting note is that Serious Sam: Shatterverse is not being developed by Croteam, which I guess is awash in Talos Principle money now, but by Behaviour Interactive, best known for the multiplayer horror game Dead By Daylight. Behaviour producer Nic Duchesne said the studio's main goal "was to respect Serious Sam's rich legacy while presenting it in a fresh, contemporary way unlike anything seen before in the series."

Croteam had equally nice things to say about it: "It's very exciting to see another talented team step in and create something bold, fresh and different within the universe we cherished for so long," studio co-founder Davor Hunski said.

A release date for Serious Sam: Shatterverse wasn't announced but it's expected to be out later this year, and it's up for wishlisting now on Steam. If you want some seriously good old-time shooter action while you wait, pretty much the entire franchise is deeply discounted in the Steam Spring Sale.

Warhammer's plague god, Nurgle, has proved surprisingly popular with videogame developers, with top-villain billing in games like Vermintide 2, Darktide, and Chaos Gate: Daemonhunters. He was also featured in Boltgun, with his grotesque nurgling servants mooning us and proving annoyingly hard to hit. They'll be returning in Boltgun 2, along with the previously revealed servants of Khorne and Tzeentch, but as the latest trailer shows, Slaanesh is also along for the ride.

A god of excess in all things, Slaanesh encompasses gluttony and partying and degenerate art, but is also unequivocally the god of fuck. Which explains why the other gods have tended to be a bit more popular with videogame developers. (Though Total War: Warhammer has been pretty up-front with Slaanesh's whole deal, to be fair.)

Boltgun 2's latest trailer showcases Slaanesh's servants the daemonettes, moving so fast they're a trail of purple silhouettes, as well as space marines from the Emperor's Children legion. Here's hoping the noise marines, who fight with electric guitars, also make an appearance. Maybe that's been them playing the soundtrack this whole time?

We'll have to fight servants of all four of the Chaos gods in Boltgun 2, and the trailer also shows Nurgle's Death Guard and poxwalkers, which look just like the miniatures. Fortunately we won't be alone. The sequel will have two protagonists, with the original's Ultramarine Malum Caedo joined by Sister of Battle Nyra Veyrath in a singleplayer campaign with branching paths.

Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun 2 is due out later this year on Steam.

Dandelion sure does spend a lot of time imagining colorful new ways for Geralt to die. He also seems to know a lot of details about Geralt's sex life? Let me back up and explain what's going on here.

The Reigns series started in 2016. It's a survivor from the era when paid mobile games could still compete with free mobile games, a golden time that turned out to be a mere blink of the gaming industry's leviathan eye. In Reigns you were a king presented with binary decisions about how to rule, which you'd choose by swiping left or right. The consequences eventually led to a colorful "off with your head" scene appropriate to those choices, and you'd begin again as the next king in line.

Sequels and spin-offs became more complicated, and found homes on other platforms. There's been a sci-fi one, a Chinese one, a Game of Thrones one, and now a Witcher one. Instead of being an heir to the throne trying to navigate coronation ceremonies and diplomatic affairs, you are the Geralts who exist in Dandelion's songs—trying to stay alive long enough to achieve the three random goals you're given each run, like winning a certain number of duels or making sweet love down by the fire, which is where Dandelion knowing way too much about what Geralt gets up to at night comes in.

Eventually the ballad ends, not always in death, and your score is tallied while the quest-completion sound from The Witcher 3 plays and confetti shoots up, with a final blast based on how long you lasted. Sometimes, when you've had a real short run, the pitiful spurt of confetti comes across kind of sarcastic.

Of dairy and darkness

One of those choices lets me steal cheese from a tyromancer (that's someone who divines the future from dairy, a deep-cut reference to a Witcher 3 sidequest), which I could give to a halfling chef, making the non-human community like me more at the cost of angering the magical community. To win back their hearts I might refuse a noble's request to knock down a mage's tower for being taller than his, but doing that will annoy the human community. The three bars measuring these reputations fluctuate constantly and unpredictably, and if any get too high or low the ballad ends. Most of mine end with Geralt being hanged for fraternizing with the Scoia'tael because I maxed out the non-human bar by accident.

I've also had my blood sucked out by multiple vampires and been shot by a dryad, as well as having ballads end where I re-skilled to become a baker or retired to the country to judge beer competitions. Avoiding those endings is a real balancing act. The fourth bar measures your commitment to the Path of the Witcher, and if you spend too much time on diversions it'll drop so low Geralt abandons the job altogether. Filling it up isn't a game over, though. Instead, it triggers combat.

Combat uses a system that's new to Reigns. Where the original had a clumsy duelling minigame and follow-ups have tried alternatives like the card game in Reigns: Three Kingdoms, here it's an arcade thing where Geralt hops left and right to dodge falling claws and fists while trying to land on swords and signs. Monsters might block columns with fiery breath or a sonic attack, while landing on an igni sign can burn away a few of their attacks or a quen shield you from the next blow.

The battles feel better on thumbsticks than they do with a mouse, so I mostly played Reigns: The Witcher on a laptop with controller in hand. It's Steam Deck Verified and an obvious fit for that platform too. Most runs are over quickly and after two or three I'm ready to do something else, which seems ideal for a handheld game.

Which is why it's odd that, like the other Reigns games, there are multiple endings—and even more secret endings—tucked away at the end of a long grind. From the first Reigns there's been deep lore stuff going on, whether a devil had cursed you to reincarnate as doomed kings forever, or whatever was going on with the goddess whose appearances were accompanied by odd glitches in Reigns: Your Majesty.

To uncover these secrets you have to jump through a huge amount of hoops, unlocking specific cards and performing niche actions, but the amount of repetition needed to do that is so offputting I've never bothered. It's an oddity of the Reigns games that they're well-suited to short snacky play, but devoted to hiding stuff behind hours of experimentation and boundary-pushing.

The mild hunt

Reigns: The Witcher does feel true to the source material. Geralt's always being hassled by people who want him to be an assassin or otherwise do random stuff that's not technically witchering, and he's always trying to maintain balanced neutrality in the face of political forces trying to use him, which never ends well.

When my careful plate-spinning makes for a decent run with plenty of new crises and characters, I think Reigns: The Witcher is a pretty good time. Sometimes I unlock a between-run song puzzle, where a demanding audience member makes Dandelion construct something poetic out of inspiration cards and specific deaths I've unlocked, which is a pleasant change of pace. But then I get runs where hardly anything is new and I die because a particularly ambiguous situation upends the apple cart I've only just started spinning plates on, and then I think Reigns: The Witcher is just sort of fine.

Nerial is the French indie studio behind Card Shark and the Reigns series, and not immediately the team you would pick for a Witcher game—unless it was a singleplayer Gwent story like Thronebreaker perhaps. Instead, Nerial is adapting the Reigns series to Geralt's adventures, having had what they call "great success" with a Game of Thrones version in 2018. A conversation with CD Projekt Red at GDC a couple of years ago got the ball rolling, and later this month they'll be releasing Reigns: The Witcher.

"The games were our first point of reference, as we're working with CDPR", creative director Francois Alliot and narrative designer Oscar Harrington-Shaw say, answering my questions via email as a gestalt. "So you'll meet familiar characters such as Yen, Triss, and Regis who more closely resemble their character in the games rather than the books, and we've adapted many popular quests and iconic moments—you might encounter a stuffed unicorn, or a mute druid."

While this game's cartoon versions of everyone from Dandelion to godlings are faithful to The Witcher 3, Nerial has added to the lore as well. Playing a preview build I was eaten by a tarasque—not the D&D monster with two Rs in its name, but the lion-headed dragon-turtle of French mythology. As Alliot and Harrington-Shaw say, "we love how [Witcher creator Andrzej] Sapkowski poached from lots of disparate strands of mythology to inspire the books, and so we also took this approach when writing new storylines, taking inspiration from Euripidean tragedies, the lais of Marie de France and even Provençal folklore."

Getting their game to gel with the existing world of the games and the books was made easier when they hit on the structure, with each of your pick-a-path adventures a ballad being composed by Dandelion based on Geralt's saga, rather than a "real" event from his life. It took a while to come up with this more fanciful spin on the regular Reigns structure of playing a ruler and then their heirs.

"One thought was to frame the game as though you were playing through a mage's prediction of a potential future for Geralt," they say, "using cards to divine possible upcoming events. We wondered if the reveal at the end could have been that this card divination was in fact the original use of Gwent cards, as though Reigns: The Witcher was the backstory of Gwent. Sort of the reverse of the history of Tarot, which began as a card game and was later used for fortune-telling. But it was hard to square this with the chronology of the Witcher universe."

Each decision you make has an effect on four meters measuring how liked or hated Geralt is by different communities, and how committed he is to the witcher's path. Turn down a noble who demands you burn a mage's tower for daring to be taller than his own and the magical community will like you more, while the human population will like you less. Make enough decisions that bottom out Geralt's human appeal and you'll be lynched. Making decisions that top out meters can be just as dangerous, like when I cozied up to the mages too much and died of overexertion in a drug-fueled sorceress orgy.

An earlier version of the favorability system "placed too much of an emphasis on the class politics of the Witcher world, as opposed to human vs nonhuman conflict, and didn't allow much focus on combat," the developers say. "By reducing the factional values to three (human, nonhuman and mage) and introducing the monster-hunting value, this shifted the balance closer to the source material, where Geralt is balancing the favor of hostile groups, but also trying to survive as a sword for hire. When the monster-hunting value reaches the maximum it triggers a fight with a monster, generally the one you're currently tracking."

These fights are new to Reigns, a rhythmic minigame where your opponent rains attacks down a board as you hop left and right to dodge them while trying to catch swords and land on signs to defeat your foe. While traditionally Reigns has found most of its audience on mobile, where swiping to make decisions has a deliberately dating-app feel, this makes it seem more at home on a handheld. "We've done a lot of our testing on Steam Deck", Alliot and Harrington-Shaw say. "It's been Steam Deck Verified by Valve and we think it's one of the best ways to play the game. It feels right at home."

Though if you're playing it in public, don't let anyone see what you get up to with the stuffed unicorn and the sorceresses. Reigns: The Witcher will be available on Steam and GOG from February 25.

I can't believe it's been nearly four years since Cult of the Lamb was released. I'd say time passes quickly when you're having fun, but unfortunately, I didn't get to spend all that time playing Massive Monster's roguelike, so there must be another reason.

But the devs over at Massive Monster have had double the time with Cult of the Lamb, having spent a whopping eight years working on the base game, all of its updates, and now the biggest story expansion to date: Woolhaven. Each new piece of content has been better than the last, which is no small feat. But after almost a decade of working on this adorably gruesome roguelike, the devs are starting to look for new horizons.

"We're definitely excited to do something else," Massive Monster's art director, James Pearmain, tells me. "We've been working on Cult of the Lamb for nearly eight years now, which is a ludicrous amount of time. And I think particularly with Woolhaven, we've done this huge expansion now, and we've extended the story. We do have other stories that we want to tell, but I don't know if they necessarily will need to be part of this game."

Woolhaven is everything I could want in a Cult of the Lamb expansion. It's given us two new dungeon biomes to explore and fight through, doubled the cult area, provided new buildings, and even introduced ranching. It's a huge expansion, so big that I'm left wondering what else Massive Monster could possibly add to the game.

"There will definitely be more Cult of the Lamb, whether that is through an update or an expansion or a new game," Pearmain says. "We're not entirely sure right now, to be perfectly honest.

"We really want to make a multiplayer game, and we've been playing around with that, and we're really excited by that. Since launching Woolhaven, we've been doing an internal Game Jam and just playing around with lots of different ideas, and that's been really, really fun, just because it's been so long since we've actually worked on anything new."

A Massive Monster multiplayer game is certainly an exciting prospect. The devs have already dabbled in co-op with Cult of the Lamb's free Unholy Alliance update, which allowed a second player to take over as the Goat and play alongside the Lamb, so perhaps this could count as practice for whatever comes next.

But that could be looking a tad too far ahead. It seems like while Massive Monster does have one eye fixed on new possibilities, it's still all up in the air as to what that could be. "In all honesty, right now, we're just kind of playing around and seeing what's fun," Pearmain adds. "And as a studio, we always like to follow the fun. I do think we're probably not going to be doing another huge expansion for Cult of the Lamb, just because we've been working on it for so long now. But there definitely will be more Cult of the Lamb, and we're definitely going to make more games. So yeah, we'll just wait and see, I guess."

Over the years, we've seen many smash hit indie games. In fact, these indie games have been the backbone of creativity in the industry on large, providing players with amazing stories and worlds to explore. Cult of the Lamb is just one example of this, a game from a small studio seemingly coming out of nowhere and garnering critical acclaim and much love.

"I think we definitely had an idea that people were going to like Cult of the Lamb and it was going to be a success, but I think it would have been mad to assume that it would have got the level of success that it did get," Massive Monster's art director, James Pearmain, tells me.

"It's weird in the industry right now, because you have these AAA games that cost $200 million or however much to make, and so they have to charge $60 or however much it is to sort of have any chance of breaking even. And then you have all these indie games that are coming out at a fraction of that. And a lot of them, actually, have just as much content as the AAA games, and in some cases they're just as good, if not better experiences."

Looking at my recently played library in Steam, it's a mix of AAA games like Fallout 76, Deadlock, or Battlefield 6, and some AA games like Arc Raiders. But there's also a hell of a lot of indie games that just keep sticking around. Cult of the Lamb isn't just a regular play, especially with its recent Woolhaven expansion; Stardew Valley, Lethal Company, and SCP: Secret Laboratory keep popping up.

One of the best things about the gaming industry right now is not knowing when the next indie smash hit is going to come out of the woodwork and happily surprise us all. But with everything else going on in the industry as of late, I don't blame anyone for getting nervous about the future.

"It's really hard to sort of tell what's going to happen," Pearmain says. "I don't know if [releasing an indie game] is necessarily harder. Our friends over at Aggro Crab just sold a ridiculous amount of copies with Peak, and you know that they're not a new studio. But I think that kind of took them massively by surprise.

"I'm sure there will be games in the future that just absolutely explode, almost out of nowhere, like Schedule 1 this year, which sold a ridiculous amount of copies. Sometimes you just make something that really resonates with people." Peak's devs have said time and again how the success of the multiplayer climbing sim took them by surprise.

On the other hand, Landfall, the other half of Peak's development team, had less success with their previous multiplayer game Content Warning, something which I thought was going to be the next Lethal Company. I absolutely love Content Warning and still play it occasionally with my friends, but it just didn't take to water as Peak did. It really does seem as if you can't predict how players will react to these kinds of games.

But that doesn't mean all hope is lost. "AAA games are getting a bit stagnant, with their hundreds of millions of dollar budgets, and then you can just make a really interesting indie game with one person, and the risk is so low, because you just need to be able to afford to eat and pay rent.

"I think that's where the really interesting stuff comes from, and I think players really respond to that. So, yeah, I don't think those days have gone at all. I think there'll be plenty more indie smash hits, and I can't wait to play them."

Cult of the Lamb is one of my all-time favourite games for a lot of reasons. The dungeon runs are brilliantly fun, the cultists are adorable, and I always have time for a good farming sim. But something I've always appreciated is the value for money.

"We have a really great relationship with the community, and we want to make sure they feel like they're getting value for money," Massive Monster's art director, James Pearmain, tells me. "Especially when the game is on sale, if you buy the bundle, you get pretty good value. There's a lot in there."

Whenever a friend comes to me asking for gaming recommendations, Cult of the Lamb is always near the top of my list. As someone who went into the roguelike with almost no expectations and then got immediately hooked, I find it a safe bet that my friends will enjoy it as much as I do.

But while enjoyment is clearly an important part of any game recommendation, what comes in second for me is value for money. If I'm recommending a game, I want to make sure it's worth the cash my friends will spend on it. Yet another reason why Cult of the Lamb is always such a good bet.

"It's definitely important to us to offer good value," Pearmain adds. "I think the fact that the game has been successful and we've been able to kind of continue working on it and continue selling copies has meant the value has got better. Obviously, you know, it's a business. At the end of the day, we need to make some money. I feel like we managed to find a good balance now. We wouldn't want to fleece players."

You can get it for £20 on Steam, or with the latest update, Woolhaven for £30, and that's without it going on sale. I've put almost 70 hours into Cult of the Lamb, so I can safely say it was worth the money I spent all those years ago.

I love the boss fights in Cult of the Lamb; they're a welcome change of pace to what is otherwise a relatively peaceful dungeon-crawling experience. But I'd be lying if I didn't admit that my absolute favourite part of fighting a boss is getting to indoctrinate them and welcome their cute follower form into my cult.

Once you defeat a boss, you have the option to take them into your cult, where you can look after them and assign them tasks to do around the place for as long as they live, which sadly is never long enough.

Spoilers ahead for Cult of the Lamb Woolhaven

So when I went into Marchosias' big fight towards the end of Cult of the Lambs' latest great expansion, Woolhaven, I was expecting to come back with a new cute little wolf follower to look after.

After defeating Marchosias, he lay in the centre of the arena bruised and bloodied. I went up and found the choice to either indoctrinate him or straight up execute him. Obviously, I went to indoctrinate him, but it didn't work. I tried again and again until Marchosias had had enough of my antics and decided he'd rather rip himself in half than join my cult. I was left devastated and slightly insulted.

It also seems to be a choice that has confused some other players who were looking forward to Marchosias joining their cult. So I had to ask Massive Monster's art director, James Pearmain, why they decided to make it this way when I talked to him last week.

"When we first started Cult of the Lamb, we decided, in this world, everything is cults, and the whole world is built around religion," Pearmain tells me. "We have the bishops and the one who waits, and these different characters, and everyone's sort of obsessed with religion. But we wanted to have a unique enemy boss in Woolhaven.

"We thought actually making Marchosias really against the religion and being really scarred by that would be more interesting than just another big bad guy. Marchosias is into science and is burned by religion. He hates it and does everything he can to avoid it. And so the decision not to let you indoctrinate him was a really important one, because it would have gone against his character."

I do see the vision. As much as I'd love to have a new boss follower join the ranks, I understand that it would be rather odd to have Marchosias happily walking around your cult, given how much he clearly hates religion.

When you first meet Marchosias while running through the snowy mountain dungeon, he's clearly suspicious of you. Later, he asks you why you spread such horrid rot around the mountain and tries to stifle your efforts by taking either rotburn or food from you. He's obviously an enemy you'll have to overcome, but I didn't get the vibe that he was a particularly bad guy.

Surrounded by scientific equipment and books, Marchosias is clearly interested in a different kind of truth. Scarred by religion, he sees your acts on the mountain as nonsensical and probably greedy. He didn't come looking for you or hurt your cult, and now you're running around the mountain killing his people and spreading a rot that clearly isn't good for anyone.

"I'm really, really glad that we did that, because I think if you had just forced him to join your cult, it would have gone against everything he stands for," Pearmain adds. "It breaks player expectations, because you think, okay, you're gonna get him to join your cult, but actually, he hates religion so much that he'd rather tear himself apart. I can understand why people are upset about it, but for me, I think that was a core part of his personality. I'm sorry he didn't get your Marchosias, though."

It's ok, I forgive the devs for keeping Marchosias from me. In the end, it was the right choice for his story and character arc, and at the very least, I got to enjoy having the cultist versions of Hagar, Fester, Mestor, and Nestor roaming around my camp.

Few things thrill me like a very old game suddenly getting an update. Keep, quintuple-A publishers, your storied pomp. Give me your ancient, your forgotten, your games that run in Unreal Engine 1 and whose default controls make heavy use of the numpad. That's what gets me excited.

So the fact that Serious Sam 2, 21 years of age, has just got Steam achievements and a lil' patch? That's the good stuff, right there.

Serious Sam 2 update 2.2 dropped yesterday, bringing with it 30 new cheevos for "your number 142451 no deaths, colt-only, left-handed, no damage, blindfolded Serious Sam 2 run!" They forgot to add: played on a saxophone.

They're, you know, full of achievement stuff: kill 20,000 enemies, find all the secrets in a level, that kind of thing. Nothing too outre, though there are a bundle of eight hidden achievements you may have to use your noggin (or Google) to uncover.

As for the patch? There's some fairly meaty stuff in there. The game's controller options (also, Serious Sam 2 has controller options) now have an auto-aim profile, a few crashes and bugs have been fixed, and the integrated InSamnity! 2 mod has "Restored the third-person tool part mover that was lost during the Steam version port."

The integrated Renovation mod, likewise, received some tweaks and fixes. You can find the full patch notes down below.

Croteam's been touching up Serious Sam 2 for a little while now, much to my delight. Last October, the game got a big glow-up to mark its 20th anniversary, bringing the aforementioned mods into the game and generally getting things spick and span. Five years before that, it got a 15th-anniversary update.

All this to say: see you back here in five years, when Croteam patches the game to work on the HoloLens headsets we're all wearing in the Water Wars.

Serious Sam 2 update 2.2

General

• Implemented 30 Steam Achievements 
• Added Auto Aim profile option to the Controller Options menus
• Updated fonts and added missing Croatian character

Serious Sam 2

• The secret treasure can no longer remain inaccessible behind a fence on Freezepad level
• Fixed crash when the secret snowman appears on Freezepad level
• Fixed crash when attempting to join a match using an IP address
• Fixed transparency issues with text strings in the Save Menu
• Updated Extras Menu

InSamnity! 2

• Restored the 3rd-person tool part mover that was lost during the Steam version port

Renovation

• Fixed an issue where custom enemies did not play their death animation and remained standing
• Fixed incorrect firing behavior when the player stands with their back to a wall while using a double shotgun combo
• Adjusted the size of the level description area in the loading menu
• Added new menu items introduced with the base game update

One of the best feelings in Cult of the Lamb is when the cult management side of the game and the dungeon crawls all click together, and you enter a serious flow state, balancing both halves of the game without having to think too hard about it.

But as fun as that may be, it's not really the point of Cult of the Lamb. Really, you should always be thinking about what the next thing could go wrong and not getting complacent about it all—which is where Woolhaven came in clutch.

"People have been playing Cult of the Lamb for so long now, you kind of get really comfortable," the art director at Massive Monster, James Pearmain, tells me. "Woolhaven is right at the end of the game, you have your big cult set up, and you have things automated.

"Introducing the winter felt like a really good way of switching things up, because it makes everything look different. Suddenly, there's all this excitement, and the followers are throwing snowballs. You can make snow lambs and change up how you're going to generate your food.

"It was a good opportunity to get people to rethink, okay, how are you going to get food? And maybe the crops die? You can't farm the crops during winter. So then, okay, well, what if we had ranching animals? So it kind of was something that came from that central idea of having the winter and just sort of wanting to sort of mix the gameplay up a little bit in the cult."

Winter in Woolhaven brings waves of storms, some worse than others. At its easiest, winter brings a chill in the air and prevents you from farming on any land that hasn't been fertilised with rot. But at its worst, it'll cover your cult in heaps of snow, with storms so violent that cultists are forced to stay inside their tent as structures get snowed under or destroyed. If you don't prepare well enough, your followers can starve or even freeze to death.

"We wanted to make sure that you're doing some new things back at the cult," Pearmain says. "Because it's a game of two halves. If we had just spent all this time on the dungeon side and the story side and left the cult site as is, it would have got a little bit boring. We weren't necessarily trying to stress the players out. It was more to provide a fresh experience."

Woolhaven doesn't just make the cult management side of the game harder, like Pearmain says, "it's a game of two halves". With two new dungeons accompanied by new bad buys to fight and indoctrinate into your cult, the dungeon runs in Woolhaven are also a much-needed refresh to Cult of the Lamb.

It's not only exciting to run into the snowy mountain and rot underbelly just to face new enemies and earn new tarot cards—the winter requires you to head into these new dungeons.

Charged shards and rotburn are a vital resource for looking after your cult, and at the beginning of Woolhaven, you can only find them in the dungeons. "It's all about trying to encourage people to jump around and keep things balanced and never feel too comfortable," Pearmain adds.

"We didn't want people to just burn through one biome and then burn through the next in a linear way. We wanted them to jump around a little bit and keep that balance. I think that gives us a bit more of an interesting journey if you go between the two."

The two new dungeon biomes work brilliantly in tandem. "Cult of the Lamb is all about juxtaposition, right, of the cute and your horrific, your comedy and your horror, those two things at odds with each other. So we wanted the second biome to be something that felt quite different. And then this idea of the rot came about, blood red versus the snowy white, pure style of the snow—it felt right."

If I had to pick, my favourite of the two would have to be the rot—the enemies are just too grotesque not to love. But I agree that both biomes are made better by existing alongside one another. I mean, now I get to enjoy the best of both worlds: indoctrinating adorable little wolves and horrific rot monsters that were made to spite god. There really is a lot to love in Woolhaven.

I'm a huge fan of Cult of the Lamb, and even still, Woolhaven managed to exceed my expectations. Providing two new dungeons, a massive cult expansion, and a gripping story. There's a lot on offer here, more than most players expected to have. But it's something that Massive Monster has planned to do for quite some time now.

"When the game came out, originally, there was a load of things we wanted to do, but we were constrained by budget and timelines and stuff," Massive Monster's art director, James Pearmain, tells me. "It wasn't until quite close to launch that the game actually sort of worked, and all the systems clicked together, so we're scrambling to sort of get that done.

"We spent the last two years after launch adding more depth to the dungeon side, in Relics of the Old Faith, and then in Sins of the Flesh, we added a bunch of depth to the cult. And then with Unholy Alliance, we kind of added the local co-op and stuff to go alongside that. Now we're really happy with how it is; we packed it full of secrets and content. There's loads of stuff to do, but we did feel like there was more that we could offer."

When Cult of the Lamb released back in 2022, Massive Monster had just a small core team working on the roguelike. "It was the first sort of big game we made in Unity," Pearmain says. "We were a really small team when we started out, and now we've kind of grown into a much bigger team. So we wanted to put all those lessons into practice and just make something really chunky.

"The community was still screaming out for more, more, more. They wanted more dungeons, more biomes to fight for and stuff. But what we didn't want to do was just go, 'Okay, here's one new biome and a few new buildings and stuff.' We wanted to make it a real chunky experience, something a bit like The Witcher 3: Blood and Wine, Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty, and Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree, which you can really sink your teeth into. And it feels like you're getting a whole new kind of game."

Going into Woolhaven, I thought the new snowy biome and rot biome would have just a couple of levels to them. I didn't think each would have several levels, each with new boss fights and therefore cultists to indoctrinate.

Now I've got Festor, Nestor, and Mestor sleeping peacefully in my camp alongside new rot cultists like Poyel, Eleleth, and Ophans. Now all I have to do is give all of them skull necklaces to ensure they stick around for as long as possible.

But that's not all. Woolhaven also introduces an extended cult area, which you can fill with new buildings like your animal ranch, and a new winter mechanic. There's just so much to keep you busy. "It was just fun to be able to do a bit of a reset and not start from scratch, but rethink a few things, and give the community something they can really get into," Pearmain says.

"We've been working on it for a long time. From the beginning, it was probably about two years of work. We've done a number of free updates, but this is definitely the biggest thing we've done since launch. So yeah, we were very excited and just interested to see how the community was going to react. And that was really positive. So it was a relief."

I had upset the peasantry by, er, murdering quite a lot of them. To be fair, they were about to hang a deserter. To make things right I agreed to help with their protest against taxation, which is why they asked me to kill a barghest for its blood: "The green really pops on our protest signs." But I hadn't got to grips with the combat system yet and the barghest ended up collecting my blood instead, which is how Dandelion got yet another story of Geralt's many deaths to turn into a ballad.

Remember Reigns? Nerial's game of Tinder-esque swipe-based monarchical decisionmaking was massive in 2016, followed by a sequel called Reigns: Her Majesty and spin-offs in other settings. Reigns: Game of Thrones seemed like a particularly perfect fit with its stories of bastardry and beheadings.

Next month, in collaboration with CD Projekt, Nerial will release Reigns: The Witcher. Rather than reliving the short-lived reigns of cursed royals, each run is one of Dandelion's ballads about Geralt's adventures. Only I guess the bard's in his tragic era, because they all end with Geralt's death. (After the barghest, I was killed by a gnomish prank.)

Every decision you make can alter four values, all of which you want to keep near the middle to avoid disaster. Three of them represent how liked you are by a different faction: humans, non-humans, and sorcerers. The fourth represents your dedication to the witcher's path. In the original games it was a bit odd how the need to maintain balance led to diffidence—one of the four icons represented wealth, so you could die by being too rich. Here, the demand for balance suits Geralt's standoffish neutrality. You can only afford to get so involved, and then you have to back off and play the reluctant antihero.

When things go particularly wrong, battle breaks out. It's a little more complex than the back-and-forth duels of the original. It's a real-time dance, with Geralt hopping left and right at the bottom of a grid while icons fall toward him like Tetris blocks. Only instead of tetrominoes some of them are witcher's swords and some of them are your enemy's attacks.

You have to kind of dance between them, trying to land on the swords as they reach you and dodge the rest. Witcher signs can also appear on the grid to set off your abilities, and some monsters have special attacks—the bruxae lets loose a paralyzing scream that freezes you in place for instance.

Each run is like a string of sidequests. You catch a serial killer, protect a merchant, arm wrestle a guard, burn a wizard's tower, and are turned into a jade pendant so Yennefer can wear you to a banquet. Completing objectives gives you more cards for the next run and levels up Dandelion's bardic abilities. One of my next objectives is to find love, which makes it easier to please people and harder to annoy them—it's called Geralt the Bathed and its icon is two feet in a tub.

Like the protestors using barghest blood, it's the kind of silly but accurate touch that makes it clear Reigns: The Witcher is the work of people who get the appeal. It even plays the quest complete sound from The Witcher 3 at the end of your runs. While each of those runs only takes minutes, I can see myself losing hours to this. Reigns: The Witcher is out February 25 on PC and mobile.

I do not know what Massive Monster puts into Cult of the Lamb. You'd think after over 50 hours, completing the game, and doing absolutely everything possible, I'd get tired and move on. But no, as it turns out, I can never get enough of collecting and fighting little critters. So you can probably imagine just how normal my reaction was when I got wind of the new Woolhaven DLC.

You're introduced to a new cult figure, Yngya, and her dead lamb followers, who were massacred at their home at the base of the mountain and left to rot. They're not very happy with it and even less pleased with who's moved in, a wolf deity, Marchosias, who also comes with a bunch of new figurehead followers who you can defeat in battle and indoctrinate into your cult.

Tearing through the mountain in both the snowy top and the rot-filled underbelly is just as exciting as it is in any of the maps. But now with new enemies to fight and weapons to bonk them on the head with, whoever thought of the flail needs a raise—it feels like a whole new adventure. But I'm not here to convince anyone of how fun Woolhaven's combat is—it's more of the same, so of course it works. No, the best part of Woolhaven actually takes place back at your cult.

Walking into Woolhaven, you're met by a very helpful moleman named Gofernon, who immediately cements himself as one of the best characters I've ever had the pleasure of meeting by expanding your base camp. Yes, you heard me, Gofernon, alongside his mole pals, dig into the bottom of the map and create a whole new area for you to decorate and use. You can do this a couple more times until you get a new area which is almost the same size as your initial camp.

To say that this made my day is an understatement, for months I'd been packing my cult tightly together, trying to optimise space and efficiency while ensuring it still looked somewhat appealing, but now I had double the area to work with. And the first thing I did was move all my new farm pets in.

One of the other great perks of Woolhaven is the introduction of ranching. Now you can build a farmhouse and fence off a field to keep animals like Yakish, Cowish, Llamaish, and Turtleish. You can shear these for wool, butcher them for meat, or milk them for, well, milk. All of which are precious items which will come in handy when the winter frost sets in.

Winter takes it all

Managing your camp in Cult of the Lamb is a multitasking effort that I've always loved. It may not be for everyone, but I actually enjoy looking after these hapless critters who won't stop shitting three feet away from a perfectly good toilet, are incapable of cooking food if you haven't set out a meal plan, and just generally let things go to hell if you're away too long. But now with Woolhaven, you have the extra stress of snow.

At first, it isn't too bad—it's mostly just aesthetic as your cultists make snow angels and get into snowball fights, but the more you interact with Yngya, the worse the frost gets. Snowstorms can trigger out of nowhere, freezing your cultists, stopping crops from growing on frozen land, preventing cultists from working or praying, or even destroying structures if you haven't set up enough heaters around your camp to ward off the snow.

The snow also won't stay forever—it comes and goes for different lengths of time, and you can predict storms before they happen and how long they'll last by building a Weather Vane. But it's easy to get overwhelmed by the need for new resources to keep your camp warm at the start.

You'll need to gather new items like Rotburn to keep the fires going, Charged Shards to fuel the warm baths, or Cursed and Pure Yewbark to create new buildings, which are integral to your flock's survival during the winter days. All of which you can find during runs and then harvest in your base afterwards by building structures like a Lightning Rod for Charged Shards or a Rotburn Mine.

But managing these resources is just part of the puzzle of Cult of the Lamb, and if you're frugal and smart, it won't take long to overcome it and stock up enough of these items to last you through any storm that comes your way.

The way in which Cult of the Lamb rewards forethought and meticulous planning is actually my favourite part of the game. I soon got into the habit of freshly planting seeds in my farmland and then performing the Ritual of the Harvest the night before the snow set in. Not to brag, but maxing out the amount of food I could harvest between the winter snow stints meant that my flock never went hungry, and I was able to build up quite a pantry, which meant I never had to butcher one of my beloved animals. (Okay, that was a little brag).

Woolhaven proves that there's no such thing as too much of a good thing—as it turns out, more of a good thing is pretty darn great. Not only was Woolhaven a chunkier DLC than I first thought it would be, with way more combat levels, side story content, and new camp structures, but it's the perfect answer to someone desperate to keep the good times going.

If you’re not careful, survivors in Quarantine Zone can bring the zombie virus into your camp. That’s not the only nasty baggage they can come with though. There’s a whole list of contraband items that can place your base in danger, so it’s vital that you know what to confiscate.

From day seven onwards, you'll need to prevent survivors from bringing weapons, drugs, and zombie body parts into the camp. On the surface, those are pretty straightforward instructions but there are a whole lot of items stuffed into survivor suitcases that aren't obviously safe or dangerous. To help, here’s a full run-through of all the contraband items in Quarantine Zone and what you should do with them.

Safe vs contraband items

You get a bonus for correctly confiscating contraband but get fined for taking safe items. For example, if you find beer, wine, or cigarettes, you shouldn’t confiscate them because the rules of the camp don’t include alcohol or tobacco as drugs. However, medications are considered contraband and should be seized.

When it comes to weapons, you obviously have to take things like blades, guns, and explosives. Potentially lethal tools like chainsaws, axes, and manual saws are on the contraband list too. However, power drills and hammers are safe to bring inside the camp. And despite how flammable it is, survivors can bring in as much propane gas as they please.

Every so often, you’ll find a survivor carrying zombie body parts. These are against the camp’s rules but due to the infection risk of handling them you shouldn't confiscate them unless you're working on the Modern Prometheus quest. Instead, the survivor who brought them is considered infected and must be sent to liquidation. A collection of teeth, while being a very weird keepsake to have, are not actually zombie parts and are not contraband.

Internal contraband

Some survivors are particularly sneaky about hiding their contraband items. To make sure they aren’t smuggling anything internally, you need to use the x-ray tool and switch down to the "all" layer. This layer doesn’t show any organs, so your view of contraband won’t be obscured. Be sure to check the back side of survivors too so you don't miss that one very obvious hiding place.

You can’t remove internal contraband yourself, but Charlie (the fella in the Hazmat suit) is more than happy to do that dirty work for you. Once you spot an item inside of a survivor, tag it and then interact with Charlie to have him extract it. He’ll place anything he removes on the table in front of him for you to inspect in more detail. If you find any contraband, confiscate it from here.

Remember that internal contraband is on your symptom list. If you want the maximum number of research points, mark it as a symptom when you find something inside of a survivor.

The majority of survivors in Quarantine Zone are a randomised mix of normal-looking folks. Every now and then you’ll come across someone with "left leg" tattooed on their left leg, but it doesn’t often get weirder than that. So, when a survivor arrives at the checkpoint with skeleton hands and an unremovable bag over his head, it’s bound to raise a few questions.

Who is the skeleton survivor?

Turns out, this odd-looking guy is based on the avatar of a TikTok and YouTube creator called DieDevDie who also provides voice acting for the character. This is one of a number of content creator cameos in Quarantine Zone, a little easter egg for anyone who happens to be familiar with them.

Other than the change in appearance and some new voice lines, investigating these cameo survivors works the exact same way as a standard investigation. For example, when I investigated the skeleton, I checked him for all of the usual symptoms and found that he had a crossed reflex, meaning he was infected. As is policy, I sent him to be liquidated—sorry, Dev.

Because he arrives on day five, before you unlock the scanner or the x-ray, you can’t check what DieDevDie looks like under the bag while he’s at the checkpoint. If you really want a face reveal though, follow him into the liquidation area while his execution takes place and witness the skull underneath.

Here are some other content creator cameos you can find as survivors in your checkpoint line:

• Godenot
• BaityBait
• DansGaming
• LightskinNightmare
• Kilira Cooper
• Dương FG

These aren’t the only easter eggs you’ll come across though. Crazy Dave from Plant Vs. Zombies has a chance to join your survivor base too. A recent update also adds Dead By Daylight survivors to the game, so you can expect to bump into Dwight, Meg, Claudette, or Jake sometime during your playthrough.

You might have gotten used to following the rules in Quarantine Zone, but every now and then a quest requires you to bend them. Modern Prometheus asks you to take a pretty big risk by allowing a survivor with a zombified head in his baggage to enter the camp.

What’s more, the survivor wants you to collect even more chunks of the undead. Here's a quick breakdown on completing the quest with each step explained further below:.

• Reach day 20 of the campaign
• Allow Stuart entry to the survivor block
• Make sure Stuart stays at the base
• Confiscate body parts from survivor baggage
• Talk to Stuart after collecting four parts

Meeting Stuart

On day 20 of the campaign, you encounter a survivor called Stuart. He’s smuggling a severed head which he claims is part of an important experiment. Usually, carrying infected contraband would get a survivor sent straight to liquidation, but you can choose to spare him and see how his experiment turns out.

In order to continue this quest, you need to admit Stuart into the survivor block, and make sure he stays there until the quest is complete. This means you need to send him back to your base during evacuation days. You also need to prevent him from dying from starvation, overcrowding, sickness, or zombie attack.

Collecting zombie body parts

Keeping Stuart alive is the easy part. The real challenge is finding enough zombie body parts to complete his experiment. You can’t use bodies taken from liquidation or the laboratory, so they have to be sourced from survivor baggage.

I had some pretty incredible luck in my first runthrough of this quest. After talking to Stuart, the next survivor I inspected was hauling an entire table of infected monster bits. Unfortunately, what survivors carry with them is down to chance so getting your hands on some severed hands won’t be that easy every time. In fact, it could take you a few days to collect enough chunks of zombie to help out your scientist friend.

When you eventually find a body part in a survivor’s baggage (or smuggled internally), confiscate it before you liquidate them. Remember that handling infected baggage is against the rules, so you’ll get hit with a $100 fine for each part you take. $400 isn’t too much cash to part with, but make sure it doesn’t push your camp funds into the red because that’ll result in a game over.

The results of the experiment

After successfully finding all four zombie parts, go talk to Stuart. Once you’re done chatting, leave him to work on his mad science overnight.

The next morning, you find that the experiment has gone wrong. Stuart has died and a small outbreak of zombies is running amok in the survivor base. To prevent any more deaths, head straight to the base and kill each zombie with your pistol or medical hammer.

Once the disaster is dealt with, you can help yourself to the belongings in Stuart’s tent. This includes $500 and a black case containing a severed head collectible. You can view your horrible trophy back at the command center.

Modern Prometheus is quite a lot of effort for a net profit of just $100, but if you’re a magpie type who can’t resist completing your collectibles list, you’ll want to make sure you finish this quest.

As survivors of the zombie apocalypse trudge into your military outpost, one by one, they wearily submit to your examinations in Quarantine Zone: The Last Check. Examine their eyes, their lungs, and their skin for any signs of the zombie virus—but don't forget to look deeper, too.

A lot deeper.

One of the tools you're given in Quarantine Zone is a handheld X-ray scanner that lets you look at the internal organs and bones of your victims patients. This is helpful for identifying symptoms of the zombie plague that might not appear on the outside of the body, like rotting lungs. (Gross.) It's also great for seeing if these survivors are trying to smuggle contraband into the military base.

And many of them are. Sometimes it's something innocuous, like a bottle of beer—and boy, you've really gotta love beer to carry a bottle of it up your dumper through a military checkpoint. Usually, though, the contraband is something more dangerous like a baggie of narcotics or a weapon. That's a no-no.

Problem was, Quarantine Zone launched on Monday and many of us have spent the past couple days dutifully scanning survivors with our X-ray tool, finding nothing, then being told we failed to confiscate the contraband people had swallowed or shoved up their butts. That's because there was a bug that rendered the illicit items and substances invisible, even to that handy X-ray machine.

A hotfix was applied today and now those items, while still pretty hard to find, are at least visible under the scanner. And you'd be surprised what you find in those wily survivors' bodies. One dude tried smuggling a hand grenade into the base. Up his butt. That's about the diciest move I'd ever heard of, until a lady came in a few minutes later with a zombie bone stuck up her butt.

Yes, survivors will try to smuggle in zombie parts, presumably to sell them on the black market, and I've found plenty in people's backpacks. It's real dedication to keister an infectious zombie bone, but this lady tried it. Gotta tip the cap for the pure gumption.

The Ask Your Mom quest in Quarantine Zone: The Last Check proves that zombies aren’t the only ones that’ll give you a hard time. This bulletin board quest asks you to hunt down six poems graffitied around the camp and deal with the human culprit behind them.

After you interact with a piece of graffiti, your flashlight reveals footprints that will guide you to the next poem. Unfortunately, the wide gaps between each footprint make the path difficult to follow at times. If you’re having trouble keeping up with the tracks or are just feeling a bit lost, here’s where to find all the poems in Quarantine Zone’s Ask Your Mom quest.

Quarantine Zone poem locations

How to find the artist

Once you’ve hunted down all the poems, go speak with Abe Crow (the unhappy subject of the graffiti). He’ll ask you how the vandal got their hands on the paint in the first place. So, you should go investigate in the storage area in the garage.

One of the scientists there explains that the stolen paint is almost impossible to wash off and so it should be visible on the offender’s clothes. Sure enough, once you shine your flashlight on the guilty survivor, you’ll see that they’re covered in red stains.

From here, you can either accept the graffiti artist’s bribe or report your findings to the scientist. The consequences of this choice aren’t too significant long-term so it’s up to you if you want a little extra money in your pocket or the warm, fuzzy feeling of doing the right thing.

A huge part of your job in Quarantine Zone: The Last Check is separating healthy survivors from zombies-to-be. Get this wrong and you could wind up with an infection outbreak in your camp, majorly jeopardizing your shot at hitting your evacuation quotas.

At first, you won’t have a full list of symptoms to choose from, or the tools needed to identify them. Each day you'll have to have more red flags to learn and instruments to keep track of, until eventually you're doing a lot of mental juggling in each interaction.To help save your camp from a bloody, brain-munching fate, here’s a full rundown of all the Quarantine Zone tools and how they’re used to identify symptoms.

Scanner

Use the scanner to see through survivors’ clothes and find any marks on their skin. Make sure to view their body from all angles and crouch down to check their feet too.

Your flashlight comes in handy for this part of the inspection process, as some symptoms can be hard to identify in lowlight. For example, red bruises and necrosis look pretty similar at times. They’re both splotchy patches that are significantly darker than bruises, but red bruises are a more deep, purple tone while necrosis is a cool black (with small sections of blood red).

Thermopulsometer

Use the thermopulsometer to check the heart rate and body temperature of a survivor. Make note of both of these figures and compare them with the ranges listed in your symptoms list. If you’re having trouble remembering these ranges, upgrade your thermopulsometer to provide color indicators or sound cues.

Reflex hammer

Testing a survivor with the reflex hammer is probably the most straight-forward part of an inspection. Simply hit them in either the arm or the leg, and wait to see how they respond. If a survivor is healthy, the limb you hit will swing backwards.

Stethoscope

Use the stethoscope tool to check out the health of a survivor’s lungs. Place the tool on the survivor’s chest and hover over any black spots you can see. These could be on the front of the lungs or the back, so be sure to check both sides.

Pay attention to how the sound of the survivor’s breath changes when you hover over each black spot. A wheezing breath indicates they are sick, but are still safe to go on to the survivor’s block. A wheezing inhale with a silent exhale (sometimes paired with a clicking sound) means the survivor should be sent to quarantine. If you hear a growling noise from the lungs, they’re definitely infected.

Not all of these respiratory symptoms will be in your symptom list to start with. So, if you hear a breathing sound you don’t recognise, send the survivor to the laboratory for testing.

X-ray

When it comes to x-rays, pay particular attention to any survivor who’s hunched over and holding their stomach. While it’s not guaranteed, these survivors are more likely to show abnormalities in their organs like internal bleeding, cuts, or unnatural colors. Switch between all four views to get the best visibility.You can also use the x-ray to check whether survivors have gotten …creative with smuggling contraband.

Matioscope

The matioscope tool reveals parasites and bacteria in the eyes by zooming in on a microscopic level. While it sounds very sci-fi, it’s fairly straightforward to use. Just pan around on each layer until you find an anomaly, and then adjust your focus to identify it.

Baggage and UV

Once unlocked, activate the UV light using a button on the luggage table. Once turned on, the UV light reveals glowing signs of infection on the survivor and their belongings.

GTA 6 delay news usually follows the same beats. The initial reaction is annoyance, and from some quarters, even dismay. Then comes the wave of contemplation regarding what the delay could mean for the industry as a whole (usually bad stuff). In our case, there's always a moment taken to mourn that every GTA 6 delay pushes its still-unconfirmed PC release date out even further. Then, usually towards the end—but sometimes right in the middle—Devolver Digital pipes up with its own delay.

Since the announcement of GTA 6's initial release date, Devolver—the publisher of Cult of the Lamb, Baby Steps, and Ball x Pit—has been threatening to release a game on the same day as GTA 6. With every new delay, Devolver delays too. "You can't escape us," the publisher reiterated today, just as it did back in May.

It's a pretty good bit. The company hasn't said anything about the game itself nor who's making it, but whatever it is, I'm sure barely anyone will notice (except sickos like me who have been barracking for Baby Steps to win PC Gamer's 2025 GOTY award).

Aside from being really funny, there's a quixotic stubbornness to the approach that comes as a relief. GTA 6 is going to completely reconfigure the industry's 2026 holiday bracket, much to the chagrin of publishers and developers working on basically any other game.

Devolver co-founder Nigel Lowrie acknowledged the open world elephant in the room in September. "It's just bigger than anything else both in the scope and scale of the game and the kind of cultural impact that it has and the attention it demands." In other words: the perfect time to release a new indie game.

Roguelite brick-breaker Ball x Pit has become my new "game I play when I'm watching people roleplay" because it's not demanding enough to distract me from all the dicerolling and regional accents, but it does give my hands something to do. Look, it's this or cigarettes and Ball x Pit is the less-crippling of the two addictions.

And now Ball x Pit is slightly better because the November patch fixes a bunch of bugs, and as the top patch note explains, the encyclopedia has been updated with full-color icons. This may seem like a small thing, but the original version not only looked bland, but made it tough to tell at a glance whether you were looking at, say, a poison ball or an ice ball. Now that one is green and the other blue like God intended that's no longer an issue. (It was enough of an annoyance there was even a now-redundant Encyclopedia Colored mod.)

The update also changes the way the retry option works: "Retry no longer causes resources gained in previous run to be lost". I still won't bother with it because I like going back to my base between runs to send the workers pinballing across the fields harvesting resources, even if I don't particularly need any wheat at the minute. It's just pleasant to set them up and watch them go.

As for actual bug bugs, Casino will now reduce the cost of rerolls like it's supposed to, speeding up harvests will no longer reduce the amount of resources you get out of them, and stone soldiers won't get stuck on minibosses any more. The market rates have been improved as well.

Here are the patch notes in full:

• Update encyclopedia to use full-color icons
• Fix possible soft lock when beating level with one of your final characters that hasn’t beaten it yet
• Retry no longer causes resources gained in previous run to be lost
• Improved market rates, rates return to normal faster
• Fixed bug where Casino wasn’t reducing re-roll cost
• Harvest aim line no longer starts from the far right side of the character
• Gatherer’s hut worker can no longer infinitely gather if you unassign them while they are out
• Speeding up harvests no longer leads to less resources gathered than normal speed
• Stone soldiers can no longer sometimes get stuck if they engage a miniboss that is attacking you
• Fixed invalid message that shows when you try to matchmake the Warrior with the False Messiah
• Wretched Onion damage now scales by AOE Damage multiplier
• Fixed bug where Dragon Prince’s attack could longer persist in other levels
• Housing built with gatherer’s hut now unlocks characters properly
• Fixed bug where final blueprint in the Liminal x Desert couldn’t be unlocked until you completed the Gory x Grasslands
• Radical now automatically chooses to revive if you have the Necromancer
• Allies or charmed enemies no longer cause final boss to not enter properly
• Balls with cooldowns (dark, black hole) now have cooldown with Cohabitants
• Radiation beam aoe damage is now tracked in game over stats screen
• No longer soft lock when you try to change gatherer’s hut aim while worker is already out
• Fix bug where cursor would appear stuck on screen with the Physicist
• AOE effects now apply lightning rod when combo-ed
• Woodpecker / stonepiercer bonuses now pierce dense resource tiles
• Radical and Cogitator can no longer fuse ball with itself
• You can no longer hurt yeti queen while it’s underground
• Buildings can no longer be placed outside of base bounds
• If character doesn’t have as many harvest upgrades as it should the next level up will give you one
• Fixed bug where characters wouldn’t gain harvest upgrades if they were brought in as the second character
• Multiselect tutorial will stop showing up eventually if it is ignored long enough
• War room characters no longer disappear from character select list
• Clearing field with tactician no longer advances units while on level up screen
• Limited how far apart cohabitants can be from each other
• Opening the context menu within the base and attempting to expand the building area simultaneously no longer leads to navigation issues
• Trying to multiselect during multi-dismantle no longer causes soft lock
• War Room’s run reward is no longer lost when assigned character is changed
• In New Game+ Characters can no longer only go on War Room runs for layers they completed on regular
• Structures - The Heavenly Trophy is no longer displayed as fully built while under construction
• The amount of gold gathered from multiple Gold Mines now resembles the number shown in the summary screen
• Passive selection screen at the start of a run no longer sometimes only displays 2 of them
• The disease status from the Virus no longer passes on friendly tiles
• The kill count in the run summary is now consistent with the Encyclopedia statistics
• Cohabitants - balls that spawn other balls can now be fired before all spawned balls have returned
• Remember previous NG+ page when re-entering level select
• Multi-upgrade no longer highlights buildings when you exit rearrange mode during animations
• Zombie can no longer spawn when killed enemy is bottom of stack
• Sandwalker no longer jitters when attacking
• Sandwalker no longer moves when frozen
• Physicist x Cohabitants balls no longer speed up too fast
• Char select no longer scrolls to previous selection on initial entry
• Fungal x Forest level no longer provides more XP than Gory x Grasslands
• Various typo fixes.
• Rearranging from normal base state with controller no longer causes building to start off placed incorrectly
• Added option to mute audio in background
• Pressing up or down directional button now moves the playable character

It's a messy time over at Heart Machine, developer of the beloved Hyper Light Drifter and its ill-fated hack 'n' slash successor Hyper Light Breaker. The latter debuted to mixed Steam reviews and muted sales when it carved its way into early access back in January, resulting in layoffs at Heart Machine and work on Hyper Light Breaker ceasing prematurely.

But it seems this wasn't enough to right Heart Machine's ailing vessel, as the studio began a second round of layoffs late last week. This time the cuts were focussed on the team creating the side-scrolling action/adventure Possessor(s), occurring less than a fortnight before the game is due to launch.

The combined layoffs have led some players to question whether to continue supporting Heart Machine financially. In a Steam discussion, user Adam posted that it's "hard to support devs when they can no longer see a cent from a game."

This was apparently posted in response to the initial round of layoffs, but other users began to debate whether developers who'd had their jobs working on Possessor(s) cut would see a return for their efforts. "I have no intention of giving money to a company that thanked them for that work by kicking them out before the game even launched", commented user inRemote.

Eventually, these queries prompted responses from representatives at Heart Machine and Possessor(s) publisher Devolver Digital. From Devolver, community strategist Harris Foster said the publisher was "saddened to hear the news of layoffs at Heart Machine" while also clarifying the situation regarding compensation for employees laid off from their roles on Possessor(s).

"Heart Machine has confirmed to us that all revenue-share eligible team members who contributed to Possessor(s) will continue to receive their share," Foster wrote. He then quoted Heart Machine's Creative and Design Director Alx Preston, who confirmed that team members scheduled to receive profit share will do so "regardless of if they are no longer here or remain at the studio".

Later in the thread, Possessor(s) narrative director Tyler Hutchinson chimed in. Initially, this was to dismiss a suggestion that Heart Machine had hired consulting firms like Sweet Baby Inc to work on the project (which would be nothing out of the ordinary even if they had).

"Please do not attribute the hard work of everyone on this team to other people," Hutchinson wrote. "We did not use any consulting companies to make this story. All of the writing in this game comes from me, our other writer and team members who wanted to collaborate."

Following this, Hutchinson urged fans to purchase Possessor(s) despite the layoffs—which include him. "As a developer who is slated for lay off—PLEASE BUY THIS GAME," he wrote. Hutchinson then laid out his case for why players should pick up Possessor(s), starting with the effort he and his teammates had put into the project.

"I view video games as modern day Cathedrals; it's the culmination of hundreds/thousands of hours of work," he wrote. "We make games because we want people to play them and have fun. IF no one does this…I really just wasted 3 damn years of my life." Hutchinson also pointed out that Devolver had been a "great publisher" to work with and were "not in any way responsible" for Heart Machine's woes. "I think they have gone above and beyond to support this project and the dev team."

Finally, Hutchinson noted that if Possessor(s) sells well, that will help support developers even if they are no longer at Heart Machine, and not just due to the profit share. "Potential employers/publishers/nepo-babies with too much money will be like: 'Oh you worked on Possessors? That game made a bajillion dollars. Please have a stable job with my company,'" he observed.

Possessor(s) launches on November 11. While we haven't had a chance to test it prior to launch, Ted Litchfield attended a hands-off demo back in April and came away optimistic. "The thing that got me most excited in the hands-off demo was the look of Possessor(s)' environments," he wrote back in April. "Search-metroid-action-vanias can often have this really abstract feel to their side scrolling levels, while Possessor(s)' starting destroyed office building actually felt like a real place I was getting a dollhouse view of."

"You're a demon made of glass and pain" has to be one of the hardest taglines there's ever been for a videogame. Now that Skate Story has a December 8 release date and approximately hour-long demo, we've found out there's an addendum to that sick as hell pitch: "And you're on a quest to eat the Moon."

Skate Story is a game that has periodically poked its head out over the past few years to say, "This is still happening, here's an absolutely incredible-looking trailer with killer music." There is nothing else out there that looks like Skate Story: Its marble columns and greek statuary poking out of surreal dreamscapes are very vaporwave, but there's so much else going on that makes it distinct from other abstract, crunchy works of surrealism like Hyper Demon. This is a rare game that leverages 3D graphics being untethered from reality to show you things that are breathtakingly, impossibly beautiful.

Every new vista in the demo's frenetic opening⁠—which sees you following a rabbit through hell portals, skating into new areas every few seconds⁠—had me hooting and guffawing so loud it scared my pets. Comparing the launch day trailer to the 2020 debut that already stole our hearts, it's easy to see where at least some of that long development effort went.

Skate Story looks much more refined and advanced in its current state, like 2020 Skate Story was an initial outing, and 2025 Skate Story is its much better-funded sequel on a new console generation. But we already knew Skate Story was going to look and sound incredible from those mic drop trailers. Along with the pleasant surprise of an actual release date after all this time, I had a wonderful feeling of relief discovering that Skate Story is also extremely fun to play.

In a real "I don't know what else I expected" moment, it plays a lot like other skateboarding videogames: You press a button to kick off the ground and pick up speed, auto grind on rails by landing on them, and have an assortment of button combos to kickflip, ollie, pop shuvit, and all that other stuff that's corroding the moral fibre of the youth. Comboing tricks together in succession, with an emphasis on variety and audacity, will contribute to a soul score you use to buy stuff, and also plays a role in Skate Story's boss fights.

That's one big thing that sets Skate Story apart for me: Having a structured, substantial story campaign with complex boss fights and some linear, obstacle course levels in addition to making your own fun sandbox play. You can still tool around in the open-ended hub worlds, racking up money from combos to get stickers, wheels, and all new boards. But it feels like the sandbox is an addition to the campaign, rather than the sandbox being front and center over those kind of ad hoc story missions you see in a lot of skating, racing, and live service games.

Skate Story also nails its mechanical execution: It feels fantastic in the hand. Its zoomed-in, off-center camera contributes to a real sense of speed, while you're encouraged to end combos with an authoritative stomp move with some delicious hitstop.

The weight and momentum of the Skater led to all kinds of close calls and rescued combos for me, particularly when I'd just about collided with some grindable terrain or some of the hell glass obstacles strewn around and ollied into a grind or drifted at just the last second to avoid wiping out. If you do beef it, no sweat⁠—Skate Story spawns you just a few feet back and you can get right back into it, a system that reminds me of Hotline Miami with its speed and convenience, but notably does not set back your progress.

So, Skate Story: Believe the hype. This game has gone from vaporware to a personal GOTY contender in the span of a two minute trailer and 50 minutes of demo. You can try Skate Story's demo for yourself and wishlist it on Steam ahead of its December 8 launch.

Today we got our first look at gameplay from Starseeker: Astroneer Expeditions, the next game from Astroneer developer System Era Softworks and published by Devolver Digital. It looks like a lot of fun, though I do have a couple reservations right out of the gate.

Beginning at a space station crammed with astronauts, up to four players can embark on missions together, visiting a weirdo planet for some co-op chaos that includes completing objectives, battling alien lifeforms, and collecting "space loot." You can glide across colorful landscapes, swim through alien oceans, and have encounters with everything from monstrous extraterrestrial brutes to harmless sentient carrots.

Your tools let you deform the alien planet, too: tunneling through the ground, building land bridges to cross gaps, and aiming water nozzles to "de-goop" important scientific equipment that the local fauna has gummed up. When a mission has been completed, you return to the space station and prepare for the next expedition.

That all looks like a good time, but where I'm a bit iffy on Starseeker is that every mission is on a timer. "The clock starts ticking the second you step out of your landing shuttle," says System Era. "On every expedition, you only have a limited amount of oxygen and will need to get back to the Star Seeker [the space station] before it runs out."

Yeah, that part. I don't love it. I'm aware a time limit can add a sense of excitement and urgency, and that extraction games and session-based co-op missions can really raise the stakes and get your heart racing. But I think timers can also put the kibosh on different kinds of fun, especially when it comes to exploration and chill co-op hangs with friends. Do I really want to be rushed off a planet by a timer if I'm having a great time with my pals?

What's also unclear, even after about 15 minutes of gameplay, is what you do after missions. Do you have any sort of player base you can build with your friends? Is there any building at all, collaborative or otherwise? Or do you just hang out in the space station, which kinda looks like a lobby or common area, sort of like the Space Anomaly in No Man's Sky?

I know it flies in the face of the very concept of expeditions, which is the point of Starseeker, but ultimately wouldn't players prefer to carve out a home on a weird alien planet instead of hanging out on a somewhat generic-looking space station they didn't get to design themselves? The Steam page does describe the space station as "ever-evolving," which could mean that the loot you gain from missions allows you to unlock upgrades for it, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's a place you can actually build on.

Am I just jumping to rash conclusions without enough information? Could be, and if I want to build bases with friends I could just shut up and do it in Astroneer, which is still being developed alongside System Era's new game. Hopefully we'll learn more about Starseeker: Astroneer Expeditions in the near future—it's planned for 2026, which will be here before we know it.

In a new trailer, developer Heart Machine has revealed the release date of its new metroidvania search action game, Possessor(s). The fighting game-inspired platformer arrives on November 11, just a brisk year and a half after its June 2024 announcement.

I got a first look at Possessor(s) in action earlier this year, but was not able to try it hands on. I liked what I saw though: Earnest storytelling inspired by early aughts anime dubs, slick combat with the promise of juggling, parries, and tricky bosses, plus some gorgeous character and environment art.

That last bit is something I'm particularly excited about with Possessor(s): I find a lot of Metroid-style platformers can have overly abstracted, gamey environments. Hollow Knight and Silksong do a great job of avoiding this, with each area having a real tangible feeling and deep environmental storytelling.

I also have to hand it to Metroid Dread on this front, a game that otherwise left me cold. Possessor(s) really sells the illusion of a ruined city over its platforming gauntlets, and I'm eager to see more.

As for combat, you can only glean so much without trying something hands on, but Possessor(s) looks propulsive and fun, while it cites some exciting influences. As a reformed Smash sicko, I want to see how much a singleplayer game can deliver that feeling.

I also dig the conceit that your weapons and gear are mundane items infused with power from the ongoing demonic invasion. Guitars, computer mice, hockey sticks, and cell phones are some of the tools that have been shown off so far.

After getting so used to long lead times after game announcements, as well as the early access model⁠—which Heart Machine opted for in its co-op roguelike, Hyper Light Breaker⁠—it's refreshing to see a game get announced then released in relatively short order. It's even more impressive given that the studio is managing two projects at the same time. You can wishlist Possessor(s) on Steam ahead of its November 11 release.

When I started Baby Steps earlier this week I thought it would end up being the funniest game ever made. Every time the bulbous antihero fell over I would laugh. I would cackle as the onesie-ed, erstwhile binge watcher slid haplessly down muddy slopes in the least dignified way possible. Sometimes I would just stand still and rotate the analog stick so that he'd do that weird whooshing wormy dance that looks so pathetic. It's fun to make Nate do dumb things and laugh at him. And get a load of his stupid walk. What an absolute loser!

If you can imagine, it gets much darker than this. Baby Steps is the bleakest game I've ever played.

Before being transported to a bizarre mountainous landscape full of illogical obstacles and donkey men with laddish Australian accents, Nate is a 35-year-old man living in his parents' basement. We all know what that implies. He watches One Piece, smokes bongs, and orders pizza a lot. He probably posts on Reddit. I bet he's playing Spider-Man 2 or Gotham Knights or some bullshit like that. Almost certainly he's a virgin. Whenever he encounters assertive, confident donkey men he's immediately cowered by them. He doesn't want to offend them and he doesn't want their help. He just wants to get away.

Baby Steps' stoner humour treads some extremely dark territory—extreme green out territory. It starts as slapstick Beckett before swerving wildly into Houellebecq-ian territory (the poet laureate of not getting any). If it annoys you that I'm comparing Baby Steps to books instead of other games, don't worry, it annoys me too: there aren't really any obvious parallels in games. I guess Baby Steps functionally resembles Death Stranding, but Death Stranding compares unfavourably to what has been achieved with this newer game.

Kojima's incoherent, self-important gesturing at "themes" is pretty dumb compared to what Gabe Cuzzillo, Maxi Boch and Bennett Foddy have made here. Rather than throw a bunch of half-cocked ideas into the big blockbuster videogame blender, Foddy and co remain laser-focused on evoking a certain kind of modern male indignity via a medium that's meant to be fun and feel good.

I'm not asked to sympathise with Nate, but the mercilessness of our shared plights (me, the player of a stupidly hard game; he, an official failure by the measure of a harsh, hyper-competitive modern world) brings us together. But despite how it looks, and despite how it sounds, Baby Steps manages to be fun, nay, addictive.

Baby Steps is a paean to failure, futility and wasted life. Sure, you can beat it, but beating it means nothing. It's possible to collect objects and carry them to certain NPCs to get Steam achievements, but these tasks are usually so onerous and straightforwardly un-fun that only those with an exquisite loathing for their own time will tackle them. Yesterday I watched for, oh, about five hours, as a Twitch streamer climbed a diabolically complex tower, only to find nothing up there (he had been warned).

Baby Steps is an unrelenting thing, completely committed to its impudently miserable vision, and I love that about it. But at a certain point, around halfway through, the game's dark comedy melts away, leaving something morbid and harassing. Spoilers for a very late game encounter follow.

After a dozen-or-so hours spent "waddlebitching" (thanks Jody) around this very ugly open world, Nate eventually finds a big cave where all the big-dicked donkey bros are hanging out. Inside this cave is a cauldron where he can make a wish. Nate has promised the donkey bros that he'll wish for cigarettes, but he wishes for something else instead. We expect his wish to be "take me home"—back to his basement, One Piece and pizzas—but instead he wishes he was dead.

That sense of a lurking darkness at the heart of this frivolous game is rendered totally unambiguous in this moment. It's not delivered in a sentimental way, it's not given some heightened emphasis. There are no burgeoning strings, the camera does not dwell on Nate's pained, newly-sympathetic face. He just says it and then goes back to his waddlebitching. But it nevertheless hits with the force of a brick shithouse pushed from the edge of a cliff.

Sometimes you get the sense that Foddy and co are laughing at you for playing this game. Why aren't you out there, making your own videogame? Or making your fortune? Why are you eating those crisps lathered in saturated fats, when liberally peppered steamed broccoli would help you shed that gut? Why don't you get a job?

Well, I don't think the creators of Baby Steps are that cruel—though maybe they are—but they're dab hands at capturing that sense of feeling small and trapped in an illogical, increasingly hostile world that bears no resemblance to the future you were promised. I can't think of a better game for 2025.

I've only played about five hours of Baby Steps, but if there's one thing I've learned during that time, it's that you always need to have complete visibility over where Nate is putting his feet. Since this is a "walking simulator" and this logic applies to real life too, it may seem overly obvious. And it might be. Maybe I'm an idiot, but I know I'm not alone in that.

Baby Steps is played from a third-person perspective and it lets you change whether the camera is oriented to the left or right of Nate. But during the trickier traversal scenarios, such as when you're navigating a very narrow bridge or even something as thin as a tightrope, I found that it was basically essential to train that camera on Nate's feet via a top -down perspective. Just seeing Nate's legs is not enough!

Just like this (thanks to Morgan Park for the video):

In other words, don't just let the camera languish on Nate's butt. Move it around, but especially move it up.

The physics in Baby Steps are detailed and fun to mess with, but even when you're just walking along seemingly safe surfaces, a simple obscurely placed rock can send you tumbling. It's fine to fall—sometimes in Baby Steps you have to fall—but during circumstances when you know that a fall is going to carve hours worth of progress off your odyssey, then let me repeat: get that camera into a top-down perspective.

You'll quickly learn that Nate's capable of some pretty amazing climbing feats that would normally be out of reach for a 35-year-old slob. Knowing exactly where you're placing either of your two feet is pretty essential for all of 'em, along with some complex (and illogical) approaches to momentum that I am very far from mastering at this point.

I fell while navigating some tricky rocks, rolling downhill like a wet sausage until I was caught by a grassy ledge. The only paths back up involved even tricker rocks, and predictably I fell again, tumbling off the grassy ledge to land next to a mudslide. Fortunately there was a dry path beside the mud, and unfortunately I found a single rock on that path, tripped, hit the mudslide, and slid to the bottom of it.

Walking back up that path I managed to slip into the mud twice more, the second time achieving such slippery velocity I flung myself back to a previous biome, landing in a lake. That motivated me to try a different route entirely, heading back toward a labyrinth of cardboard called Box Hell, at which point I spotted a ladder leaning against the hill I somehow completely missed the first time through this area, and which let me bypass all that mud-and-rock nonsense.

It still took me three goes to get up the ladder, of course.

This is Baby Steps, a parody of open world games, and our collective punishment for using the phrase "walking simulator". You play Nate, a basement-dwelling loser mysteriously teleported from his couch to the wilderness like the Pevensie children being magicked to Narnia, only instead of plucky youngsters full of Blitz spirit you are a 35-year-old failure full of pizza.

There is a mountain in the wilderness and maybe if Nate climbs it he'll be able to go home. It's as reasonable an assumption as any, so off you set, taking your first steps, and almost immediately falling on your dumptruck ass.

Baby Steps recommends you play with a controller like a real yakuza, so I did. Squeezing one trigger lifts your foot, and pushing a stick moves that foot. You've got a fine degree of control over where that foot ends up before you put it back down, which will not save you. Nate has all the balance and grace of a moose on ice, and he's doing this hike barefoot.

He could have got shoes at the start of the climb, but he turned them down. In the first of many delightfully improvised cutscenes, Nate meets a cheerful Australian hiker who offers help and he immediately says no. Nate is a man so awkward he wants every social interaction to end the moment it begins, if not sooner, rejecting every offer of help, including a map I would actually really have appreciated.

Baby Steps takes the idea of games as challenges, of hard modes and iron man runs and proud declarations that yellow paint is ruining videogames, and personifies it as a specific kind of man—the man who will not ask for directions no matter how lost he is. The next time someone dresses their victory over a videogame as some kind of macho triumph, I'll be thinking of Nate, his onesie turning brown as he falls in the mud over and over.

Because it was there

In addition to the challenge of working your way from one campfire to the next as you ascend through a series of zones, there are optional challenges to hurl your wobbly cheeks at. Hats you can wear are precariously placed on top of trees or broken piles, and so are lost objects to return to nearby firetowers. But every time you tumble there's a high chance you'll lose your hat or whatever's in your hand, and the act of leaning over to pick it back up can sometimes send you tumbling again. I lost a hat when I fell through the roof of a barn and couldn't find it in all the straw, a moment so dispiriting I gave up on hats entirely and did the rest of the climb bareheaded.

But the moments that are most dispiriting are when you're completely at a loss as to which of several hardscrabble climbs is even doable. Sometimes there's only one way up (like the ant tunnels leading out of the sandcastle), but sometimes there are multiple paths of varying difficulty. How many times do you throw yourself at a broken rockface or a cactus bridge or a wet plank before you trundle off to see if there's an easier way?

More than once I gave up on something that turned out to actually be the easy option because I blundered my first couple of attempts, then wandered around for an hour trying things that were far harder. At one point I knocked down a yellow shovel I could have used as a bridge and spent an age trying other ascents before learning that if I just quit out and went back in again the shovel returned to its original location.

Odds are you'll find at least one moment in Baby Steps you think crosses the line from "funny satire of videogame design and difficulty discourse" into "actual bullshit someone should be ashamed of." It'll probably happen somewhere different for everyone, though the odds of it being one of the many bullshit moments in the sandy zone are high.

Scale Sheer Surface

I've heard people say they stopped enjoying Skyrim the moment they realized they could fast-travel. Once they started teleporting from one quest goal to the next all the fun went out of it. I enjoyed Skyrim even with the fast-travel, but I understand their position. Bouncing directly from objective to objective can be draining and joyless in a way that ambling around isn't.

Baby Steps makes ambling into slapstick comedy, and I laughed a lot while Nate groaned and swore and blubbered. At least, for the first seven or so hours. The seven hours after that started to edge into being draining and joyless in their own way—honestly, sand can fuck right off forever, Anakin was right, just a hateful substance—but by that point the story had hooked me. The snappy dialogue of those cutscenes stays funny when the physics lols have worn out their welcome.

The reward for persevering in Baby Steps isn't anything as ephemeral as a sense of triumph over adversity or whatever nonsense the masocore people get out of their boring games. No, it's cutscenes where a character who is probably voiced by Bennett Foddy menaces Nate through sheer overbearing force of personality and Australian-ness.

Normally satire makes it hard to take the thing it's satirizing seriously, but after almost 15 hours of waddlebitching my way up one mountain I loaded up Borderlands 4 and doing a doublejump-glide into a jetbike felt incredible. Baby Steps is a masterpiece, but I think actually I will just chill in a game with quest markers for a while.

Baby Steps, the "slapstick walking simulator about a slob climbing a mountain" co-developed by Bennett Foddy (the Getting Over It guy, which should give you a pretty good idea of what to expect), Gabe Cuzzillo, and Maxi Boch is out today, and the reviews are pretty close to unanimous: The word "hate" appears in the vast majority of them, as do words and phrases like "infuriating," "awkward," "stupid," "frustrating," and a whole bunch more—none of which would likely lead you to believe that these are all words uttered in fascinated praise.

We already had a pretty good idea that Baby Steps was going to be very good thanks to our March preview, but this confirms it. There are some complaints, and at least one critic didn't vibe with it at all, but overall? Baby Steps does what it does very well, and what it does is drive people bananas with rage even as it compels them to keep playing.

We have our own full Baby Steps review for you thanks to PC Gamer's walking warrior Jody Macgregor, but here's a look at what others are saying.

"There's so much to love here"

GamesRadar: 3.5/5

GR takes some issue with the lengthy gaps between certain challenges, and the fact that watching Nate, the titular baby-stepper, slide down a hill for 20 seconds is funny the first time, but loses its charm after several hundred times. "Even the most welcoming path through the game is littered with irregular explosions of extreme frustration," reviewer Luke Kemp wrote, adding that he "was angered more often than [he] should have been."

But that is the name of the game, and Kemp said "the difficulty inherent in even the simplest of traversal provides regular shots of satisfaction when you overcome it, and the world is full of weird and wonderful surprises that reward exploration."

"One of the most hilariously infuriating journeys it has ever been my pleasure to rage through"

IGN: 9/10

"[I] ended up developing a deep respect for the system that was given to me, which has so much nuance and so many tricks to learn that I felt like the only limit to what I could pull off was my own skill," IGN review Travis Northrup wrote. "For a hypercompetitive person like myself, this pulled me into an inescapable pursuit of mastery that kept me awake long into the night cursing my creators as I tumbled to the ground for the 50th time in a row."

Sounds absolutely torturous to me, but Northrup said Baby Steps is one of his favorite games of 2025, "a triumphantly quirky physics game that asks you to challenge yourself, both with alluring hiking obstacles that had me screaming to the heavens and a shockingly unconventional story and characters that ended up feeling like family by the end."

"You may or may not need to pick up some cigarettes along the way for a gaggle of donkey men with enormous, swinging dicks"

Polygon: no score, but that's a great quote

Writing for Polygon, Giovanni Colantonio said beating one of Baby Steps' toughest challenges gave him "that fabled rush that Dark Souls players feed off of." He also found real power in the game's story, which he said is "a sincere dissection of manhood and the societal pressures it creates."

"It’s a game about feeling inadequate, but not knowing how to express it," Colantonio wrote. "Every misstep is another disappointment that doesn’t just set back your progress towards the ending, but any hope that our hero can grow too." Yet grow he does, which is Baby Steps' true brilliance: "Each time I take a risk that ends in success, it feels like I’ve done something to help build our hero’s confidence. It’s about him, not me and my stupid avatar."

"Is it possible to love and hate a game at the same time?"

Eurogamer: 4/5

Eurogamer's Robert Purchese says "how you cope with frustration will determine how you cope with Baby Steps," which is one of the reasons I'm staying away from it. But, he continued, "it's more approachable and forgiving than I assume many people will make out."

That doesn't mean it won't piss you off, repeatedly and persistently, because it will, but that's the essence of the experience, "and there is nothing else out there like it."

"I can't explain Baby Steps, but I can recommend it"

TheGamer: 4.5/5

Reviewer Sam Hallahan says specifically that he "conquered" Baby Steps, "because the journey feels like one of the most significant videogame accomplishments I’ve ever managed." Some of the humor fell flat for him (although other bits "feel like utter strokes of genius"), but otherwise it's a genuine banger: "Worth testing your patience, endurance, and curiosity in order to experience a game that is unlike anything I’ve played this year."

"We relished it all"

Push Square: 8/10

Stephen Tailby warned that mileage will absolutely vary when it comes to Baby Steps, based on its "unorthodox dialogue, intentionally maddening gameplay, and willingness to test your patience." But despite some rough edges, including "a couple of odd bugs and occasional crashes" during its roughly 20-hour playtime, he loved it, calling it a rage-bait game, but "one that offers a meaningful narrative thread to follow along with its vast number of tough but satisfying challenges."

"Hiking is hell"

The Verge: no score

Khee Hoon Chan of The Verge is clearly not a hiking enthusiast, but he "can't help but grudgingly agree" with Baby Steps' take on the whole thing: There's a lot of cool stuff out there, and sometimes it's worth making the effort to take it all in, even when that effort really sucks.

"It’s how the game stands out from the burgeoning genre of hiking simulators like Death Stranding, A Short Hike, and Firewatch — titles that depict the activity as a meditative, serene experience," he wrote. "But in Baby Steps, you aren’t just traversing treacherous environments, but also getting around with your own ramshackle body."

"A brainrot-infused adaptation of Sisyphus"

ShackNews: 7/10

Despite the score, it doesn't sound like ShackNews review Lucas White had much fun with Baby Steps. He was stuck at the final challenge of Baby Steps for at least three hours, an experience he described as "an interesting cross-section of misery, stubbornness, and something resembling integrity," and also found its humor flat and challenges not terribly rewarding.

Unlike Colantonio at Polygon, White also wrote that he "never felt that magical sense of 'accomplishment' fans of Soulslikes or whatever tend to nod at: "Struggling to climb up the inside of a crashed train for three hours left me feeling hollow after succeeding. I was glad it was over, but instead of yelling some variant of 'let’s go,' I simply thought, 'Well that sucked and I’ll never get that time back; oh well'."

"Entirely too cringe, stupid, or mean without any real payoff"

DualShockers: 4/10

Most reviewers really liked Baby Steps, but not all of them, and Ethan Krieger at DualShockers had some harsh words for it, including comparing it to the infamous 2003 film The Room. Krieger felt the mechanics were uninteresting, the graphics ugly, the soundtrack purpose-designed "to send your mind further into a state of madness," and the characters, game world, humor, and underlying narrative utterly lacking in redeeming qualities: "It's just stupid stuff in a stupid game that feels like it's trying to trick you into thinking that maybe it isn't."

So that's where we currently stand: Not a unanimous critical hit, but pretty close to the mark. That's reflected in user reviews on Steam as well: There aren't a lot, just 48 as I write this, but 91% of them are positive. That's a very good start.

Baby Steps developer Gabe Cuzzillo prefaced today's "very unprofessional" developer overview by saying "you shouldn't know very much about this game when you play it, because it's full of surprises and they're fun." After watching it, I'm not sure I know any more about the comedic walking simulator, but I'm certainly intrigued by the vibe here.

If you're wondering what's so unprofessional about the overview, he goes on to freestyle a few facts about the game, like how its ambient soundtrack is "kind of subtle and cool and interesting, unlike anything you've ever played," before transitioning to what feels like the end of his spiel.

"Are you interested in novelty? Are you a novelty-seeking person? I don't know. You just want to play the same thing over and over again, maybe. Maybe you like League of Legends, that's fine. You're probably not going to buy this game … Alright. Hope you buy it. Goodbye."

After this is said, there are seven minutes left to go in the video. Cuzzillo notes that he's "not going to do the edit" and then just… starts over and reintroduces "the first fact" about Baby Steps. This happens a few times, but there are some insights to be gleaned here. For instance, Cuzzillo notes Baby Steps is partially meant to satirize triple-A narrative games, noting "there's over a feature film's worth of stupid cutscenes in it, with us doing acting … all the cutscenes are improvised by us, much like these facts."

Bennett Foddy's involvement should make it no surprise that Baby Steps is also, in part, about frustration and failure. Cuzzillo said in the overview: "You can fall off [a ledge] and feel the despair and frustration, and maybe that will lead you to have some kind of revelation about yourself and how you react to the trials and tribulations that life throws at you."

The preview is sort of snarky and silly in a way that suits a climbing game about "an unemployed failson with nothing going for him" except his voluminous clappers, so I'm happy to forgive its tone as a guy with hundreds of hours sunk into that yawning abyss, League of Legends.

If you're interested in taking some Baby Steps of your own, the game releases on Steam Sep 23.

Cult of the Lamb is releasing its Woolhaven DLC early next year, but with only a reveal trailer so far, there's still a lot we don't know about what it has in store for us. Fortunately, the Cult of the Lamb social media pages have been drip-feeding information to us about the size of the DLC in comparison to the first game, how it ended up getting slightly out of hand, and why the devs have chosen to release a paid update rather than another free one.

According to a TikTok posted by Cult of the Lamb, the DLC will be "almost as long as the original game" for no other reason than "we flew a little too close to the sun here. We tend to go all out, be at weddings, to raves, to three free massive content updates. This DLC is not free, but I promise you'll love it." They're not wrong, either. If there's one game I know I can rely on when it comes to crazy marketing, it would be Cult of the Lamb.

Though, despite the promise of another hefty adventure as a cult leader, the fact the DLC is paid is what is confusing a significant number of players. Cult of the Lamb has been incredibly generous in supplying us with free content updates over the last three years, be it the addition of co-op through the unholy alliance update, or the slightly cursed (but entirely on brand) addition of Sins of the Flesh. So, it's not too surprising that a paid DLC is the natural next step.

However, in a previous video, Cult of the Lamb also shared that they were aware of people's confusion as to why the DLC would be paid when everyone is so used to free content updates already.

In response, they shared "as much as we'd love to continue updating the game for free forever, it's not realistic for us as a studio. Woolhaven is so much more than any of these updates. It almost doubles the gameplay from the original release. We're not going to put you into debt, it will be a really reasonable price."

Whenever you're shown a map for a game, you probably start scouring it for any areas that could hint towards updates in the future. No? Just me? Okay. Well, I definitely did this with Cult of the Lamb when I first played back in 2022, and the haunting mountain in the background seemed like the perfect candidate for a future DLC. I started to lose hope as the years passed, but at long last my wishes have come true and a journey to the mountain has been revealed.

Woolhaven will be Cult of the Lamb's fifth paid DLC, and promises a huge expansion to the story. It'll send us to the mountain after the "forgotten God of the lambs" summons us to restore a flock forgotten throughout history. But as always, there will be some intimidating forces that aim to stop you every step of the way. The reveal trailer shows a towering beast that I can only imagine will turn into a boss battle later down the line similar to the Bishops we've slain in the past. Two new dungeons featuring all sorts of new enemies are being added too, including the executioner from the very start of the game. Which means one thing and one thing only: revenge.

You won't just have to worry about hygiene and hunger in the cult this time around either. The mountain poses new environmental threats you'll need to navigate to ensure everyone's safety, such as harsh blizzards, freezing temperatures, and all sorts of things that can cause frostbite and famine. Luckily though, new structures are being added which will help us to protect our precious followers.

One feature I am particularly keen to know more about is the addition of ranching, which makes sense if you're stuck up a mountain and struggling to find food I guess. In the trailer we see the lamb riding some sort of yak-like animal, but I'm looking forward to seeing what other creatures we may stumble upon and how exactly we can bring them back to the cult to keep us warm, farm for wool, or you know… eat them should all else fail.

Currently, the closest we have to a release date for Woolhaven is early 2026, so it could be a while before we get to reunite with our fellow lambies. But I am more than ready to take on the challenge of the mountain and uncover a little more information about where exactly our lamb leader came from. And probably sacrifice myself a lot in the process.

Something curious happened in mid-2024: everyone went crazy over a little game called Supermarket Simulator. There's never a shortage of quirky little games about doing real-life jobs, but for some reason this particular retail sim about stocking shelves and waiting on customers blew up big—and that didn't just draw the attention of players, but other developers.

That includes Stas Staryk, who had been doing corporate VR training and outsourced work for Epic Games, but wanted to make his first game with the company he'd co-founded, Brigada Games. A game like Supermarket Simulator had a lot of appeal, Staryk told PC Gamer this week.

"We decided that it's interesting to try our first game in this [simulator] genre, because it's not so expensive in development [and] it has a pretty large audience," Staryk said. "I think we tried two ideas. The first was 'Warehouse Manager.'"

His team put together a mock-up trailer of what a warehouse management game might look like and received positive feedback from Reddit and Discord. Ultimately, though, Staryk decided to go another route with Brigada's first game, thinking there were too many warehouse-style sims already coming out.

"And actually it was true, because one month later, Storage Guys was announced [and] they used the same assets we used in our trailer," Staryk said.

Next, the devs considered making an alchemist simulator, Staryk said, due to his personal interest in "real alchemists, not fantasy alchemists, but the real Middle-Ages alchemists," he said. "How they lived, what they did. They were the first scientists."

Another concept trailer was made, but the alchemy simulator idea was eventually scrapped. "It looked too complex for us, for our first game."

The team moved onto the next idea: zombies. "I'm a big fan of the Walking Dead universe," Staryk said. Still wanting to stick with a simulation game but incorporate the undead, Staryk says one of the developers at Brigada Games suggested "something like Papers, Please and zombies," and the idea for Quarantine Zone: The Last Check was finally born.

Pivoting to a zombie theme appears to have been a great idea: Quarantine Zone now has over a million wishlists on Steam and a publishing deal with Devolver Digital. Ironically, if there's one thing players don't like about the demo, it's the warehouse management aspect of it: everyone hates the wonky supply cart you have to push around, so ditching the Warehouse Manager concept was probably a wise move.

Quarantine Zone: The Last Check is a simulation game set during the post-apocalypse where you scan survivors for signs of a zombie virus before either letting them through a military checkpoint to safety or… y'know, icing them.

But I didn't need to explain that because you've probably either played the free demo or, even more likely, seen clips of it on social media. Have you watched a video of someone using an X-ray to look through people's clothing for zombie bites or necrosis, shining a purple light in their eyes, listening to their lungs for signs of illness, or gunning them down if they flee the checkpoint? That's Quarantine Zone.

The demo came out in May and almost instantly became a smash hit, netting developer Brigada Games over a million wishlists on Steam and a publishing deal with Devolver Digital. Not bad for a dev's first demo.

Speaking to Stas Staryk, Brigada Games CEO and co-founder this week, I asked why he thought the Quarantine Zone demo did so well on social media and what other games can do to achieve that sort of success.

"The game must provide the opportunity for the streamer to engage the audience, to talk to them, to ask them [questions], to [get] advice about what to do," Staryk. "The streamer also must make a lot of decisions. This is what the audience really likes, and to have opportunities to make mistakes, especially critical mistakes."

There's definitely lots of chances to make poor decisions in Quarantine Zone, because it's pretty hard to tell the difference between a survivor with a harmless cough and some bruises and one with a deadly zed infection coursing through their veins—as I found when I played the demo myself and frequently guessed wrong.

Another important quality for standing out on social media? A short game loop that can be fully absorbed by viewers.

"Our loop is just one minute. During one minute you inspect the refugee and make a decision, it takes about one minute for one refugee," Staryk said. "I didn't understand this, but this is what gave us a strong advantage for TikTok, because our game loop is very short and it can be fully demonstrated in a short TikTok video."

And there's one more advantage that a lot of other games don't have, since most of Quarantine Zone focuses on a single survivor standing right in front of the player: "Everything is happening in the center of the screen," Staryk said. "It's very easy to make Tiktok videos and vertical videos."

And those videos spread fast. One streamer who made a TikTok video during a Quarantine Zone playtest, before the demo was even released, eventually racked up 30 million views, says Staryk. Now that's a viral (haha) video.

"It's better to ask for forgiveness than permission," modeler Ryan Yan said, recounting his team's mantra going into GDC 2024. Yan and creative director Liam Cribbs were in San Francisco to pitch publishers on a school project they'd been plugging away at for nine months with a handful of friends at NYU.

Mycopunk, which released in early access this month under the Devolver Digital umbrella, is a fast-paced co-op FPS about underpaid robot exterminators cleansing a planet of its fungal infection. "A lot of us are big fans of co-op shooters, so we wanted to make our dream version of a Deep Rock, Helldivers, and Risk of Rain-type game," Cribbs said in a recent interview with PC Gamer.

It's pretty darn fun, and earned enough buzz to bag a "Very Positive" Steam rating with over 1,400 reviews. Impressive for what started as homework, but the student team—now graduated and united under the studio name Pigeons at Play—feels lucky to have gotten this far.

Cribbs and Yan had gone mostly out of pocket to attend GDC (the school covered one ticket, but not travel or board) armed with nothing but a laptop and a pitch deck their professors helped them with.

"It was a bit of a gamble," Cribbs recounted, "because when we got to GDC, we didn't actually have any meetings set up. We were just sort of talking to people trying to get something set up."

"It was pretty important that we get people to play the game and that we make this experience worth it, because we were paying to fly to San Francisco for this, it'd be a waste if not," Yan added.

If you build it…

The pair walked around the show floor every day and attended industry parties every night, setting up improvised demo stations and showing Mycopunk to anyone and everyone.

"We just found areas to set the game up wherever we could, or just have people play it while they're sitting or waiting in line for other things," Yan said.

"We set up next to people who had paid for booths. That might have upset some people," Yan added with a guilty smile, "but I think that the people at the venue appreciated that we were this little indie game going out of our way to set their stuff up. Nobody told us to leave."

"We'd go to these post-GDC parties every night and just find a counter to set up the game, which was kind of fun. There weren't any publishers walking by, but a lot of our longtime players and playtesters we met there," Cribbs said.

Yan added that at one Day of the Devs event, an impromptu Mycopunk demo pulled enough of a crowd that other devs started setting up next to them.

"I think for us there was a lot of luck involved. But also, you pick your luck, right? You put yourself in a situation to be lucky. And I think we absolutely did that."

That luck manifested in a meeting with Devolver Digital. The publisher kept in touch after GDC, but Pigeons at Play wouldn't ink a deal until September 2024, four months after they'd already turned Mycopunk in and gotten an A.

"Actually no, we didn't get an A because [the class] was pass/fail. So we passed," Yan clarified. "If we'd gotten an A, that would've been much better for my GPA."

While the traditional "make a prototype, find a publisher" route is just one way to go about game development—others just make a great game and then publish it themselves—Pigeons at Play believes there are lots of great games that never make it out of the classroom because students don't consider it a real possibility.

"We hope that students at NYU and other schools will take this as an example that you can pitch games so long as you have a concrete plan," Yan said, "and most importantly, that your demo is fun. It doesn't happen enough."

It's not even out yet, but zombie base management sim Quarantine Zone: The Last Check is already a certified hit. Its demo, released in May, attracted hundreds of thousands of players (myself included), received great reviews and lots of attention on social media—and has now infected over a million Steam wishlists.

It's not surprising, then, that the developer of Quarantine Zone, Brigada Games, has also attracted a lot of interest from publishers. Devolver Digital announced today that it will be publishing the "apocalyptic admin simulator," which is planning a full launch in November 2025.

I hear what you're saying: November 2025 is a bit of a change from the tantalizing "September 2025" that was shown as a release date on Quarantine Zone's Steam page right up until this very morning. But an extra two months isn't that long to wait, is it?

Besides, there's some good news: you'll get another bite of the zombie sim before launch. Speaking to PC Gamer this week, Brigada Games CEO and co-founder, Stas Starykh, confirmed that a new demo would be ready for Steam Next Fest in October.

As for what new features fans can look forward to in the full version of Quarantine Zone, it sounds like Brigada is cooking up some fun new devices for examining patients for signs of the zombie plague.

"There will be at least three new tools, like X-ray, a medical hammer, and a metascope for checking inside the eyes," Starykh said. There's also a science lab, as shown in a recent preview on YouTube, with a special chamber "to see different levels of the human body, like the skeleton, muscles or heart, skull and brain, and everything inside."

There will also be an endless mode for the game, Starykh said, for those who just can't get enough of playing post-apocalyptic peekaboo with the zombie virus. If you're one of the few who hasn't already tried it, the current demo is still available on Steam.

Along with a million wishlists, the demo for zombie apocalypse management sim Quarantine Zone: The Last Check got a lot of feedback. The demo was massively popular when it launched in May, and linked to a survey for players to fill out when they finished playing.

Boy, did players fill out that survey.

"We got almost 100,000 surveys fulfilled," said Brigada Games CEO Stas Starykh when he talked to PC Gamer this week.

That's a lot of feedback—so much that Google Docs couldn't even view that many tables of data and the Starykh says they had to use an AI engine just to sort out all that data. "But now we know our weak points [and] we understand our strong points," Starykh said.

The biggest weak point? That damn cart.

In Quarantine Zone, your main job is to examine survivors of an apocalypse and look for signs that they've been infected by the zombie virus. You use high-tech gadgets to check for symptoms, then send people to the safe zone if they're healthy, to quarantine if they're a bit sus, and to their deaths if they've been infected.

But periodically you have to put down your sci-fi tools and push food and fuel around the base in a large, unwieldy cart that controls like a busted supermarket shopping trolley. It's awkward as hell to steer around, and players aren't shy about letting the devs know it.

"The cart was our biggest problem, and people hate it. It's very annoying. It's like a boss in Dark Souls," Starykh said, chuckling. "We analyzed reviews on Steam. Half of negative reviews contain the World 'cart'."

Not everyone is furious with the cart though. "Many people said they like the idea, but they don't see the connection between [the cart section] and the game, like it's a separate game which doesn't have any connection with the game itself."

But it sounds like most players had such a good time with everything else they were willing to overlook that damn cart: reviews for the demo are 91% positive on Steam.

Today, Devolver Digital announced it will be publishing Quarantine Zone: The Last Check this November. A new demo is also planned for October as part of Steam Next Fest.

It was meant to be a simple mission. My line manager at the humble mega-mining corporation Saxon—the cockroach known as Roachard Cox—laid it all out: break into a compound, tear through the fungus and goop to free the core from its prison, transport it back to the drop pod, and then escape with ample time to spare. Unfortunately, few things in life are simple.

See Mycopunk is about as chaotic as a co-op shooter can get. You work for a megacorporation that wants to mine the planet of New Atlas for Saxonite, but after a fungus infects the world, you're sent down alongside other members of the New Atlas Hazard Crew to clear the way and gather various helpful resources. For example, The Gravity Farms hold Romphus, a fungus that grows on enemy shells, and Gussula, both assets I was carrying this mission out for.

I got through the first leg of the mission without any issues. Well, to be more specific, I left all my issues behind as I skedaddled away from hordes of fungal-infected enemies with the help of my trusty grapple pole, launching me into the stratosphere.

My objective? A large energy core tucked away in a warehouse—quite far away, situated on the other side of a sparse forest. Luckily, there was a laser gun waiting for me outside, which I could use to blow the hinges off the door and get inside.

The only problem was that, by the time I started work on destroying the hinges, my original issues all caught up with me. I was quickly swarmed by mountains of mycological robots. My mother's words, "Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today", echoed in my skull as it was bashed in by a bot with a comically large claw.

Luckily, I was able to kite my problems instead of dealing with them, slowly picking them off while creating enough distance to fulfil my contractual obligations.

I finally managed to blow the hinges off the door, get inside the compound and locate the core. It was wrapped in the same fungus that had infected the planet of New Atlas. I shot all the gunk off, then started rolling the core out the door and back to the drop pod, channelling my inner dung beetle.

Just as I was about to kick the core into the ship, an Abomination Sniper spawned on top of me and ate it. Typical. Abominations are huge robots, armed with an array of weaponry like laser beams, sniper rifles, and even immortality shields, which you have to destroy first before you can deal with them.

Killing one of these beasts isn't easy, which is why I usually live and let live when I encounter one. But this fiend is at my core, and I can't leave without it, so oil must be shed.

One game of 'ring around the drop pod' later, I was able to pry open the metallic jaws of the Abomination, drag the core out of its gut, and haul it back into the ship. It was hard, pure chaos and work, but hey, that's just your average day working for Saxon at the New Atlas Hazard Crew.

Run for the hills

Mycopunk is full of clutch plays, chaotic fights, and good old-fashioned train-ing enemies. It's probably the most fun I've had in a shooter for a long time, primarily because it manages to straddle the line of being difficult but not punishing.

When selecting one of the various mission types, you can also customise the difficulty. There are three swarm intensities to choose from, which'll alter how likely enemies are to overrun you. Then there are six different difficulty levels to pick from, Difficulty 1 is the easiest, providing the least amount of resources, and Difficulty 6 is the hardest, giving players the most resources and XP.

Being able to change swarm intensities and difficulty separately from each other lets you experience all the different missions at your own pace, in circumstances that let you enjoy Mycopunk to the fullest. Like having to deal with mountains of enemies piling onto you at every second, but don't want them to pack too much of a punch? Pick a high swarm intensity at a low level, and so on.

Outside of difficulty, smart design choices (like removing the need to hunt for ammo or getting rid of the dreaded stamina bar) also make a world of difference. Instead of worrying about where I could find the next ammo cache like in other games, all I need to do to get more bullets is damage enemies with my other weapon.

This lets you focus on pulling off sick trickshots or clutch plays, rather than chaining you to a reload animation. It's also a great way to encourage players to diversify and upgrade all their weapons, not just focus on one favourite, which is something I'm guilty of in my FPS games.

I'm a huge fan of there being no stamina system, too. The enemy bots are also pretty fast, so having the ability to keep on running is vital. But it's not like you zip around whenever you feel like it. Instead, three of the four characters all have movement-based abilities which are on cooldown.

Scrapper (my fav) has a jetpack and deploys a grapple pole, which the whole team can use to launch themselves in the air. Wrangler has an air dash and a rocket lasso that can propel you forward. Glider has a wingsuit that you can fly around with. Bruiser just deploys shields and can ground slam, which emits a shockwave to damage nearby enemies, so I'm sure he appreciates the infinite stamina more than anyone else.

These small tweaks remove stressors that some games tend to rely on—lesser games might hold sacred the myth that a shooter has to be gruelling or realistic. Meanwhile, in Mycopunk, I'm a robot in a puffer jacket, being advised by a talking cockroach—realism went out the window a long time ago.

Putting the 'fun' in fungus

Mycopunk is launching into early access, but even so, there's loads to do. There are four different main locations on New Atlas, each dishing out a unique combo of fungus resources, which you can use to upgrade your weapons.

There are also different kinds of missions for you to explore. Cleanup Detail and Regulated Rampage are similar, in that you just need to kill a bunch of fungus-infected robots or just clean the infection out by shooting at pustules. Saxonite Transport and Prized Possession are both payload escorts, with different kinds of obstacles in the way.

Finally, Planetary Defense sees you power up and fire a planetary railgun to take out a rival company's spy ship. This is by far the coolest mission, and something I've had a ton of fun completing with friends—there's something particularly funny about one of your teammates getting crushed by falling debris, all because you forget to warn them that you're ready to use the railgun.

But the fun doesn't stop when the mission does. The home base is huge, there are minigames, car racing, and loads of pictures of what I can only assume are the developers' pets as screensavers all over the place, which is excellent.

This is when you also upgrade your characters and kit. Instead of simply unlocking upgrades from spending resources you gathered, there's also a hive-shaped inventory which you can sort upgrades into. All the upgrades come in different shapes and sizes, resembling a molecular string. You can have as many upgrades as will fit, so you have to sort them well—I even unlocked a rare upgrade for matching a 'hidden path'.

Mycopunk shows a ton of promise, but that doesn't mean it's infallible. The progression can become a bit of a slog, and it can take a while to level up or collect enough resources to upgrade your kit. There's also definitely a cap as to how many missions you can do in a row before it all just blends into a violent blur. The variety in mission types only keeps things fresh for so long.

There are also some glitches, many of which the devs are aware of, but that doesn't make them any less annoying. I've been lasered by an Abomination through a wall more than once now—you're never safe, even when you think you are. But none of this ruins the fun, it's just something to bear in mind: The fungal growths of Early Access.

Nate lifts his left foot when I squeeze the left trigger, and his right foot when I squeeze the right trigger. He swings the lifted foot forward when I push the left stick forward, but if both feet are on the ground when I push the stick he leans forward instead, usually falling over immediately. And probably sliding downhill in his gray onesie, butt in the air.

As a third-person game, Nate's rump is in view for a lot of your time playing Baby Steps. Dudes who need to defend their enjoyment of Tomb Raider sometimes say, "If I'm going to be looking at a butt for hours I'd rather it was a nice one." Nate is not Lara Croft—he's a basement-dweller in his 30s mysteriously teleported to the wilderness in the middle of a One Piece marathon, which is probably the only kind of marathon he's ever participated in. But he's been given a lovingly rendered posterior nonetheless.

"I have a theory," says Baby Steps co-developer Bennett Foddy, of QWOP and Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy fame. "I've been doing art on this project for coming up on six years now, and you look at other people's work, both in film animation and in videogames, and what you start to notice is that every animator winds up a little bit arse-focused. Even going back to the old Disney and Bugs Bunny shows."

"As if they didn't start that way," says co-developer Maxi Boch, of Dance Central and Lego Rock Band fame.

"Maybe it's what draws people to the field," Foddy concedes. "But there's definitely a butt-centric nature of animation going back right to the beginning. I think it's just part of that proud tradition."

It's also hilarious. Baby Steps has made me laugh even as I tumble off a narrow plank and slide downhill, thanks to Nate's swearing and goofy wiggly pratfalling. "We put a lot of work into making him ragdoll in a particular way," Foddy says. "He kind of rolls like a sausage now, instead of just being like the typical ghostly ragdoll in a videogame. You can really get into a situation where it seems like he's coming to rest as he slides down the hill, and then he'll sausage roll over and continue to fall. Yeah, we put a lot of work into making those things funny one way or another."

The other things that made me laugh while playing the Baby Steps demo are the cutscenes. To my surprise, they're voice-acted and motion-captured above and beyond the standard you might expect from an indie game about slapstick physics. Scenes between Nate and the strange folk he meets on his trek flow like a sitcom where actors improvise around a script, like What We Do in the Shadows if instead of being about vampires who are kind of losers it was just about losers. But, as it happens, there's no script at all.

"Fully fully improvised," is how co-developer Gabe Cuzzillo, of Ape Out and Foiled fame, describes it. "Going into it, we have an idea of what the scene is, and then we just record 10 sometimes very different takes of it, then listen back and find one that we think is funny, then animate around that. We have a mocap suit, and we do facial animations using ARKit on the phone. The whole thing is meant to be fast and flowy; let it be a little bit more spontaneous. We have workflow now where we can have a cutscene done in about a day, and it means that they can be a little bit stupider and more off the cuff, because low investment."

All the characters are voiced by the three co-creators, with Cuzzillo as Nate and Foddy as most of the people he meets along the way. It's got the vibe of those old point-and-clicks like Discworld, where Tony Robinson (Baldric from BlackAdder) seemed to voice half the cast. "There's a lot of Bennetts," Foddy says. "Gabe and Maxi both have one character, and I have, I don't know, eight? They all sound the same. Don't get your hopes up."

Foddy's laconic Australian accent makes his interplay with the anxious, lost Nate even funnier, especially when he casually throws in antiquated Aussie slang like hooroo to baffle him. "I didn't realize that was slang forever," says Cuzzillo. "I thought you had just made up a sound."

As well as being funny, the cutscenes work as rewards for all the effort you put in. Whether you slog your way up the mountain or wander off-piste because you saw something interesting off to the side, the friction of the laborious walking controls makes sitting back to watch a comedy sketch feel like something you earned rather than an interruption.

Despite the corner-cutting, they have slowed down Baby Steps' development. "It doesn't make a ton of sense production-wise," Foddy admits, "which is why indie games don't tend to have cutscenes. Indie games tend to have some text that appears and nobody's mouth moves, which was the original plan."

Committing to a third-person camera and relatively realistic graphics—this is the most browncore game I've played since the early 2000s—encouraged them to make Baby Steps more and more like the kind of Ubisoft-adjacent open world games it was parodying. "Working in that zone, you get kind of fidelity-pilled," Foddy says. "You get gradually sucked into, or addicted to, making things look more high fidelity."

"When I first became friends with Bennett I was working at Harmonix," Boch says, "leading pretty large teams working on games. And I was like, 'Bennett, someday I want to produce a triple-A game that you design.'" Baby Steps is the closest they'll get to that. It's an indie Death Stranding where you are both the man and the baby, and it ruthlessly takes the piss out of open world conventions like grappling point highlights and overstuffed maps.

"Just the fact that we're making you do the walking, just the fact that the character is so unprepared, basically everything about it is making choices that are opposite to those big-budget games," Foddy says. "Except in the aesthetics, except where we try to at least suggest the look and feel of, like, an Assassin's Creed game or a Zelda game or something like that. To me, that's a pretty funny joke."

"We can only afford maybe 1/10 of the kinds of polish that they might have," Boch adds. "Your standard game, third-person, is going to have destructible aspects of the terrain, etc, etc, etc. We can invest deeply in a soiling system for the onesie, but we can't rattle off every single standard open world feature, and moreover we don't want to. The intent of the game is to make a send-up, or heighten some of the aspects of these types of triple-A games that we find to be tedious or maybe tired."

See that mountain? You can climb it. But you'll probably trip and then slide down it halfway, with your butt in the air like a proud baboon.

Baby Steps is due out on September 8. You can play its demo on Steam.

My Friend Pedro was a Flash game that evolved into a standalone release in which you played a man who used his skateboard gun-fu skills to kill bad dudes at the command of a talking banana (named Pedro). It was a lot of fun. I gave it an 81. You could throw a frypan into the air and then ricochet bullets off it in slow-motion.

Its developer, DeadToast Entertainment, followed it this year with Shotgun Cop Man. A more lo-fi take on the action-platformer genre, Shotgun Cop Man saw you descend into Hell to fight demons with a shotgun that launched you into the air when you shot the ground. Want to double-jump? Shoot twice. It was almost as much fun, though it didn't have a skateboard or bullet time.

Until now. DeadToast has generously bolted three new worlds with 17 levels in each of them onto Shotgun Cop Man. These 51 levels are themed around My Friend Pedro and add skateboards and bullet time, as well as breakable glass, frying pans, ziplines, swing ropes, and a friendly banana. There are also three new boss fights, one of which is with a helicopter.

Which is a lot of value to add to a game for free. Even better, Shotgun Cop Man is currently on sale for 20% off if you haven't checked it out already, and My Friend Pedro is on sale for 80% off if you missed out on that bright yellow slice of the old ultraviolence before now. Basically, you've got no excuse. Unless you hate bullet time, in which case Max Payne 2 would like a word.

If you're anything like me, a Gen Z caffeine addict with the attention span of a fruit fly, ancient classics like Pong and Breakout don't do much for you. 'How am I supposed to play this without roguelite elements and heaps of stacking upgrades?' I cry, and if the lesson is that sometimes less is more, an hour with Ball X Pit has made sure I may never learn it. Sometimes more is more, and it rules.

Devolver dedicated its Summer Game Fest show to Ball X Pit, a brick-breaker turbocharged with new twists, and I was able to try a demo of it before the reveal.

Skeleton soldiers in the form of blocks and rectangles march down a vertical column trying to shoot you and reach the bottom, while you run around automatically firing balls which bounce around and deal damage. If you catch the balls mid-flight, they immediately shoot out wherever you're aiming. There's already some depth there: you can aim wide to take down a whole group with ricochets, or get up in an enemy's face and rapidly bat the ball back at them to focus one down.

The fun really starts, though, when you start leveling up and racking up special balls. Between a broodmother ball that "births" more balls as it flies around, a burn ball that lights enemies ablaze, and a midnight oil ball that turns burning enemies into living bombs, and all sorts of colorful alternatives, Ball X Pit goes from stark simple to nigh-unreadable chaos in a matter of minutes.

Each special ball gets added to your arsenal and comes with its own suite of upgrades and potential fusions with other special balls; before long, you're making split-second decisions in a sea of automatic laser fire and screen-coating explosions. Boss enemies will DPS check your build as the skeleton hordes get tougher and more numerous, and I was constantly itching to level up just one more time, get a little bit stronger, so I could live a few dozen seconds longer.

In-between runs, you hurry back to New Ballbylon (yes, really) and spend whatever cash you earned on the meta progression stuff. New buildings, new playable characters, new potential builds for future runs, and so on. The structure is nothing unusual, but I still walked away from the demo pretty taken with what I played—which speaks to the sheer, twitchy fun this game finds in its ball-bouncing brick breaking.

Frankly, I thought I was getting tired of the roguelike formula, and Ball X Pit packs in a lot of concepts you have seen before. But the action in its demo is so breakneck, such a potent distillation of that power-scaling madness I love in games like Risk of Rain, I came crawling back to the play button after seeing what the demo had to offer.

If you're keen to check out Ball X Pit, you can wishlist it or play the demo on Steam.

With so many roguelike deckbuilders out there, I appreciate when one stands out immediately—and there's a lot that stands out in Shroom and Gloom, announced today by Devolver Digital.

It's in first-person perspective, for one, so you don't see the typical view of your hero on the left side of the screen and bad guys lined up on the right. You hold your cards in front of you, when you look at your map you see it being held in your hand, and between encounters you actually walk through tunnels and passageways to get where you're going by pressing W. That alone is already a refreshing change.

There's plenty more, though. Shroom and Gloom is a "double deckbuilder," meaning you have a deck you use for combat but another completely separate deck you use for exploration through the branching map. Dig up new additions to your deck by playing a shovel card, play a camp card to take a rest, and walk right up to shops to purchase new cards.

And, as I did in the demo, you can build a toad shrine and then lick it to remove a card from your memory (and deck). Plus, if you come to a locked door but you don't have a key… well, you can just smash it open by headbutting it. I'm not saying it doesn't hurt: you'll lose a couple of hitpoints, but at least the door opens.

Where are the shrooms promised in the title? That's where your enemies come in: they're all weird lumpy mushroom monsters, gross but also cute. (The art style of Shroom and Gloom is a delight, like if Adventure Time was drawn by R. Crumb.) I started out battling them with some basic cards, like a knife for stabbing and a "roast" card for fire damage. Fatally burning a mushroom would provide me with a "toasty" card, which I could eat to restore my health. Roasted mushrooms? Delicious and healthy.

As I continued through the dungeon I met meaner mushrooms but built a stronger deck. One card let me replenish my HP by taking a bite of an enemy before they were even dead, another card would increase in damage with every kill, and my favorite was a mace that not only dealt a lot of damage but would remain in my hand after a fatality. I did a lot of whomping on some minor mushrooms with that mace, especially after using another card to increase its damage a few times.

The mushrooms did a lot of damage to me, too: developer Team Lazerbeam says "there are no block cards" in Shroom and Gloom. If any enemy attacks you, they're gonna hit you and hurt you, in other words. In the demo that led to my health plummeting quite a bit in most fights, but there were multiple ways (like chowing down on my spongy enemies) that meant I could regain a ton of health during a fight, too.

I made it to the boss in the demo, though this being a roguelike deckbuilder it naturally had multiple stages and its final form (summoning a bunch of tentacles after taking several big bites out of me) eventually wiped me out. I was prepared for this eventuality: a card I'd collected earlier let me rise from the grave and heal to half my HP, but it still wasn't enough to triumph.

No matter. I'll be back soon because the Shroom and Gloom demo is a lot of fun and I'm eager to play through it again. You can find the demo on Steam, and look forward to more when Shroom and Gloom enters early access later this year.

While every other publisher runs from the new GTA 6 release date, Devolver Digital is determined to have its own 'Doom Crossing' moment.

This weekend, Devolver shared a post on X in response to the Grand Theft Auto 6 release date announcement, with the ominous message, "You can't escape us. May 26, 2026 it is then."

This challenge was a follow-up to a post from back in March where Devolver casually vowed, "Gonna release a game the exact same day and time as GTA 6."

Devolver hasn't yet announced what game it'll be pitting against GTA 6. The publisher is known for its irreverent industry stunts, but there could be something to the plan if it finds the same mutually-beneficial hype experienced by Animal Crossing: New Horizons and Doom Eternal on March 20, 2020.

That shared release date was notable for the comical contrast—as with movies Barbie and Oppenheimer—so whatever Devolver lands on will likely be a wildly different game from GTA 6.

Devolver has published some spectacular indie games, including Cult of the Lamb, Death's Door, The Talos Principle, Gris, and The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood. If anyone can successfully launch an indie game on the same day as GTA6, it's probably them.

The mystery upcoming game destined for GTA 6's new May 26, 2026 release date could be almost anything. We know Enter the Gungeon 2 is slated for a 2026 release, although Hotline Miami 3 might be a more theme-appropriate candidate (however, a third installment in the series has yet to be announced).

The situation could get especially spicy if GTA 6 gets delayed again, allowing Devolver to either release its game on time and brag or delay it unnecessarily to stay true to its word.

At the very least, Devolver might get a good showing from PC gamers, since GTA 6 likely won't even be on PC on launch day.

Shotgun Cop Man is a throwback to an earlier age of indie games, before the phrase roguelike deckbuilder had occurred to anyone, an age when 2D puzzle-platformers with a single mechanical hook were all the rage. "In this one you can reverse gravity." "In this one you can rewind time." Well, in Shotgun Cop Man you jump by shooting at Hell.

The plot is a wafer-thin excuse to fill levels with enemies and traps: You are a brick-shaped cop man who has descended into Hell to arrest Satan. Satan wears a string vest and has a bum-cleft chin, and each of the game's nine worlds begins with him giving you the finger and telling you to fuck off before buzzing demons lift him away. Do not go into Shotgun Cop Man expecting any more story than that.

DeadToast's previous game, My Friend Pedro, had an equally silly excuse plot—a talking banana told you to do murders—but explored it with surprising thoroughness. While I miss that level of commitment to nonsense, Satan's casual dismissals of your attempts to bring double-barreled due process to Hell are pretty funny.

It's a game about momentum. Shoot down with your shotgun and you get launched into the air, but shoot down with a pistol and you do a little hop that'll let you skip over a bullet without braining yourself on the spikes overhead. It's also about momentum because the levels are quick-fire bursts, full of diagonal slopes to slide down and gaps to launch yourself across in a propulsive race to the exit.

What you should expect is a taut action-platformer where you can grab a demon in midair then throw it at another demon to kill them both. (Something that's not tutorialized but doesn't need to be—an option to press the same key you use to pick up guns appears as you fly past a demon and it just makes sense.) Complications arrive in later levels like explosives, spinning lasers, and demons who are also wizards, as do more weapons to swap your pistol for, like the one that shoots in three directions at once.

Once pipes arrive the gun that ricochets becomes amazing, because if you shoot it down a curved pipe at the right angle you can pop a flying demon at the other end. This is the kind of joy you'll find in Shotgun Cop Man.

It nails the little details, like the way you stop falling briefly while shooting your pistol, letting you chain together a bunch of air-time kills as you plummet down a shaft full of demons, or the way the thumping music sounds tinny and distant when you've been hit and are frantically trying to grab the floating heart that stops you dying. Sound effects like the "foonk" you make when entering and exiting pipes and animations like the spinny one-hand reloads are all perfect too.

There's a level editor and achievements, and yet I can't see myself going back now I've defeated Satan. The moment I finished Shotgun Cop Man it left my head completely. Which is fine. For me, this is a one-and-done run, a single-serving treat I played for five hours and enjoyed and that's all it needs to be.