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"Too big a risk": Moonlighter devs delay new game's demo for fear of genAI cloning, calling on platforms to "keep strengthening protections for original work"

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 17:02:28 +0000

Moonlighter and Cataclismo developers Digital Sun Games have postponed a public Steam playtest for their new game ReVamp, for fear of people using generative AI to clone their work before release.

"I was a real anglophile": A Canadian's obsession with Viz magazine is why Grand Theft Auto: London's streets are covered in dogs' eggs

Julian Benson — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 16:30:00 +0000

The Grand Theft Auto games have a long history of being made by developers who live far from their source material. The original game and its mainline sequels have all been led by Rockstar North, housed in a decidedly not US-based Edinburgh. But, even when it came to a comparatively local GTA mission pack set in London, the team chose instead to ask their newly acquired Canadian team to handle the development work. It didn't matter that only a few people on the team had actually been to London before.

Yet, that distance, as proven across the series grants the developers a more incisive view of a place, one that focuses more on a setting's cultural rendering than its reality.

As evidenced by Grand Theft Auto: London's dog shit.

"Sexy sorceresses" and "bare-chested fighters": Dragon Age's original artists wanted to base it on Conan the Barbarian, much to the outrage of the designers

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 16:05:04 +0000

Buried in the vast and sooty-fingered Summer Eternal anthology, there's an interview with former BioWare developer and Dragon Age lead writer David Gaider, who is now creative director at Stray Gods outfit Summerfall Studios. The interview is a podcast-length account of BioWare's transformations over Gaider's career, stretching back to Baldur's Gate 2. Amongst other things, it explains why the Dragon Age games feel so different from sequel to sequel.

Gaider discusses the original trilogy's fortunes under RPG-phobic parent company Electronic Arts, commenting that 2009's Dragon Age: Origins made it to release partly thanks to "sunk cost" thinking after EA bought the studio. He also talks about Dragon Age's lack of a properly defined vision, early on, which led to a lot of overcorrection between releases. As regards Origins, there was something of a faction war initially between departments over what exact flavour of fantasy fiction the new RPG should draw on.

Crusader Kings 3's merchant republics expansion, Silk and Silver, will release during the very quiet time of mid-November 2026

Mark Warren — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 14:55:52 +0000

The second big expansion coming to Crusader Kings 3 this year finally has a proper release date. Silk and Silver, the gold-clinking sibling of recently released Church-centric DLC By God Alone, will arrive on November 17th. Just a couple of days before that which shall not be named, but has resulted in a lot of studios opting to give mid-November a wide berth release-wise.

Endless pile of Needle In Haystack games begins to emerge, as viral hit imitator's devs claim their code was nicked by a genAI-using clone

Mark Warren — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 13:25:56 +0000

In a metaphor far too on the nose to turn into any form of fiction, at least without the writer getting mercilessly cyberbullied, a game about finding a needle in a haystack has now become the genuine needle at the heart of a pile of imitators. A pile so large, in fact, one copycat game stands accused of ripping code from another.

This week in PC games: build a better zombie in Stupid Never Dies, glue together houses in Cutout Village, and settle brave new worlds in Star Trek: Outposts Unknown

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 12:59:48 +0000

Hello all! Welcome to another wonderful week of PC games, and mounting bloodlust. As I type these words, a neighbour has started using a leafblower. I hate leafblowers. They are mutant hairdryers from Hell. They scatter my thoughts like the tiny, tiny quantity of leaves in the neighbour's garden – a quantity of leaves you could very easily sweep up by hand in two minutes, if you had even the slightest bit of gumption.

What's that? You think I should release vipers into the neighbour's toolshed? What a capital idea! But sadly I don't have any vipers to hand, and besides, I have to finish writing this list of new PC games. There are exactly as many games in the list as there are leaves in the neighbour's garden. He'll be at it for hours, no doubt. Please read, while I order in some fresh vipers.

Life has once again found a way in Athanasia, an "immersive" dinosaur FPS that feels like comfort food for Dino Crisis and System Shock players alike

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 11:17:27 +0000

Good news, people who figure they are going to die of old age before they get another Dino Crisis! Good news also, people who can't get enough throwback immersive sims! Even as Capcom forge ahead with their Resident Evil remake ouroboros, plucky Momentum Games and horror publishers Black Lantern Collective are releasing Athanasia - a first-person homage to both Dino Crisis and System Shock, in which you play intrepid researcher Carmen Flores, who has been sent to an ominous abandoned scientific facility in South America.

One of these days, I'm going to turf up to a collapsing laboratory complex in a game and discover nothing but stationery, old rubber gloves, and unfiled expense claims. I imagine a lot of laboratories are abandoned not due to (for example) gene-modded dilophosaurus outbreaks, but because the funders got cold feet long before Project X reached the prototyping stage. But that day is not this day. Today, there are dinosaurs! Argh, my face and/or intestines! Here's a trailer.

Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines remaster or remake rumours begin to flow, reportedly in part thanks to a metal band from the original's score

Mark Warren — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 10:41:01 +0000

Rumours of Troika classic Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines potentially getting the remaster or remake treatment have surfaced. They've come from two places: one being the fairly standard source of poster on a game leak-obsessed section of Reddit, the other being rather more unorthodox. It's not often a metal band allegedly pause mid-concert to ask the crowd if they know an old game's getting a revamp.

The Sunday Papers

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 10:00:00 +0000

Sundays are for firing up Twine again and thinking you know what, if this swanky IF plotter had been around when I was an undergraduate, I might have preserved all my exam revision notes in text adventure form. I still have two, reassuringly heavy boxes of tabbed and colour-coded index cards that you could plausibly lay out to form a maze, navigable by compass commands. Head down the western corridor from Middle English to the Renaissance, and – ah, bollocks, you have been eaten by a Grue. Surely somebody's thought of this, in the decade and change since Twine was released? I mean, we already have 3D museum exhibits extracted from Wikipedia.

Sundays are also for heading to the allotment and getting annoyed with the tomato plants, who have decided to go bonkers right at the end of the growing season. I thought you were done, pesky nightshades. I thought I could leave you alone for the rest of the year. Finally, Sundays are for sharing good criticism, like the below.

Rain98 is a blue-hued, pre-Y2K, Serial Experiments Lain inspired visual novel about time travelling to the past to end the world

Oisin Kuhnke — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 21:50:37 +0000

Picture this. You're me, and you boot up the demo for Rain98, an incredibly blue-looking, rainy visual novel set in Tokyo, 1998, about a woman who refers to herself as the Angolmois, a world-ending reference to the predictions of good ole Nostradamus. At one point you have to light this woman's cigarette in a lightly stylish sequence. You get to a bit where you're asked to put your name in, and you put it in because like its predecessors, this is surely a self-insert kind of situation. Only you get a Steam achievement for getting a game over for putting your name in. Rude! But curious, so you, and of course I mean I, pressed on.

Black & White 3 doesn't sound like it's ever going to happen, but good ole overpromising Peter Molyneux may have let slip about a remaster of the original

Oisin Kuhnke — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 20:29:12 +0000

Peter Molyneux feels like a man who can never die. He's just sort of always been there, and seems like he always will be, making some kind of game where you can hypothetically do what you want, never quite living up to expectations. But hey, he's Peter Molyneux, what else would you expect? The complicated icon is still ticking away at his latest, Masters of Albion, but in a recent interview, he spoke of one of his old classics, Black & White, and the idea of a third entry in the series (and the fact that there might be something newish on the way).

RimWorld meets Moebius-esque roguelite colony sim Trailblazers: Into The March welcomes you aboard its hulking landships with a chonky-sounding demo

Oisin Kuhnke — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 19:07:41 +0000

With the devs behind RimWorld gearing up for their next game with a recent engine switch, it'd be entirely fair if you were hankering for something new (if still familiar enough) yourself. Trailblazers: Into The March is one such game, having introduced itself to us earlier this year, a mishmash of the aforementioned colony sim, Nausicaa, Moebius, Andrei Tarkovski, Jeff Vandermeer, and FTL: Faster Than Light by Edwin's measure. And now you don't just have to look at its trailers, because there's a demo for you to have a go at.

As too much of the industry embrace their own death through genAI, Konami say it's real people that are most important for making good games

Oisin Kuhnke — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 17:04:18 +0000

I've taken a habit, recently, to proclaim my desire to explode in lieu of anything more realistically violent I could wish upon myself when I feel stressed. And, in what would likely be more concerning if I were a sentient bomb talking to a bomb diffusal squad, I've been saying that a lot lately, primarily because of the copious amounts of AI nonsense I've been seeing… everywhere. Epic Games, the ever-boycottable company called Microsoft, the decompiling community, the poison has found its way into everyone's veins and it's making me want to, say it with me now, explode! So you can imagine my relief to hear a developer say they don't think AI will make a massive impact. The developer? Perhaps surprisingly, Konami.

Oh dear, half a year after launching Samson, Swedish developer Liquid Swords have filed for bankruptcy

Oisin Kuhnke — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 15:58:54 +0000

Update 19/10: Despite attempts to find the studio a buyer, co-founder Christofer Sundberg has announced that Liquid Swords is closing. "I'm proud of our team and what we built," he writes, adding that former staff are "discussing continued support" for Samson.

What are we all playing this weekend?

Julian Benson — Sat, 17 Oct 2026 07:00:00 +0000

Saturday's are for having your mind read. Or, at least, this Saturday is because I'm seeing Derren Brown's new show. I'm a little self-conscious about it, not because I'm worried the mentalist will hypnotise me and make me profess a false love for consoles over PC games but because my partner and her family have never seen me at a magic (or magic adjacent show).

Reader, I am an awful audience member for conjurors, illusionists, and psychics.

Nonolith traps you in a living maze and challenges you to find hidden terrain magic using good old copy-paste

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 17:44:15 +0000

After enjoying Echo Weaver last week, I'm in the market for games that gaze with utmost scorn upon the concept of unlockable abilities, smugly declaring that everything you need to complete them is available to you from the word go.

We have reached a new threshold in genAI gloom, with a game dev cancelling a demo for fear of copycats ripping them off before release

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 16:50:00 +0000

In what I suspect is the start of a trend, assuming it isn't one already, the creators of Drunken Goddess Reflux have yanked a planned public demo partly because they're concerned about people using generative AI to clone their game and release a copy before they even launch.

"We were wrong": Wardogs devs end Season 2's team-specific cash and XP bonus experiment after a single, tumultuous day

James Archer — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 16:30:00 +0000

Season 2 of Wardogs, the multiplayer sandbox FPS currently blasting and/or politely driving its way through early access, introduced an un usual "social experiment" when it launched yesterday. In an attempt to rehabilitate the reputation of its Lonestar faction, a.k.a the infamous Blue Team, developers Bulkhead began granting bonus XP and cash – the latter being the upgrade-focused game’s lifeblood – to Blue players alone. The hypothesis, apparently, was that more skilled players would give Lonestar a chance, helping boost its dismal winrates and perhaps improve its tarnished image.

One day in, then, how’s it going? “We were wrong. We fucked up,” says Bulkhead CEO Joe Brammer in a video announcing the bonus scheme’s immediate cancellation. Ah!

The Blood of Dawnwalker's update 1.1 adds a "forgiving" difficulty setting, but I think I'll find it hard to forgive its introduction of "directional animal petting"

Mark Warren — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 16:21:53 +0000

Quick! Hit left scratch ear! Hit down rub belly! Slap right bum pats! Annnnd you've died because you failed to parry a paw coming for you with the force of a vampire's claw. This is how I assume things will go if I boot up The Blood of Dawnwalker once its 1.1 update debuts. Devs Rebel Wolves, in their infinite wisdom, claim to be set to add in "directional animal petting" as part of it.

The creator of last year's cult hit RPG The Necromancer's Tale is back with The Lich Wars, a storybook RPG that follows 30 years of undead botheration

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 15:45:00 +0000

Psychic Software have announced The Lich Wars, a standalone prequel for their widely acclaimed RPG The Necromancer's Tale. Widely acclaimed by me, anyway. I'm pretty wide, these days – the local Morrisons keeps doing discounts on 80-biccy packets of bourbon creams.

I liked The Necromancer's Tale specifically for how it wove a whole RPG around the narrative dynamics of a single RPG class, with players performing rituals in each chapter to develop their morbid spellcraft, while managing the suspicions of nearby townsfolk. I also really loved its choose-your-own-adventure prologue. The Lich Wars sort of spins the prologue out into a full game.

Cyberpunk 2077 movie "won't be a one-to-one translation of the game's story", CD Projekt Red boss confirms, and boy do I think that's the right move

Mark Warren — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 15:15:40 +0000

Since the existence of plans for a Cyberpunk 2077 live-action adaptation from devs CD Projekt Red and Paramount Pictures was revealed last week, I've been hoping it won't take the form of porting V's tale from the game to the big screen. Such a thing wouldn't necessarily be terrible, but I like my game adaptations a bit more on the original story side of things, as Cyberpunk tie-in anime series Edgerunners has been. The good news is that one of CD Projekt Red's big bosses has now confirmed that this adaptation won't be beat-for-beat retelling of 'Honey, there's a Keanu in my brain'.

Penguin Colony review - the least expected Soulslike you'll play, and a cracking parody of Lovecraftian empires

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 15:15:00 +0000

Penguin Colony is probably the best pisstake of Lovecraft and Lovecraftian horror I've played. It's the best because it places Lovecraft's universe at a creaturely remove, amplifying its absurdity without having to drop any punchlines. Entering a ravaged polar campsite, I advance among burning tents and uniformed corpses to a pioneer seated on a crate, who is busily sawing his own face off. Ice and snow shrill overhead and Lenval Brown's narration rumbles in my bones, speaking of eldritch relics and unquenchable ambitions, of "queer creatures" and inexplicable deaths, of madness and glory, of "scientific explanations" and empires from other dimensions. I consider all this, and say: Fnaaarp.

The pleasures of Double Fine's Thank You Bus Driver are not in the destination, nor the journey, but in slapping my disobedient passengers

James Archer — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 14:38:59 +0000

Showing some gratitude is the least these scribbly wretches can do. The passengers in Thank You Bus Driver – Double Fine’s new comedy public transport sim – are almost invariably rowdy, entitled hypocrites, happy to sully my single-decker by picking their toes and bellowing down their phones, while only ever being seconds away from a strop if another traveller does the same. Still, here I am, locked in symbiotic misery with them, desperate to choke down the scraps of acknowledgement they’ll spare for arriving at their stop in good time. I hate them. Please love me.

Ubisoft were working on a second Assassin's Creed game set in Qin Dynasty China, if this allegedly leaked footage is to be believed

Mark Warren — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 12:02:35 +0000

Footage alleged to show a prototype of a cancelled Assassin’s Creed game in action has popped up online. The game, it's claimed, was set in ancient China, went by the working title Assassin’s Creed Destiny, and was a separate project to Chinese-set mobile game Assassin’s Creed Jade. Instead, from the sounds of it Destiny would have been a game aimed at PC and consoles.

Valve roll out Steam Achievement Sets in beta, splitting up games’ perpetually growing trophy masses into DLC and season buckets

Mark Warren — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 10:23:52 +0000

Steam has a new feature in beta aimed at helping completionists feel like they've got a bit more of a handle on their never-ending quests to 100% games whose trophy lists keep on growing and evolving. Steam achievements can now be grouped into sets determined by the developers, creating a means of separating off the likes of DLC trophies from the base game's to-do list, thereby making it clearer what you've done so far and where you might want to focus next.

CD Projekt is in "a really dangerous place", says Anthem's executive producer, pointing to ballooning costs of making games of that scope and quality

Julian Benson — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 08:15:00 +0000

"The triple-A industry has become over-specialised, specialised to the point of hyper-fragility," Mark Darrah states in a foreboding interview found deep in the pages of the Summer Eternal Anthology, recently covered by Edwin. As a former executive producer at Bioware, who corralled teams on Anthem and Dragon Age, after starting his career as a programmer on Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, and Jade Empire, Darrah has seen firsthand the growing scale of video game production and the challenges it can bring.

Darrah's also been vocal about the difficult development of Anthem in the past, and the struggles he had at Bioware. However, while what he says in the interview may be familiar, I found it gained sharper definition when read in light of games industry news and some of the interviews I've had with developers this year. So let me pull together some of the choice bits with the extra context from our own RPS vaults.

Welp, all of you RuneScape folks who hate Reignited have gotten your wish, as the controversial MMO rejig has been cancelled

Oisin Kuhnke — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 21:51:05 +0000

Welp, that was short lived. Earlier this month, Jagex made some big RuneScape announcements, namely that they're making a fourth version of the MMO (aptly, currently called RuneScape 4), but also the arrival of RuneScape Reignited, a new character type that would come with its own, new economy. The intention here seemingly was to bring new people in to breathe some life back into the game. This did not go down well with the old timers. And now, it's been flat out cancelled.

Ahead of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4's launch next week, unionised Activision testers have voted to authorise a strike

Oisin Kuhnke — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 20:27:22 +0000

Call of Duty testers have voted to authorise a union strike. The union, formed back in March of 2024, is made up of almost 600 quality assurance workers at Activision, and plan to strike if conditions at the publisher don't change.

Urine Trouble: PEE V PEE, a multiplayer game about hiding from the cops while you take a whizz on public property, takes the trophy for punniest title of the year

Oisin Kuhnke — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 18:59:01 +0000

I've been doing this whole games journalism for over five years now, and I've seen a lot of different kinds of games in that time. I've written about plenty of them too, with a fair few being plenty weird. But I'll admit that today's game is one that I do understand if I were to tell anyone I'm interested in playing who maybe isn't familiar with games as a whole, they'd probably talk to someone else at the party. You see, Urine Trouble: PEE V PEE is a competitive online game all about pissing literally everywhere, and trying not to get caught doing so.

After almost three years of early access, Enshrouded has hit 1.0 with a complete story, bigger map, and way too much more to mention

Oisin Kuhnke — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 17:01:56 +0000

The increasing number of early access games always throws me off, because one day you're seeing an announcement of a game releasing, and then a while (normally years) later, you see another announcement for said game releasing. Feels like I'm in a constant Groundhog Day situation, probably not good for my sense of the passage of time. Anyway! Existentialism aside, after launching into early access almost three years ago, Enshrouded is now out in 1.0.

Monumentally expansive roguelike Caves of Qud is getting even bigger in December with an early access expansion that lets you play as messed up dogs and trees

Oisin Kuhnke — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 16:30:00 +0000

Caves of Qud is a game well liked over here at RPS; Brendan gave it the coveted Bestest Bests badge back when it launched into 1.0 a couple of years ago, and all! It's a game I still want to reckon with more deeply, and perhaps with the reveal of its first expansion I'll be more enticed to. It's called Diaspora, and its biggest feature is probably the fact that you'll be able to play as plants and animals. Interestingly, much like the base game before it, developer Freehold Games will also be releasing Diaspora into early access, a unique step to take for a bit of DLC.

4X strategy sequel Humankind 2 gets its first extended in-game footage, rich in era-spanning, culture-shaping, history-rewriting action

James Archer — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 15:45:00 +0000

Not counting the slivers of footage tacked onto that baby's-eve-view reveal trailer, Humankind 2 devs Amplitude Studios have unveiled their first real footage of the history-spanning strategy sequel. Throughout its (nearly) seven minutes of maps and menus, we can see what appears to a greater focus on resculpting and adapting your chosen cultures to meet the challenges of each era, and less on sticking with preset archetypal bonuses.

There's still loads of cultures to work with – over 70, sayeth the trailer, spread across six eras – and as in the original Humankind, it's possible to take a single civilisation all the way through the game. The sequel, though, also throws up complications like biomes, where environmental dangers and opportunities must be dodged and seized.

"Total War: Shogun 2 Complete Edition has fallen short of both your expectations and our own standards", Sega say as they pull it from stores and restore the original

Mark Warren — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 14:27:58 +0000

Total War: Shogun 2's Complete Edition is set to be pulled from stores by publishers Sega and developers Creative Assembly, who've admitted that it fell short of both player expectations and its creators' standards. The studio and their overlords have pledged to "investigate the issues" with the game and will be reinstating the original version of Shogun 2 as the purchasable one while they do so.

"I lost the concept of home, until my grandmother took me into these forests" - Trollheim: Gnomes is a survival game from ex-DICE and Paradox devs that channels childhood fairytales

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 13:00:00 +0000

Swedish studio Off-leash Interactive and Denshattack publishers Fireshine Games have announced Trollheim: Gnomes, a survival-crafting fairytale in which you, a three-inch-high gnome, explore a procedurally generated forest derived from Nordic folklore. You'll be clambering up enormous trees, lighting campfires beneath mushrooms, and befriending or evading troublesome larger supernatural creatures known as "Väsen".

I caught a briefing for Trollheim: Gnomes earlier this month, and while I worry this is generic fare on some level, I'd sure like to get lost in those procgen woods. I'm also interested in the game's eight-player multiplayer, in that it seemingly creates opportunities for hide-and-seek – the game's building system affords scope to camouflage your dwellings against the litter, moss and mold of the forest floor.

The rumoured Steam Frame OLED would fix one of the Frame's minor weaknesses and do nothing for its major ones

James Archer — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 12:30:00 +0000

Good catch by SteamFrameHub here: snippets of the recently released Steam Frame kernel source code contain references to a possible variant of Valve's new VR headset with upgraded OLED lenses. A failed prototype, ditched during development? Maybe not – one of the related code branches, which codename the device 'Planar,' was updated on October 2nd, weeks after the LCD-lensed Frame opened for reservations.

There's details, too. The OLED lenses seem to have a native resolution of 3,552x3,840 and a max refresh rate of 90Hz, suspiciously identical to the MicroOLED lenses used by Samsung's Galaxy VR headset. In standalone VR play, this would be much harsher on the (allegedly unchanged) Snapdragon SoC than the current Frame's 2,160x2160 eyescreens, but then the code also hints that Valve are getting around this with a cousin of the Frame's foveated rendering and foveated streaming tech: foveated scaling, where higher pixel density is used where your eyes look, and lower, less demanding pixel density is applied where they don't. Interesting! Even if right now, the whole idea of a Steam Frame OLED doesn't make much sense.

"Some people like it, some people are annoyed by it": Substructure may look like Factorio, but it changes the automation game in some fundamental ways

Julian Benson — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 12:00:00 +0000

In many respects, as someone who has played a lot of automation games, Substructure is very familiar. It begins with you landing on the surface of an alien world and using nothing but pluck, the tools on your UI, and the schematics in your tech tree to construct a sprawling factory that claws up resources from the planet and transforms them into materials and components to build ever bigger machines.

But it also hints at more.

League of Legends Classic will become a thing of the past in January 2027, though it may one day be resurrected as a limited-time event

Mark Warren — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 11:01:24 +0000

The classic mode rolled out in League of Legends earlier this year will cease to be a permanent addition once the calendar flips over into 2027, ending a fairly brief nostalgia run, devs Riot have announced. The mode, offering a version of the MOBA mirroring its early days, only debuted in July. It might come back in a different form down the line, but Riot have found that there isn't enough of a prolonged appetite for days gone by to be worth propping up something akin to the classic modes seen in games like World of Warcraft.

Big Walk devs House House announce support for BDS Microsoft boycott, say the co-op puzzler isn't coming to Xbox

James Archer — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 10:27:34 +0000

House House, creators of breezy co-op puzzle adventure Big Walk, have become the latest high-profile game developers to express support for the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement's ongoing Microsoft boycott. The developers, who also made avian mischief sim Untitled Goose Game, wrote in a post that they've been observing the boycott – called in 2025 in protest of Microsoft's business ties with the Israeli military – for a while, citing it as the reason why Big Walk went without an Xbox console release alongside its PC, PS5, and Switch 2 versions.

Ubisoft reportedly look to cut 100 more jobs by proposing voluntary redundancies at studios including lead Anno devs Ubisoft Mainz

Mark Warren — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 09:51:03 +0000

Ubisoft have initiated talks over voluntary redundancies at three German studios under their banner, reportedly seeking to cut around 100 workers via the move. Ubisoft Dusseldorf, Ubisoft Berlin and Ubisoft Mainz are the studios set to be affected, with talks over the plans between Ubisoft and a works council representing staff having been initiated by the publishers last week.

Living world, god-mind or "something far more terrifying": Etre is an eye-melting, Control-inspired action game about reshaping a cosmic brain

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 17:00:00 +0000

If I ever go looking for my significant other and find myself inside a planet-sized megamind that's on the verge of gaining consciousness, I will not run around zapping the cerebral fauna with my magic handcannons. I will not jump on or scan anything. Instead, I will heed the lessons of Harlan Ellison and curl regretfully into a ball, awaiting my transformation into a puddle of mournful goo.

It's one of many ways I apparently differ from the protagonist of Etre, a new third-person action adventure from Studio Lifeforms, in which you "explore an interconnected labyrinth of luminous architecture, solve spatial puzzles, and engage in fluid combat as you search for your lost love and decide what this new intelligence will become."

Fortnite is finally coming to Linux thanks to Epic rebuilding Easy Anti-Cheat, though Steam Deck support is still in the wind

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 16:30:00 +0000

Epic have announced that they're rebuilding their Easy Anti-Cheat software in order to get their flagship battle royale Fortnite running on Linux, after years of fretting that they don't think they'd be able to shut down cheaters operating across all the associated kernel configurations. It won't support Steam Deck for the foreseeable, mind.

Over the Hill's off-roading simulation winches you in with a more laid-back take than SnowRunner's, but it'll still bite careless drivers

Mark Warren — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 16:00:00 +0000

Over the Hill, a rather chillaxed take on brutal Saber Interactive off-roading sims like SnowRunner, is the latest game from vibesy driving enthusiasts Funselektor. The folks behind the likes of Art of Rally and Absolute Drift have assembled untamed wildernesses in the cold Canadian hills and the boiling desert of Algeria, before handing myself and Julian the keys to some 4x4s. Here’s our verdict.

"We vibe coded a new Epic Games Launcher" because "programming is hard", announce company we're somehow supposed to see as a serious Steam competitor

Mark Warren — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 15:32:37 +0000

Days after a report emerged about them imposing an "AI-first" production model on the devs of a new Disney shooter, Epic Games have released a new version of their launcher in preview form. It's been "vibe coded" with aim of making it "faster than the other guy". That other guy is Steam, something the yacht gag in the second paragraph of the announcement post makes even more obvious.

Asha Sharma announces Xbox Labs project to "explore new technology," which sure sounds like tinkering with old games through AI

James Archer — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 15:17:23 +0000

As part of Microsoft's ongoing, physics-ignoring push to do more business with thousands fewer staff, games chief Asha Sharma has announced Xbox Labs: a new umbrella for Xbox's R&D into the kind of game remixing and rejigging most visibly characterised by viralities like Halo for browsers, or Mario in Elden Ring. Both enabled, perhaps tellingly, by the AI-driven decompilation of the original source codes.

Rockstar 'union busting' tribunal extended to November 18th, meaning it will close just days before GTA 6's release date

Julian Benson — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 14:45:00 +0000

The employment tribunal between the Independent Workers' Union of Great Britain (IWGB) and GTA 6 maker Rockstar games was due to conclude this Friday, but the legal case has now been extended into November.

It's like everything Rockstar touches gets delayed…

"We are here to give you something to believe in": the former Disco Elysium devs of Summer Eternal reveal new RPG Red Rooster, a game of fire, water and alternate selves

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 14:15:41 +0000

Earlier this month, the former Disco Elysium developers of worker co-operative studio Summer Eternal sent me a 500-page anthology describing their new game Red Rooster. It's a 3D, real-time, third-person RPG you could broadly style as a spiritual Disco successor, working in the tradition of Planescape: Torment and Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, but which also owes much inspiration to Baldur's Gate 3 and Dark Messiah of Might and Magic. It takes place in a magic realist, "our-world-adjacent", mightily flammable and divided river city called Arta-Tantor, created with Unreal Engine and housing a "physics-powered sandbox of objects you can individually move, manipulate – and burn."

Rockstar are "confident" that GTA 7 won't take another eight years, despite similar promises of greater efficiency seemingly having come with Red Dead Redemption 2

Mark Warren — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 12:05:28 +0000

Future Rockstar games won't take as long to make as GTA 6 has, the studio leadership currently behind the series have asserted, saying they're "confident" work that's gone into this latest game will allow them to build "more sideways than upwards" going forwards. That's despite Red Dead Redemption 2 seemingly having been viewed in a similar light when Rockstar opted to put everyone on getting over the line rather than developing GTA 6 concurrently.

With the Steam Frame becoming Valve's new favourite VR child, they're selling off their last Index headset stock

James Archer — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 11:20:34 +0000

Valve have officially discontinued the Valve Index VR kit, launching a 20%-off sale on its headset and controllers to get rid of any lingering stock.

This was arguably an inevitable end, given the newer, more multitalented Steam Frame launched last month, with the Frame's memory-shortage-induced price hike failing to discourage enough orders to the extent that its waiting list now stretches into 2027. It's also, truth be told, not really an effective discount – buying the Index headset, both controllers, and two separate (yet essential) HTC-made base stations totals £1,027. Which isn't just more than an entry-spec Frame, but more than the £919 that the full Index kit originally launched at.

Ubisoft are making layoffs at Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced studio Ubisoft Singapore while closing Trials creators Redlynx

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 10:43:55 +0000

Update: Following a request for comment, Ubisoft have confirmed that they are proposing to close Redlynx, affecting "up to 52 positions", subject to negotiation under local labour laws. As regards Ubisoft Singapore, "70 positions have been impacted to align the studio with upcoming production needs". Ubisoft's statement stresses that the Singapore team "remains an important part of Ubisoft’s global production organisation."

Our original story continues below.

"My idea of a Netflix for games doesn’t work": Garry's Mod creator says struggling spiritual successor S&box will go free to play as part of major rethink

Mark Warren — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 10:00:00 +0000

Earlier this year, Garry's Mod and Rust developers Facepunch Studios released S&box, a mix of open source game development platform/spiritual successor to their Valve prop-filled physics sandbox. It's not fared well, only earning mixed reviews and being stuffed with low quality AI generated games early doors. Now, Facepunch founder Garry Newman has announced plans for a major overhaul that'll see S&box go free to play.

If you've sworn off genAI Crazy Taxi and dislike all the twerking in GTA 6, consider Shifu: Traffic Masters, a jolly open world driving game set in 1990s China

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell — Wed, 14 Oct 2026 09:28:34 +0000

I'm not your guy for computerised automobile magic picture shows, or "car videogames" as they are popularly known – for that, we turn fearfully to Mark Warren, whose every word during Gchat meetings is screamed against a backdrop of throbbing motors. Still, once in a blue moon a car game hooks my interest. Take Shifu: Traffic Masters, which we can approximately translate as Driver and/or Midtown Madness (those are explicit inspirations), but set in northern China during the 1990s. It's got a demo on Steam. Cars emit steam, don't they? How poetic of them. Here's a trailer.

Send in the Clown is a turn-based RPG comedy about fighting one annoying child at a birthday party where there's only one fight in the whole game

Oisin Kuhnke — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 21:54:00 +0000

I generally find it quite frustrating how limited the medium of games insists on being when it comes to engaging in a wide breadth of genres. One particular genre that its filmmaking cousin frequently utilises but is rarely seen within games is comedy. Sure, occasionally a game makes an attempt at telling a joke within a cutscene (failing more often than not (comedy's hard!)), but rarely is it a genre mechanically. So I'm quite pleased to learn of Send in the Clown, a turn-based RPG where you play as a clown that has to save a 12 year old's birthday party… and it only has one turn.

Escher's Dream is a Portal 2 mod inspired by the non-euclidean works of the classic artist that will leave you feeling only a little bit nauseated

Oisin Kuhnke — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 20:29:21 +0000

You know, given the ubiquity of his work, I'm surprised there aren't more M. C. Escher inspired games in this world There are a few, like Monument Valley, Manifold Garden and Superliminal, amongst a handful of others, you just don't find them all that often in spite of how striking a sense of space is found in Escher's work. Escher's Dream is not, unfortunately, a game of its own, but it is a neat looking Portal 2 mod with some trippy levels in it.

Echoes of Delicious in Dungeon ring out in Deep Dish Dungeon, a co-op dungeon crawler about making meals with whatever you can scrounge up that's out now

Oisin Kuhnke — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 18:30:00 +0000

I would really like it if someone made a Delicious in Dungeon game. It doesn't have to be official, it can be legally distinct! I've been asking for over two years now! I imagine I'll have to keep waiting, but luckily for me, a new game is out today which certainly feels reminiscent of the delightful (and morbid) anime, while still going for its own thing: Deep Dish Dungeon, a co-op dungeon crawler about making do with the ingredients you find that has a dash of Metroidvania elements.

Coming soon to Invincible VS, it's your copyright-friendly neighbourhood Agent Spider

Ashley Schofield — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 18:00:00 +0000

Spider-Man might be one of the most parodied characters of all time, simply due to also being one of the most well-known characters of anything, well, ever. Everyone knows who Spider-Man is. Invincible VS' latest trailer plays into this cleverly, with the reveal of Agent Spider as an upcoming DLC character making frequent allusions to his Marvel counterpart.

Ratocalypse might sound like a low-budget horror flick, but it's actually a neat looking Fire Emblem adjacent strategy auto battler

Oisin Kuhnke — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 17:30:00 +0000

What do you think when you hear the name "Ratocalypse"? To me it sounds like one of those so bad they're good horror flicks like Sharknado, and now I kind of want this film to exist. Alas, instead of what I said, it's actually a quite neat sounding, Fire Emblem adjacent, strategy RPG auto battler about anthropomorphic medieval rats who've been subjected to a zombie plague.

"They thought Callisto was a complete failure": Glen Schofield blames publishers Krafton for The Callisto Protocol's crash landing

Ashley Schofield — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 17:00:00 +0000

Four years after the release of Dead Space spiritual successor The Callisto Protocol, the co-creator of both, Glen Schofield (no relation), has now openly claimed that Callisto's sub-par release state was down to publishers Krafton - as he and his team were "forced to ship the game" to Krafton's shortened schedule.

Going Medieval's new diplomacy update is all about calling your neighbouring settlements for favours, which yes, may mean delivering a cow or two in return

Oisin Kuhnke — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 16:28:51 +0000

Going Medieval may have been in early access for almost five years, but even after it arrived in 1.0 back in March developer Foxy Voxel have continued to build upon it. The sim's latest update has arrived today, bringing with it a whole bunch of diplomacy. Relations? With other people? Perish the thought! But I suppose sometimes there are some benefits to such a thing.

No, I am not evil for wanting to turn space whale city-builder Beyond These Stars into a Moby Dick simulator

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 16:00:00 +0000

I think I'm a pretty decent Space Whale Mayor, all told. A caring and responsible fellow traveler for Kewa, the astral cetacean on whose craggy, cloud-hung back every city in Beyond These Stars is founded. For each hexagon of whaledirt I transform into a mine or a smelter, I give back to the creature in some way – adding saplings to the forests that emit my city's bubble of breathable air, or spreading compost across the cracked stone of Kewa's neglected extremities. I have unblocked the river that runs along their spine, irrigating the badlands and rousing long-dormant seeds from the dust.

OK, so my progress hasn't been tidy. I did manage to poison half the river, after getting a bit extravagant with wood-fired power plants, but I'm swiftly repairing the damage, having built three automated tile cleaners on each bank, while pausing nearby steel production to avoid adding any more slag and soot to the water. Meanwhile, my hedge gardens gleam like jewels socketed in amongst the dull bronze wires of my roads. My foresters labour zealously to push back the grey. My people are full of good cheer, despite living on an exclusive diet of tea and potatoes. They don't much like the stinking, iridescent river, but they do like all the playgrounds and fountains I've set up near the major workplaces.

GTA 6 PC release planned for early 2027, report claims, which could mean we're playing in time for GTA Online 2: Vice City 4 U or whatever they call it

Mark Warren — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 15:30:21 +0000

Well, that's happening quicker than I'd anticipated. This is both what the actress said to the bishop and my immediate reaction to a report which claims GTA 6 is planned to release on PC in the opening months of 2027. That'd put it a scant matter of months behind the initial release for console on November 19th, but far less than the year or so folks like me had assumed based on how Rockstar handled GTA 5.

Dwarf Fortress creator Tarn Adams is as tired of genAI in the industry as anyone else, and is pretty set on never using it

Ashley Schofield — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 13:42:44 +0000

Another day of news, another day in which I find something genAI-related to write about while sighing. But, lo and behold, for once, it isn't a case of a company shifting gears to prioritise AI usage over paying workers, or a studio tucking its tail between its legs admitting 'yes, we used it, but we hoped you wouldn't notice', but instead a developer loudly and happily rejecting it. Rejoice!

Tekken 8 finally gives a first look at upcoming guest Yujiro Hanma from Baki, and he looks just as grotesque as you'd expect

Ashley Schofield — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 11:58:24 +0000

The main selling point of Tekken 8's Season 3 DLC pass, alongside veterans Kunimitsu, Bob and Roger Jr, is Yujiro Hanma, the main antagonist of fighting manga Baki and father of its eponymous protagonist. Yujiro was initially revealed in May through a trailer made up entirely of panels from Baki, leaving it in question just how a character that looks like that would be adapted into the Unreal Engine 5 hyper-realism of Tekken 8. The answer, apparently, is that Bandai just said fuck it, and let him look inevitably grotesque.

Cut Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced epilogue scene, that could hint at fresh 18th century stabby hijinks, allegedly taken down by Ubisoft following datamine

Mark Warren — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 11:20:00 +0000

Ubisoft appear to have copyright struck a YouTube video showing off an unused epilogue cutscene datamined from Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced. The unfinished scene reportedly features Edward Kenway chatting to a character who kicks the bucket at the start of Assassin's Creed 3, and could be interpreted to hint at the potential for some fresh AC adventures to fill in gaps around the first half of the 18th century.

Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls to add Jane Foster's Thor, Venom and Jubilee - following Phoenix Cyclops - in its Year One DLC pass

Ashley Schofield — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 10:47:35 +0000

Following the announcement of Phoenix Cyclops as the game's first DLC character back in July (who'll finally be joining the roster on November 2nd), Arc System Works have ripped the plaster off and revealed all the other new fighters set for Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls' Year One phase. Courtesy, by the by, of a beautiful illustration by Peach Momoko, the artist of 2024's unique Ultimate X-Men run.

Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse review - a fantastic action game, a less than stellar Metroidvania

Ashley Schofield — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 10:03:04 +0000

Rose Belmont is not her father. Rose is something new: the next generation of the legendary vampire hunters spending her life trying to step out of Trevor's shadow, to be seen as the self-reliant woman she is. Any monster that faces her is surprised to see a young girl, not the grizzled old man they've grown used to. But, despite these expectations, despite the long shadow her family tree casts, Rose tries to prove herself. She will not rely on, or be saved by, what came before. She will blossom into something all her own. This is her story, not his.

Castlevania: Belmont's Curse is, similarly, something new, learning from its predecessors. The first entry in the series in over a decade, and developed not internally by Konami but by the indie studios responsible for roguelike Dead Cells (including its Castlevania-themed DLC), Evil Empire and Motion Twin, it manages to stand on its own as a modern interpretation of a classic series. That said, it's far from a perfect evolution. And, just to get this out of the way: yes, it feels a little like Dead Cells in its movement, and no, since there has been some confusion online, it's not a roguelike.

RimWorld switches engine from Unity to the devs' own, faster Waylith Engine, all apparently without breaking mods somehow

Ashley Schofield — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 08:51:40 +0000

Ludeon Studios, developers of sci-fi colony construction sim RimWorld, have announced in a Steam update that the game will be moving over from Unity to the studio's own in-house Waylith Engine in its upcoming update 1.7. Ludeon states that the game will "look and play exactly the same", but performance will see an improvement of around 2-4x.

Update 1.7 on Waylith promises "faster startup time, game load time with big mod lists, map generation, world generation, general ticks-per-second, and just about everything else", with an example given that "a modpack with 1500 mods went from 14 minutes to 6 minutes to load." While this would be a pretty major improvement in itself, the simple fact that community mods still work after an engine switch is what really impresses and slightly confounds me here. Ludeon notes that some may appear as "potentially unsupported" due to the version changing, but will still function just the same. Saves also can be carried over from 1.6 to 1.7, meaning there'll be no loss of progress just for updating.

"No more hand-written code": Epic reportedly impose "AI-first" model on creators of new Disney shooter with Marvel and Star Wars characters

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 22:29:01 +0000

The happy-go-lucky bigwigs at Epic Games have instructed the creators of an unannounced shooter that features Marvel and Star Wars characters to complete their project using an "AI first" production model, according to a report, with generated art and code. The Disney collaboration in question was allegedly due for release in March, but has now been delayed indefinitely. The game's makers are, we're told, being ordered to make heavier use of Anthropic's Claude and similar tools.

Valor Mortis' system requirements appear to have been drastically cut, just before the FPSoulslike launches

James Archer — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 18:08:25 +0000

Pretty good first-person Soulsliker Valor Mortis seems to have sliced its PC system requirements down, dropping its minimum CPU and graphics cards demands as an October 13th launch – for those who never trusted calendars, that’s tomorrow – looms.

Burn With Me is a hand-drawn demon card game featuring the artist's own hand - and also, a refreshingly finite alternative to yer Balatro-likes

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 16:49:06 +0000

Burn With Me is a hand-drawn game in which the most prominent non-hand-drawn bit is artist Eva Manuilovich's own right hand. Excellent, no notes. Manuilovich's hand appears on the right throughout each ~~match~~ ritual, dealing cards with a flick of the index finger; when you beat the target score, it gives you a thumbs-up, then reaches languidly towards the card you've won.

Valve have released the Steam Frame's CAD files, but there’s already a cottage industry of DIY wrist straps and lifesize skull stands

James Archer — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 16:47:22 +0000

Last week, Valve chose their absolute most favourite announcement time – Friday evening, after we all go home – to release the Steam Frame’s CAD files to the world. In short, this lets anyone with a 3D printer or a lathe or an injection moulder (etcetera) take the VR headset’s official blueprints and use them to make cool stuff for it. Non-commercially, of course.

Even before this great declassifying, though, it seems some lucky first-wave Frame recipients were already putting their own headsets on the line to prototype homemade gadgets and accessories. Some are sensibly practical. Some look inventive, if janky. At least one of them is a melting skull. All of them, I salute, as standard bearers of this open, occasionally unhinged thing we call PC gaming.

Nvidia are abandoning their RTX 5090 graphics cards in order to focus on AI dev friendly RTX Pro ones, leaker claims

Mark Warren — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 16:06:36 +0000

Nvidia, AI-obsessives to the point of yassifying basketballers, are shifting production away from their top of the range RTX 5090 consumer graphics cards in favour of RTX Pro ones. That's according to a leaker with a solid track record when it comes to the company. If accurate, the move's the latest instance of a gaming tech firm turning away from regular PC owners to chase the more plentiful cash offered by hawking gear to GenAI developers and datacenters.

You need not hunger for that Zelda Ocarina of Time remake when we already have Indigo, a colossal N64 romhack featuring mushroom forests and bearded Link

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 15:04:54 +0000

The Legend of Zelda series is fond of stories about the inexorable and obliviating passage of time. Somebody should make one about growing so old, stupid and exhausted that you can't distinguish original Zelda games from romhacks of those games. Romhacks like Indigo, a "full game replacement" for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, set 15 years after the events of Majora's Mask. It's got a couple of public demos, and is playable on PC via static recompilation - the mechanical translation of the console code into C code that runs on other platforms, not to be conflated with genAI porting.

Gears of War: E-Day DDoS attacks are to blame for "intermittent disconnects" and "login issues", The Coalition confirm

Mark Warren — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 14:31:41 +0000

DDoS attacks suffered by Gears of War: E-Day over the weekend were to blame for players being suddenly disconnected from servers and having trouble logging in, according to devs The Coalition. The chunkily-armoured shooter's online services were targeted, it would seem in a deliberate effort to grind the Gears to a halt.

You don't just paint the map your colour in new WW2 RTS Battleplan, you redraw the frontline with a pencil and hope your troops do the rest

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 13:30:00 +0000

You may have heard that the pen is mightier than the sword, but did you know that the pencil is mightier than the 7th Panzer Division? Here is Battleplan to educate us on the subject. In this WW2 real-time strategy game, you issue orders by drawing on a big pseudo-paper map based on geographical survey data. Then you sit back and watch as thousands of troops, tanks, planes and artillery wotsits strive to transform your arbitrary doodles into actual conquered territory.

Valor Mortis review - this Napoleonic first-person swordfighter is one of the freshest Soulslikes in years

James Archer — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 13:00:26 +0000

Well, I say "freshest." In its ickily up-close vision of Napoleonic battlefields, swapping the boring old bubonic plague for a fleshy, pustulating necro-blight, Valor Mortis is as horrid and grim as a standard Soulslike rulebook would compel.

At the same time, One More Level’s first-person take on campfires and attack-pattern combat does feel like a game striking out on its own, and not just through its unusual choice of perspective. If anything, there are decisions here that might have FromSoft purists calling for the guillotine. Yet it’s almost all in service of an intentionally tighter, more intimate kind of supernatural action, which – while lacking the immaculate complexity of Souls masterworks – serves up enough tense sabre duels to see the whole thing through.

This week in PC games: play a human-eating Katamari from outer space, take over a nature reserve in Planet Zoo 2, and battle Napoleonic body horror in Valor Mortis

Julian Benson — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 12:31:47 +0000

Edwin came up the ladder to my office last week to remind me that my quarterly Maw Safety Certification was up for renewal. Without an in date health and safety and wild eldritch creature control license, I'm not allowed to remain in the Treehouse and we have to shut down the site. So, today I'm down in the Maw's chamber coaxing it to hock up some globules of games.

Edwin's here, of course, though he seems pretty smug to be on the other side of the plexiglass for a change. I wouldn't mind if he weren't also inciting the Maw with lurid hand gestures.

Star Citizen singleplayer spinoff Squadron 42 gets a Steam page ahead of its 2027 launch, and this is how I've learned about 50 million famous actors are in it

Mark Warren — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 11:41:47 +0000

Squadron 42, the singleplayer spinoff that Star Citizen devs Cloud Imperium Games have been teasing and promising and roadmapping for a loooooooooooooooooonnnnnnnnngggg while, now has a Steam page. Yep, things are finally gearing up for its launch next year. Plus, there's a new trailer that emphsises for those out of the loop (me, basically), that pretty much every sci-fi celeb under the sun is set for a cameo.

Explore the town of Detour in this new Fallout 4 mod chock full of voiced NPCs and quests

Mark Warren — Mon, 12 Oct 2026 09:32:08 +0000

A group of veteran Fallout 4 modders have just added a whole new town to its wasteland, offering another place to pop into for some trading and questing as you roam post-apocalyptic Boston. The place, dubbed Detour, looks set to act as a "new quest hub" that'll grow via new additions from its creators over time.

The Sunday Papers

Mark Warren — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 10:00:00 +0000

Sundays are for realising that this is speeder racing. No, not podracing. You're not skilled enough for that yet. You've got to get your reps in to be the best of the best on the tracks of the galaxy far, far away. You've got to beat Ary Quill, Griff Halloran, Soren Zaks, Katja Mox, and the rest. But it's futile. Because you won't beat one crocodile-shaped little creature. YOU WILL NEVER DEFEAT BIDDY BLAS. HE WILL BLAS PAST YOU IN A BLAS OF GLORY, BIDDYING YOU FAREWELL AS HE ROCKETS BY. HE IS THE GREATEST RACER WHO EVER LIVED. HE IS THE STAR WARS: GALACTIC RACER, AND THE FORCE SHINES OUT OF HIS BIDDY BOTTOM.

Oh, you're challenging him to a race? Prefer to be BIDDYLASTED INTO OBLIVION.

Gargantuan cop immersive sim Militsioner now has an acrophobia-inducing demo, and yes, I did somehow manage to fail the tutorial

Oisin Kuhnke — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 21:55:00 +0000

Excitedly, I boot up the new demo for Militsioner, a game I've had a watchful eye on since its announcement. A phone rings, it's my lawyer. I don't know why I've been arrested, but with the shattering of my balcony window I quickly know one thing: there's a giant motherf**king cop that won't let me leave this town. He (always referred to as HE) starts to grill me. He tires of the questions, asking me to vocally consent to staying put and forgo any attempt at escaping. I refuse. I fail the tutorial. "Oh," I say to myself. "So this is gonna be a good video game, huh?"

Oh lord, now those GTA 6 leakers are saying if enough of you give them money they'll leak a playable build of the game

Oisin Kuhnke — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 20:24:35 +0000

You can wait another month and some change to play GTA 6, right? I mean, everyone reading this who has a console, anyway, still no bloomin' sight of a PC release date. In any case, I'm sure you can wait, and I'm sure you wouldn't be silly enough to give Cyberleek, that hacker lot who've been leaking clips from the impending industry ending game for a good while now, money in their own cryptocurrency just to play it, right? Because that's what the group is asking you to do.

Nivalis Nights might not have any combat, "but that doesn't mean it's a cosy game," so says its lead writer

Oisin Kuhnke — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 17:53:51 +0000

Discourse notwithstanding, there is a time and a place for cosiness in games. It's nice to chill out sometimes! I can admit that. I also just prefer a bit of friction in a game, something to put the edge on occasionally, even if there is cosiness to be found within it. And according to the lead writer of Nivalis Nights, Thomas Welsh, you can find some of that cosiness, it just isn't a cosy game, and you have to put some work in to get it.

A Crimson Desert exec thinks critic review scores were lower because they didn't have enough time to play it, and boy oh boy I wonder whose fault that is

Oisin Kuhnke — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 17:02:49 +0000

Crimson Desert looks like a perfectly fine game. I've not played it, and I don't intend to, so my perspective is based predominantly on trailers and reviews from my industry peers. Which, as it happens, also generally seemed to reach a consensus of "yeah, it's fine." Sibling site European Gamer certainly seemed to think so, as did others. But if you ask the European CEO of developer Pearl Abyss Lybee Park, the difference between critic and user scores comes down to the fact that the former didn't have the "the fair chance to explore" the game in full during the review period.

Resident Evil inspired, cannibal dungeon crawler Medium Rare has a delightful art style trick up its sleeve: stock photos

Oisin Kuhnke — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 16:07:07 +0000

I've spoken here before how the ultimate way to rope me into checking your game out is by having a nebulously designed Strong Vibe, a look that immediately sets it apart before I even know what any mechanics might be, and Medium Rare, a Resident Evil inspired dungeon crawler RPG about rescuing your wife from a human meat factory, has a deliciously nasty vibe. And its crunchy look has some inspired origins: stock photos.

What are we all playing this weekend?

Julian Benson — Sat, 10 Oct 2026 07:00:00 +0000

The descent into autumn continues: this week I slept with an extra blanket on the bed. I'm not into swapping the duvet out for the winter tog yet, I'll be holding off on that until at least December, but the laying of the first blanket is a true marker of autumn's arrival.

"It's not in the top five reference points": Afterworld isn't just a Fallout grand strategy game, say Paradox, it owes a lot more to the Bronze Age

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 17:15:00 +0000

When Paradox announced their post-apocalyptic North American grand strategy game Afterworld, I made the obvious comparison to Fallout. For this I should be chained to the fender of a war rig and pelted with scoops of radioactive dogfood, while being slowly driven through a pack of three-headed coyotes. In a new dev diary, Afterworld's content designer and "elder lore keeper" Luke Bean has gone into some detail about the game's setting, explaining that Afterworld owes more to study of the Bronze Age collapse than any Vault Tech malarkey. The continent's diverging tribes are also apparently far more estranged from and mystified by the "ancients" than their peers in Bethesda's RPGs.

"The people of this world aren't Americans exactly," Bean began. "They are people who remember the Americans. America was an ancient empire to them, sort of the way the Roman Empire was for us, and they live in the shadow of that history. The people know that there was this time full of powerful and mysterious science. They think of the ancients - us - as people who could do anything they wanted with science. And so the central mystery of the past to them is if the ancients could do anything they wanted, why'd they all die? They must have wanted to die."

Embrace your jobbing musician soul with a new Cyberpunk 2077 quest mod that comes with the option of playing all the wrong chords for Master of Puppets

Mark Warren — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 16:38:11 +0000

Cyberpunk 2077 quest mods are still a relative rarity and the latest's aimed at folks who don't think getting to play that one gig with Samurai during the main story's enough jammin' in front of a crowd. It'll let you and brain-dwelling Keanu Reeves tour various venues throughout Night City and offers the option of adding in custom songs from your own playlist if you don't mind looking down to see that your fingers definitely aren't in the right place.

Wardogs season 2 deepens the sandbox shooter's capitalist hell by letting you bet cash on your own performance

James Archer — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 16:00:21 +0000

"The race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong," wrote the late author Damon Runyon, "but that's the way to bet." As someone neither swift nor strong, this does not bode well for my chances in Wardogs season 2, which sees the early access sandbox shooter adding – among many other things – a gambling system.

The Galaxies Showcase returns on October 15, with announcements from ZA/UM, Embark Studios, and Frontier Developments

Julian Benson — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 15:32:11 +0000

I'm sure you already had it marked in your calendars, but it is that time of year again when the Galaxies Showcase takes one more spin around the internet. This year's stream will see new announcements Arc Raiders's developer Embark Studios, Zero Parades: For Dead Spies' ZA/UM, and Elite Dangerous' Frontier Developments, along with a whole host of others.

The showcase itself is taking place on October 15th, and you can watch it on IGN's Youtube channel, over on Facebook, Twitch, and Musk's pits. And I do believe it will also be popping up at the top of our homepage during the stream, too. Think of it as us hanging a projector screen on the side of the Treehouse.

“We're not getting any younger, and the world seems to be ending": Amanita reveal Machinarium 2, sequel to 2009's prettiest robot adventure

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 15:05:20 +0000

The dashing Da Vincis of Amanita Design have announced Machinarium 2, a sequel to the 2009 puzzle adventure young master John Walker called "a sort of beauty that games are almost never graced with". I haven't played the original Machinarium, but I have played Amanita's splendid living object platformer Creaks, and in general, I would quite like to go to bed with the entirety of their art team. So here's me sternly ordering myself to finally play Machinarium while we wait for the follow-up, which doesn't have a release date yet. But does have a trailer.

Draw maps of a vampiric lighthouse that defies logic in This Is Not For You, the latest horror game inspired by House of Leaves

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 14:10:53 +0000

This Is Not For You is, in fact, for some very specific kinds of people. It is for people who love drawing maps, and it is for people who love having their blood sucked by a non-Euclidean lighthouse. Somebody plot that on a Venn diagram for me.

Created by Mexico-based studio Interactive Dreams, it's a dimension-defying maze game in which you play Ulysses, a shipwrecked sailor who strays into a strange lighthouse that's bigger on the inside and also, utterly incoherent. Walking north could take you south. Walking out of a bedroom could take you to the bottom of the ocean. Why yes, it is inspired by Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves. Here's a trailer.

Forza Horizon 6's first major expansion will pull up in January, now Playground Games just need to offer any kind of hint whatsoever as to what it'll look like

Mark Warren — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 10:00:00 +0000

Forza Horizon 6 has, as is standard for the live-service racing series, settled into a steady rhythm of revolving weekly to-do lists and a gradual drip feed of fresh cars since it came out in May. Unless you're hopping on for regular bouts of driving with mates or just dig the grind, odds are most folks will have dipped in and out over the months, possibly only returning when a new season adds the likes of a drift attack mode to the open world. Horizon 6's first major DLC's likely to change that at least for a little while, and Playground Games have now revealed it'll be arriving in January.

Timeloop metroidvania Echo Weaver is the brave game that locks almost nothing off and challenges you to break it

Edwin Evans-Thirlwell — Fri, 09 Oct 2026 09:33:30 +0000

Writing about new 2D timeloop metroidvania Echo Weaver is tricky because most - possibly all - of what you need to complete it is available to you the very second you first wake up, deep in the charnelpools of an ethereal and shattered lunar civilisation.

The plot in brief: you are a perpetually rewinding robot boy on a mission to work out what the hell happened. You'll explore overgrown biomes, investigate busted machines, run errands for a handful of scrappy, splashy-hued aliens, and conjure holographic flashbacks that cover the circumstances of your own creation. Developers Moonlight Kids stress that the only thing you really gain in the course of all this is knowledge. There are a few upgrades to gather, but no core skills to unlock. Instead, it's all there for you to learn, whether by reaching a tutorial area or just by hitting buttons at random and messing with terrain fixtures.

As such, my telling you about abilities really does risk ruining it, much like explaining the behaviour of celestial bodies in Echo Weaver's great influence, Outer Wilds. So if you're strongly inclined to buy the game – my verdict after four hours: a vivid and thoughtful, freeform Metroidy puzzler with refreshingly minimal combat and a few rough edges - maybe get your feet wet before reading on.

You can now sign up to playtest the genre-bending Pony Island 2: Panda Circus, and while you're at it the original is free for a few days too

Oisin Kuhnke — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 21:56:00 +0000

I love an everything seasoning video game. You know, the kind of game where it's five different genres at once, somehow, all of which builds into one cohesive vision? It's not an easy thing to pull off, but Daniel Mullins seems to be quite good at it, as evidenced by Inscryption, and as suggested by the upcoming Pony Island 2: Panda Circus. Which, by the way, now has a playtest you can sign up for.

All hail brand synergy, Cyberpunk 2077 is getting a live action adaptation from Paramount and the producer behind the horrendous Doom movie

Oisin Kuhnke — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 20:28:03 +0000

Welp, Cyberpunk 2077 is getting a live-action adaptation! With the plethora of Hollywood adaptations of video games these days, this is one of those bits of news that has me thinking, "wait, that wasn't already a thing?" Apparently not!

Dave the Diver is wrapping up its DLC plans with an aquatically appropriate Subnautica 2 collab

Oisin Kuhnke — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 19:06:45 +0000

I am not a huge fan of collaboration DLCs, mostly because my curmudgeonly self can only see them as attempts at multiple companies trying to profit off of one another's things. But I do have to admit that yes, the just announced collab between Dave the Diver and Subnautica 2 does make total sense. Certainly more sense than the Godzilla one from a couple of years back.

The Witcher 3 Remastered's latest patch brings some bloomin' improvements to the game's bloom problems, amongst other lighting buffs

Oisin Kuhnke — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 18:30:00 +0000

A dev's work is never done, and certainly not with a big ole revamp like The Witcher 3 Remastered. CD Projekt Red put out a new patch today bringing in a range of fixes for the RPG, perhaps most notably sorting out some of the game's lighting issues, amongst other, PC-specific related problems to do with your GPU.

Volatiles takes the piece-by-piece map building of boardgames like Betrayal at House on the Hill and slaps a gory survival shooter on top of them

Julian Benson — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 18:00:00 +0000

I do love a boardgame where you reveal the tiles as you play. Sure, I also enjoy turning over all the pieces at the beginning of a game of Settlers of Catan and taking in all the tiles and trying to work out a strategy based on which resources are clustered near which port, but that's not the same as a game like Betrayal at House on the Hill, where you all start together in one single room and unveil the architecture of the house tile by tile as you explore. You have that same strategic eye, looking at the function and threat each room holds, but because the house is still being built, your plan can't become fixed. You have to reassess the layout of the building with each new piece and, of course, when you hit the moment in the game where one player betrays you the real danger arrives, all that planning now has to be twisted to oppose the new threat.

Volatiles is an action game that plays with that same sense of strategy and mystery. It starts with you waking in a strange facility with little sense of what brought you there. The scientists around you say they're helping you, but they're the same people who keep dunking you into a sensory deprivation tank and forcing you to fight the monsters in your mind.

It's just possible they don't have your best interests at heart.

Prospice: Anomalous Logistics is SnowRunner except instead of lengths of copper pipe, you're transporting the body parts of eldritch gods

Julian Benson — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 17:30:00 +0000

Viewed from the front, my truck, with its winch and thick off-road tires, could be straight from SnowRunner central casting. Sure, it would an off-off-Broadway production of SnowRunner, with the polycount and texture resolution of a PS1-era take on the driving simulator, but I'm looking at a vehicle that is ready to struggle through thick mud and deep water; a petrol-guzzling workhorse.

Then I walk around the side and glimpse the load it's hauling: a giant severed hand, freshly cut from the corpse of a buried god.

Prospice: Anomalous Logistics has all the markings of SnowRunner, MudRunner and Spintires games, the driving simulators with a focus on overcoming difficult off-road terrain, but it's seen through the lens of eldritch horror and the new weird.

Lazare’s Sacrifice is a narrative deckbuilder made with Gwent's creator about avoiding the guillotine during the French Revolution

Oisin Kuhnke — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 17:00:00 +0000

The sort of beautiful thing about triple-A games is that sometimes they have the resources to make an entirely new game within them. That was how Gwent was born, an in-world card game you can force Geralt into play that was eventually spun off into its own, fully-fledged thing. I imagine we'll be seeing a revamped version of it whenever The Witcher 4 arrives, but considering that's 2028 at the earliest, may I suggest making your bed with Lazare's Sacrifice, a narrative deckbuilder set during the French Revolution that's being made in collaboration with Gwent's lead designer Damien Monnier.