Happy this week all! Please, please come save us from the tormenting sun. The mercury is forecast to hit 38 degrees in south Britain this week, which might not seem very high to you readers from the Bermuda Triangle, but please remember that British people are all descended from selkies and grindylows, that our “breathable fabrics” consist mostly of horsehair, and that we all live inside up-turned witch’s cauldrons.
My up-turned cauldron resides at the exact epicentre of the incoming solar blight – a Mawish plot, no doubt, to cut off the flow of videogame news at its wellspring. My inbox is already filling up with contemptible heatwave advice from “door and window” experts. Fools! We games journalists cannot afford doors and windows. The view of a kinder world outside would only distract us from the important labour of writing lists of new PC games, like this one.
Monday 22nd June
Desolation Seed (early access) promises “an open air combat prison of urban ruins, environmental biohazards, and societal collapse”. Gosh it looks lovely and cool and foggy in there. Sign me up.
Gunbrella and Gato Roboto devs Doinksoft are back with Dark Scrolls – a relentlessly rightwards-drifting roguelite platformer, with characters ranging from dudes waving frying pans to Vivi from FF9. Seems fun, also features some appealingly sunless dungeons and forests.
Idle Chapel is pretty novel as idle games go. The cultists are rising and your job is to convert them, so that you can channel their prayers into your church altar. “Smite them back to the light,” urges the Steam page. Can we maybe smite them back to the refreshing shade, as a compromise?
Tuesday 23rd June
Relief is a deckbuilding roguelike that combines Chinese mythology with horny anime designs. I choose to believe that there will be only the saucy kind of “thirstiness” involved, and that “relief” refers to it happening largely or exclusively at night.
“Dimhaven”, you say? A mystery photography puzzler set in an abandoned island tourist resort, “shrouded in mist and desolation”? (From the Quern devs?) I am already buying a ferry ticket.
Deer & Boy is an emotive platformer we could maybe summarise as Bambi and the Blind Forest, except that it doesn’t seem very Metroidy. Importantly, it takes place in the frozen north.
Heavydelic (early access, pictured) is a “Slavic Synthpunk Platformer” with Amanita-level art that fairly explodes off the screen. Can’t think of a heatwave joke for this one – it just looks terrific.
Also terrific-looking: Rift Wizard 3 (early access), a sandboxy traditional roguelike that boasts of open-ended buildcrafting by way of hundreds of spells.
What’s the temperature inside a black hole? I’m not sure the answer can be given in plain English.
Wednesday 24th June
Empulse is an agile 6v6 shooter that has both gladdened and saddened James by almost, but not really being Titanfall 3.
S.A.N.D.Y. – Beach Cleaner horrified me at first by prominently featuring a beach – surely, you’ll be able to cook eggs on the sands of Brighton come Wednesday – but then I realised that it’s a post-apocalyptic world bathed in permasmog, so it’s all fine.
Thursday 25th June
The machine minion sim is in ascendancy, this week. 7 Nights with Vroombi is the tale of a robot hoover cleaning up what appears to be a haunted house. Ectoplasm must gunk up the nozzles something awful. Can’t fault the chilly ambience, though.
nophenia is a “small dream explorer” featuring a wolfgirl and a fliphone. Oisin enjoyed the demo. I haven’t played it but I enjoy fliphones, even if I frequently get confused about how many “p”s they have.
Omen Exitio: Hunger is a monochrome Lovecraftian gamebook mystery starring a journalist in 1927 New York.
Friday 26th June
Eyes of the ElderWood (early access) is a first-person horror based on Kashubian folklore in which you draw spells with your left hand, and shoot a revolver with the other.
RPS editorial plans for this week consist mostly of melting into goo – all save Mark, who I think lives outside the projected path of fire – but we do have a few embargoed bits and pieces. Do you like… boxes of evaporated water? If I were to call you a wermo, would that strike any chords? In the meantime, please let us know if there’s an intriguing PC game we’ve missed. I’m off to phone the International Space Station. Perhaps if I offer to reblog an astronaut’s Linktree they’ll agree to park themselves over Hertfordshire for the next few days.