This week in PC games: new Ace Combat, Transport Fever 3, and a System Shock-alike set on a disco space station

What we're feeding the Maw

Happy this week all! ...Ugh, you are all still here. When I went on holiday last week, I was hoping that I'd return to find that the whole "videogame journalism career" thing was just a fleeting delusion brought on by excess consumption of unripe pears. Perhaps I've actually been a wealthy gentleman gadabout this whole time, free of any need to keep the hellmouth topped up with layoff reports in order to stave off deprivation and disaster.

The one consolation - other than EIC Julian's many encouraging facial expressions and hand gestures – is that people are still making new PC games, and a few of them are actually quite interesting! Here's the latest list of new releases.

Monday 28th September

• No, I refuse to believe that my holiday is over. Let's all get the heck down to Camp Whittlewood, a pixelart horror RPG about cub scouts going camping in the deep forest, featuring absolutely no serial killers.
• Camp Whittlewood aside, there are precious few holiday-themed games on this list. Instead, we have games like HR: Human Remains. It's about being an office clerk in Hell, after humans lost a war with the demons. Get through your to-do list, or get fed to the Maw (no relation).
• Yots is a PS1-ified co-op extraction game in which you repeatedly pillage a procgen city that looks like Silent Hill, assuming Silent Hill existed in the 1930s. I'm pretty sure it did. I don't think they had Pyramid Head technology back then, but they certainly had fog.
• Speaking of lumbering metal monsters - where are my 90s Mechwarrior enjoyers? Drop Command is here with a mixture of cockpit combat and overarching 4X elements.

Tuesday 29th September

• Nivalis Nights is a cyberpunk restaurant management game and life sim from the makers of Cloudpunk. The views should be pretty lush, whatever you may think of the jobbing element. Alas, my holiday!
• Toem 2 is the new toem' up from John Toem, developer of Toem. (Actual studio name: Something We Made. Actual game description: a gentle diorama platformer and photography puzzler.)
• Transport Fever 3 is the latest borderline masturbatory infrastructure meddler from Paradox, featuring the shiniest trains you ever did see.
• From the makers of Human Fall Flat, here's Tiny Flock, a VR shepherding sim with more seesaws, circus machines and great white sharks than I believe is traditional, in real-life shepherding.

Wednesday 30th September

• Radiosol casts you as a mechanical spider exploring a fallen world of attractively dusty and dessicated megastructures. It does use genAI to translate the game into Spanish, Japanese, German, French, and Chinese. I am underlining my own reminder to write/commission a piece on genAI translation in gamedev.
• Okko The Exiled is a pretty gorgeous 2D sidescroller about some diminutive fellow with horns and a massive club. Look at him go!
• Songs of Glimmerwick is a witch school RPG in which magic and music are closely allied. The developers are promising "hijinks". Don't… tempt me, Frodo!
• Crusader Kings 3: By God Alone is the CK3 expansion in which you can run the Vatican and do all kinds of notionally un-Christian things – just ask Julian.

Thursday 1st October

• Dynasty Warriors 3: Complete Edition Remastered is an Unreal Engineered revamp of the early noughties musou masher and its Xtreme Legends expandalone. Always had a sneaking fondness for DW games, despite the fact that they often play like lawnmower simulators in which the grass consists of shrieking spear guys.
• RetroSpace (pictured) is the immersive sim with Saturday Night Fever vibes in which you, a janitor, try to survive inside a space station that has been yoinked into a blackhole.
• There are planes in Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve, Bamco's latest Hot Shots-alike.

Friday 2nd October

• At last, a serious test driving simulator but with the cars exchanged for children's playthings.
• Intravenous 3: Borderline is a free standalone prologue for a top-down tactical shooter that is purportedly as sneaky or LOUD as you want it to be.

What's the weather like there? On-going UK drought notwithstanding, we're edging into the golden season where you still get a few immaculate summer skies, but elegantly merged with the crispness and enchantment of autumn. Argh, having to undertake 'gainful employment' in these conditions is an offence to Nature. Now is the time to be out of doors, cavorting in the leaves, rather than staying inside to play/write about smelly videogames. Although if you have any new releases to recommend, we'd be interested as ever. Have a jolly week.