The Maw - 19th-24th February 2024

This week’s new PC game releases and our weekly newsblog

Another week of PC game releases is upon us and oh heck, slow down. There are an alarming number of games out this week that I want to play, from large-scale 3D productions to itty-bitty time-killers, each sinisterly appropriate to my Steam stats and wider research interests. Are videogame publishers andThe Mawin cahoots to overwhelm me with impulse-buys and sabotage my attempts to Report the News? It’s possible. It’s possible. The Maw can be pretty cunning for an indiscriminate force of cosmic famine. The creature has been known to forge alliances with misguided mortals, seeking to flank and overwhelm harried news writers. How else to explain Phil Spencer’s T-shirts?

But let’s not worry about that for the moment. Without further ado, here’s a list of PC games out this week thatI, for one, consider worthy of a click, if not necessarily a purchase: low-poly vertical shmupDark Gravity(19th Feb); floral/insectile bullet hellNidus(19th Feb); dieselpunk Advance Wars homageEmpires Shall Fall(19th Feb); roguelike not-PokerBalatro(20th Feb); faerie survival simNightingale(20th Feb, early access); biopunk side-scrollerSlave Zero X(21st Feb); Skynet-era RTSTerminator: Dark Fate – Defiance(21st Feb); build-optimising action-RPGLast Epoch(21st Feb); post-apocalyptic car-whispererPacific Drive(22nd Feb); hellish feud ‘em upSolium Infernum(22nd Feb); primordial horror management simThe Tribe Must Survive(22nd Feb); claustrophobic desktop shmupWindowkill(23rd Feb).

As ever, let us know if I’ve missed anything obvious, like a newHalf-Lifegame or something. Also as ever, you can follow our efforts to sift good news stories from the currents of the interweb in our weekly liveblog below.

Our live coverage of this event has finished.

IT IS MONDAY

Set up a cordon around the emergence site! Salt the entrances and exfoliate the wallpaper! FEED THE MAW.

–Edwin Evans-Thirlwell

ViaPCGamesN, the Satisfactory devs still have “a huge backlog of ideas”, even as their long-in-early-access factory sim rumbles towards 1.0 release.

–Edwin Evans-Thirlwell

Arrowhead are currently capping Helldivers 2’s concurrent players at 450,000 players to stop the servers exploding, as reported byPCG.

–Edwin Evans-Thirlwell

ZA/UM have formally acknowledged layoffs and a project cancellation reported last week byGHLF. “As with all studios, we adapt the size of our team to the work underway, growing when we start a new project and shrinking if one is cancelled,” a spokesperson toldVG247. “It is always hard to lose talented colleagues, and we thank those leaving for their many contributions to ZA/UM.”

–Edwin Evans-Thirlwell

A surprise gift from our tech team - we can now give posts titles without automatically bumping the liveblog to the top of the site (as we generally do when covering major events, such as game conferences). This means we can now do a little clickable “contents page” for days of the week up the top of the feed, there. Bless the techies!

–Edwin Evans-Thirlwell

Eleventh Hour Games have been detailing what they’re adding to budding Diablo-killer Last Epoch for this week’s 1.0 launch. The changelog is so massive they’ve broken it into chapters. Here’spart 1, which covers a couple of new classes, andpart 2, in which there is much talk of new items and gear. Do the words “Spine of Malatros” mean anything to you?

–Edwin Evans-Thirlwell

Xbox big cheese Phil Spencer has generously toldthe Vergethat Microsoft don’t wanteverybodyto become a Game Pass subscriber. “I tell you honestly, running the business, having a diversity of business models that are working is pretty critical,” he said. “The one thing I will say about the Game Pass subscriber revenue is that it’s consistent.”

–Edwin Evans-Thirlwell

PCGhave dug upan Elden Ring modthat turns the whole game upside down. Different starting locations! New classes! One to occupy you while you wait for the Shadow of the Erdtree DLC, perhaps.

–Edwin Evans-Thirlwell

Midday music: quite a downbeat choice, but I’ve been enjoying Metric’sNothing Is Perfect.

–Edwin Evans-Thirlwell

Another one to add to the insane list of games coming out this week, but at least this one is a) free, and b) lasts a mere hour. It’s thevery lovely, Please, Touch The Artwork 2. Here are two of my favourite screenshots from it:

–Katharine Castle

Former Halo designer Kevin Schmitt has been discussing rejected Halo pitches on Xitter.

We must have pitched 20-30 game ideas over the 12 years I was there that would have totally worked in the Halo universe. Many SP & MP ODST themed ones. Some galaxy-spanning, some more intimate…and one that was really dark. lol.

–Edwin Evans-Thirlwell

I’ve beentalking to Aaryn Flynnabout the possibility of Nightingale’s Realm card system becoming a fully-fledged cardgame of some kind.

–Edwin Evans-Thirlwell

Writing these updates from a preview event in which I’m sitting next to possibly the largest quantity of Mini Cheddars I have seen in my life.

–Edwin Evans-Thirlwell

Andmerry Balatro weekto you as well!

–Katharine Castle

Helldivers 2 has made its three “hardest” difficulties harder and itsactualhardest mission easier in its latest patch, so you might be able to actually beat that Defend event now. The patch doesn’t address the ongoing buckling of its multiplayer servers under the game’s popularity, which led concurrent players to be capped over the weekend, so you might struggle to log in to begin with, mind.

–Matt Jarvis

That Crazy Taxi reboot will apparently be a “triple-A” game, according to the head of Sega’s Sapporo studio, who are working on the return of the arcade classic teased at the end of last year. But what does “triple-A” mean? An open-world multiplayer affair? Collectibles galore? Towers to climb in your cab? Your guess is as good as mine.

–Matt Jarvis

Huge Elden Ring mod The Convergence is basically a whole new game, with almost triple the number of playable classes (each with unique starting locations), dozens of new weapons, hundreds of extra spells, overhauled crafting and fast-travel systems, and more. The ideal way to pass time while you’re waiting for official expansion Shadow of the Erdtree to arrive!

–Matt Jarvis

Capcom have apologised for ‘not meeting expectations’ with Street Fighter V, saying that their “self-reflection” on its messy launch - lambasted for a small roster of characters, thin single-player content and server issues - helped make this year’s Street Fighter 6 that much better.

–Matt Jarvis

TUESDAY DAWNS

Cry havoc, and let slip the blogs of war! FEED THE MAW.

–Edwin Evans-Thirlwell

Last night developer Sirrah messaged me about their story-driven colony builderTrappist, in which you control a movable base exploring a single solar system. I get an ever-so-gentle Outer Wilds vibe from it.

–Edwin Evans-Thirlwell

ViaEurogamer, there’s a Nintendo third party direct showcase happening tomorrow, 21st February at 2pm UK time and 6am PT. Given that it’s a third party dealio, it’s likely many of the Switch games shown will also be on PC.

–Edwin Evans-Thirlwell

According toPCGamer(specifically, freelance RPS contributor Rick Lane- hello Rick!) there’s an open world Terminator survival game set for full reveal at Nacon’s Connect event later this month. It’s set after Judgement Day, which is certainly a good timeframe for a survival experience. Will we get to infiltrate human enclaves as closet cyborgs? Here’s Nacon’s teaser trailer from a year back.

–Edwin Evans-Thirlwell

PCGamesNreportsthat Everywhere and Mindseye studio Build a Rocket Boy are laying people off. This is the studio founded by former GTA developer Leslie Benzies. Apparently, the publishing department, QA and art teams have gotten the worst of it.

–Edwin Evans-Thirlwell

A quote from Digital Eclipse editorial director Chris Kohler about restoring old games to our screens, taken from Khee Hoon Chan’s interview feature over atTechradarabout game preservation: “The game actually doesn’t need to be fun because, if we’re setting the player’s expectations correctly, we’re not asking you to go in and play this and derive simple enjoyment from it; we’re putting this in as a museum exhibit to help you understand the path that a certain company took, or game designer might have taken to get to the final goal, or simply to show you something that’s historically fascinating.”

–Edwin Evans-Thirlwell

Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader hasreceived a major patch. According to Owlcat, it spans “over 1800 changes, including brand new voiceover and narrative content, QoL improvements, balance updates, numerous bug fixes and hundreds of fixes for optimization, performance and co-op stability.”

–Edwin Evans-Thirlwell

Here are thefull 1.0 patch notesfor action-RPG Last Epoch, which releases tomorrow 21st Feb. As detailed in the notes, the devs are taking the early access servers online for 24 hours later today to make the necessary changes.

–Edwin Evans-Thirlwell

As reported byThe Scotsman, GTA devs Rockstar North have claimed over a third of a billion pounds in UK tax relief over the past decade.

–Edwin Evans-Thirlwell

Assassin’s Creed: Mirage has anew updatethat adds permadeath to the game.

–Edwin Evans-Thirlwell

Here’s a new trailer for Sand Land, Bandai Namco’s Dragon Ball-flavoured vehicular RPG.

–Edwin Evans-Thirlwell

People are still having a devil of a time finding a sessino in Helldivers 2. As reported byPCGamesN, Arrowhead CEO Johan Pilestedt has said it’s not as simple as buying more servers. “We need to optimise the backend code,” he said. “We are hitting some real limits.”

–Edwin Evans-Thirlwell

The Loadout, meanwhile,speculate very plausiblythat Arrowhead will one day add the first game’s high tech Illuminate faction to Helldivers 2.

–Edwin Evans-Thirlwell

Xbox have announced thenext batch of games coming to Game Passin late February - very pleased to see Indivisible on there, and Tales Of Arise and Boltgun!

–Katharine Castle

–Graham Smith

Everywhere developer Build A Rocket Boy have now confirmed the studio is going through a round of layoffs, first reported yesterday, confirming “the removal of a number of roles globally"in a statement to Eurogamer.

“While we have made great progress developing our products, we are now in a position where we need to make changes to the way we work across our business in order to become a more agile studio and to meet the requirements that our projects demand,” said a spokesperson.

Build A Rocket Boy is the new studio from former GTA producer Leslie Benzies.

–Graham Smith

Balatro, the Poker roguelikeKatharine awarded a Bestest Best in her review yesterday, is actually out now. You’ll find iton Steam.

–Graham Smith

Rampage Edition won’t be free-to-play, but a “premium and definitive release” of the original, and it’s due on April 9th. Here’s a trailer:

–Graham Smith

There’s a new seven-minute video breaking down the concepts behind Kemuri, the first game from Ikumi Nakamura’s studio Unseen. It talks setting, art and character but also gives glimpses of prototype parkour and grapple-hooking:

–Graham Smith

People (the magazine and website) have a couple of photos of Cate Blanchett and Kevin Hart in thecoming Borderlands movie. Wild that this could be the nadir of Blanchett’s entire career at the same time as being the zenith of Hart’s.

–Graham Smith

Temtem: Swarm is a Vampire Survivors-like spin-off of the Pokémon-like Temtem, mixing topdown bullet heaven with character evolutions and three-player co-op. It’s aiming to release this yearand there’s an announcement trailer now.

–Graham Smith

Here’san expanded breakdown of what Gigantic: Rampage Edition is, and how it came to be.

–Graham Smith

Need For Speed: Unbound is getting asecond year of live service updates, including a cops vs. racers mode “inspired by NFS: Hot Pursuit”.

–Graham Smith

As MiniMatt mentioned in the comments, Kingmakers is a mashup of many things. Mainly: medieval-era battlefields with modern weaponry, and command-level strategy and citybuilding with on-the-ground third-person shooting. Its trailer has become a sensation in the past 12 hoursand you should go watch it immediately.

–Graham Smith

Xbox have announced a second set ofgames coming to Game Pass in the second half of February. Popular JRPG Tales Of Arise arrives today, with Bluey: The Videogame, Indivisible, Space Engineers, and Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun all joining between now and March 5th.

–Graham Smith

The first trailer for#ELDENRINGShadow of the Erdtree will be revealed in 16 hours. Join us at 15:00 UTC.https://t.co/vdG8dJvcetpic.twitter.com/lBbKJYxW2z

–Edwin Evans-Thirlwell

HERE BE WEDNESDAY

Warp factor 4, engage! FEED THE MAW.

–Edwin Evans-Thirlwell

So, Elden Ring DLC time. Any hopes or speculations? Perhaps they will let us play as one of those giant living urns. Heck, I wouldn’t mind being an NPC in Elden Ring. It’s very peaceful when there are no players around.

–Edwin Evans-Thirlwell

Jeppe Carlsen has shared a clip of an early prototype for what would become Cocoon.

–Edwin Evans-Thirlwell

Last night Graham popped a note aboutSeablipin our Trello. I’m going to crudely summarise it as Terraria Sea Of Thieves.

–Edwin Evans-Thirlwell

–Matt Jarvis

Good news, masochists:Elden Ring DLC Shadow of the Erdtree will have a fight that’s just as hard as Malenia, according to noted sadist Hidetaka Miyazaki - and a poison swamp too, for good measure.

–Matt Jarvis

Prison Architect 2 has seen its development sentence extended by over a month,pushing its release date into May.

–Matt Jarvis

THURSDAY BECKONS

–Katharine Castle

After a slightly rocky start, Inflexion Games havecompleted their server maintenanceon Nightingale last night, so servers are now back up online. They also released a hotfix patch to address a ‘Running out of GPU memory’ error.

–Katharine Castle

The studio behindFebruary’s most played Steam Next Fest demoDungeonborne have released some fun stats about what players got up to during the demo period - and it’s not good news for skeletons. 29 million of them were dispatched, but only just over 6000 players were able to beat the big Cyclops. You can see the full breakdown below.

Our team has been poring over your feedback and plotting out the path for future plan. Meanwhile, dive into some intriguing stats and standout moments from the Steam Next Fest demo!#Dungeonbornepic.twitter.com/jVmw6Zzudc

–Katharine Castle

There’s a new trailer for the lovely-lookingThe Plucky Squirein the wild, thanks to this week’s IGN FanFest. Very excited for this one.

–Katharine Castle

In the more immediate release schedule, here are some more neat-looking games hitting Steamtoday:

–Katharine Castle

–Graham Smith

Riot’s long in-development tag team fighting gameProject L finally has a real name: 2XKO. Everyone hates it.

–Graham Smith

Millennia, Paradox’s take on the history-spanning 4X genre, willlaunch on March 26th. A new trailer also gives a glimpse of its Variant Ages, which can introduce alternate histories like alien invasions and steampunk technology.

–Graham Smith

Publisher Thunderful say that citybuilder SteamWorld Build underperformed various expectations, via their fiscal report andas covered by Game Developer. After several years of acquiring other studios, they’re alsoin the midst of layoffsand looking to sell subsdiary publisher Headup Games.

–Graham Smith

Sons Of The Forest 1.0 is out now andthe full patch notes are livefor those curious how the gribbly cannibal survival ‘em up has changed.

–Graham Smith

The Forever Winter is a co-op survival shooter about fighting and looting “under the shadow of terrifying and gargantuan war machines locked in a never-ending conflict”, according toits Steam page. There’s also a cinematic trailer with some really pleasingly practical, ramshackle mech and exosuit designs.

–Graham Smith

Nvidia’s new appmerges their control panel, GeForce Experience and RTX Experience apps together into one, and won’t require you to login to use. Truly groundbreaking. Can someone now convince HP to make it so I don’t have to login in order to print stuff from my own printer?

–Graham Smith

Escape Academyis a fun, charming escape room game with co-op, and itslatest DLC, set in a magic school, is out now.

–Graham Smith

FRIDAY AT LAST

Instruct the ion beam crews to open fire! FEED THE MAW.

–Edwin Evans-Thirlwell

Here’s a video of the forthcoming Adventure mode for the Steam edition of Dwarf Fortress, feat. Tarn Adams of Bay12 Games.

–Edwin Evans-Thirlwell

Eleventh Hour Games founder Judd Cobler has written arecap postabout Last Epoch’s launch. Apparently there were 150,000 people playing within 20 minutes of launch, and the game’s servers have been struggling.

–Edwin Evans-Thirlwell

To nobody’s great surprise, Warner Bros have revealed that Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League “has fallen short of our expectations”, though Warner Bros Discovery CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels didn’t specify a sales figure during the associated earnings call. Thanks,IGN.

–Edwin Evans-Thirlwell

Age of Mythology Retold, the remastered Age of Empires spin-off, has finally resurfaced with a close look at its new character models - and the news thatit will be out on Steam and Game Pass this year.

–Matt Jarvis

Age of Empires 2’s Definitive Edition is getting its first “campaign-focused” expansionin next month’s Victors and Vanquished, letting you lead Vikings, Japanese clans and more in 19 scenarios - most based on popular community mods.

–Matt Jarvis

Age of Empires Mobile will bring the storied RTS to your phone screen this summer, as the free-to-play spin-off mixes series’ base-building, resource management and battles into an online multiplayer experience.

–Matt Jarvis

Prince Of Persia: The Lost Crown, Ubisoft’s excellent metroidvania, is gettingextra content and modes in free updates soon. It’s already an excellent game, if you haven’t played it, asKatharine’s review explained.

–Graham Smith

Much-maligned supervillainous live service game Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League has fallen short of expectations,according to a financial call from its publisher.

–Graham Smith

I’m in love with Night-Runners and itsfree Prologue demo on Steam. It’s a racing game which harks back to the classics (and cult classics) of the PlayStation 1 and 2 era, while also bringing its own open world, procedural, and narrative ambitions.

–Graham Smith