The Maw: what's new in PC games this week?
All that's fit to play over 1st-5th July, plus our weekly newsblog
Happy this week, everybody! Not going to lie, it's a dry one. Drier than a doldrum dunked in silica gel packets, dustier than Death's doorstep. There are precious few eyebrow-raising new PC games on the cards, but I have swaddled my head in wet blankets, braved the desert and returned with a small handful of dreams.
Monday 1st July is a day of immaculate blackness and creepy lo-fi linework, care of space station spook-a-walker Vorago. Tuesday 2nd July is a time of much free-to-play schlooting, care of The First Descendant - and of much pay-to-play mmorpging, care of Final Fantasy 14's Dawntrail expansion. On Wednesday 3rd July there... is... Connect-4, but inside a computer? On Thursday 4th July therrrrrrrrre isssssss... a game literally just called Multiplayer RPG? That's like naming your dog "Dogs". And on Friday 5th July, a relatively electrifying shmup called Void Reaper.
You may not get to play that last one, because odds are high that the Maw, our resident dark god of video game news, will have blossomed in outrage and swallowed the world by Thursday. Please: if you spy any headline-worthy new PC games anywhere, perhaps sheltering from the summer torpor on Itch.io, sing out in the comments. Please. The Maw's shadows are growing clearer and sharper, lengthening like silences. Our generators agonise, struggling to fill the calm. It may already be too late.
Our live coverage of this event has finished.
Valve might be trying to do something about Team Fortress 2's aimbot problem.
The Sims 4's next expansion is called Lovestruck, and it adds a dating app and outdoor woohoo on July 25th.
Deus Ex's Randomizer mod has just released version 3.0 and now you can pet the dogs and cats.
Dune Imperium, which I adore, is getting its first digital expansion in July with the arrival of Rise Of Ix.
HAPPY MAWNDAY
I'm off on holiday till Wednesday, but there is yet time for a bit of housekeeping. Perhaps due to the dreadful lassitude, this week's liveblog has frayed away from the timeline and become entangled with last week's. Either that, or Graham accidentally popped Friday's updates in the draft liveblog I'd set up, because I did not tell him I was setting up a draft liveblog. I know which explanation I prefer.The upcoming Crazy Taxi will include multiplayer, according to a page made to hire fresh developers for the SEGA game. The company also released a recruitment video in which devs talked about working on the game, and series producer Kenji Kanno confirms there will be a multiplayer component (thanks, Automaton).
Glass-shattering first-person shooter Selaco has been updated with a big patch that adds new weapons upgrades, difficulty mutators, and the ability to pet the vacuum cleaner robots. Among many other changes, you can also now kick people (hooray!) but only when you have your fists out as a weapon (booo!).
It's Dino Crisis' 25th anniversary! Hey. Hey. Capcom. Hey. Hey Capcom. Hey. Capcom.
Hey
LOVE YOU TILL TUESDAY
The Maw's sundering tongue-barbs glisten with organ-melting venom in anticipation.Hitman's next elusive target is punchy man Conor McGregor playing an MMA fighter called The Disruptor. Lovely coat, to be fair.
Resident Evil 9, a game we all knew would happen, is officially happening. It was confirmed in Capcom's NEXT showcase yesterday, and It'll be lead by Resident Evil 7 director Koshi Nakanishi.
Capcom still haven't heard our cries for Dino Crisis (see yesterday's Maw-ing) but they have given us a demo for dreamy yōkai slayer Kunitsu-Gami: Path Of The Goddess. This was Edwin's favourite game at Summer Games Fest, and the way he described it has made me immediately download the demo on Steam.
Graceborne is a mod that makes Elden Ring all Bloodborne-y, with new weapons, costumes, and enemy redesigns. *Micolash voice*: Ah, trailer. Or as some say, tray-tray:
HAVE GENERALLY AMICABLE RELATIONS WITH YOU TILL WEDNESDAY
The beast frolics and fevers! Reload the 18-Inch Patch Noter and set headlines to "Dazzle"! FEED THE MAW.Kring is a bizarre collection of festively fleshy minigames - "clicker, bullet hell, top-down platform, side-scroller platform, shoot'em up, beat'em up, and other strange genres that defy categorization" - that together wear the label of a god sim. It's from Italian dev Ivan Venturi, one of the minds behind Hell Galaxy, and has a demo on Steam.
Powerwash Simulator's Alice In Wonderlands DLC is out now.
Paradox have posted a video about the Byzantine Empire, this being the key inspiration for the upcoming Roads To Power DLC. It features actual history professor Anthony Kaldellis. Look at him go!
Someone done a The Bear videogame mock-up and it is incredible.
As Edwin mentioned earlier, Tales of Kenzera: Zau developers Surgent Studios, founded by Assassin’s Creed Origins actor Abubakar Salim, have laid off over a dozen staff less than three months after their debut game hit PC.
VA-11 Hall-A developers Sukeban Games' next project .45 Parabellum Bloodhound is a modern successor to horror strategy classic Parasite Eve, and that has me unreasonably excited.
New Transformers game Galactic Trials is part racing game and part roguelike battler, rolling out this October.
Tiny Garden plants a charming, cozy farming sim inside virtual Polly Pocket toys. it looks very sweet, and it's already passed its funding target on Kickstarter ahead of a release next February.
IT IS UK ELECTION DAY
Being a bear of little brain, I forgot to mention a couple of things in the weekly round-up. Firstly, today 4th July sees the release of Zenless Zone Zero, the new free-to-play action-RPG from the makers of Genshin Impact - probably a bigger deal than Multiplayer RPG, with all due respect to the latter's developers. Secondly, today is the day of the UK general elections, and we've been given the day off by Ian Games of the Ian Games Network to go vote. As such, it's going to be a quieter Thursday with minimal updates, though Brendy did find time to rank the best JRPGs on PC. We'll see you on Friday.IT IS NEW UK GOVERNMENT DAY
Well, that happened. FEED THE MAW.Suicide Squad's season 2 roadmap is in the wilds.
Annual speedrunning event Summer Games Done Quick 2024 has raised a lifetime total of $50 million for charity. This year's funding goes to emergency medical aid nonprofit Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières. The event runs for another couple of days - here's the full schedule
.Former Rockstar senior camera artist and virtual cinematographer Joseph Rubino has shared a little about GTA 5's scrapped Trevor DLC, speaking to SanInPlay via Eurogamer. The key line: "When GTA Online came out, it was so much of a cash cow and people were loving it so much that it was hard to make an argument that a standalone DLC would out-compete that."
Final Fantasy 14’s Dawntrail expansion has only been out a few days, and one of its new jobs is already being adjusted in its next set of patches.
Battlefield 2042’s Dead Space crossover, which arrives in its final seventh season next week, just makes the absence of a Dead Space 2 remake hurt all that more.
Factorio's long-awaited expansion Space Age and its 2.0 update arrive this October, with the expansion costing as much as the original game - it sounds like you’ll get more than your money’s worth, though.
Escape from Tarkov will now grant players in-game currency as a bounty for reporting cheaters, as part of devs Battlestate Games' ongoing war against ne'er-do-wells in the extraction shooter.