Happy Mawday all! This week, I’m thinking about how we can expand our bestiary of Maw manifestations. When describing the beast, we often resort to stock Lovecraftian imagery of a kaleidoscopic kerfuffle of teeth and tentacles, but the Maw’s appearances aren’t always so pulpy and cinematic. Sometimes, it just looks like a blinking cursor, or an expectant child, or a feeling of guilt about not returning a text message from an old friend. Sometimes, it looks like an audience of people who want to read about new PC games.
Come, depress yourself with me as we tot up possible indicators of Maw activity. Alternatively, read about some of those aforesaid new PC games. Thanks very much to Editor King Julian for suggesting the majority of titles on this list, which he has been doing with disturbing efficiency of late.
Monday 12th January
- Big Hops is a 3D platformer featuring a frog who is given to both the titular big hops and also, tongue-based gymnastics. I guess Big Tongue would have sent the wrong signals.
- Confidential Killings – A Detective Game is definitely a game that could have done with a better title. You might as well call Mass Effect “Space Shootings & Shaggings – An RPG”. Oh no, I think I’ve just talked myself into this.
- Quarantine Zone: The Last Check is a game about playing a border guard during a zombie apocalypse that has the strong potential to be either a Papers, Please-style moral experiment or a crass and gaudy fantasy about brutalising migrants, and is perhaps worth us writing about in either case.
Tuesday 13th January
- Out this week in early access, Hytale is the previously Riot Games-published sandbox building RPG, now in the hands of the Minecraft Hypixel server founders at Hypixel Studios. This could be Big, though I’m not sure the world needs another cousin of Minecraft with Robloxy game creation platform aspirations.
- Hank: Drowning on Dry Land (pictured) is a caped debacle in which you play drunk, time-travelling pseudo-Batman trying to escape from a comicbook world. Julian picked this one out in our morning meeting for being a budget experimental immersive sim, akin to Blendo’s recent Skin Deep.
Wednesday 14th January
- Fez fans ahoy! Cassette Boy is an action RPG puzzler in which you can spin the world to reveal things or remove them from existence. I like the old school Nintendo handheld visuals and the guiding meditation on object permanence.
- Streetdog BMX is six colourful 3D maps’ worth of kids doing frightfully Tony Hawkish things on bicycles. Seriously, how do any of these mad children still have groins.
Thursday 15th January
- The Legend of Heroes: Trails Beyond the Horizon is the thirteenth instalment in an apparently brilliant RPG series I am resigned to never being able to play before the sun implodes.
- Tabulo is the latest Balatro-like, which is to say, the latest snazzy application of roguelite mechanics to a concept that was getting on quite well enough without – in this case, chess
- Craftlings is… Lemmings, the ancient Psygnosis game in which you try to stop critters walking off clifftops, but it’s also a colony building sim, with mines and airships and monsters? This is a truly terrifying piece of retro alchemy.
Friday 16th January
- The Fortress is a first-person turn-based dungeon-crawling RPG in the tradition of Eye of the Beholder and Legend of Grimrock. You’ve been locked up by the Sorceror King. Please attempt to get out.
- NEUROXUS is a dizzy third-person mech shooter that looks like Armored Core 6 but more neon.
- Moving Simulator is, as you may deduce, a moving house simulator, though I guess that could also be “moving” as in emotive. Perhaps it’s both? Moving house tends to be pretty moving.
- Lunar Ascendant is about playing politics as the very first mayor of the Moon. You will monitor social media, bandy words with representatives of various factions, and figure out your relationship to an Earth now run by super-advanced AI.
Other things afoot this week: James and Julian have some preview events to attend. Mark and Ollie are gunning for a bit of that Hytale launch excitement, among other things, and I’m trying to turn around a Pathologic 3 review, after only getting code on Friday.
The Maw’s manifestations may diversify and fracture into ubiquity but we Leech Wizards of games journalism will always be here to intercept its dreadful advance and woo the creature with some absolute gibberish about, I don’t know, overpowered shoes in Arc Raiders or something. Let the cry ring forth once again from the battlements: FEED THE MAW!
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