What we're feeding the Maw

Image credit: Replicant D6

This week in PC games: too much horror! And not the kind related to graphics card prices, stinky corporate acquisitions, or the general corrosion of all that is real and good. There are a lot of horror games, I mean. I do like horror games, but I'm easily deadened by them - I need an apple-cheeked platformer or two to reset my gauges, between soul-harrowings.

Besides, if the weekly new game round-up skews too hard towards any one genre, the Maw gets acid reflux, and the last time that happened, it resulted in Jupiter's Great Red Spot. Fortunately, there are a few sweetie-pie city sims and novelty sport games knocking around, to lower the pH values. Let's get stuck in without further ado.

Monday 10th August

• Horse Magnifier: The Full Horse is the alarmingly evolved Steam edition of a curious Itch.io jam project, in which you try to make a normal horse on the right look like a nightmarishly distorted horse on the left.
• T.W.I.R.L. is "a psychological horror inspired by P.T. about a deep, dark secret you've kept since you were 9-years-old". It's an hour long, and is about exploring a house late at night.
• Got time for TWO hours of horror? More partial to frostbite than childhood secrets? You might prefer Homeostasis, an Amnesia-type thing about investigating Antarctic bases in a snowmobile. The stars are wrong.

Tuesday 11th August

• Fans of higher-concept chills are getting their fill, this week. Project Looking Glass casts you as a grieving woman using CRTs to explore the astral plane, as part of secret government experiments in the 1960s.
• Finding Polka is a big stroll through lovely ballpoint landscapes in search of a French bulldog that looks like one you knew as a kid. There are minigames hidden away in the crevices, and characters you can high five.
• Ledgerbound is a comedy tactics RPG in which you play an insurance adjuster. Your goal is to defeat the Ancient Evil... so you don't have to pay out life insurance to all the heroes slain by the aforesaid Ancient Evil. After all, our firm is not liable in cases of clear incompetence and underpreparation.
• Agent 64: Spies Never Die (pictured) is here to remind weary middle-aged people that GoldenEye came out on N64 almost 30 years ago. I do like those pantomime NPC combat rolls.
• Hellbound Inc is a 2D precision platformer in which you play an undead courier, shipping packages through bustling netherworlds.
• Omen is a vaguely Desert Strike-ish roguelite space shooter with extraction and base-building mechanics, plus a touch of "cosmic dread".
• While we're talking cosmic dread, who fancies building a colony inside a dead space god? Entirely via the medium of text? "The deeper you dig, the more the carcass understands you" – oh good, I was hoping we'd get along. (Update: according to the project's demo page, The Carcass makes use of generative AI.)

Wednesday 12th August

• While we're talking about digging, why not pop a squint at The Cave Diver? It's like QWOP but you can only use your hands and help help help, I'm stuck in a pretzel-shaped tunnel. Hint: the cave may also be another god of some description.
• Chainsaw is a deranging turn-based RPG in which you play "an unstable and violent individual, strangely kind". Your allies include a "cowardly, moralistic rabbit" and an "emotional elephant". There's a city of monsters that needs your attention.
• Security 51 is Papers, Please, but you are trying to stop Bad Things escaping Area 51. Beware of anybody/anything with perfect paperwork.
• Oh, thank heavens – a Nice game, for a change. Verde is about building grassy chessboard towns for jolly seed people.
• Another Nice one: Limbot challenges challenges four players to collectively steer a giant cardboard robot. You can also play it solo and operate all four limbs yourself, but you might feel lonely. It can be lonely inside giant robots.

Thursday 13th August

• Pro Jank Footy is my kind of retro football sim – that is, one that is minimally concerned with football and maximally concerned with power-ups.
• Servant of the Lake is a new entry in the Rusty Lake adventure series. You are a new servant at the Vanderboom estates. By all means stick your nose into any alchemical mysteries you encounter while dusting the portraits.
• Sandustry is a 2D factory-building exploration game with some appallingly granular real-time physics, lent purpose if not focus by the ruins of an ancient civilisation far below.
• Kudos to James for spotting Memoirium, a Soulslike in which you explore dreamworlds that I think deserve better than to be called "PS1-inspired", but that's all I've got for the moment.
• Who likes citadels? Who likes balls?

Friday 14th August

• Who likes dungeons? Who likes pinballs?
• In 137, you're a disembodied presence running a strange underground factory by means of fixed cameras and UNIX commands. The factory changes when you perish – yeah, it's "roguelike-style".
• Spatial puzzler Kubo is about joining up route cards and blocks to create a network of stars.

What are RPS staff doing this week? Well, you wouldn't believe how much of a hue and cry the guides writers are raising about a certain forthcoming game. I can't say what it is yet, but as a rule, when those absolute NERDS in the guides mines really enjoy something, we soft-fingered surface dwellers in Non-Guides Editorial take a serious interest.

Beyond that: Mark is away on holiday, hopefully having long sleeps and dreaming dreams that do not feature any Cyberpunk 2077 mods. Julian is just back from holiday, though he's shortly heading out to visit a certain strategy game publisher of note. James has a new contraption you can play games on. Seems plausible that he'll write about it. And I can't remember my own plans because it's lunchtime and I have no glucose left with which to do brain thoughts. Have a good week.