November digs in. The conveyor belt of crowns, clowns and clones that is Videogaming rattles onward through the midnight forest. The rains swept past over the weekend and now the mud is waist-deep, worryingly responsive, and rank with the stench of neglected deckbuilders. Several sedan chairs carrying former BioWare creative leads are caught in a wave of slop, becoming a disorderly barricade of people crying out for Femshep to come save them from the GAAS. Tencent executives rush over with handfuls of rope, but whether they mean to drag the afflicted free or bind their limbs is unclear.
Answering the call of nature, you wade away from the tumult of shovels and torches. As you pass behind a trunk, you are caught in the spell of metsänpeitto, and are suddenly alone. There is no sound, neither the shriek of mired horses nor the clinking of coins in the CEO carriages. The trunks lean towards the glow of your lantern. Then you hear a crackle. Twitching radiance guides you through a gap to a clearing, where five hooded arcanists circle a ritual pyre. Each is named for a weekday, and each has a bagful of new PC games they now thrust upon you. Which will you choose? Do not refuse them all: the flames can always take another body.
Monday 17th November
- The Berlin Apartment is a first-person relic hunt in which each artefact transports you to a different time in Berlin’s history.
- Sheepherds! is a co-op game in which we all play Very Good Boys and Clever Girls (no, not velociraptors) chasing flocks of sheep into pens. You can also play dog football with the sheep as your audience.
- Forestrike is a 2D martial arts brawler with the difference that you can visualise, plan and re-attempt your beatdowns using the art of prophecy. I’m still not wholly sure that’s any different from restarting a checkpoint, but I did like the martial arting when I played a preview version.
- Aniwars: Call Of The Void is Fire Emblem but all of your units are leering anime ladies.
Tuesday 18th November
- Morsels is a creature-collecting top-down roguelite about a manky little mouse fighting their way up through a metaphysical sewer
- The Diner At The End of the Galaxy is a Milliways sim, basically
- Birdcage is an arcade shmup with an atypically hefty story component in which you, a “newly-hatched” gunship pilot, must “destroy the World-Egg”.
Wednesday 19th November
- Moonlighter 2: The Endless Vault is another helping of the action-RPG management sim in which run a store by day, and replenish your shelves by raiding dungeons at night.
- Brush Burial: Gutter World is a crunchy, staticky immersive sim in which you, a swamp devil in a corset, break a lot of bones
- Not fond of swamp devils? Why not play Demonschool (pictured), then – it’s a Persona-esque tactics RPG in which a posse of students mash hellfiends on a mysterious island
Thursday 20th November
- Wretch: Divine Ascent is a 1v1 auto-battler that appears to be Backpack Battles but with a high-end Unreal Engine look
- Live Hard, Die Hard is a bit auto-battly, too, though it sells itself as real-time strategy. It’s a side-scrolling, two-layer affair with base management in which you engineer human cyborgs to fight aliens
- Prologue: Go Wayback! is the single player open world survival game from the Plunkbat man’s studio, with maps generated on your PC using “our own in-house machine-learning model which is trained on publicly available open-source data and vetted to prevent the use of any copyrighted material.” Enough of a disclosure for you?
- Sliding Hero is a top-down puzzle combat metroidvania set in a 1700s Venetian villa, with a carnival theme
Friday 21st November
- “You are the Evil Emperor’s only daughter, but can you claim the throne?” The answer lies in visual novel life sim Galaxy Princess Zorana. Unless you happen to actually be the daughter of an evil emperor, in which case, you do you.
The choice is made. Your sight thickens abruptly, the fire falling still. The hooded figures swell and pustulate and you realise that you are looking at a circle of mushrooms, while lying flat on a boulder of moss.
You rise to your feet groggily. Behind you, the great procession of Videogaming continues. Somebody has resolved the sedan chair situation by rolling the ex-BioWare contingent into an enormous, squelching katamari. A few bats swoop past as you resume your place in the convoy. Keep trudging onward. Surely this forest has an outside. Some day, December will come.
.png?width=1200&height=630&fit=crop&enable=upscale&auto=webp&w=100&resize=100,100&ssl=1 "Don’t worry, Resident Evil Requiem won’t have PC woes like Monster Hunter Wilds, says Capcom")
