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LEGO Skylines is the new plastic city-builder from Cities: Skylines 2 and Surviving the Aftermath developers Iceflake Studios, published by Paradox Interactive. I've played an hour or so of a preview build, just long enough to devise a circular highway of coffee shops, glass-fronted houses, unaccountably cheerful farms, and playgrounds poking up haphazardly like fungus. Kind of like the M25, but more rustickal. There's a park in the middle that can't work out which century it's in, with an ornamental fountain every ten paces to baffle the casual stroller.

Today, September 29th, The Witcher 3 is back on the path in Remastered form. With that remaster bringing a host of tweaks to the decade-old RPG, there was always going to be an adjustment period for the RPG's established mods. One that won't work right out of the gate is the WAR Project - an ongoing effort to restore a plague-themed questline CD Projekt Red abandoned prior to release.

However, the modders behind it have made clear this is just a temporary bump in the trail and promised "something extra" for the update that brings their demo up to remastered spec.

CD Projekt have released the full list of PC system requirements for The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt – Remastered, a free upgrade for the base edition of the grizzled and cantankerous fantasy action-RPG. This covers both the previously announced minimum PC specs and the recommended, ultra, ray-tracing minimum, ray-tracing recommended, and path tracing configurations.

There's been a wave of furry horror games with surprisingly elaborate tactical simulation elements, and when I say "wave", I mean that I'm aware of two. One is Casualties: Unknown, a 2D misericore spelunking experience with an injury system so byzantine it took Oisin multiple paragraphs to work out how to die. The other, somewhat nicer game is Fright Train, a swish B-movie survival shooter in which you are a literal dog soldier, the magnificent Doug Barker.

Typically, I'd take the title as a fair warning that this is roguelikey and thus Not My Bag. But it's been a while since I've played a good arcadey blaster, and I'm on a bit of a space kick lately and... ooh, go on then.

Rogue Eclipse fortunately leans more arcade than arbitrary, and shortcuts, alternative weapons, and ship tweaks come fairly quickly. You begin more than capable, and the action itself is the point, rather than masochistically testing yourself for the sake of it. It's pretty great action too, which outweighs some frustrations that even roguelike fans might concede could be polished down a little.

Early in horror game Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival, the character you play, Aidan, and his partner Sunny, are pushing the bounds of the sex they enjoy together. Already into BDSM, they discover a puzzle box that, when solved, will allow them to explore a new extreme of their fetish play. However, when they unlock the box it summons a set of torture demons called Cenobites and Sunny is torn to fleshy pieces and sent to hell. From that violent beginning, Aidan bargains with one of the demons of torture to find a way to bring Sunny back to life and be made whole.

Not your average walk in the park – or, if it is, I am deeply sorry for you. (My park is great. There is a duck pond). Nonetheless, it is a good starting point for a horror game based on Clive Barker's horror series.

Still, when I spoke to Hellraiser: Revival's developers I wanted to know if Sunny was being punished for enjoying her fetish.

Happy this week all! ...Ugh, you are all still here. When I went on holiday last week, I was hoping that I'd return to find that the whole "videogame journalism career" thing was just a fleeting delusion brought on by excess consumption of unripe pears. Perhaps I've actually been a wealthy gentleman gadabout this whole time, free of any need to keep the hellmouth topped up with layoff reports in order to stave off deprivation and disaster.

The one consolation - other than EIC Julian's many encouraging facial expressions and hand gestures – is that people are still making new PC games, and a few of them are actually quite interesting! Here's the latest list of new releases.

Hearts of Iron 4 developers Paradox Interactive have prohibited the use of Discord profile pictures of historical figures born after 1st January 1800, save for official in-game portraits, amid an uproar caused by a moderator banning somebody for using a photograph of Republic of Turkey founder Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.

Discord server members are still free to "use any official Hearts of Iron IV in-game portraits, including those from after 1800, with the exception of prominent leaders of Nazi Germany," according to a Discord post attributed to game director Laszlo "Batya" Pieper (copied to Reddit). In the same post, Pieper notes that "Paradox never aims to review history or take positions on political figures, and we clearly handled that responsibility poorly."

Sundays are for recovering from the friend-of-a-spouse’s wedding you attended on Saturday while suffering from an acute case of Old Person’s Back. Unfortunately, the time for recovery has in fact passed, as you have already moved to the more immediately satisfying phase of assigning blame. Possible suspects: your swivel chair, your mattress, the PC monitor you had to laboriously re-box for transit, your sofa, and that most connviving, spine-bending bastard of all, light walking. Spoiled for choice, you sit down in your untrustworthy chair and begin to read some of the week’s writing highlights instead.

If your game immediately makes me think of any of Fumito Ueda's in any sort of way, the likelihood is that I am to play it. There are only so many Ueda games (three, by my count) and there will only be so many (hopefully more that upcoming fourth one isn't the last), so when something rocks up that fits into that vibe like TALON TOWERS, a parkour platformer set on dilapidated structures that stand high above an infinitely stretching fog, I'm going to be pulled in.

Just hearing that a game has mashed two genres together does not generally excite me. It's a useful shorthand, maybe, but there's only so many roguelike deckbuilders I can take. Once in a while, however, a mashup comes along that makes me think, "well that doesn't seem right," and my ears perk up like a dog that's learned how to spell walk. Today, that mashup comes in the form of Brokensides, a psychological horror beat 'em up where you play as a violent sea bunny recently freed from imprisonment after committing a Cardinal Crime.

Tense platforming? Riveting, punchy action combat? Complex, thought provoking puzzles? Is this what we come to video games for? Of course not! It's for the menus, those sweet, sweet collections of pixels that let us tailor our experience and commit crimes like turning off the music so you can listen to a podcast you'll only half pay attention to. Well, that's at least what Video Game Menu: The Game will have you believe, a video game about video game menus (perhaps I didn't need to explain it to you, it's kind of in there in the name).

My first thought when I played through the Chimera tank boss fight in Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty was probably something along the lines of, "wow, this sure looks expensive!" It's incredibly flashy to start off with, this Ghost in the Shell-esque tank chasing after you in a big set piece moment that ultimately culminates in it unwillingly hunkering down in one spot for your killing convenience. And as it turns out, such a big, boisterous boss fight takes a lot of work; two whole years, in fact.

A developer's work is never done! On the very same day it launched, Control Resonant received a hotfix that tackled various complaints that were levied against the game's combat, making it slightly more manageable for those having a tougher time. While a fuller update won't be coming until next month, developer Remedy have outlined their plans for the next couple of updates, namely a New Game++ mode, and a photo mode.

I'm sure I had at least three more sets of Saturdays and Sundays in my September box. That thief time has snuck in again and picked up all the unattended days. If you see him, give him a whack on the back and see if he'll cough them back up again, I'm not quite ready to crack the wax seal on October 2026.

For the months leading up to September, there was a certain amount of steadying ourselves. Hovering over the month of November like a giant steel toe-capped boot, GTA 6's looming release date drove many developers to shift their game's launch to this month or simply pushed them back into 2027.

Now three weeks into the full flow of game releases – which has seen Mark up to his neck in Blood of Dawnwalker, James swinging a great big hammer in Control Resonant, while somehow also reviewing Valve's new VR headset, and Edwin diving into the horrors of both Roman Sands RE:Build and Silent Hill: Downfall, as well as two Jay Castello reviews, Moonlighter 2 and Nighthawks – we are almost through and out the other side.

There’s plenty to dislike about this latest round of corporate-mandated Xbox misery. The hundreds more human beings losing their livelihoods. The embracing of risk-averse factory line development. The fact that nobody, still, knows what on earth is happening with Arkane.

After months of smaller patches, Hytale’s early access phase is getting its inaugural Chapter update, confirmed release date and all. Chapter 1 is out on October 12th, and it’s a bundle of (mostly goblin-related) firsts: chiefly the game’s first "handcrafted" dungeon, a gruesome underground lair, and Hytale’s first bonefide boss fight, against a flamethrowing gob-king.

Demo sessions are often terrible ways to see a game, doubly so at conferences. You want to sink into a game at your own pace (and with unbroken access to fresh cups of tea), not get dropped into the middle of the action, hoisted up again 20 minutes later and plonked into another section of a game. However, that's the nature of these things sometimes and it suits some games more than others.

Total War: Warhammer absolutely does not suit it.

Grand strategy games are built for armchair generals. Not just any armchair, either, a wingback one where the leather on the arms is nearly worn through where said general has rested their elbows in deep contemplation. They're not games made to be played in short bursts. As such, I can't really speak to Total War: Warhammer 40,000's end quality from its Gamescom demo, but perhaps it says something that after an hour where I played 20 minutes of the battle tutorial, 20 minutes of the campaign tutorial, and 20 minutes in a scenario where my Space Marine army faced an overwhelming assault from an ork horde, I still came away keen as the baked beans found in an Astra Militarium ration pack to play the full game.

Armed Fantasia, a JRPG pitched as a spiritual successor the PS2-era roleplaying series Wild Arms – and led by former Wild Arms producer Akifumi Kaneko – has been cancelled. Digital Bros, the parent company of Armed Fantasia publishers 505 Games, announced in a financial statement that it was one of several games for which "The Group decided to discontinue development," the others being a sequel to F2P strategy game Battle Islands and action RPG Directorate Novitiate, which had already revealed its own demise in May.

Arc Raiders developer Embark Studios is bowing to the pacifists and trialing a PvE mode in their extraction shooter. If you play between October 13th and 20th, you'll be able to flick a toggle that means you load either into the traditional world of Arc Raiders, where human players vie for the valuable scraps left behind in a ruined world watched over by killer robots, or a slightly safer version where the machines are still deadly but the humans can't hurt you.

"We’re seeing a large and growing group of Raiders who come to the Rust Belt for the co-op and the ARC, not fighting with other Raiders," Embark say in the post announcing the trial. "That group has become a core part of our community, so it’s important we learn how to support them properly rather than leave them working around the game."

I would hope that for most of you it would not be a controversial thing to hear me say I hate generative AI. It stinks! It is rotting everyone's brains, and the people shilling it don't even care (see Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang saying he doesn't think it matters that kids aren't actually learning things like basic math when they use AI). But - please don't leave yet - it sure does make for some primo storytelling. Like, for example, in the upcoming LOVE alt delete, a psychological horror visual novel where you are beta testing a chatbot that you're trying to date.

If it ain't broke, why fix it? That seems to be the thought process behind Iron Bramble, the next game from the devs behind Rusted Moss. Like its predecessor, Iron Bramble is a pixel art metroidvania, one where you have a grappling hook that lets you swing about the place at rapid pace, only this time the setting is a "cyber-gothic megastructure" and you play a story-eating demon (?) woman in a world where humanity's flesh bodies have all died out and their souls now reside in metal, robotic husks.

Marathon will be "growing beyond extraction." That's what Bungie say in a new blog post outlining the future of the shooter, after announcing earlier this week that they'll be bringing back vaulted Destiny 2 campaigns. "Marathon launched as a cutthroat, winner-takes-all PvEvP experience," they explain. "We want to preserve that thrill for the players who enjoy it, while creating more ways for others to experience the world and find the level of challenge that works for them."

Right, I need you lot to pipe down for a minute because you're making games less interesting. Last week, The Blood of Dawnwalker director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz shared that the game's timer mechanics may be dropped in future installments of the vampire (eventual) series. This sounds like a boring decision to make if you ask me, as it's the thing that most interests me about the RPG. And now, according to Tomaszkiewicz in a new interview, the timer mechanic was actually toned down based on its early reception.

Control: Resonant is out today, and wouldn't you know it, there's already a hotfix. Though, day one updates aren't exactly new in this day and age now, are they? This particular patch looks like it's laser targeted at comments made in reviews about the game and how dang tough some of its enemies are, to which James would like you to know he says, "Pfft, wimps." Save your snark for him, not me!

Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader's story-concluding final DLC has been pushed back to December, developers Owlcat have announced. At the same time, they've introduced the companion around which this last expansion, Processional of the Damned, will revolve. Her name's Stella. She's an "unsanctioned psyker", a "miracle sent by the Emperor himself", and is prone to shedding tears of blood.

Discord have rolled out a revised global age verification system, having delayed deploying one earlier this year following largely privacy-based backlash.

I’m not saying that the reveal of Beat Saber’s "biggest update ever" was timed to coincide with a swell of VR interest induced by the new Steam Frame. But I am going to infer it, without evidence, before immediately moving on to what the sweaty sword-slashing rhythm game can expect when said update lands in Spring of 2027.

First and foremost is an entire new mode, Flux. This sees Beat Saber ditch the sabers and dial up the beating, demanding your own bare hands punch, prod, and slap their way through notes. A Beat Saber Unarmed build, basically. Looks fun! If probably no less tiring.

Obsidian will remain a "distinct" Obsidian with their own "creative identity and strengths", despite no longer operating independently of fellow Xbox-owned RPG makers Bethesda. That's according to Jill Braff, president of Bethesda and Microsoft's casual games division, in a memo sent to staff at the former following this week's layoffs and reorganising of studios at Xbox.