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While the upcoming Slay the Spire 2 hovers threateningly over the deckbuilding landscape, one game in the genre is replacing the usual boney arithmetic with harsh words, legal loopholes, and subtle threats. All Will Rise is a “narrative deckbuilder” set in a tense courtroom where you play a lawyer cross-examining those who may or may not be involved in the brutal murder of a holy river.
Arc Raiders! It’s an extraction shooter! A fact that will leave many with the question, “is this the one that’ll push the genre to the mainstream?” Personally I haven’t the foggiest, and I don’t have a horse in that race either. That kind of nonsense matters more to shareholders than it does to little old me. Still, we’ve not got a huge amount of time to wait to find out if Arc Raiders is the one to make extraction shooters big, as during Geoff’s Livestream of Questionable Quality and Orbs, it got a release date.
Partly in the absence of real surprises, and partly because the auditorium bass notes were making me feel queasy and dissociative, I spent a lot of this year’s Summer Games Fest showcase transfixed by Geoff Keighley’s balls. I am, of course, referring to the show’s animated backdrops, in which glutinous, gleaming orbs floated like nitrogen bubbles in a cosmic brain – sometimes tossed upon a tide of marbled petro-vomit, sometimes drifting over a scree of lava lamp effluence, sometimes hovering against sherbety silver Bermudas of arches and plinths. Immersive!
Heart Machine’s side-scrolling metroidvania platformer Possessor(s) is Hollow Knight with a splash of Amanita Design’s Creaks. The bulk of your enemies are household objects – vending machines, plant pots, office printers and other fittings that have become vessels for demons. From this premise springs a note of tragedy powerful enough to conquer my outrage at a game title that has brackets in it. The demons are not, in themselves, violent – it’s inhabiting the inanimate that maddens them. “Possessing something cold and dead is agony… so they lash out,” explains Rhem, a mortally wounded devil you meet in the prologue.
Resident Evil 9 – aka Resident Evil Requiem – is in development, there’s a substantial trailer below, and most surprisingly, it already has a specific release date: February 27th, 2026.
Too many cosy games about mindlessly planting turnips. Not enough cosy games about the house slowly being taken over by viscera. Fractured Blooms is tagged on Steam as “cute” and “anime” and “psychological horror”. It was announced at the Summer Game Fest, where presenter Geoff Keighly described the game as “Doki Doki Literature Club meets Silent Hill”. There’s no release date, but here’s a trailer.
You might have seen a new name around the homepage this past week: Mark Warren. It might also be that you recognise the name if you’re a reader of RPS sibling site VG247, where Mark has already been plying his trade for several years. Well, we’ve adopted Mark here at RPS, as one might adopt a puppy if the puppy really liked mods, RPGs and Helldivers 2. Come say hello in the comments.
Does Elden Ring Nightreign‘s bird-bodied Guardian have a human face hidden somewhere on his feathery body? It’s a question people have been thinking about, and by “people” I mean a small subset of Elden Ring obsessives who like to watch the game being picked apart 3D model by 3D model.
Thanks to a prolific Souls modder/dataminer, I can provide you with an answer. In their latest video, Zullie The Witch – who’s previously solved various Souls mysteries and modded an Armored Core into Elden Ring – has unmasked Nightreign‘s crop of nightfarers like they’re Scooby-Doo villians. Most of their faces look how you’d expect, but there are a couple of noteworthy cases that I think it’s worth you knowing about.
Burden Of Command is a lot like me, in that it deserves a lot of love but it’s too frustrating and annoying to get it for long.
The concept is promising: tactical battles with a small batch of soldiers, but as a “leadership RPG” instead of a regular wargame. Occasional glimpses kept my hope alive over its long development, perhaps predisposing me to forgive more than usual when it finally arrived last month. I’m glad I did. But wow, did this game get me yelling for a while.
Back in 2023, Nintendo held one of those Direct thingies it likes to do, and as it often does the Japanese version of the stream had some games the western one didn’t. In particular, there was one game that drew my attention: Stray Children. It caught my eye in part because it has a really unique pixel art look to it, but also because Yoshiro Kimura was its director, one of the original designers of cult-classic Moon: Remix RPG Adventure. And now, after a bit of a wait, developer Onion Games have confirmed it’s getting its English release later this year, and it’ll even be doing so on PC.
