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This week, dozens of Microsoft employees occupied the company’s east campus in Redmond, Washington in protest against the use of Azure and generative AI technologies by the Israeli military, during their on-going assault on Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.
Despite the grand sense of wanderlust dripping off its title, Lego Voyagers casts you and a pal not as minifig explorers (or even the tiny brickfolk of Lego Builder’s Journey), but as humble 1×1 blocks. You’ll get one eye each, and be thankful for it. Nonetheless, Voyagers still wants you to venture out and roll your way through its plastic wilderness, with some light puzzling, Split Fiction-style cooperative mischief, and building – usually with your own heads as the cornerstones – along the way. Last week, ahead of its Gamescom showing, Mark and I channeled our inner construction materials to try it out.
I loaded up a recent Pragmata demo in blissful ignorance – or, at the very least, regular ignorance – of the depth of feeling surrounding its central hacking system. The need to shut down robotic baddies’ defences before giving them the ol’ semi-auto handshake is, it seems, widely enough perceived as a potential dealbreaker that Capcom have recreated it as a browser game. As if to whisper a reassuring “No, look, it’s not that fiddly,” into sceptical ears ahead of release next year.
I get it. Described in the abstract, it does sound like you can have a little third-person shooting, as a treat, but only after you finish your tile-colouring minigame. After actually playing Pragmata, though, I’m firmly on Team Hacking: besides being rich with upgrade potential, it doesn’t interrupt the action so much as conduct it, specifically to a tempo that feels refreshingly unique by over-the-shoulder standards.
Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2 got a full release date during Gamescom Opening Night Live last night, along with a fresh trailer. However, there’s one detail that might put a bit of a dampener [dhampir? – Ed] on your claret-tinged celebrations about the game finally overcoming its many bloody delays.
You see, while the base version of Bloodlines 2 offers four vampire clans with different playstyles for you to get behind the fangs of, Paradox have opted to stick a further two behind paid day-one DLC.
I’d entirely forgotten about Battlestar Galactica. I wouldn’t say hearing the show’s melancholy singsong theme during last night’s Open Night Live gave me Proustian nostalgia pangs, but it did fill me with a vague desire to look up Gunstar mods for Homeworld.
The game announcement in question was for Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes, a new tactical roguelite from the developers of Crying Suns. Published by Dotemu, it gives you quasi-isometric control of the human armada racing to escape the sinister Cylon fleet. You’ll divide your time between managing tensions aboard your ships via branching story beats, assigning limited upgrade resources, flushing out new vessels from the planets you visit, and fending off the perfidious toasters in real-time space combat. Here’s a trailer.
Enotria: The Last Song developers Jyamma Games are making a new action-RPG inspired by and named after Dante Alighieri’s 14th century epic poem La Divina Commedia, aka the Divine Comedy.
Like the poem, it sees you descending through the circles of Hell, each the geological manifestation of a particular Sin. Unlike the poem, it features a set of combat classes, a choice of protagonist genders, a narrative alignment system, procedurally generated extraction dungeons, and customisable weapons and armour. As the poet himself might say: in the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where I had to grind for crafting materials.
Black Myth: Wukong developers Game Science have revealed Black Myth: Zhong Kui, another single-player action-RPG steeped in Chinese mythology. It casts you as a ghost-hunting god who wanders between hell and Earth. Here’s a CG short from Gamescom’s Open Night Live 2025, which shows the fearsomely bearded Zhong Kui himself riding an extravagantly sized tiger.
Valor Mortis, a soulslike set during Napoleon’s 19th century conquest of Eastern Europe, has been revealed by Ghostrunner devs One More Level during Gamescom Opening Night Live‘s preshow. It’s set for release in 2026.
Yep, if you’re a fan of games that drip with Frenchness and also revolve around beating up gaudily-health barred baddies before they do the same to you, this one might have you reaching for your musket and bicorne. That’s assuming the setting offers enough of a unique feel that Valor Mortis doesn’t resemble being trapped on a Fromsoft-imitation Elba.
Skibidi. Dop, dop, dop. Yes, yes. Skibidi. Double u. Neem, neem. This is the clarion call of the modern age, the infernal message brought unto our virgin ears by the Skibidi Toilets. No, wait, keep reading! It’ll be worth it. Probably. After all, the word skibidi has now been added to the Cambridge Dictionary, and this is a reality we’ve all got to reckon with.
Skibidi Toilet, in case you’ve been living somewhere free from the influence of vertically-framed surrealism, is a long-running series of 3D animations by YouTuber Alexey ‘DaFuq!?Boom!’ Gerasimov. It generally conveys the tale of a great war between a legion of heads protruding from loos and an army of folks with cameras for heads, with help from Half-Life 2 assets and inspiration from the annals of Garry’s Mod machinima. Any 12 year olds you know probably can’t get enough of it. Or think it’s lame because they’ve already moved on to the next thing.
