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🆕 On the Shelves

🤴 Blue Prince

Raw Fury

Welcome to Mt. Holly, where every dawn unveils a new mystery. Navigate through shifting corridors and ever-changing chambers in this genre-defying strategy puzzle adventure. But will your unpredictable path lead you to the rumored Room 46?

• I'm looking forward to playing this, but as a patient gamer, I'm happy to wait until it comes down in price.
• From what I hear, this game pretty much requires you to keep notes in a physical (or digital) notebook (see r/ObsidainMD) which can be a positive or a negative depending on the person. Some embrace it, others hate it. I'm not exactly sure where I sit, but I really enjoyed keeping notes for "Her Story," which is the only other game I've done that, so I'll probably be happy to keep notes for Blue Prince, too.

🐱 Bongo Cat

Irox Games

Bongo cat needs your help. Bongo cat needz more hatz!!! Every time you press a key, Bongo cat will punch your taskbar. Type, click, play, work to collect more points. Which hats will you find?

• What more to say? It's a super silly, cookie clicker-like idle game where you receive tokens for pressing keys to buy things for the bongo cat.
• The cat lives on the desktop so (s)he can keep you focused on your work.
  • See cat → want to press keyboard
  • More presses → more tokens.
  • Gamification at its best (/s)

📡 On the Radar

🏃 Marathon

Bungie

You are a Runner, a cybernetic mercenary scouring the remains of a lost colony for fortune and power. Team up in crews of three as you battle rival Runner teams and hostile security forces for weapons and upgrades.
Survive and everything you've scavenged is yours to keep for future runs on Tau Ceti IV or if you're brave enough, a journey to the derelict Marathon ship that hangs above.

• The cinematic trailer is absolutely next level, but the fact it doesn't translate into gameplay has annoyed/concerned a lot of people. The world building is immense, but the gameplay is limited to the extraction shooter genre.
• For me, it has strong NeoTokyo vibes. Now, most readers will not know of this game, but if you do, drop me a line to tell me how much you loved it (or, at least, loved the concept). What was it? A Counter Strike mod with incredibly ambitious world building, and a killer soundtrack, but gameplay that fell short due to its limited scope of team death match.
• I have not played Marathon yet, but if it can pull off a world that feels as rich and interesting as their art style, I might be all in!

🎮 In Rotation

🔫 Call of Duty: Black Ops 6

Activision

Call of Duty®: Black Ops 6 is signature Black Ops across a cinematic single-player Campaign, a best-in-class Multiplayer experience and with the epic return of Round-Based Zombies.

• Well, this was a free to play game on Steam, as well as a quest on Discord, so I thought I'd pick it up to check it out.
• It's a 150GB download...! It took about a full day to download and then asked me to install a number of updates, so it really was unplayable for a good two days... I saw complaints about this on Steam too:

This is supposed to be an ultra-casual shooter, but after a full days work and a full evening of spending time with my family, the last thing I want to do with my handful of free time before bed each night is waste it watching the fucking shaders compile because of all these stupid micro-updates every week that refresh the cash shop with more junk I'll never buy.

• Mostly negative reviews on Steam, a lot pointing towards the microtransactions being core to the game. Booting it up, I got this feeling too. It literally takes you to the "Battle Pass" page instead of the lobby. Ergo – buying stuff is introduced and you have to choose to play the game. It should be the other way around, surely?!

Honestly, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 feels like it's at a breaking point, and it’s tough to ignore how much it’s overdue for a serious overhaul. Yeah, I get that microtransactions are basically the norm these days, but they can't be the only focus of a game.

👀 Unspottable

GrosChevaux

Unspottable is a competitive party game. Blend in the crowd of AI characters, hunt down the other players and use the many different environment specific rules to win the game. Walk like a robot and punch like a human!

• A fun "prop hunt" style game where it starts with the screen populated by a large number of exactly the same character. In order to figure out which one you are, you move around (with your controller) and see which of the robots matches your movement. Be careful though, if you move too distinctly, you'll be discovered by the other players.
• Once you know which one you are, you have to walk around and punch the other characters which you think are other players. But if you punch a robot, your action of punching gives away the fact that you are actually a human, resulting in the other players coming for you.
• We played it as a family and had a ton of fun. Super silly stuff.

🍞 Bread and Fred

Infogrames

Grab your best bud for help in this new co-op challenge to help two adorable penguins, Bread and Fred, reach the top of the snowy summit. Time your jumps, cling to walls and swing across gaps to see how far you can make it before you tumble all the way back down the mountain.

• A fun lil game of cooperation—a genre that I play a lot—where two penguins have to help each other scale various obstacles.
• Local coop is OK, but there are some issues with online multiplayer, which is why it has been getting bad reviews as of late.

🩸 Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon 2

INTI CREATES Co., Ltd.

Koji Igarashi and Inti Creates are back with more retro sword-and-whip action! Curse of the Moon 2 brings classic 2D action and a dark, 8-bit aesthetic together with modern playability.

• Not quite a metroidvania, but has big Castlevania vibes due to being the brainchild of Koji Igarashi.
• It's a really solid 8-bit aesthetic in terms of both graphics and sound. But it doesn't look like it would run on old hardware. Too many sprites, too many colours. So it fits into this weird place of modern nostalgia. I don't hate it!
• The progression system and life system is pretty solid. You unlock new characters with unique attacks/abilities as you go through the game, and can instantly switch between them during a run. However, they act as your "lives" so when one of them runs out of HP, you can't switch to them and are limited to the remaining characters. Once all characters run out of HP, it's game over, and you have to restart from the previous checkpoint.
• Of note is the sheer size of boss sprites. Huge, gorgeous, grotesque monsters with a variety of attacks and phases. I'm really enjoying them and their chunkiness!