The Maw: what's new in PC games this week?
Mekkablood, Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth and a nice bit of snowboarding
Live
In a bid to shore up the Treehouse finances following several staff departures, I'm announcing a new line of official Maw spin-off products. Presenting: New Viscous n' Delicious Mawflakes! The ultimate cosmic breakfast cereal, available in all the colours of the rainbow plus 666 others that aren't fit for human eyes! Simply pour over molten ichor and leave to stand - you'll know they're ready to eat when you can no longer hear yourself weeping. "Ready to eat" is a phrase that cuts two ways, of course - and what better way to accompany being eaten by Mawflakes than by reading about this week's new PC games.
Monday 20th January sees the release of what Nic has called the only good video game, Mekkablood: Quarry Assault. Despite Nic's appraisal, developers are perversely insisting on releasing other games this week. Games like None Shall Intrude, a tile-based card-battler in which you play a raid boss fending off hero parties. They're both followed on Tuesday 21st January by Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders, which Graham says "might have been one of the best games I played last year" if it had released last year. Can't argue with the logic. Wednesday 22nd January brings the Steam release of JRPG boardgame Dokapon: Sword Of Fury and free-to-play party RPG King Arthur: Legends Rise, which looks cheesy as hell. And then comes the usual Thursday deluge on 23rd January: a new Tokyo Xtreme Racer, returning to the tarmac after 18 years, the PC version of Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth, and a PC port of cult saber 'em up Star Wars Episode 1: Jedi Power Battles. Friday 24th January, finally, is a day of monochrome feline whimsy thanks to Cat Detective: Albert Wilde.
You might be wondering where you can buy a nice box of nutritious/ravenous Mawflakes. I'm afraid your regular Earth money is no good here. Instead, you must pay in the form of comments, be they actual news tips or just drive-by shitposting. Write a few solid putdowns and you'll find your box of Mawflakes at the nearest crossroads on a moonless night, when the clocks strike 13. Anyway, here's this week's news liveblog. Hope it's a fun one.
This is older news, but - medieval city-builder Foundation hits 1.0 release on 31st January. "Like a warm bath, but with windmills," wrote Alec Meer (RPS in peace) of the early access version in 2019. I like the zone-painting and how the procedural building tool lets you clump together castles like balls of clay.
You can now run Doom in a Microsoft Word docucument, after someone got inspired by the recent efforts to make the ubiqitous shooter run on a PDF file. Recently, it was made to run as a Captcha and (arguably) gut bacteria. Still no sign of it running on a Freewrite, sorry Nic.
Marvel Snap is back online in the USA after being removed from service as part of the country's ban on TikTok - both are published by Chinese company Bytedance. Now, developers Second Dinner are seeking a new publishing partner to avoid this happening again.
Here's a new multiplayer demo for throwback RTS Tempest Rising. The trailer presentation makes me think of Red Alert and Tiberium Wars.
Capcom hope to bring down the somewhat eye-watering PC system requirements for Monster Hunter Wilds (which launches in February), according to their German Xeetbox account.
SeekerX says: One title that tried to slip The Maw's hungry gaze by releasing yesterday 1/19 is bullet-Hell deckbuilder Lymbus, whose demo tried to bully Nic back in September - https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/lymbus-is-hostile-to-my-existence-and-keeps-demanding-brain-cells-i-havent-grown-yet -- It looks a bit Mega Man Battle Network-y , so therefore as a roguelike it may be kind of One Step from Eden -ish? Only with the "My screen is exploding with overflowing geysers of retro internet" vibes of Hypnospace Outlaw or recent neal.fun idle game Stimulation Clicker. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2683590/LYMBUS/
Get a load of that screen curvature!
SeekerX says: Ender Magnolia is very much my pick of the week, but RPGFan has a couple more things that look interesting -- Also coming Thursday 1/23 is a PC release for tactics RPG Mercenaries Lament: Requiem of the Silver Wolf, which has been on console for a year or two. The first review I can find says "Developer, Rideon, certainly churns them out, and the series has evolved into a comfort food experience. They look vaguely like Final Fantasy Tactics or Tactics Ogre, and play like a vaguely decent homage to those genre greats. In recent times there has even been some kind of effort to throw in some thought-provoking deeper themes." Checking Steam -- holy moly, it looks like there have been 6 of these Mercenaries games already and this is #7??? https://store.steampowered.com/app/2321040/Mercenaries_Lament_Requiem_of_the_Silver_Wolf/
This does seem tasty fare for the SRPG enthusiasts. And yes, it's always terrifying to discover that some game you've never heard of is actually part of a series that goes back a decade or more.
SHIN MEGAMI TUESDAY
MAW THE FEED.Alan Dean Foster - Star Wars and Star Trek novelisation author and the brains behind the Spellsinger books, among others - is getting into gaming. An adaptation of Dean Foster's Midworld, first in the Humanx Commonwealth series, is to be published by Sunset Sugar Studios on PC via Steam in 2026.
Road trip RPG Keep Driving will launch on 6th February.
Silksong update: the cake was lying.
ThatFulvioGuy says: I had to wishlist Mekkablood after seeing that header image, but then I scrolled down... "Dall-E 3 was used to help generate the textures and pixel art, no artist prompts were used, just generic terms. Suno was used for the music." Oh well *unwishlists*
Yarp! I should have spotted that. It's from a solo developer, so this isn't quite the same thing as (to give a hopefully unfeasible hypothetical example) Microsoft AI-hallucinating the next Gears Of War based on news coverage of warzones, but it's something we should look into as and when we write more about the game.
SUPER MONDAY BALL
We did Nintendo puns last week. Now we must balance the scales by ripping on Ninty's ancient rival Sega. FEED THE MAW.