The Maw - 19th-24th February 2024

rockpapershotgun.com:

Another week of PC game releases is upon us and oh heck, slow down. There are an alarming number of games out this week that I want to play, from large-scale 3D productions to itty-bitty time-killers, each sinisterly appropriate to my Steam stats and wider research interests. Are videogame publishers and The Maw in cahoots to overwhelm me with impulse-buys and sabotage my attempts to Report the News? It’s possible. It’s possible. The Maw can be pretty cunning for an indiscriminate force of cosmic famine. The creature has been known to forge alliances with misguided mortals, seeking to flank and overwhelm harried news writers. How else to explain Phil Spencer’s T-shirts?

But let’s not worry about that for the moment. Without further ado, here’s a list of PC games out this week that I, for one, consider worthy of a click, if not necessarily a purchase: low-poly vertical shmup Dark Gravity (19th Feb); floral/insectile bullet hell Nidus (19th Feb); dieselpunk Advance Wars homage Empires Shall Fall (19th Feb); roguelike not-Poker Balatro (20th Feb); faerie survival sim Nightingale (20th Feb, early access); biopunk side-scroller Slave Zero X (21st Feb); Skynet-era RTS Terminator: Dark Fate – Defiance (21st Feb); build-optimising action-RPG Last Epoch (21st Feb); post-apocalyptic car-whisperer Pacific Drive (22nd Feb); hellish feud ‘em up Solium Infernum (22nd Feb); primordial horror management sim The Tribe Must Survive (22nd Feb); claustrophobic desktop shmup Windowkill (23rd Feb).

As ever, let us know if I’ve missed anything obvious, like a new Half-Life game or something. Also as ever, you can follow our efforts to sift good news stories from the currents of the interweb in our weekly liveblog below.

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Eleventh Hour Games have been detailing what they're adding to budding Diablo-killer Last Epoch for this week's 1.0 launch. The changelog is so massive they've broken it into chapters. Here's part 1,