Let me breathe a sigh of relief as big new releases finally slow down, possibly because this is the week for what used to be called E3. That’s my theory and I’m sticking to it. This week the Switch 2 and Xbox get the ports of Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth. Also, The 7th Guest is getting a remake this week, and the first Gothic is getting a remake that also releases this week. There are a couple of sports additions this week. Codemasters’/Electronic Arts’ F1 series is getting a new track and new cars and rules and new teams for the 2026 season to reflect the real life F1 2026 season. And finally, Konami’s long running football (soccer) game series that started off in 1994 as International Superstar Soccer (ISS) and then was renamed to Pro-Evolution Soccer (PES) has been renamed to eFootball Kickoff (eFK?) and is coming out this week exclusively for the Nintendo Switch 2.

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Her life is a fairy tale, the music insists. She strolls from room to room, her visage fixed and ghastly, a lipsticked rictus struggling to assert humanity with its rigid approximation of warmth. Her halting and barely comprehending voiceover mimics intimation in jagged English. Everyone surrounding her is anxious and tentative, showing her fabrics and dishware and deference, a hushed cadre of aides and security, caterers and tailors, servers, servants, attendants all. She is the center of everything, uncaring, grotesquely regal, a gaudy reminder of something we thought had washed away long ago, now discovered clinging to the shoe of history. The tailor retreats behind a curtain to fetch something else and now a Laotian immigrant speaks about coming to America. Melania, who wore a jacket emblazoned with the words “I really don’t care” to a child immigrant detention center, waits through the woman’s too many words. Her eyes, holding back daggers, flick to an aide off-camera: how much longer will this take?

Her father’s handheld camera pokes in like a court jester with nothing to say because it’s all already too ridiculous anyway. Brett Ratner cuts to some faded family photos in ornate frames pretending classiness. Michael Mann’s longtime cinematographer Dante Spinotti angles into the light to break out a spangle of celebratory lens flare. The music reminds you it’s all as magical as a goddamn fairy tale. You don’t even know, it patters. You can’t even believe. Absolute fucking magic, it moans, whorishly brittle and insistent, into your ear.

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After its long and uneven history, the James Bond license to videogame finally lands with IO Interactive. The studio releases 007: First Light on Wednesday. Will it usher in a new era of Bond games? Is it a wallet threat for Hitman fans, or just for James Bond fans? 

Other notable releases this week include the early access release of Paralives, a potential competitor for Electronic Arts’ Sims. There’s not one, but two Forklift games coming on Thursday. Nickelodeon offers their alternative to Mario Tennis. Nintendo is releasing Warioware-type mini-game collection Pictonico, which incorporates the photos on your phone. And the developers of Shovel Knight are releasing a retro Zelda-type action-adventure called Mina the Hollower.

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It is a well-known fact that critics are like sea monsters. They latch their miserable appendages upon the ships of passing artists, leeching sustenance by taking down other people’s hard work. If the artist’s ship is sound, if their creation has no visible flaws, it is that much harder for the wretched critic to latch onto.

Look, what I’m getting at: it’s harder to write a review for a good game than a bad one. Where are the clever put-downs going to come from? The witty repartee? The first Hades has become the new gold standard for action roguelikes. It’s probably not going to surprise anyone that Hades II is also good. Very good.

What’s a sea monster to do? It’s a conundrum.

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Wallet threat level is extreme once again! After the studio that made Disco Elysium split up, different developers have claimed they’re “the developers of Disco Elysium”. One of them is releasing a new game, Zero Parades: For Dead Spies. The wary Disco Elysium fan might consider that a wallet threat.

This week sees the release of a major first-party Nintendo title: Yoshi and the Mysterious Book, which seems very charming and could be a major wallet threat for those of us with young children. This week also features the release of Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight, which seems to encompass every piece of Batman media, including the Arkham games from Rocksteady and all the Batman movies. How can they possibly do all that in one game and still have a coherent narrative? Find out later this week.

This week also sees the release of an immersive sim headed by Warren Spector and Paul Neurath. Originally Thick as Thieves was envisioned as a PvP experience but is now a $5 release with a four-hour campaign that can be enjoyed as a solo experience or in co-op. 

But the most dire threat is from the Forza Horizon series reaching Japan. I will confess that I paid the extra $60 for the premium edition and I’m playing this early. Virtual Japan is even more beautiful than I had envisioned, and it’s just a delight to be exploring Tokyo and its surrounding countryside while trying to constantly remember that I’m driving on the wrong side of the road.

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Once upon a time, there was the perfect boardgame, and it was called Twilight Struggle. It came to us in 2005, otherwise known as the Dawn of the Age of Caylus, which was a threadbare—even penurious—era, a time when gameplay was as cold and austere as ye olde English lords who created it to keep the boardgaming peasantry groveling for scraps in an unending servitude to mechanics. The fact that it took a couple of breakaway designers across the Atlantic to set gaming in a new direction simply mirrored the arc of world events, and thus when Twilight Struggle rose to the very top of the Boardgamegeek rankings, it was as momentous as the time in 1992 that Francis Fukuyama dubbed “the end of History.” As the game itself was about that very period, it all threatened to wrap itself into an infinitely self-reflecting vortex, but games like Agricola soon arrived to carefully shepherd boardgamers away from geopolitical aspirations and towards portraying themselves as actual shepherds. And thus the peace was kept nigh many years.

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This week’s biggest headliner has to be Subnautica 2. Unknown Worlds was involved in a big legal battle with their publisher who ousted the studio’s leadership, but the studio leadership won their court battle and now back in charge. Before that happened the publisher had announced this early access release of Subnautica 2, maybe to defy the court decision? But the studio heads are back in charge, and they’re still coming out this week with an early access release of Subnautica 2. So I think we’re all curious about what kind of state Subnautica 2 will be on this early access release.

This week also sees a release of a new Battlestar Galactica game; the release of Outbound, a sequel to Call of the Sea called Call of the Elder Gods; and Directive 8020 from the Until Dawn developers.

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The two games I’ve got my eye on this week both play on nostalgia. Mixtape is set in 1989 and plays heavily on 80s nostalgia. MotorSlice, meanwhile, looks like 2008’s Mirror’s Edge and gives me nostalgia for a first person parkour genre that never really took off.

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Why do some people love sausages and other people hate sausages? No fucking reason. 

–Rubber, by Quentin Dupieux

Absurdism is the sausage made by feeding European flesh into the machinery of industrial slaughter. Before World War I, it had found expression among various high-falutin’ philosophers who explained that searching for meaning is futile. All is vanity, etc. But the horrors of World War I cultivated a global zeitgeist, kicking off the celebration of the non sequitur as a learned response to enormity. It was all the rage on French stages. The sort of thing you might learn in Paris, like drinking absinthe. Which is probably why I first encountered it doing student theater. You give a student a stage and some actors, and there’s no telling what kind of nonsense they’re going to make happen. Genet, Ionesco, Sartre. Then absinthe at cast parties.

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My personal biggest wallet threat this week is one of the biggest Diablo expansions yet: Diablo IV: Lord of Hatred. Mephisto, the Lord of Hatred, was introduced in the opening of Diablo IV’s main campaign in the form of a wolf who rescued the player character and has hounded him or her since then. Looks like we finally get closure on Mephisto’s story in this expansion. In addition to the two new characters you get to play, it sounds like they completely reworked the other characters in the game as well, so I’m looking forward to checking that out.

There’s also Invincible Vs, a superhero fighting game in the Invincible universe; Saros, a spiritual sequel to Housemarque’s Returnal; and Aphelion, the latest game from Life is Strange developer Don’t Nod, in which the discovery of a 9th planet is humanity’s last best hope. 

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Seven-year-old Tommy Chick was drunk with excitement at the prospect of seeing 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. It would be on Wonderful World of Disney, channel 7, this Sunday night. For as long as he could remember, he had doodled pictures of Captain Nemo’s Nautilus, often in the clutches of a giant squid. And at last, it was going to play out before his very eyes!

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I thought this week would be the calm before the storm — stay tuned! — but there are enough big releases to keep your wallet threatened in advance. We have a pottery-breaking game from Double Fine; a new Peter Molyneux god game entering early access; the follow-up to Vampire Survivors; the minimalist sequel to minimalist shapez; breakout game Caromble’s breakout from early access after 11 years; and the Seumus McNally Grand Prize winner from this year’s Independent Games Festival. Maybe this is actually the storm before the storm?

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It’s wonderful stuff, snow. Very multi-faceted.  Did you know that the Inuit have a hundred words for snow? Oops, that’s an urban legend. Oh wait, it is true, sort of. Anyway, leaving linguistics aside, snow can be many things. It can come down in great globs of Christmas magic. It can be hard as rock, strong enough to make an igloo. It can be heavy and full of water, perfect for making a snowman, or fine like sand, stinging your eyes as it is carried by the wind. It can even be soft underneath with a thin crunchy layer on top, like a crème brulée for your feet.

Snow deserves a video game worthy of its majesty. It’s so often treated as a mere change of scenery to be sandwiched between the lava world and the tropical world. Canadians eat snow for breakfast, they’ll know what to do.

Enter The Long Dark, a game about surviving winter in the Great North after “The Quiet Apocalypse”, a geomagnetic event that has made modern technology inoperative.

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This week we get Nintendo’s latest flagship title, Tomodachi Life. From the trailers, I honestly have no idea what this game is, except that it populates the world with your Miis from Nintendo Wii somehow? But I thought Nintendo didn’t even have access to our Miis from the Wii anymore? Does that mean we’ll have to recreate them? No thanks Nintendo!

Capcom’s latest third-person shooter features an astronaut with a companion who looks like a little girl. I have somehow remained immune to Capcom’s success in recent years. The last Capcom game I actually played for an extended time was probably their last flop: Dead Rising 3. And I’m very interested in Pragmata. I wonder if that’s a bad sign for Capcom?

Also this week, Windrose enters early access. This age of piracy game had such a successful demo that it’s one of the most wishlisted games on Steam. And we’ve been seeing the trailer for Replaced for years as a cool cyberpunk setting done using pixel art. Another game that we’ve been seeing trailers for is Mouse: P.I. For Hire, the first person shooter set in 1930s cartoon noir setting. All three of those may pose a potential wallet threat this week.

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Can former Just Cause developers make an interesting open world game with 70s muscle cars and melee fisticuffs instead of guns? If the answer is yes, Samson could be a serious wallet threat this week. Otherwise, beware People of Note, a musical RPG where each battle is a musical performance. Also beware ChainStaff’s dilemma of rescuing comrades or listening to the alien voice in your head telling you to harvest them. And beware Find Your Words’ attempt to capture the magic of watching your kids find their first friendships. And beware House of Hikmah’s adventure in the halls of Islamic scholars during its Golden Age. And DarkSwitch’s fusion of city builder and tower defense. Potential wallet threats abound this week from unlikely directions!

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