“Welcome to puberty, Tom,” chirps I Was a Teenage Exocolonist about fifty years too late.

I’ve just turned 13 ingame, and I’m more confused than when I was actually 13. What is going on here? Who is this game for? People who play deck-builders? Visual novel readers in search of arbitrary branching? Actual 13-year-olds? Is this twee bildungsroman what passes for young adult fiction these days? Is its pastel-colored space colony appealing or even remotely interesting to sci-fi fans? Is this how Northway Games follows Rebuild, their ruthless zombie apocalypse resource management games? And now that I’ve reached puberty, how much worse are the rest of my teens going to be? At least when I was actually 13, they separated the boys from the girls and marched us into the gym to watch an awkward instructional film. Here, now, I have no such guidance. I have only a haphazard deck of cards.

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Oh my, what a busy week of releases we’ve got coming up! Deep breath. First of all, there’s An Incident at Galley House, a remake of 2025’s text-based Type Help, from the creators of The Roottrees are Dead, which was a big hit here at Qt3 last year. The moment I got my first look at Denshattack!, an indie game about a skateboarding train, I wanted to play it right away. Then there’s Ascend to Zero, a top-down roguelite where players need to clear a run in 30 seconds by manipulating time. The cloning survival game The Alters is getting DLC called Last Variable about the Scientist clone who stays behind and creates new clones of geologists, biologists, chemists, and physicists. Annapurna Interactive is releasing a narrative-puzzle game called D-Topia about a utopia run by robots. Cult-hit/turn-based strategy series Culdcept is making a return to Nintendo Switch and PC with Culdcept Begins. Devolver Digital is releasing a follow up to a 2019 multiplayer gem with the goofy party game called Heave Ho 2. The VR-only games Moss 1 and 2 are getting combined and finally ported over to non-VR platforms in Moss: The Forgotten Relic. The Crow Country developer SFB Games is dropping The Mermaid Mask, the latest entry in the point-and-click Detective Grimoire series. As a fan of bicycle games, I’m really looking forward to Mavrix by Matt Jones coming out this week, allowing me to explore an open world filled with challenges. And finally, another enticing wallet threat comes to us at the end of the week from the makers of Flower and Journey. ThatGameCompany’s Dear Van Gogh game will be part of their early access release of Sky: Children of the Light.

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This week we have an interesting grab bag of goodies that should appeal to different people. Fans of Assassin’s Creed IV could find a return to the pirate-themed remake modernized with more than just a coat of paint. Fans of Doom: The Dark Ages will find an expansion apparently so big it’s almost like a sequel. Fans of EA Sport’s College Football series will get their annual installment this week with the latest players and college schedules. Fans of Granblue Fantasy Relink will find a new expanded game and a new reason to return to the action RPG. And fans of space shooting and infantry first person shooters will find Angels Fall First releasing after 11 years of early access.

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I went into Boot Riley’s I Love Boosters with some trepidation. Sorry to Bother You, Riley’s previous and first movie, felt so distinctive. So subversive, so slyly goofy, so warmly funny instead of resentful. It felt so much like one person’s voice, one person’s bottled-up inside joke finally escaping. How could Boots Riley possibly capture that same grinning lightning-in-a-bottle quality a second time? Surely he’d written and directed his masterpiece and from there on out, it would be iterations or sophomore efforts all the way? What could possibly top LaKeith Stanfield’s rap performance for Armi Hammer, which has aged in such wonderfully uncomfortable ways since 2018? 

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Hyperwired caught my eye in recent showcases. It’s a twin-stick shooter with the twist that you’re flying around with a giant plug hanging from your ship. When you get low on power, you have to plug in and are presumably stationary while you recharge. That could be a potentially interesting twist to the genre. The other interesting wallet threat this week is the Nintendo exclusive Rhythm Groove Heaven. I’m a sucker for a good rhythm game, so I’ll keep my ears open for impressions of this one.

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Rail shooters are something I don’t normally care for, but with two exceptions so far. One is Rez, Sega’s music themed rail shooter, for its brilliant use of minimalist visuals and music integration. And the other is Star Fox. Why does Star Fox overcome my usual dislike of rail shooters? Maybe it’s the fact that you’re in a little space ship, sometimes flying through space, sometimes on planets. Whatever the reason, I can’t resist the siren call of a remake of Star Fox 64. 

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Square’s HD-2D-style Adventures of Elliot is the only major release this week. An earluer demo had gotten a good reception, so perhaps it’s a wallet threat to watch out for.

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Twin-stick shooters like Sektori are a dime a dozen, and they’re especially cheap when they’re abstract. Arcade action without some sort of theming — ancient Greece, plucky spaceships rescuing dudes, giant bugs, ghost and goblins, swords and sorcery — isn’t just naked, it’s barely there. Unsexy when sexy can make all the difference. Quaker meeting houses to Catholic cathedrals, plain donuts to sprinkles and pink icing, greyscale resale value to cherry red with painted flames. So what’s a game like Sektori to do in the Geometry Wars postbellum?

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Welcome to E3 Week! No wait, it’s not called that anymore. Showcase week? If you checked out some of the showcases yesterday, you know there were a few shadow-drops, so your wallet was actually threatened by some titles yesterday that you might not know about, so we’re starting with Sunday this week.

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When developers IO Interactive obtained the rights to make a James Bond game, it’s like a tiny cog in the machine of the universe fell into place. IO Interactive’s flagship product is the Hitman series and the titular hitman, Agent 47, is basically James Bond without the sex drive. He’s a snappy dresser that attends cocktail parties and infiltrates military bases. He meets all sorts of interesting people… and then kills them. However, Hitman fell into a bit of a rut. On the other hand, the James Bond franchise has multiple games under its belt, but those were mostly straight-up shooters. Apparently, the Broccoli family, the historical owners of the James Bond IP, were wary of allowing violent games to be made with the licence. That’s weird, but I get the point. Bond is not just a guy that shoots people. Where’s the spycraft? The gadgets? The suave party chatter? All of this happens to be IO Interactive’s strong suit.

IO Interactive and James Bond are a match made in heaven. So how did they do? I’m a bit anxious… Okay, deep breath, let’s do this.

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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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