This week in PC games: Pathologic 3, a fresh Pokémon rival, a mind-bending FPS and some crablike base building

Before we statesman the year’s archetypal round-up of caller PC crippled releases, an apology: we skipped feeding the Maw for 1 full week backmost successful December. In a deceptively carefree comment, I explained that I had excessively overmuch seasonal blogmange to prepare, but this was really a PR excuse to minimise hysteria. You see, backmost successful November the Maw ate me, and I person lone conscionable exited its digestive system. During past emergencies, I’ve done this by hooking onto gumlines and moving my mode from tonsil to tonsil. This clip I forgot to bring my climbing axes, and was obliged to flight in… the different direction.

It is champion not to stock more. Thankfully, the Maw’s interior odours are lone smellable successful the 11th done 17th dimensions, though they tin inactive beryllium detected successful Normie Spacetime – you whitethorn person noticed that each the reflections are pinstriped today. Anyway, present that I’ve decently explained the interruption successful service, let’s gingerly dip our still-reeking fingers into the spumes of commerce.

Monday 5th January

• Last twelvemonth was each astir horses. This year, perhaps, is the twelvemonth of crabs. Step guardant (or much likely, sideways) Dunecrawl, successful which you and up to 3 different players roam a godforsaken unfastened satellite atop weaponised crustaceans.

Tuesday 6th January

• Feed The Reactor is an incremental clicker successful which you driblet antithetic types of substance into a cosmic vortex. Generating vigor helps you level up the reactor and unpeel the communicative layers of a “strange galaxy”. An alien fishperson complains that they are ever astatine warfare with Crustacea. See, crabs again.
• Trigger-happy Satisfactory players and the mayoral benignant of Helldiver mightiness admit StarRupture, an aboriginal entree crippled from the Green Hell devs successful which you physique outposts connected planets and support them against swarms of… crablike monsters?!?
• There are 19 bosses successful the fetchingly ghastly pixelart metroidvania Death Machine and surely astatine slightest 1 of them is an invertebrate with 8 legs, a carapace and ample pincers.

Wednesday 7th January

• Our adjacent 2 offerings travel from the worryingly crab-agnostic Julian. Firstly, Oddcore - a deranged and fizzy FPS taxable parkland of backroom spaces and dysfunctional corpo messaging. Seems lovely. No evident crab beingness though. Stop resisting progress, Julian.
• Now this is much similar it. EvoCreo is simply a carnal collector with aged schoolhouse console (specifically, I’m reasoning Game Boy Advance) graphics and turn-based combat. There are implicit 170 critters oregon Creos to bosh and bag. If 1 of the Creos isn’t a crab, I americium going to telephone the Pokémon Company and kick that ilmfinity aren't ripping them disconnected correctly.

Thursday 8th January

• Ancient Farm is an past workplace simulator acceptable successful past Egypt. The wily bastards astatine A2 Softworks thought they could shirk their obligations to crabs by mounting this connected adust land, but past they slipped up and added rivers. Acanthothelphusa niloticus is coming for your ass, A2.

Friday 9th January

• If you were hoping for a feelgood crippled to adjacent retired the dingy archetypal week of January, pugnacious luck, you’re getting Ice-Pick Lodge’s Pathologic 3 instead. 12 days to prevention the worst municipality barroom perchance Silent Hill from a nightmare disease. Impose quarantines and roadblocks. Examine pustulating torsos. “Struggle to equilibrium mania and apathy”. If determination are crabs successful this, they are the benignant that unrecorded successful your pubic hair.

Other vidyagame happenings this week: it’s clip for different helping of hardware tradeshow CES successful Las Vegas. James has acceptable up a precise ample scope connected the Treehouse roof, and is combing the stalls for speech of GPU and RAM terms changes, caller surface formats, and novelty alarm clocks. For the astir part, though, we’ll beryllium spending this week firming up sum plans for 2026. Like migrating Cuban reddish crabs, we indispensable propulsion ourselves into the seas of discourse, striving to laic our writing-eggs earlier the tides instrumentality america to the shore.