I’ve always found Dune: Awakening an oddball concept – it’s been repeatedly made clear, by Zendaya no less, that Arrakis will immediately kill, flay, and digest anyone who pokes a toe into its sands without an impossible sci-fi techsuit and a lifetime of edged weapons training. Not, you'd suspect, an obvious setting for a survival crafting game where genre conventions demand you begin life as some naked loser picking up sticks.

And yet, Awakening has turned out alright, hoisting desert exploration and ominous sci-fi atmospherics above the tedious 24/7 resource gathering that has choked out certain peers. PC performance is workable too, with enough concessions towards low-end rigs, though it’s not crysknife-sharp either: some technical mishaps need a prompt patching, while Unreal Engine 5 is up to its usual stuttering nonsense.

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Resident Evil: Requiem's first trailer tied it unambiguously to the wider Resiverse, with sweeping footage of a nuked and abandoned Raccoon City, but the slice of zombie survival I saw at this year’s Summer Game Fest felt like a pocket horror experiment in the vein of P.T. and Amnesia: The Bunker. I hope it’s not a one-off. I hope the whole game is like this.

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In Capcom’s sci-fi third-person shooter Pragmata, you are a gruff and gun-toting astronaut called Hugh Williams who is exploring an AI-operated moon base with the help of a juvenile android, Diana. She rides on your back like a sinister blue-eyed goblin, her enormous mop of blonde hair flapping in the wind as Hugh jets around on his suit thrusters.

The notes of God Of Warlike deuteragonism here betray Pragmata’s dragged-out development – it was announced in 2020, when Dad & Sprog action games were all the rage, but was delayed "indefinitely" in 2023. Still, the game I played at this year’s Summer Game Fest didn’t seem greatly the worse for its long spell in cryostasis. It’s a slick-thinking girl’s shooter and a gratifyingly bright and clicky piece of lunar set dressing, with shattering robot enemies that put me wistfully in mind of Binary Domain.

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Towards the end of my hands-off demo for Onimusha: Way Of The Sword, Capcom introduced me to a bunch of ragamuffin ninjas who moult their injured selves when struck. It looks like they're springing out of their own dying heads, like Athena bursting from the skull of Zeus. That's the kind of freak factor I want from an action-horror series whose last major instalment released in 2006. A bit of gentle madness to blow the dust off. A generous pinch of vicious little weasels who won't fight fair, to lift this Edo-era yokai hunt above the ranks of action games that just want you to combo and parry ad nauseum.

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We've already reported on the hidden radio stations you can listen to as you traipse about cutting up rocks in survival MMO Dune: Awakening. They play chiptuney classics from the original, 1992 Dune games that will drive you slightly mad even without huffing spice. But they also include full-blown radios drama based on various backstory events which unfolded before you arrived on-planet. It is like listening to a really intense episode of The Archers on BBC Radio Arrakis.

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Esports pros aren’t the only gamers who need higher frame rates these days, with advancements in GPUs squeezing more and more frames out of games.

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Some game demos, you write up after the expo because they need a bit of reflection; some game demos, you write up immediately because they are easy to digest, even through a droning fugue of jetlag; and some game demos, you write up immediately because they synchronise perfectly with your swivel-eyed, hyper-caffeinated delirium.

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Skyblivion’s been on track to come out in 2025 for a little while now, and now we know at least one of the places you’ll be able to grab it when it arrives - GOG.com.

The massive modding project that’s remaking The Elder Scrolls 4 in Skyrim’s engine has been in the works for over a decade. Having not had their hard work torpedoed by Bethesda and Virtuos’ own Oblivion remaster, its team are currently grafting hard to ensure they’re ready when the time comes to pull the release trigger.

With the mod now confirmed by GOG to be arriving on the PC storefront in 2025, assuming it makes its current release goal, I reached out to Skyblivion project lead Kyle 'Rebelzize' Rebel and GOG themselves. We chatted about what went into the decision for the same PC storefront that hosted Fallout: London’s release last year to handle this Oblivion-remaking Skyrim mod, and where progress is at on the road to release.

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