Alright, Dark Souls fans. You know the drill. Hellpoint is an optionally-cooperative “intense action RPG”. It’s all gloom and shortcuts, and it’s out right now. For some reason developers Cradle Games aren’t billing it as a Souls ’em up but I’m onto them.

Regardless, it could be neat. You’re poking around a sci-fi citadel gone bad, now “overrun by cruel interdimensional entities acting as puppets of the malevolent Cosmic Gods”. I wouldn’t call it a looker but I still like what I see.

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Hubbish bubbish, rhymes are rubbish, eye of newt and blah blah blah. Gosh, magic is a chore. If only we had a catalyst to… Oh, hello reader, what are you doing here? Well, as it happens, yes, you can help me out. Just stand over here while I scratch these runes around you. I’m trying to summon the 9 best magic spells in PC games, you see. Stand still, please. You won’t feel a thing.

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I watched a lot of Bernard’s Watch as a child. This has left me with infrequent frustrations over not being able to pause time at my whim, and an unease over the prospect that anyone with such an ability would almost inevitably age, wither, and die before any of their loved ones. The greatest failing of Bernard’s Watch was its cowardly decision to leave this trauma unresolved.

Life Is Strange swaps out pausing time for rewinding it, which is better, but still makes me worry about Maxine’s memory banks.

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As a nostalgia trip, Sonic Mania is impeccably precise. So, naturally, you’ll want to really nail those throwback kicks by, uh, playing it through an unrelated publisher’s digital subscription service. The blue blur and his grossly mutated twin-tailed fox friend are now sprinting through EA’s Origin Access Premiere service, with Two Point Hospital and Endless Legend set to join them in the near future.

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Tom Clancy is anime now. At least he will be, with the reported announcement of an animated series based on long-dormant sneak ’em up Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell. While he’s been out of the videogame space a long time, it seems like Netflix and Ubisoft are bringing Sam Fisher back via the streaming service, greenlighting a two-season adaptation that probably promises plenty of awfully dark frames punctuated by green dots and neck-snapping noises.

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It’s a bit late to the battle royale party, but Hyper Scape is just about ready to leave open beta. Ditching the Twitch-drop invites to enter open beta earlier this month, Ubisoft’s take on the massive last-person-standing deathmatch genre launches properly next month, kicking off its first season with a new weapon, new hack, limited-time modes and the almost-mandatory 100-tier battle pass.

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If there’s one thing I respect in any creator, it’s commitment to a concept. I believe in going all-in on things, even when they’re ridiculous, on the principle that passion and dedication can elevate even the most outlandish nonsense to a state of beauty.

Fight Crab challenged this belief.

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Unfortunately, high stakes cybercrime in the real world isn’t quite as cool as it seems in Cyberpunk 2077. There’s no punked-up jacket plugging USB cables into his eyeballs to steal corporate secrets here – instead, it’s chumps trying their luck with email scams suggesting that you (yes, you!) have been given special access to the game’s supposedly-upcoming beta. It’s gotten bad enough that the devs have stepped in, warning fans that no, these aren’t legit, and there probably won’t even be a beta.

But you’re a smart kid, right? You probably knew that already.

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Spiritfarer

, the “cosy management game about dying”, is full of many little acts of kindness.

“You can hug anyone, by the way,” Nicolas Guérin tells me, during my recent hands-on preview. Guérin is creative director at Thunder Lotus Games, and Spiritfarer is a slight shift from their action games Sundered and Jotun. Death is a common theme, perhaps, but Spiritfarer is a much more gentle affair. I hug a little mushroom with arms and legs, who is the avatar of a seven- or eight-year-old boy. He leaps into my arms. It is very sweet.

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Eight years and a few hundreds of millions of dollars in crowdfunding into development, and Star Citizen‘s star-studded Squadron 42 campaign is still nowhere on our scanners. After plans for more regular updates seemed to fizzle out, Cloud Imperium today filed the paperwork to acquire planning permission to post an entirely new development roadmap for the revised roadmap they announced earlier this year.

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