Marathon lives! Well, of course it does, it would be quite shocking if PlayStation were to cancel it before it even got a chance to become Concord 2, but that's neither here nor there. What is here, and soon to be there, is another playtest, of which sign-ups are now available. It is being dubbed a "closed technical test," and plans to run for just a few days, between October 22nd and October 28th, but there are a few differences to be found compared to when we last saw it.

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In the late '90s, early 2000s, there were two distinct flavours of aesthetics: boomer shooters, and Y2K girlypop vibes (for the sake of this argument we will ignore every other aesthetic that existed at the time). Boomer shooters like Doom and Wolfenstein were bloody, gory, and had a real "video games are gritty and cool now kind of vibe." Conversely, products aimed at young girls were often glittery, pink, featured leopard print, and were often about love and harmony. Don't Stop, Girlypop! is a game that combines these two vibes, and it is very good (and stressful).

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I dunno about you, but I usually dig a big Skyrim mod that threatens to make my number of hours spent padding around Tamriel even more ludicrous. Lordbound is the latest danger to the free time of poor folks like me, having just soft launched after ten years of development spent creating a fresh region bigger than the Dragonborn DLC's Solstheim and filling it with stuff to do.

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Oh boy. Unfortunately, it's one of those days. You might remember that last week, Dune: Awakening developer Funcom laid off an unspecified number of staff. Yep, that same Dune: Awakening that appeared to be doing pretty well for itself. Go figure! Today, there's more bad news, as it turns out that Metal: Hellsinger studio The Outsiders will be shutting down completely as part of said layoffs at parent company Funcom.

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Assassin's Creed Mirage's free Valley of Memory DLC, reportedly the product of a partnership between the publishers and the Saudi-backed Savvy Games Group, releases in November.

Announced back in August, the free DLC takes players to 9th century AlUla, an ancient oasis city and governorate in Saudi Arabia. Ubisoft's announcement post didn't mention the country by name.

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Enginefall is as much about fabricating bandages and building hovels as it is about mad locomotive sci-fi, but upon being invited to try out an early build, its concept proved compelling enough to punch through my survival crafting fatigue like a runaway... I dunno, bus. Basically it’s a first-person Snowpiecer-em up, where a typical session sees postapocalypse survivors raiding enormous trains, fighting (or joining forces) from tail to tip to usurp the conductor’s position and steal precious fuel cores before escaping back to their own private engine.

Again, I like the idea. I especially like that Enginefall isn’t massively fussed how you deal with other Tailies – alliances, truces, and armed banditry are all permitted and accommodated for. What I played last week, sadly, was awkward, janky, and undercooked, to the point where the one thing more ambitious than the game’s railriding concept might be its Q1 2026 release plan.

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