Sundays are for trying to work out what the hell we’re supposed to do when every videogame company above a certain scale has business links to some kind of fearful death machine. And also, for rediscovering the joys of small fan heaters. My fan heater is called Phil. He hunkers by my feet and phils (fills) my ears with a soothing roar. Occasionally I try to dry socks on him and he gets mad, switches off and sulks for 15 minutes, but beyond that, we have a pretty good working relationship. He’s humming away right now as I assemble this round-up of Top Reads.

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This is proving to be one of the worst weeks of my life, for various reasons (no, not because Jason Schreier is mad at me). In my time of need, I open the magic portal of escapism and find Pathologic 3 looking back at me like a poison toad.

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Manor Lords and Terra Invicta publishers Hooded Horse are imposing a strict ban on generative AI assets in their games, with company co-founder Tim Bender describing it as an “ethics issue” and “a very frustrating thing to have to worry about”.

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The self-explanatory Don’t Stare is both a gamejam creation I enjoy for itself and also, an idea I’d love to be incorporated into any number of first-person RPGs. Here is how the latter possibility might work: you are bandying insults with the Demon King ahead of the final battle. You’ve got some solid bantz going, but there’s a note of awkwardness, for the Demon King has very large, protruding ears, and you can’t stop looking at them.

Such biteable tubercles! Such luscious lobes! The more you stare, the more agitated the Demon King becomes, till at last, he flees in tears before you’ve exchanged a single blow. And that, young Chosen One, is how we first defeated evil many decades ago. I understand the Demon King has had some plastic surgery since.

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Microlandia deserves a much longer article, preferably written by our resident virtual metropolis judger Sin Vega. For the moment, I will only say that it’s a work-in-progress city-builder fuelled by a poetical mixture of admiration and terror for cities.

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Was your new year resolution to rebuild an evil temple on behalf of a baleful god? I bring wonderful news, then. The former Epic and Valve developers of Dead Money LLC have signed a wicked pact with the strategy game illuminati of Hooded Horse to release Architect of Ruin – a “completely hand drawn” fantasy colony simulation game that looks like Dwarf Fortress twisted by 45 degrees and pumped full of Dungeon Keeper DNA. I am already in love with the trees, their rich foliage flattening to a core of shadow. Do not turn your back on the trees. Especially when you’re chopping them down to make arcane icons.

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Last January, our reviewer Brendan "Shitty Shitty Wham Bam" Caldwell called My Summer Car "a sordid sim of piss and pistons that won't hold your disgusting little hand", proceeding to warn that it "will either scare you off with its complexity or induce Stockholm syndrome with its mesmerisingly neglectful approach". Out now in early access, My Winter Car is all of that plus the "terrible coldness and darkness of Finnish winter", in the words of developers Amistech Games.

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Update 8th January 2026: Posting on Bluesky, Jason Schreier has called this article "a complete misunderstanding of what I said, which is that I wouldn't be shocked if GTA6 does come out this fall, following the same delay pattern as RDR2". I think this is a fair criticism of the introductory paragraph below and the fifth paragraph, in which I misread the line about not being "super shocked" as referring to the possibility of another delay. Apologies, Jason!

Original story follows:

GTA 6 may not yet be “content complete”, according to anonymous sources cited by Bloomberg’s scooper-dooper journoman Jason Schreier, and he would not be “super shocked” if the new Miami-set open world game were delayed again, though he thinks the current 19th November 2026 release date is relatively solid.

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Ubisoft are closing Ubisoft Halifax, the Canadian developers of mobile games Rainbow Six Mobile and Assassin's Creed Rebellion. This is strictly speaking outside our mandate as a PC gaming site, of course - I fear smartphones like Hell itself, and only ever communicate over long distances using homing pigeons - but it's all part of Ubisoft's wider transformation into a heavily Tencent-backed publisher, and the nasty twist is that Ubisoft Halifax had only just voted to unionise.

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I found the opening 15 minutes of EvoCreo’s demo to be a laugh riot, mostly because I accidentally named my character “Help”, not “Helen”. This lent a certain urgency to all the routine scene-setting and tutorial dialogue. Help, Farmer Whatshisname is looking for you! Help, I’m adding a map feature to your tablet! Help, there are over 170 Creos to discover! Given that RPGs can be sluggish at first, I think I’m going to adopt this as standard practice going forward. Nothing gets you over the opening hump like the impression that everybody you speak to has just escaped from a burning house.

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“Weird spiderwebs appearing at odd hours of the night in Rockstar’s open world game Red Dead Redemption 2?” you chortle. “That sounds like the testimony of crazy old Edwin Evans-Thirlwell, the guy who writes about new Molyneux projects like a pauper child returning from market with a handful of magic beans”. Mates, I promise I haven’t fallen victim to a scam of some kind. There are weird spiderwebs in RDR2. I read about it on the internet!

The spiderwebs appear to be part of a huge Easter egg puzzle the community (aka Youtubers, Xitter users and redditors) are now attempting to solve – an Easter egg that has allegedly lain uncracked since the game’s initial release in 2018. Spoilers to follow, of course.

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I'm a bit tantalised by FPS Quest, but I do worry that it has already defanged its most interesting ideas. Developed by Farlight Games Industry, it's a dungeon crawler in which your frame-rate "is your health", with mistakes and damage causing slowness and stuttering.

To regain health/frame-rate, you must do what you do when running any game on a potato PC - fiddle with the settings like you're bargaining with an especially recalcitrant devil. This extends from lowering the quality of wall textures and characters, to plucking out whole pieces of environment. The more you do this, of course, the stranger the world becomes and the harder it is to navigate. The killer line from the Steam page: "optimizing is risky". You'll also have to keep a lid on a simulation of your PC's temperature, and there are faux-prototype off-map areas to explore via noclip-style abilities.

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As the Bob Dylan song goes, how many lush alien planets must a Man presumptuously land on and turn into poorly optimised Toyota plants before he finally decides he’s sick of being an extractivist piece of shit? Dylan was being rhetorical, but I studied at the school of Homer Simpson, and want you to give me an actual figure. I’m going to say: four and a half. If you’ve yet to hit your personal quota, well, here’s StarRupture out now in early access.

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Late last year, RocketWerkz shared the first details of Kitten Space Agency - a spaceship engineering management game from a team including the original developer of Kerbal Space Program, which aims to fill the sparking void left by the downfall (or is it?) of Kerbal Space Program 2. Aside from introducing feline astronauts, the game runs on a new engine that can support a fancier and more consistent physics simulation.

It looks like catnip for Kerbollards (TM), though I have some broad reservations about the project's use of new community-funding platform Ahwoo. Among those working on Kitten Space Agency is Stefan Moluf, an actual real-life former spaceship flight software engineer, who wrote code for SpaceX launch vehicles and rockets back in the 2010s. In addition to discussing the game, which you can read about in depth here, we talked a little last year about how Moluf jumped between industries, and how programming rockets compares to programming rocket games. Fear not, the following chinwag makes no mention of Elon.

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The second alien fleet appears on the edge of our solar system around two hours into my first game of Terra Invicta, which leaves early access today, but I don’t have time to fret about them because I’m busy jockeying with the Protectorate for the keys to Mozambique. The Protectorate are a secret org who believe human beings are incapable of defeating the game’s extra-terrestrial creatures. As such, they feel we must aspire to become the very finest doormats, appeasing the invader in return for continued existence as a subordinate species.

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GTA 5 voice actor Ned Luke - aka Michael de Santa - got swatted for the eighth time over Xmas. I don’t mean that somebody belted him on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper. I mean that somebody put in a hoax call to emergency services in a bid to have armed police sent to his house. The latest incident happened this December while Luke was streaming GTA Online with Rob Wiethoff, the voice of John Marston in Red Dead Redemption and Red Dead Redemption 2. YouTuber IceBladeNinja has the whole clip for you to watch below.

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Before we begin the year’s first round-up of new PC game releases, an apology: we skipped feeding the Maw for one whole week back in December. In a deceptively carefree comment, I explained that I had too much seasonal blogmange to prepare, but this was actually a PR excuse to minimise hysteria. You see, back in November the Maw ate me, and I have only just exited its digestive system. During past emergencies, I’ve done this by hooking onto gumlines and working my way from tonsil to tonsil. This time I forgot to bring my climbing axes, and was obliged to escape in… the other direction.

It is best not to share more. Thankfully, the Maw’s internal odours are only smellable in the 11th through 17th dimensions, though they can still be detected in Normie Spacetime – you may have noticed that all the reflections are pinstriped today. Anyway, now that I’ve properly explained the break in service, let’s gingerly dip our still-reeking fingers into the spumes of commerce.

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It's a bad idea to predict a year's worth of Videogame Happenings while you are delirious with cold, but one of the advantages of being delirious with cold is that you become incapable of noticing that ideas are bad. In the brief interval before I eat a bowl of cakemix and fall asleep, here are some quick opinions about the Trends and Tribulations of 2026, mostly based on our reporting from 2025. The evergreen short version: it's never too late to get back into amateur dentistry.

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Most anticipated? Oh reader, you gentle, innocent child. Hark at you, ambling in here with supple joints, eyes clear as springwater, and the scent of hope in your hair. I have grown old, dear reader. I no longer feel this emotion called "anticipation", anymore than I remember the taste of strawberries in the Shire. Years of waiting for another Legacy of Kain game have broken my spirit. My heart is a sponge of sorrow. My beard coils round my ankles like a listless cat. All has become grey.

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Readers, you disgust me. How many videogames do you need? I spend all year heaping your plate with digital comestibles, and then you rock up at the arse end of December, clamouring for a "selection box" like a flock of gannets.

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