A good look at the world, story and gameplay of the Gothic Remake has been shared during this THQ Nordic Summer Showcase, exploring the ways that this is both faithful to and an improvement upon the cult classic 2001 RPG.

Featuring clips of gameplay and other in-game shots, there’s a good four minutes of footage in the trailer, as THQ and developer Alkimia Interactive explore the various facets of the game that they are rebuilding from the ground up.

Set in a medieval fantasy where the Kingdom of Myrtana is fighting a war against Orcs, the king has made a desperate move to send any and all criminals to the Valley of Mines to extract magical ore that can be used to construct powerful weapons. Trying to seal the valley with a magical dome, the spell goes wrong, permanently sealing the valley, giving the convicts a chance to rapidly take control. Now there are three camps and ways of thinking, the Old Camp, New Camp and the Sleeper (who worship a mysterious new swamp deity), and you’ll have to decide which team to side with.

The world is key to the RPG with daily cycles for its inhabitants, while you’re given the freedom to explore and tackle the unfolding story as you see fit, taking on quests to earn respect, but then having freedom to complete them how you see fit. The combat remains slow and methodical, with melee, bow and arrow, and arcana all available to you.

As a remake of such a beloved title, Alkimia is retaining everything that was there in the original, but expanding on the world to tell new stories and grow existing ones. More diverse NPC routines and actions will be built into the setting, and there’s new places to explore, thanks in part to swimming, diving and the new climbing ability improving how you can get around.

Combat controls have been modernised, while still aiming to be tactical and slow paced, while there’s also more complex crafting and character progression systems. The UI is generally kept to a minimum to keep players immersed in the world.

Gothic has been in the works for quite some time. It was greenlit off the back of some canny marketing by THQ Nordic, first commissioning a playable teaser that was made and released in 2019 to show what a Gothic remake might be able to offer, and then gathering what ended up being “unambiguous feedback” from fans. Off the back of this, they founded Alkimia Interactive in Barcelona specifically for the remake, and they’ve been plugging away at it ever since.

There’s obviously some real progress being made, but there’s still no sign of a release date, so I expect we’ll be back here again at THQ Nordic’s summer showcase in 2025?

As proudly individual as each game in the SteamWorld series is, sometimes you just want a good old fashioned sequel, a game that goes back over familiar ground and tries to make things bigger and better. With close to a decade since the original, it feels like high time that Thunderful return to one of their most popular entries with the side-scrolling turn-based action of SteamWorld Heist 2.

Where the first Heist was a space-faring jaunt in junky steampunk ships, SteamWorld Heist 2 throws you right into the midsts of a great ecological crisis threatening its watery world where boats and subs are the order of the day. Oh sure, it’s already just a fragment of a planet hurtling through space, but where now Steambots are struggling to find clean water, afflicting them with Rust, and there’s literally just one ship’s captain who’s got a hope of unpicking the mystery of what’s going on. Captain Leeway steps into the breach – no, not “Krakenbane” herself, but her son – or at least, he would do, but at the start of the game, he’s very much down on his luck, his inherited submarine having been confiscated and having lost his good arm for shooting.

So the game opens with an introductory mission with his last two trusty crew members embarking on an audacious mission to steal his submarine back, facing off against the Dieselbots of the Royal Navy to do so. This personal task successfully completed, and Captain Leeway is thrust into continuing his campaign against the Dieselbots, the mysteriously bony Rattlers, and trying to get to the bottom of what’s giving all the Steambots a nasty case of Rust – hint, it’s the salty water.

Just as before, SteamWorld Heist 2 is XCOM given the Flat Stanley treatment. Instead of commanding your handful of crew members through 3D spaces, you’ve got a side-on view of every combat location. It’s a nice and permissive kind of turn-based tactical battling though, letting you aim and shoot through the cover you’re hiding behind and past allies, through thinner gantry-like flooring, and using ricochets to hit enemies who are in cover themselves. And instead of aim being a percentage based roll of the dice, it’s more like Worms in that you have to line up your shot and then time it with the natural sway of the weapon – It helps greatly that one of your first characters is a sniper, which gives you a laser sight that even shows bullet bounces.

SteamWorld Heist 2 comes with a new Jobs system for classes, though, all dependent on which primary weapon is equipped. There’s no limitations to Job switching, and as soon as you’ve gained a level in one role, those skills can then be unlocked for another role by assigning Cogs. The Flanker and Brawler are easy to synergise, giving a melee character much enhanced movement, while you could turn your Sniper into a backline support with cover building and team healing abilities from the Engineer.

The deeper you get into the game, the more weapons and gear that you’ll earn, and there’s further avenues to upgrade your characters and roster as a whole. Higher levelled weapons will dish out more damage, and there’s also Epic weapons with special effects, like a sniper with electric discharge, or a crossbow for the Reaper instead of an SMG.

There’s some great nuances to explore here, especially as you need to make the very most of every advantage your get on higher difficulties, and there’s missions that will hew toward one style of play or another. Compared to the original, level layouts are now fixed, but with randomised cover and enemies, so you have much more repeatable experiences than the more broadly procedural levels of before. That leads to missions where, confronted with countless Rattler totems and a secondary objective not to destroy any of them yourself, you’ll need precision and minimal ricochets – it took me a few tries. And then there’s just stages that are designed for varying team sizes.

Another big area that SteamWorld Heist 2 improves upon is with everything between missions. Yes, there’s downtime at safe havens and bars, where you can rest up to get to the next day, shop for better gear and chat to NPCs – you’ll also get the luxurious vocal harmonies of the original songs by Steam Powered Giraffe stuck in your head – but then there’s the neat open world to sail around to get to each location, and enemy ships to battle.

The submarine is pretty weak to start off, but with weapon mounts to the side, front and top, as well as more unlockable slots for upgrades, it can become a pretty fierce little thing, capable of taking on enemy capital ships. That’s especially true because of how agile it is with responsive arcade handling, not to mention the upgrade to let you dive beneath the surface – where you’ll come to find other subs and mines. It’s a fun diversion between the sometimes gruelling battles.

By default, the game comes at you with the Experienced difficulty level, and through the opening regions, that’s pretty straightforward to handle. However, the Rattlers can really swarm you and levels often have enemy spawn points that make you scramble and rush just to survive – by the third or fourth region the difficulty had really stepped up a few notches. Thankfully the difficulty is customisable beyond the fistful of presets, and a checkpoint system mid-level lets you roll back up to two turns if you want to slap yourself for a dumb move or fluffed shot.

Sometimes a game doesn’t need an engrossing story or compelling main characters. Sometimes, you just want to go from virtual arena to virtual arena and take out enemies with an assortment of weapons, tools and abilities. This is what Deadlink offers. It is a roguelike first-person shooter set in a cyberpunk world where corporations are more powerful than governments, and have the violent means to hold onto that power. You are a brain in a jar that can be transferred to different combat shells, using their skills in a VR setting to test their capabilities against those corpo assets.

From the off, you can see Deadlink has a lot of depth to it. You’ll be repeating runs to earn experience and points, allowing you to unlock new skills and abilities while making progress across levels to unlock the other three ‘shells’ to shove your brain into. The default Soldier shell is not all it’s cracked up to be, and while it suits the first area it is the least fun to use. It comes equipped with a shotgun and rocket launcher, while the abilities include a rappel that can hook onto surfaces and enemies, and a Scrambler that marks and staggers foes. The Hunter shell is more entertaining to use, coming equipped with a Hand Cannon and Arc Cannon, as well as the translocator ability, which swaps your position with a normal enemy as well as marking and stunning them. The next shell is the Decoy which leaves behind a hologram that enemies target while you stay invisible for a bit, but it’s far from being the most fun to use.

That title goes to the Engineer, which comes equipped with a Gauss automatic rifle and a grenade launcher. The Engineer’s deeply enjoyable abilities include being able to deploy a turret, and use a wormlink that can link to enemies marking and incapacitating them. Finally, there’s the Juggernaut, armed with a sawed-off shotgun and a flak cannon, with a Graviton Punch ability which can destroy some enemies in one hit, and Stray Redirector which makes the shell invulnerable for a bit, but sacrifices movement speed. While I did experiment with all the shells, it was Engineer I kept going back to, though Hunter, Juggernaut, and Soldier all offered something different to enjoy.

The combat shells are just one small part of what Deadlink offers. Once you’ve selected your shell, you’ll eventually have three modes open up. The Campaign challenges you to move through four stages, each made up of rooms and with a boss waiting at the end. Time Attack offers courses that will test your reactions, and there’s the Extant Existence mode which is an unlimited wave mode, where you try to survive against enemies for as long as possible. Unlike many Roguelikes, the rooms themselves are set so you can learn enemy spawn patterns, but the challenge will always be different due to your implants. Implants and room transitions is where the Roguelike elements of Deadlink come in.

Deadlink’s implant system is the anchor of the Roguelike, making  you consider their strategies on every run. As you progress through each arena you may get the chance to equip an implant, or make adjustments to weapons and the shell. These can be anything from adding fire or toxic damage to your gun, making your abilities more powerful, or improving the amount of health and shield you have. You won’t know what implant will be offered so you really are coming up with your approach on the fly. The implants themselves have different tiers, and need different amounts of power, which you can see in the equip screen. Legendary implants require the most power as they offer the best advantages, for example, providing a combat drone to assist.

The power management is easy to figure out, as rows on menu show how much battery power is needed for a slot to be used. Furthermore, implants are split into active and passive. Active implants demand action being taken by you, like activating an ability, or breaking the C-balls that are floating around the arena, while passive implants are always on in the background. There are dozens of implants to find and unlock, with more being made available as you level up. I have to say, my best run came from having a majority of passive implants, as then I could just focus more on running and gunning.

The levelling up system has its own depth with upgrades available for individual shells, as well as general upgrades that improve health, shields, unlock new tiers of weapon mods, upgrades, and more permanent buffs or abilities, such as the defibrillator which will revive you once on a run. Some upgrades require experience points to unlock, while others require Turing Tokens, with the better ones requiring both. Experience is earned through playing the levels, while Turing Tokens can be found as one of the offers at the end of an arena, or through defeating bosses.

All of these in-depth systems of implants and levelling feed into the main experience. Deadlink only has four overall stages, split into combat arenas, but with the challenge you will not get past the first two, Tora and Watts, without significant experience and upgrades. The action is very fast paced, and you are almost always moving to avoid incoming attacks while firing off your own, but it does start to feel a bit repetitive as you go through the same levels trying to move further. There are no surprises waiting for you in the initial runs most of the time, though occasionally you will need to survive for 45 seconds, which isn’t a huge challenge, or break corrupt C-Balls. To unlock the higher difficulties you also need to complete runs on the lower difficulty, which does give something to aim for but also risks you burning out.