This week in PC games: a battle royale detective game, a broken Y2K metaverse, a laptop tycoon sim, and a new Company of Heroes RTS

What we're feeding the Maw

Hello all! Welcome to another week of sordid digital diversions, aka new PC games, dumped upon the innocent wanderer like a chamberpot upended over your head by a Victorian maid, as you saunter down an alleyway in your finest crinoline and lobster tail bustle. How are you supposed to attend the Crown Prince's soirée in this bedraggled state? In vain do you shake your reeking fists at the chambermaid, for she is a minion of the Maw, and only squawks with glee. You totter out of the alleyway, mopping your face with your nosegay, and are promptly arrested for being a public obscenity.

Enough of this pissy period palaver! Our list of the week's most promising new PC releases awaits. It's a longer edition, possibly because my laptop audio stopped working halfway through the curation process, so I may have included a few extra games that sound absolutely abysmal.

Monday 27th July

• Endacopia is a point-and-click horror game inspired by 90s edutainment software. I have a soft spot for antique edutainment games, but I enjoy the chilliness of this.
• Broken Reality 2000 is a first-person puzzle-platforming adventure set in a predatory Y2K metaverse with euphoric Space Channel 5 aesthetics.
• Plum Road Tea Dream is a semi-autobiographical adventure about a queer POC developer moving through seven worlds that span a range of graphical styles. A journey of "self-acceptance and resilience".
• In Moon Crashers you have crashed upon the moon. Now, you and three friends must scour the surface for metal and crystals with which to build an escape rocket. First, you'll probably need to build a bunch of buggies that handle like "soap on ice".
• Forsaken Realms: Vahrin's Call looks like no-frills third-person genre fantasy fare, with a lot of colourful scenery and backstory to chew into. It's about a mercenary fighting their way through a gutted and beleaguered city. Slight Kingdoms of Amalur vibes, perhaps.
• In roguelike deckbuilder Kinny and the Cosmic Cauldron, you're a witch cook chucking volatile ingredients into a big pot. The stranger the soup, the better – your clients are all eldritch beings.

Tuesday 28th July

• Dissolution of the Silent Union combines gloomy anime girls with photography of eerie abandoned buildings. "A melancholic and liminal short story played in a single sitting, where the fear of collapse is felt at every moment."
• In Orbital Hell you and your autofiring rotary cannon are stuck in a hollow planet with endless batches of geometric boglins. Looks like a hallucinatory score-attacker in the Devil Daggers vein.
• Désorienté is a mucky narrative… thing that takes place in "a violent world where intestines are the only currency" and features "a medieval language spoken in northern France between the 9th and 14th centuries". Certainly quite a specific seam of ugliness being mined here.

Wednesday 29th July

• CipherMind is a battle royale detective game, would you believe. Eight players trapped in a big concrete labyrinth must deduce each other's names in order to delete opponents.
• Lunarium is a dishy action-RPG with an elevated diagonal perspective, in which two girls, a knight and a floating sorceress, hack and spellcast through castles, temples and caverns. They have spelled "Embroidery" wrong on the Steam page but I'll allow it, because the art is quite lovely.
• It's time to weather a few waves of World Warriors (II) in Relic's spin-off strategy game Company of Heroes 3: Final Stand.
• In dicey RPG Joy Malignant, you're a faceless soul assembling the mosaic of your past in a city of the damned. Oisin enjoyed the demo.
• Truck-kun is Supporting Me from Another World?! is the latest spoofy debauch from Strange Scaffold. It stars the real hero of any isekai, the truck driver who accidentally kills the protagonist in the opening moments so that they can reincarnate in fantasy land. In this variation, you have to keep running people over to generate munsters so that the isekai heroine can level up.
• Outfield is an urgent lesson in the pros and cons of growing crops taller than your head. Pros: you can hide in them. Cons: other things can hide in them.
• There are head-high crops in the first episode of Olga, too, but this is one of them cosypunk, cottagecore adventures with no combat. Nothing will eat you and there is no rush.

Thursday 30th July

• Blast and board galleons just like we used to in *squints* possibly the 1990s in Legacy of Sail, a real-time naval tactics-me-do.
• Culdcept The First is a new version of the 1997 boardgame/cardgame fusion, in which players move around a grid-based map summoning creatures with cards, harvesting magic power, and sabotaging each other. On paper, it reminds me of the much more recent Armello.
• Mistfall Hunter (pictured) is a big lustrous PvPvE extraction RPG. There's Gyldenblood in them thar Gyldenmists! Also a petrified giant or two.
• It is not our place to question why turnips have hands in Turnip Mountain, a 2D climbing sim in which you can plug in a second mouse to control your other hand. Or just use a regular dual analog stick controller if you're BORING.
• Signy & Mino: Against All Gods pits a girl and her dog against some gods (useful trivia: "dog" is "god" spelled backwards). It's a side-scrolling, vaguely turn-based RPG that hinges on chaining moves and extending the combo between enemies.
• Oh sweet merciful heaven – a laptop building tycoon simulator.

Friday 31st July

• Devil's Hand is about forming poker hands on a grid to clear your deck and save a Soul Card from Satan.
• Confidence is a preference for the habitual voyeur of what is known as Parkside: Decayed Soul Manipulation, an immiserating sim shooter set in California 2038, featuring some hacking and many alleyways awash with charismatic trash.
• Dreamy 3D puzzle-platformer Cloud Sculptor is about moulding and chiselling statues for weird ghosts. It refers to a frog as a "classic sculpting tool". I have no independent expertise with which to challenge this statement.

This week I am thinking about: recommendation algorithms. Of the many vampiric datafeeds you likely make use of in daily life, which would you say is the 'best'? Which does the most insidious job of exposing you to New Stuff, without advertising the fact that some dire corporation owns a bunch of your data and is attempting to optimise your tastes? Which of them is least/most like a contemptuous and insanitary, foulmouthed and unrepentant Victorian chambermaid? Have a good week, wherever you are, and let me know if we've missed anything special.