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From the deep ambers, oranges, and lilacs of its colour scheme to the way its protagonist wields his sword, it is clear that Duskfade takes some inspiration from Kingdom Hearts. This is not a bad thing. Part of the fun with the indie landscape today is how developers can take familiar ideas and spin them into something original. However, there is also an implicit promise when developers go down this route that on some level, their game will also be for fans of the same source of inspiration.

Europe is being ravaged by wildfires and hit with relentless heatwaves, so we really wish we could bring you a good Update Patch this week. Unfortunately, the biggest companies in gaming decided to end July with a slew of bad news.

It’s funny: I’m playing on a larger screen, but reading strikes me as way less convenient than it would on PC, or even on a Switch set to handheld mode.

When we look at the most successful AAA open-world games, we might often recognise the same strengths: larger than life worlds that are pieced together brick by brick for players and made vivid through high-fidelity graphics. What if one of those games had a world that was really large, but also really small? What if the world was pieced together with plastic bricks?

While I genuinely enjoyed my time with Momento, it is not a perfect game. Some of its flaws are things the dev team can fix, but some are more fundamental to the game as a whole. As for my minor gripes: the controls are extremely finicky, to the point of occasional frustration. The fixed camera angle is an understandable design choice, but makes it hard to get some items onto the shelves or into the cupboards you want.

Fatekeeper is one of the most bizarre games I’ve ever played. Its announcement blew me away with fantastic visuals, excellent animations, and the inclusion of an original language — all of this in a project created by a small indie team. Ten months have passed since the announcement, and Fatekeeper is now out in early access, and after two and a half hours with the game — which was enough to finish the currently available content — I can say it is a beautiful looking, if rough playing experience.

Carissa is a high-powered marketing executive that has given her entire life to ascending the corporate ladder, at the expense of her social life, romance, her video game hobby, and even her precious anime figures. On the day of her big promotion to VP of Marketing, a celebrating Carissa is accidentally run over by a truck driver, the playable character. Instead of dying, she is magically transported to the fantasy realm of Talinfold and morphed into an armoured elven warrior.

The rush of a train speeding through a forest, the anxiety of borderline out-of-control turns, the thrill of landing that last-second heelflip, and the surprise of completing an objective you weren’t gunning for: these are some of the feelings Denshattack! elicits. It’s easy at first to dismiss the game with “it’s Tony Hawk but trains”, but there’s so much more going on here.

Another day, another defeat for physical media fans everywhere. On 1st of July 2026, Sony revealed its intentions to end production of physical game discs for PlayStation games in January 2028. From that date, new PlayStation games will only be available in digital formats, including those copies still sold at retailers, which will now come as download codes in a case.

One of my big failures as a preeminent review artist is my bitchy, grouchy, temperamental moods. When the PC-based platformer Valkyrie Saga came to me in January almost everything poised about it being a relaxing, meditative platformer soured me. This is the weakness of a life lived in excess: something funny about it is that two months spent playing AAA games out of bitter curiosity at the state of what $70 video games looked like drove me right back into its wings — er, arms.