Akatori centers on Mako, a young girl wielding a magical staff and tasked with ending the toxic Amber Storms plaguing her world. This is no ordinary staff, either. Sealed within it is a magical bird, fittingly named Akatori. Hey, that’s the title of the game!

: Big Walk is exclusively a cooperative online multiplayer game. Absolutely no part of it aside from the tiny opening hub area is remotely playable with only one player, and couch co-op is intentionally not included for reasons that will become clear shortly.

What the hell is Truxton Extreme? No, it's not the name of Elon Musk's latest kid - good guess, though. Instead, it's a surprising new entry in a series many have likely never heard of: a shoot-'em-up arcade title known simply as Truxton (or Tatsujin in Japan, meaning “expert”).

For all the similarities Kusan shares with the game that inspired it, the story isn’t one of them. Developer CIRCLEfromDOT delivers an in‑your‑face narrative wrapped in gorgeous comic‑panel artwork, yet the substance underneath doesn’t quite keep pace.

Much like the original, Tormentum II doesn’t aim to reinvent the fleshy, alienesque wheel, so to speak.

Tears of Metal is a game that allows you to do just that while fighting alongside your Scottish forces to reclaim your home from foreign invaders. So you get to wear a kilt and have a short commute!

Lifted is a game whose intentions are pure—to take the normally quite morose cinematic platformer genre popularized by Inside, Limbo, Planet of Lana, and others, and give it a colorful, family-friendly setting with a Pixar-esque vibe.

IVE or DIE - Children of Rain, capitalizes its verbs for good reason: death is constantly tugging at your sleeve and the only way to swat it away for one more day is to brave the perilous depths of what-used-to-be human civilization.

Folks, I'm afraid to be the bearer of bad news today. Gaming has peaked. This is it - there's nowhere to go but down. And you can thank Heave Ho 2 for this, because with its release we finally have a game that allows you to fart on your friends as a dedicated feature.

Desktop Explorer blends puzzles with outdated software and cryptic files that you must sift through and even modify to find out what is actually going on in this weirdly sentient computer. It has been left behind by your uncle, who has recently passed away, and is full of notes and information that he left behind for you to look through. The computer also comes with an odd software called "Desktop Explorer," which houses different adventure-style quests.

The recommended way of playing The Mound is naturally, with a group of willing participants, but that’s a terrible thing to do to your friends, so maybe try to find some players online or go it alone (if you dare).

In Pathogenic, you’ll control a lone disease attempting to hijack the human body. This means traversing its many components, including the skin, stomach, liver, and beyond, yummy!

The Mermaid Mask’s gameplay is extremely reminiscent of the Professor Layton games, and I think that’s one of its greatest appeals. You navigate the town of Silkworm-on-Sea through a point-and-click system where you can interact with any object on the map.

Deer & Boy features our titular Deer & Boy on a journey across the country, spanning forests, factories, mountains, and caves, and with every part of our journey, we face a whole host of hazards, challenges, and beautiful vistas to ogle at. Developers Lifeline Games have touted Deer & Boy as ‘an animated film you can play,’ and that is exactly what they have achieved, with a beautiful story, gorgeous world, and all the adorable animal companionship Disney made commonplace.

, Dark Scrolls is the latest game to take a swing at what was once considered an exciting genre, though to developer doinksoft’s credit, they are at least attempting something a bit different by having an old-school auto-scrolling screen that can quite literally crush players if they don’t keep moving forward.

o what is Swapmeat? Well, it's not the lingo used to exchange nudes on Grindr (though perhaps it should be), nor is it a weird phallus-swapping porno inspired by Freaky Friday, though again - maybe someone should be taking notes. Instead, Swapmeat is the gaming scene’s newest attempt to be actively repulsive to vegetarians, bringing us a beef-themed third-person shooter and roguelike that takes massive inspiration from Risk of Rain 2...

Now, I don't play a lot of beat-'em-ups as I often find their gameplay to be as repetitive as those fake mobile games ads YouTube probably forced you to watch at the start of this video. But occasionally, ones like Absolum or Big Helmet Heroes will be great enough to tickle my fancy and earn a recommendation, genre misgivings aside. Is Lost Castle 2 such a game?

Crushed in Time is a sort of spin-off of the developer’s first game, There is No Game: Wrong Dimension, where you traverse different video game universes in a point-and-click adventure. One of these universes included Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, and the team must have loved them so much that they decided to give them their own game.

I didn’t think much when Witchspire came my way. An open-world game full of things to find, stuff to craft, brooms to fly, and critter souls to harvest and force into indentured servitude. A big point of the game is to live and frolic with your other little witch friends.

Does Voidling Bound, a twist on the monster-taming genre, work? Or is it just another monstrosity?