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In the UK, May has hitherto been a month of innocent delight and sacred observance, with no less than two bank holidays. On May Day - a festival of ancient origins that shares a date with International Workers' Day - the youths of the village garb themselves in daisies, erect huge candy-striped maypoles, and dance around them in an effort to get all entangled and possibly end up kissing. NO MORE. For May is now the month of DOOM. It marks the coming of a new Dark Age.

Which is to say, it's when we'll get to play id Software's cacodemon-booping FPS Doom: The Dark Ages, going by a leaked release date ahead of tomorrow's Xbox Developer Direct.

Halo has a history of embracing wacky game modes, and Halo Infinite players are seeing that tradition continue this week with a new playlist of game modes. "Action Sack" is a returning playlist for the series. It first appeared in Halo 3 as a rotating set of modes that would see you quickly cycling through various deadly minigames, from chaotic rockets-only nukefests to panicky punch-ups with ammoless pistols. This time, the playlist includes a familiar geometric hazard that has seen the death of many a bean: the "hex-a-gone" level from Fall Guys.

"Your grace, the act of assigning blame is often as satisfying as resolving the issue itself," opens brilliant little browser strategy Vox Regis by Sheepolution. From your tower, you gaze down at four factions, each with their own members and complaints. If any one faction gets too large, they'll rebel against you. Luckily, you're very good at speeches, which you can use to blame all the realm's ills on other people. "It was the lion faction! They raised taxes!" you shout and point with one hand, holding a big bag emblazoned "taxes I done stole from the people" with the other. It worked! Now, the members from the other factions that are personally annoyed about taxes will come cull the lion faction down to a more manageable size. Bloody love a bit of politics, me!

Each year, the Game Developers Conference (GDC) release the results of their State Of The Game Industry Survey, which collects responses from over 3000 developers. The 13th annual survey - which you can find in full here - queries respondents on topics including layoffs, generative AI, the live service boom, and funding. As is the nature of our times, it's a big grim salad with a few bright crouton sprinklings. From the report's introduction, which does not mention croutons even once:

Many moons ago in the Before Times, a mysterious cataclysm scattered a number of seasoned BioWare developers across the face of heaven. The developers fell upon the mortal planes like comets. Where each landed, a game development studio took root. Inflexion Games. Summerfall Studios. Humanoid Origin. Worlds Untold. Archetype Entertainment.

Summerfall appear to be prospering, but many of the studios founded by former BioWare devs have experienced hard times. In particular, Humanoid Origin and Worlds Untold have respectively closed and "paused operations" without releasing a single game. I'm raising a tentatively congratulatory glass, then, to Yellow Brick Games, a studio founded by former Dragon Age director Mike Laidlaw. The company's debut game Eternal Strands will release on 28th January, and there's now a PC demo.

Or months ago, maybe. I don't know and I have no time to check, because I'm playing the Steam demo for The King Is Watching. I wrote about it last year, but that was an older demo build. Things were different then, but the core of this minimalist city builder strategy remains: you'll need to actively train your kingly eyes on your feckless underlings if you want them to do any work. Don't watch the wheat fields, no food. Don't watch the barracks, no knights. You'll need those knights to defend from attacks too. Do you see how it all connects?! Do you?! Please, do your research. Here's a trailer to help:

Debate continues to rage on the internetworks about whether premium video games, and especially the ones with the largest budgets, need to have higher price tags. This time, the culprit is Matthew Ball of analyst firm Epyllion, who remarks in a sprawling State Of Videogaming 2025 report that "some gamemakers hope GTA 6 will be priced at $80-$100 [in the USA], breaking the $70 barrier and helping $50 titles to move up to $60, $60 to $70, $70 to $80, etc."

Picked up by VGC, these comments have now been circulated on social media, and have attracted the extremely polarised mixture of responses you're probably expecting. Among those chipping in is Larian's director of publishing Michael Douse, who makes the familiar argument that overall prices for games like GTA aren't necessarily higher today when you factor in economic inflation, while also acknowledging that up-front price alone doesn't explain the industry's recent mass livelihood devastation, and that few people would happily pay that much for a video game - not even Our Lord In Open Worlding GTA.

The relaxing fish catchin' and scratchcard gamblin' of Webfishing proved itself deeply attractive to anyone looking for an easygoing escape. So it makes sense at least one other developer is looking to apply the same lo-fi principles to their own "hangout game". The simply titled Sledding Game looks like a chill afternoon of standing around on mountains with your mates and going for a big slide downhill every now and again. It's still early in development, as you can tell from the trailer below. But you'll be able to embody penguins, frogs, and polar bears as they drink hot cocoa in log cabins and ragdoll into one another willy-nilly. Other cute animals are to be confirmed, but I am putting my money on an dopey-faced ermine.

Steam are throwing a Real-Time Strategy Fest this week, encompassing discounts and demos, and people who like clicking on Orc-emitting huts are eating well. Of the new strategy game demos I've spotted so far, the one that interests me most is Calyx, in which you are at war with a mass of alien vegetation, which expands toward your base in a blossoming, suffocating avalanche of green moss and purple tendril. It seems a bit raw at the level of controls and performance, but the concept is very promising: basically, imagine if Creeper World 4 were a bit more like Ground Control. Here's a trailer.

Capcom have declared that they hope to bring down the recommended PC specs for open world dinosaur-tipping simulator Monster Hunter Wilds, just a month before release day on 28th February, and a few weeks ahead of the final open beta. Much like an exhausted hunter applying a carving knife to the flanks of a steaming heap of Rathalos, they shall trim and whittle their prize to its essential organs - hmm, actually we never see the concluding butchery in Monster Hunter games, now that I think of it. You just waft your knife around dramatically while the slaughtered quarry peacefully disappears and chunks of dino component materialise in your inventory.

One piece of worldbuilding advice I've always found useful is to go at least one level deeper than the obvious. To wit: why have a lantern, asks FPS Mohrta, when you can have a horrible vulture-esque creature called a lantern beast that lives on your head to light up the dark for you? "Found a good'un," I wrote in Slack shortly after playing Mohrta's Steam demo. "It's so rad and strange!". Well, that's the pitch, reader. It's a "nonlinear FPS game blending action, exploration, and light dungeon crawling". Very rad. Very strange. Nom nom.

Cyclopean: The Great Abyss appears to have glorious dungeon graphics but I can't say for sure because I can't get torches to work. I think your character is supposed to kindle them automatically when you venture into a dungeon - at which point the view switches, classic Ultima-style, from top-down into first-person. My character never deigns to light a torch, however. Possibly this is because, no matter how many torches I loot or buy from the underworld's infrequent traders, my character page always tells me I have none. Is my character eating them? Are they too afraid to light them and expose what those dungeons contain? Do I need to read the manual properly? Or is it just a bug?

An unannounced "PvE Action RPG" set in one of Games Workshop's fantasy properties was apparently in development until being cancelled late last year, according to a new report from mp1st.

News of the project was pieced together by mp1st from several LinkedIn profiles belonging to former employees of studio Thought Pennies. Different sources alternately describe the project as a “multiplatform, social role-playing game" and a "fantasy live-service RPG", although it's possible these refer to different projects from the same time period.

Please excuse the eyeball jelly. I've just got done tearing my face away from the screen it was attached to by the glitter and amphetamine-infused superglue secreted by Mindwave's minigame barrage. The current Steam demo is a generous slice of a wonderful thing its developers describe as a "cerebral microgame frenzy". It's the sort of thing you play for five minutes before realising, not unpleasantly, that you are most definitely inside of it now. It has wrapped you all up, and it's going to be quite difficult to escape. Trailer below:

Isn't Straftat a pleasing word to say? Straftat. It almost demands an angry bark, an accusatory finger. Straftat! The bite-sized two-player shooter was one of our favourite games of last year, summoning the fast-paced killthrills of ancient Quake servers as much as the quickfire 1v1 scraps of the gulag in Call of Duty: Warzone. And now it has a bunch of new maps. Not content with making the powerful pew-pew 'em up completely free (WHAT), the developers have added new weapons, features and a further 30 bullet-pocked arenas. And look, an icy and divisive fan-made map of ye olde Counter-Strike appears among them.

Superhero card game Marvel Snap has been taken offline in the USA as part of the US government's ban-or-divest policy towards ByteDance, the Chinese company best known for owning and operating shortform video-streaming service TikTok.

As much as I'd like to dredge up an old RPS tradition and write "Severance is back!" repeatedly for 500 words, I'll resist the urge and instead just slide a nice free game over to your side of the table, hidden underneath an inconspicuous pile of photocopies. Lumon by Mark Gomersall is a free number clicker based the fourth best television show ever made (Succession, Hannibal, Scavenger's Reign, discuss). It's not a rip-roaring videogame time or anything, but it is cute. More importantly, it's topical. More importantly, it means I get to write "Severance is back!" a bunch. It's back! It is!

In a bid to shore up the Treehouse finances following several staff departures, I'm announcing a new line of official Maw spin-off products. Presenting: New Viscous n' Delicious Mawflakes! The ultimate cosmic breakfast cereal, available in all the colours of the rainbow plus 666 others that aren't fit for human eyes! Simply pour over molten ichor and leave to stand - you'll know they're ready to eat when you can no longer hear yourself weeping. "Ready to eat" is a phrase that cuts two ways, of course - and what better way to accompany being eaten by Mawflakes than by reading about this week's new PC games.

Ok, let's get it out of the way up top: I probably won't be losing any sleep over dinosaur horror game Code Violet not coming to PC either. While I've still got a pavlovian response to anything that reminds me even a little of Capcom's sadly abandoned Dino Crisis series, the trailer below doesn't inspire all that much confidence this one will pick up the mantle.

On this Sunday, I find myself deeply nostalgic for chunky scart cables, terrible bookmarks though they may make. Book for now!

Sundays are for resting, supposedly, but it can also be for mopping the floors, washing the bedding, and catching up on work because you simply have too much to do.

Remember the Electronic Wireless Show? Two of its hosts, Alice Bell and Nate Crowley, have started a new podcast "about video games (mostly)". It's called Total Playtime and an introductory episode 0 and a Patreon are live now. The third host is Jon Hicks, with whom you may be less familiar, but he used to be my boss and thus may be considered the 5th Beatle of RPS. Anyway, go give it a listen.

I don't think we've ever written about Intravenous 2, but the topdown shooter has been on my radar since its release last year. It's a blend of tactical stealth and frenetic Hotline Miami spraying, and it just got a major update to add Steam Workshop support and a map editor.

Sons Of The Forest is about being chased by fithy cannibals who cannot swim, so the latest update ought to be useful to players. Its major new feature is the addition of rafts, which players can construct and then float about on like a 2000s Tom Hanks.

Genshin Impact's developers have agreed to pay a $20 million (around £16.4m) fine to settle charges brought by the US Federal Trade Commission. The FTC allege that HoYoverse "unfairly marketed loot boxes to children that obscured real costs and misled all players about the odds of obtaining prizes." HoYoverse will also be banned from selling lootboxes to children under 16 without parental consent.

Look there, my friends. The almighty and sombre Hippopotamus Of Farewell has graced our presence again this weekend. Whether you do it in the comments below or on his actual leaving post (or indeed his other leaving post), let's all give our resident Edders a good send-off. And now we shall drown our sorrows in digital worlds. Here's what we're all clicking on this weekend.

Team Cherry's long-awaited metroidvania Hollow Knight: Silksong will be re-revealed in April, if you believe a bunch of frantic reddit posts about cake. The standard practice when writing up such fan theorising is to walk you through it step by step, peeling back the layers like Inspector Clouseau. But I know that you are a busy person, so I will jam it all into a single sentence: a Twitter account purporting to be a Silksong developer has posted a tweet that seemingly predicts the Switch 2 announcement while using a profile picture of some cake taken from a recipe book that was published on 2nd April 2024 which is exactly a year before 2nd April 2025 which is the date of the Nintendo Direct teased in the Switch 2 announcement.

There’s a lot you can do with a third dimension. Texture. Nativity dioramas. Spheres. Hyper Light Breaker, in expanding from the 2D action of Hyper Light Drifter, chooses to almost entirely remake itself as a free-roaming roguelike, trading post-apocalyptic pixel art for big proc-gen vistas and even more acrobatic swordplay.

Its technical ambition, sadly, ends up undermined by the emptiness of its world, the lack of exploratory pleasure that Drifter nurtured so well, and combat that’s more faithful to the original yet doesn’t quite adapt well enough to 3D. Not to mention it has more than its fair share of early access bugs and, especially in the early stages, balancing missteps.

Three-person Danish team The Outer Zone and Frostpunk creators 11-bit studios have announced Death Howl, a very gloomy soulslike deck-builder set in a "stone-age Nordic-inspired" open world that consists of biomes with names like "the Forest of Howling Shadows". Lots of howling round these parts.

You play a mother, Ro, whose son has been claimed by the Grim Reaper, or whatever they had instead of the Grim Reaper back then - this was, I think, prior to the invention of scythes? And cards? Anyway, while searching for Ro's son, you'll take part in grid- and turn-based battles against a regular cauldron of unspeakables, including disembodied raven heads and what appears to be a huge pair of subterranean lungs. Here's a trailer.

Looks like Sony have caught the live service jitters. The company have cancelled two online multiplayer games, including one based on God Of War, according to a report by Bloomberg journalist Jason Schreier. Two different Sony-owned studios were recently told to stop development on their projects. One of those studios is Bluepoint, known for their work on the Demon's Souls remake. They were making the unannounced live service God Of War game, according to Schreier. The other studio is Bend, developers of open world zombie 'em up Days Gone. We don't know what they were working on, aside from the fact it was also to have a live service business model. In any case, both have been canned.

Superheroes often conceal their identities behind masks, capes and in my case, a pungent snood-and-hoodtop combo that makes me look like I've crawled out of a drain. No, don't ask what my real superhero identity is. After all, knowing my secrets might expose you to the wrath of my enemies. And in any case, I don't trust you. It turns out some of you people have been keeping secrets from me, as well. You have been furtively playing superhero shooter Marvel Rivals with a keyboard and mouse adapter, which makes it look as though you're playing with a controller, so that you can take advantage of controller features such as high-sensitivity aim-assist in competitive play.