Hello all! I regret to report that the Maw is in a really good mood this week. Its scales have an almost flirtatious lustre, flashing in and out of visibility as I gaze from my eyrie above north London. Its crimson coral coils and fins of mounded verdigris can be seen reflected in the distant moneytemples of Canary Wharf. Its fractal teeth and hair form expressionist whorls and divots among the haggard late summer clouds.

The Maw is merry because this week is Gamescom week – a time of much videogame news and thus, a time of feasting for extradimensional gods with a hankering for headlines. It also happens to be the week in which Rockstar and Netflix will stream a GTA 6 documentary (27th August), giving rise to many, many articles in the vein of “50 individually rendered breakfast cereal shapes you missed from the all-new Vice City”. As if all that wasn’t enough, there are a load of uncommonly chunky new PC releases to contend with. Here’s my latest list.

Monday 24th August

• Burned Horizons (early access) is a complex production, in several senses: a hard-eyed milsim and squad tactics game with ‘no-XP’ customisation, set during a fictional 2002 Europe-wide war against Russia. The devs characterise it as a fable about Putin’s imperialism, writing that “monsters like him don’t stop – until someone stops them.” It’s from a team based in Ukraine, the UK and the USA.
• Money for Girls: Amortized is a horror detective visual novel from lauded hypertext designer and former RPS columnist Porpentine.

Tuesday 25th August

• 1666: Amsterdam (early access) is the time-jumping, Dan Brownian witch ’em up from Assassin’s Creed creative director Patrice Désilets. Once in development at now-dead THQ, the project has changed hands repeatedly in the course of an extended feud between Désilets and Ubisoft.
• Aliens: Fireteam Elite 2 looks like a pleasant bit of 1-4 player xenomorph grand guignol, to purge the synapses while you wait for the probably more-elegant Alien: Isolation 2.
• Astral Court DX is a bullet hell that’s set in heaven but isn’t an actual “bullet heaven”, in the sense of Vampire Survivors. It casts you as a celestial convict doing platform challenges to stave off their execution. There are 189 levels, apparently. It looks like a Y2K shareware release (complimentary).
• Blood Dungeon is a frantic and suffocating platformer with bullet hell/heaven elements, from the creators of Nidhogg. Big fan of the apparent default character’s scrambling arms and expression of constant panic.
• Sokogram is a hybrid puzzler that combines the block pushing of sokoban games with the paint-by-numbers of nonograms. This is somebody’s very specific wet dream. Please don’t tell me if it’s yours – I have no need to be aware of such things.
• Western Rye (early access) is kind of like Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare but with more of a survival game element, including base construction. In other words, big ole cowboy sim plus carpentry and zombies.

Wednesday 26th August

Thursday 27th August

• the cabin game (early access) is a much shorter name for a game, necessitating some additional description: you are stuck in a haunted cabin with up to four of your friends, playing cards that add rooms to the cabin while also, generally, making the cabin worse.
• Lou’s Lagoon is a jolly adventure platformer set on an archipelago, in which you can loaf about in a seaplane. Jak & Daxter with a touch of the Brew Barons, maybe.
• Star Wars: Zero Company is an Ahsoka-era squad tactics game from old XCOM talent. I recently interviewed the developers about their publisher EA being suddenly acquired by a Saudi Arabia-led consortium.
• Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 2 brings together MGS4 and Peace Walker in a new remaster package with a sprinkling of archive materials, including Metal Gear’s first handheld outing, Metal Gear: Ghost Babel.
• Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy takes the Asobo series’ third-person action to an island caught between the Middle Ages and ancient Minoan times, where there are light-based puzzles and creatures who follow you with unknowable intent.
• Captain Tsubasa is back to save your silly footballs from the mediocrity of licensed realism.

Friday 28th August

• Don’t Drop The Cake (pictured) invites you to balance a tray while navigating a nightmare of conveyor belts and blokes with daisies for heads.
• Autobattling, attention-based automation, Lewis Carroll, and spooky mansion delving combine in Alice’s Gaze. “Experience the deepest chills in the laziest way” is a pretty neat sales pitch.
• Stripped-down city tender A Little Age is your laidback end to the week, probably.

We’re taking a different approach to Gamescom this year. The major thing is that we won’t be liveblogging Opening Night Live, the annual Geoff Keighley scorched earth trailerdump, or trying to write up individual news articles on the night. Repeated experience has shown that trying to digest Keighley’s bombardments as they happen a) doesn’t deliver traffic returns that justify knackering ourselves, and b) risks a glut of relatively thoughtless pieces that make us look like the rapidly decomposing zombies we secretly are.

Instead, we’ll be covering Gamescom at our own pace, trying to focus on the games and stories we think are most deserving. James, Julian and Mysterious Surprise Guest will be attending the event itself in Cologne, interviewing a lot of people and playing a lot of demos. Mark and I are team homefront, with Oisin covering alternate evening news shifts as usual. Meanwhile, guides writers Ollie, Jeremy, Callum and Dion continue to operate in an alternate editorial universe of Roblox games, Mortal Shell 2, and nu-Onimusha. What are you up to this week? You are allowed to say: not playing or thinking about videogames at all. I hear that can be healthy in moderation.