Uruc is being created by a first time developer, Stefan Haasbroek, who is also a progressive metal artist⁠—his most recent EP has about as prog metal a name as you can get: "Spectral Tardigrade Mole Station." It helps explain how the music in Uruc's trailer was so affecting, but also the whole thing has this inherent progginess that I'm really digging. That key art of the worm-fox basking in an open wasteland? Pretty proggy. Oh, it's about a little creature caught amidst war and horror beyond its ken? Are we talking about a game, or a concept album here.

PCG contributor Jon Bolding observed that "Somebody played Rain World too much and now it's everybody's problem," and you can definitely see the Rain World influence in the wee fox guy's distinctive shape, as well as the very particular horror of being an animal trapped in the ruins of a civilization it doesn't understand. But Uruc is giving me the vibe of a more traditional metroidvania⁠—at least going off what little material we have so far⁠—than Rain World's unique blend of survival elements.

I'm in love with the look and sound of Uruc, with anime-inspired mecha of the more Armored Core, "technology is dehumanizing" variety seemingly marooned on or assaulting (or both) an ancient, dead world whose blasted vistas and strange monuments remind me of the art of H.R. Geiger and Zdzisław Beksiński (or Scorn, a game heavily inspired by both artists).

True cosmic horror is being confronted with something beyond your powers of reason and deduction, like an ant exploring a circuit board, and it's a feeling few games have ever evoked in me. Uruc really seems like it has that secret sauce, and I'm eager to play it. The game currently has no release window or presence on Steam or itch.io, but Haasbroek is crowdfunding for the game via BackaBuddy, and you can also follow the developer on YouTube or Bandcamp.

Red Thread Games (the studio behind Draugen and Dreamfall Chapters, headed by veteran videogame wordsmith Ragnar Tørnquist) might have bitten off a bit more than it can reasonably chew. All those disparate elements can grind awkwardly against each other in places, and the combat is undeniably stiff and janky, with sassy battle-chatter frequently interrupted or cut short. But somehow, Dustborn holds together well enough to be an enjoyable romp, thanks in large part to an unusual focus on the moments where you’re not doing very much at all.

Dustborn makes negative space a primary feature. It dedicates an uncommon amount of its (respectably beefy) play-time to just sitting down and talking through recent events with your crew. Lengthy after-action camping sequences divide episodes of adventure, and even during tense encounters characters will stop for a breather to talk through their feelings about the situation and each other. No gruff action-men conveying all their thoughts and feelings with a grunt and a nod here; superpowers aside, these are soft and fragile people with things to say, and the game gives them plenty of time to say it.

Talking heads

Negative space has always been an important part of games, especially when there's a lot of plot or game mechanics to digest. Our squishy, porous brain-meats need time to properly sort, collate and comprehend what they’ve been up to. Often, this just takes the form of busywork, be it long travel times or inventory shuffling. It gives the players room to breathe, but the cast are often expected to do a Hollywood walk-and-talk, ideally with the snappiest possible banter. Dustborn goes its own way and dedicates what feels like almost half its length to making these quiet segments memorable in their own way.

While many of these sequences can be tapped out of early or even skipped entirely, I feel that they’re the heart of the experience. Each camp-site or location to sit down is a bespoke environment, often featuring the characters in fresh outfits and new poses. As the characters occupy themselves with their own hobbies and obsessions, you get to wander around and listen to them chatting, or sit down for a one-on-one and see how they’re feeling.

What do you say to your party’s heavy-hitting but soft-hearted tank—one of the starting party—when she starts to feel sidelined by a growing roster of friends and allies? There’s no easy answers, because people are messy. This may be a game with boss fights against robots and long brawls with alt-history JFK’s jetpacking fascist police force, but for the most part, it’s a cozy, almost intimate time.

These quiet moments aren’t without mechanical value in Dustborn, either. Each of your crew have several named facets to their personality which can be encouraged or suppressed through dialogue choices. The game is keen to stress that none are explicitly good or bad—they're just different ways for the story to play out. Those personality profiles offer different dialogue during quieter moments, but they can also determine what options are available during adventure sequences. When stranded on a highway with no easy routes out, stealing a truck might be an option if you’ve encouraged your party engineer’s more pragmatic side. But if you’ve nurtured their idealistic streak, they might reject that plan, forcing a search for an alternative solution.

Fundamentally, it’s nothing new. Plenty of games have echoed the party member moments that BioWare made famous with Mass Effect and Dragon Age; the recent Baldur’s Gate 3 had its share of campsite conversations when your companions weren’t frantically trying to jump your bones. But Dustborn feels like a more extreme extrapolation, using the downtime to properly deconstruct and analyze itself through the lenses of its diverse and often disagreement-prone band of heroes. It’s not a trick that every game can pull off, and the indulgently long dialogues aren’t something that other mediums could easily manage.

It won't be Dustborn's clumsy combat sequences that'll see me through to its end. It'll be its characters, and the meandering conversations we share in the moments between.

This week's Gamescom Opening Night Live event featured trailers for two upcoming gacha games with distinctly adorable pitches. There was the previously announced Infinity Nikki, the upcoming open world dress-up adventure game from what was formerly a mobile-only freemium series. Newly announced Floatopia is an Animal Crossing-inspired game which hasn't fully detailed its monetization yet, but the "lucky tickets" for "standard and pick-up draws" referenced on its site are kind of a tell and players are clocking it as such.

Two trailers in one show is just the tip of the iceberg, I'm sure. There have been ongoing rumors that dominant gacha developer Hoyoverse is working on an Animal Crossing-inspired game too. This sudden influx of rumored and confirmed cozy gacha games feels as if my chill corner of gaming is having the Eye of Sauron turned upon it. Which, these days, is actually the Eye of Capitalism.

I wrote late last year that the cozy games trend hasn't even peaked yet, specifically predicting that we would start seeing a lot more official marketing for games using the word "cozy" and that the term would start getting diluted (even more than it inherently is) by more unlikely kinds of games name-checking the cozy trend.

The gacha game publishers have witnessed the rise of cozy gaming and they're here to monetize it with "lucky tickets" and limited-run outfits, and whatever else they can devise. Infinity Nikki's tagline "the coziest open world game" is case in point.

I'm not 'line in the sand' against gacha games—grown-ass adults can do what they want with their grown-ass money and I'm already on record being excited for Infinity Nikki—but some people absolutely are drawing that line, and I don't blame them. We spent years yelling about and attempting to legislate loot boxes only to welcome in its somewhat insidious twin for tea.

Now I'm not here to infantilize or belittle my Stardew-playing siblings, but I do feel very protective of them. The cozy gaming community that's rallied on social media over the past couple years attracts a lot of players who are new or returning to PC gaming. Some may have experience in the mobile game scene where gacha has already been popular for years, but many don't have that vocabulary under their belts. Hell, even I watched two trailers for Nikki and didn't realize what it was until I went to its website and saw that telling slew of in-game currency rewards for its pre-registration event.

I'm fully planning to get into Infinity Nikki and Floatopia and whatever Hoyoverse is doing next with my eyes wide open and credit card safely stashed. I just hope that all my other cozy game enjoyers are equally prepared for the shift.

I've heard of riding outfits and hunting costumes and other such purpose-specific wardrobes of history. But the Victorians have nothing on Infinity Nikki, the open world dress-up adventure game where you'll unlock a floating outfit, gliding outfit (apparently not the same thing), shrinking outfit, fishing outfits, and more. Nikki showed up at Gamescom Opening Night Live today with a new trailer and also just opened registration for its closed beta.

Infinity Nikki is the fifth game in what was formerly a mobile-only series, now coming to PC (and console), as we found out during Sony's State of Play earlier this summer. Today's new trailer was more abstract than that reveal trailer, basically just a fever dream of cats, chickens, and sheep all singing "Nikki" over and over again as stylist Nikki and her cat companion Momo explore Miraland. Fortunately, Infold Games gave a more comprehensible explanation in text form:

"Sink into an immersive world with boundless opportunities including cozy open-world exploration, fun platforming, puzzle-solving, gorgeous style possibilities, and much more brought to life by former The Legend of Zelda director Kentaro Tominaga," Infold Games says. "Solve intricately designed puzzles and ward against dark energy with Nikki’s adventurous spirit. Commune with playful creatures and create specific outfits to fish in the river, catch bugs in the fields, and travel between lands."

I've always been quite keen on games where I can build and decorate, even without goals (Townscaper, Tiny Glade, etc), but I've never been one for open-ended dress-up, so fashion games have always been outside my sphere. But if you throw in some beautiful open world, a bit of exploration, traversal puzzle solving, I am so very in. Infinity Nikki has my extreme attention. 

Now I've not done any deep dives into the lore of the Nikki series but Mollie Taylor did once try to explain Love Nikki to me, which is apparently way darker than I thought this adorable fashion game would be. So I'm quite curious to see if there's a similarly dire story hiding beneath Infinity Nikki's bright surface.

What I hadn't quite clocked from the reveals so far was Nikki's premium currency monetization, though that'll come as less of a surprise to those familiar with the mobile games, I'm sure. You can spot on its official website the pre-registration rewards including multiple currencies that remind me a lot of what I'm now used to seeing in the likes of Genshin Impact and other gacha games. So know that, ahead of time.

Though we've not gotten a release date for Infinity Nikki, it has just opened up registration for its closed beta test (dates to be announced), which will include PC players. You can also find it on the Epic Games Store.

But what if they made a whole game out of the herding? And what if the developer was Okomotive, maker of Far: Lone Sails and Far: Changing Tides? And what if the trailer was drop-dead gorgeous? Take a look and tell me you don't want to drive a herd of... of... well, whatever those big monsters are, across a big and mysterious world.

This is a departure for Okomotive, trading in the side-scrolling nature of the Far games for... I don't know what you'd call it when you're going toward the center of the screen instead of sideways across it. Horizon-heading? Middle-moving? Depth-delving?

But you can definitely tell it's still Okomotive. There are environmental puzzles to solve in Herdling while driving your pack of beasts along trails and through the mountains, and while the world looks quite different than the decaying realms of the Far series, there's still the same sort of ominous beauty to it.

"With Herdling we wanted to start a new kind of adventure, not only for the players, but also for us," said Okomotive. "To create the herd of beasts and their mountainous world was an ambitious challenge for us and we enjoyed every step of that journey."

If the trailer got you interested, you can find out more about Herdling at the Panic Games Showcase on August 27.

It's a great twist for a game that at first just seems like a cute little adventure in the style of the old top-down Legend of Zelda games. Initially charged just with finding some beeswax for a wizard, Jot merrily journeys through the pages of his book with his friends, all brought to life with gorgeous 2D animations. But when the evil sorcerer Humgrump unmoors him from the constraints of the story, things get a lot more interesting.

My hands-on only features the first four chapters of the game, but I'm impressed how much creativity developer All Possible Futures has crammed into that roughly two hour introduction. As my party and I continue to travel the land—now searching for a way to stop Humgrump—my fourth wall-breaking abilities let me overcome traditional obstacles in fun new ways.

Jot can now monkey about with the very sentences of his story, for example, swapping a word from one line to another. Changing a word will change whatever it describes, making a "big" enemy "small", turning "night" to "day", or making a "locked" door suddenly "open". There's not as much room to experiment as I'd like—only certain words are allowed in each sentence—and the puzzles are more charming than they are brain-teasing, but I'm hopeful more depth may develop as the game goes on from here.

You can also, as I mentioned before, simply jump out of the book entirely, and either run over to another portal to jump back in at a different point, or explore the cluttered and oddly sprawling desk the book rests on to find new abilities. Thanks to your powers, you're free to jump in and out of any artwork you find out there, flitting between 2D and 3D to get across gaps and avoid patrolling beetles (apparently they love eating fictional characters?).

My favourite moment in the preview build comes when I discover an abandoned game card—think Magic: The Gathering—depicting a classic fantasy elven archer. Leaping in, I'm able to battle with and then befriend her. She likes me enough to lend me her bow, which I can take with me back into my own story and use for a shooting minigame against swarms of flying insects. It makes me really excited to see what further surprises are in store deeper into this adventure. Does Jot ever get to explore a comic book, or perhaps the art on the front of a videogame case?

But even within the confines of the original book, there's such a sense of imagination to The Plucky Squire. Minigames like that bow-based encounter abound—within four chapters I've boxed a honey badger Punch Out-style, done Mario-style 2D platforming, had to time my grab perfectly to snatch a fish out of mid air, and more. None of these diversions has great depth or strategy, but that's not really the point—the joy is just in seeing what fun little scene has been prepared for you next, and how it'll be rendered in the game's adorable art style.

The combination of gentle charm with real creativity really elevates The Plucky Squire into something more interesting than just another cosy little adventure. If it can maintain that sense of novelty and fun in the chapters that follow—and maybe get a little more elaborate with its puzzles—it could be 2024's next great success story when it launches on 17 September.

You can unlock the first bag increase with two backpack pockets which can both be found in the grasslands  where you start. After that, you'll need four additional pockets to upgrade your backpack with another five slots. These are scattered throughout the grasslands, jungle, and swamp. To make it easier for you, I've pinpointed on the map exactly where to find each backpack Pocket to save you trekking aimlessly. 

Grasslands backpack pocket locations 

There are three backpack pockets located  in the grasslands, which is enough to unlock five additional slots in your bag. 

1. Scientific Refuge: The first can be found in the Scientific Refuge to the east of Arsira Village, which you'll have to explore as part of the story anyway. Once you're in the Refuge, go into the room at the back, and the backpack pocket is on top of the desk ready to be picked up. 
2. Weeping Rock: The second is found behind the Yellow Witherbloom at the weeping rock. You'll need to have the Krist spell, which is also unlocked in this area as part of the main mission, to get past this section of withering. Once you've cleared both yellow blooms a hole in the wall will open up and you'll see the backpack pocket tucked away on the floor. Once you've picked up this pocket you'll be able to unlock five additional slots to your bag through the skill tree. 
3. West of Grasslands Base: For the third, you'll need the help of Ura (the horse-like creatures) in the area. If you head in a general northwest direction from Aleph Prime’s Grasslands Base you'll encounter several walls you need to break through. This is where the Ura come in handy since they are the only way you'll be able to break them down. Once you're in, the backpack pocket is under a crate covered by a net by the final wall you come across. 

Jungle backpack pocket locations 

There are two backpack pockets available in the Jungle biome. 

1. Jungle Base: The first is found at Aleph Prime’s Jungle Base in a side room. The backpack pocket is on top of a chair so it's incredibly hard to miss.  
2. Marsh Shrine: The second is sat on top of a stack of boxes at the Marsh of Shrine toward the north of the map. You'll need the help of some creatures to gain access to the area since it's blocked off by walls, but with the number of Batar and Yekembo around you'll have help on hand. Once in, look for  the stack of boxes under a net  towards the middle of the room and the backpack pocket on the floor. 

Swamp backpack pocket locations 

The final backpack pocket you need to find to max out your inventory space is located in The Swamp. 

1. Study Center: It can be found in Aleph Prime’s Study Center toward the centre of the swamp map. Once you're inside, you need to get to the higher floor by going up the stairs, and drop through the hole in the floor to grab the upgrade. You will need the Hanar spell to get through this area but once again you unlock this as part of the story.  

Once you've collected all the backpack pockets, you'll be able to upgrade your inventory space through the skill tree. This will add another five slots to your bag, and is the final upgrade available. Although it doesn't seem like a huge difference, it's enough space to explore Ava and cram whatever you find into your pockets without having to worry.  

Protagonist Vic is a witty, compassionate character that I found myself adoring quickly. Her voiced narration and character interactions made me connect with her far easier than having to read dialogue off the screen. Although Creatures of Ava isn't shy about having its inhabitants spill information in numerous text blocks, the most important parts are highlighted through audible conversation. Paired with the stunning visuals, I could've easily sat back and enjoyed each cutscene stitched together like its own TV show. 

These conversations also served as my way to understand the skills I was learning as I played. Creatures of Ava uses a magic staff, referred to as the Nafitar, to interact with parts of the map. It can be used to destroy witherbloom blocking your path, levitate parts of structures to help your platforming, or give yourself a shield so you can walk across fungus-infested floors without taking any damage. 

Basically, it's the one tool you use, and having characters break down its abilities was essential in me gaining my confidence in making the most of it. If I had been bombarded with spell slots locked to different keys, I wouldn't have enjoyed Creatures of Ava in the same way and probably would've fumbled a lot more trying to use the right ability. But, having all my special abilities tucked into a neat scroll wheel and locked to a single tool was far less overwhelming. 

However even with magical abilities unlocked as you go, the gameplay of Creatures of Ava is incredibly straightforward. The story was easy to follow, and the majority of main quests involved me racing back and forth relaying messages between characters or finding items around the map.  The world helps to carry the more monotonous moments, and in particular the critters that inhabit it are what kept me powering through the classic fetch quest fatigue.

I love a funky little fella in a video game. As soon as there's a beastie, I'm more than likely searching whether or not there's a plushie form of it. Fortunately, Creatures of Ava is filled with friends of all shapes and sizes, and what makes the experience even better is that you can pet every single one of them. In addition, each species has its own special ability, such as biting through ropes holding bridges up or pushing huge stone blocks out the way. 

One of Creatures of Ava's biggest challenges is learning what each creature is capable of and knowing when to utilise their skills appropriately. But, if you're like me and find it hard to retain so much information at once, the Avapedia you fill out each time you encounter a new species is a great source of information when you're stuck. Having this on hand each time I found myself struggling to solve the puzzles of a certain biome like the Jungle or Swamp was incredibly helpful, because I would've just run around in circles otherwise.

Taming the creatures also deserves its own shoutout. I'm so used to having to slowly approach beasts, soothe them, and bribe them with some sort of food or treat before I can befriend them. But, in Creatures of Ava you have to use the power of song. You're given a flute at the start of the game and taught a special tune to help the biomes inhabitants know you're friendly. This isn't enough to have them trust and follow you though. You need to repeat each species' individual tune to gain their trust, and as you go through each section of the map these grow in difficulty and include more notes for you to hit through the on-screen wheel.

Rather than taking these animals in for your own collection, you take them in for research to understand the environment. As you go through the story, you realise that Creatures of Ava is all about sustainability and the improper use of animals for science, which is a pretty important message sugarcoated through its cutesy critters and bright gameplay.

As an action adventure creature collector, Creatures of Ava is a fun albeit a bit repetitive addition to the genre. However once you dig past its surface, its emotional story of saving a world from destruction and helping its inhabitants makes for an unforgettable game. Having a somewhat heavy message behind such a sweet game is a fantastic way to get players of all ages to listen and understand that it's a fictional representation of a very real problem. And who knows, it could encourage the next age of Vics to get out and see what wonders the world has to offer.

The standard witherbloom buds you'll encounter around the grasslands are a reddy orange, so it's easy to notice the difference between the two, since the yellow are bright and surrounded by spores. The health bar of a Yellow Witherbloom is also solid yellow and won't deplete until you use the appropriate spell. That's because Yellow Witherbloom bulbs are essentially armoured, which makes them immune to your staff's  absorption abilities. Fortunately, you'll be able to unlock the means to get rid of them pretty quickly.

How to remove Yellow Witherbloom

You'll need to unlock the Krist ability before you can get rid of Yellow Witherbloom. After exploring the Weeping Rock civilization and completing the sagestone puzzle with Nim'ar, the Nafitar (your staff) will gain the ability to cast the Krist spell. You complete this mission within the grasslands, which is the first area of the map you encounter in Creatures of Ava. So, you'll unlock this ability quite early in the game. You can't skip ahead to complete this puzzle, so you'll need to work through the mainline quests and then retrace your steps to destroy Yellow Witherbloom around the starting zone. 

To activate Krist, you need to create a connection ring around the Yellow Witherbloom by clicking and holding the left mouse button, before hitting the E key. This will send a blue light barreling toward the bloom and remove the yellow outer layer. From here, you can continue to use your standard weakening spell on the bloom to remove it. The effects of Krist only last for a limited amount of time, though, so you'll need to act fast to stop the bloom from re-growing its protective layer. 

Yellow Witherblooms are found throughout Creatures of Ava and are well worth stripping away, even if they don't lead you to the next part of the story. Sometimes you'll uncover a pathway or free a creature, but there are also some valuable collectibles hidden behind the withering such as backpack pockets or health brews—well worth going back and exploring older areas to find.

Yesterday, Paradise Killer developer Kaizen Game Works released a nine-minute gameplay deep dive video for its next game, Promise Mascot Agency. It's a gameplay overview that gets both more inscrutable and more compelling with each passing minute, and for a surreal management game following in the footsteps of Paradise Killer's metaphysical murder mystery, I'd hope for nothing less.

As disgraced Yakuza lieutenant Michizane "Michi" Sugawara, players will embark on what the video calls "a journey into the underworld of Japan, with a twist," which is a hell of a way to describe being exiled to a cursed town to manage the crime family's last business after losing its fortunes in a mysterious betrayal. That business happens to be a failing mascot agency, in a world where mascots are "living creatures that were born from the earth at the dawn of time," according to Kaizen.

Mascot agency management seems to involve a lot of flying through the air in a rocket-propelled, winged Kei truck. Like I said: inscrutable. But watching Michi drive around town to recruit mascots like a fish with its torso filleted open or a perpetually-weeping tofu block, I'm content to leave scrutability at the door.

The absurdity on display here extends beyond Promise Mascot Agency's premise and into its mechanics. To successfully recruit a mascot to the agency, you apparently have to entice them by manually choosing which job perks to offer, like additional profit share percentages or regular bonuses. Once recruited, mascots can be sent out to work jobs, with their performance determined by their individual specialties.

Unfortunately, mascots will sometimes encounter "incidents" that disrupt their job duties, risking the agency's profits and reputation. During a job, our sobbing tofu friend mentioned above was unfortunate enough to cross paths with a normal-sized door, "the bane of every mascot's existence," and got stuck. Luckily, Michi can enlist the aid of "Mascot Support Heroes," townsfolk who can give mascots "the power they need to overcome challenges." In the video, this took the form of a card battle, where befriended characters were played to deal damage to the door and release the wedged mascot.

"Townsfolk" might conjure the image of like, a normal guy for you, so let me correct that: Townfolk in this case might mean a railway employee with an accompanying cat wearing a matching uniform, or "Captain Signs," a local hero covered in traffic signs who sells items.

Eventually, Michi can supplement his efforts to repay his staggering Yakuza debts by subcontracting recruited mascots to work in other towns, or even operating crane games stuffed with mascot merchandise. Along the way, Michi can explore the town for truck upgrades, alongside opportunities to "smash the old order" and "uncover a conspiracy that could destroy the underworld of Japan."

Overall, the vibe here lands somewhere between Yakuza and Deadly Premonition—a statement I hope will serve as an activation phrase for at least a dozen weirdos. I have fully no idea how Promise Mascot Agency will fit all these pieces together, but I'm thrilled to find out when it releases in 2025.