What we're feeding the Maw

Hello all! Welcome to another week of feeding the Maw, the gluttonous cosmic sinkhole we must keep topped up with videogame news, lest it expand and masticate the entire universe. We're up against it this week, because no less than two RPS writers are taking holiday, leaving the Maw's thousand-ton dumbwaiters and condiment howitzers dangerously understaffed. Senior staff writer Mark is off on Friday - I can already hear the lamentation of various spouses in his on-going game of Crusader Kings 3. Even worse, Edwin, our breathtakingly insightful and ruggedly handsome news editor, is away from Wednesday (note to self: set this article's author field to anonymous, before publishing).

We're all doomed. Doomed, I tell you! Fortunately, there's a fair crop of promising PC releases in the offing, including a couple of Big Series instalments and a pinball game that professes to contain all of Western philosophy. Seems like the Maw will be a while digesting that one. Here's the list – please add to or deface it as you please.

• Finally, a Patrick Swayze simulator. Roadhouse Simulator sees you pouring drinks, working the door and organising the, er, pig races at a Route 66 watering hole.
• Scirocco Thugs is a pipe-wielding mobster masher set in cursed lo-fi Southern Italy.

• Did you ever really treasure one of those finger skateboard keyrings, as a kid? Stuntboost is for you.
• Panzer Deck is a WW2 card/logic puzzler, and very much not a turn-based strategy 4X, whatever you might deduce from the screens and narrative premise.
• EbiTapes is a cosy-grungy adventure game in which you play a smiling doodle froggo, searching a music festival for notes to weave into mixtapes.
• Nighthawks is a vampire nightclub RPG from Wadjet Eye. No, I didn't forget to put it on the list originally. *casts glamour* Nighthawks has always been on this list! And now you will fetch me a vodka raspberry liqueur with cranberry juice!

• In Nomori you are a plucky girl navigating a whimsical spirit archipelago by twisting the geography, flipping gravity and messing with time.
• Was that last one too plucky and whimsical for you? Fine, be a smelly bastard war rig engineer in Apocalypter.

• Silent Hill: Townfall is the first Silent Hill from Stories Untold developers Screen Burn. I thought it was good, apart from all the time spent cowering in wardrobes.
• Control Resonant (pictured) is James's favouritest videogame in all the world. "If you love Resonant so much why don't you bloody marry it," I told him on Friday. He's just informed us that the ceremony will take place a couple of hours before the launch, and none of us are invited.
• Alien Breed: 35th Anniversary Collection is making me feel very old. Ah, they don't breed aliens like these today.

• Scorched Sun is kind of Darkwood but with first-person turn-based combat. You are tasked with getting to the bottom of an ominous monastery.
• Fallosophy is the aforesaid pinball game in which all of western philosophy has been combined into a single, extremely tall table. Bertrand Russell is spinning in his, er, Bally/Williams flipper solenoid coil.

As for what the remaining members of RPS are up to this week: it's all planes and trains in Julianville, while James-on-Sea is experiencing another Steam explosion. Over in Jeremyburg, they be Dawnwalking and Obscuring Clair (poor girl, she does have a habit of blocking people out in photos), while things are coming up Resonant in Callumtown. Have a good week, and let us know about the great games we've missed.