Welcome to Video Video games Weekly on Engadget. Count on a brand new story each Monday or Tuesday, damaged into two components. The primary is an area for brief essays and ramblings about online game traits and associated subjects from me, Jess Conditt, a reporter who’s coated the trade for greater than 13 years. The second accommodates the online game tales from the previous week that it is advisable to learn about, together with some headlines from outdoors of Engadget.
Please take pleasure in — and I will see you subsequent week.
June has handed me by in a haze of air journey, gentle sickness, protests and Pleasure, and it’s now formally time to shut the guide on Summer season Recreation Fest 2025. round this 12 months’s present they usually’re all price a learn, however earlier than transferring on for good, I wished to focus on a remaining batch of video games that I can’t cease occupied with. This week, I current three mini previews straight out of SGF 2025 — and solely two of them are horror video games, which is a stupendous show of progress on my half.
Crisol: Theater of Idols
Crisol: Theater of Idols wasn’t on my radar till I sat down and performed it on the Blumhouse sales space, however now it’s pinging loud and clear, as if the booms had been emanating instantly from the blood-soaked bowels of Hell. It’s a first-person survival-horror motion sport set in a demented model of Spain that’s crammed with monsters of recent folklore. Murderous marionettes and big, ornately adorned skeletons hunt you thru darkish streets and towering gothic buildings, lamplight glinting off of each gross 3D element. The entire demo felt like getting misplaced in a terrifying, nightmarish carnival, and I loved each little bit of it.
In Crisol, blood is your supply of ammunition, and also you drain the corpses of people and chickens to refuel your well being bar in addition to your weapons. Crisol is tense and beautiful, harking back to Dishonored or Resident Evil Village, and enemies are each strong and difficult to evade. Crisol is the debut sport from unbiased Spanish staff Vermila Studios, which obtained an for the mission in 2020. It’s being revealed by Blumhouse and is due out this 12 months on , PlayStation 5 and Xbox Sequence X/S.
Grave Seasons
There’s one thing deeply improper in Ashenridge, the idyllic rural village the place Grave Seasons is ready. At first look, Grave Seasons is a cute, narrative-based farming sim with detailed pixel artwork, juicy romance choices and layers of home-maintenance mechanics. You spend time planting, watering, harvesting, crafting objects, selecting up trash and chatting with villagers — and you then dig up a severed hand. Pilar, your flirty neighbor who runs the tailor store down the highway, says one thing ominous concerning the destiny of your own home’s earlier proprietor. The vibe shifts; the shadows begin to look sinister. Night time falls and the actual horror is unleashed, sudden, violent and all of the extra stunning in such a peaceable setting. A supernatural serial killer is on the unfastened in Ashenridge and, in between planting crops, it’s as much as you to analyze (and possibly date) the assassin.
Grave Seasons is a sport that may stay or die by its tone, and up to now, developer Good Rubbish has completely nailed the vibe of nefarious, creeping dread. Ashenridge is a wonderful little city with tons of individuals to satisfy and actions to finish, and the character avatars are horny, candy and tremendous intriguing. A magical homicide investigation is just the cherry on high of a reliable farming and relationship sim, and I’m desperate to take a chew out of the complete sport. At SGF 2025, builders stated the whole Grave Seasons expertise ought to take about 20 hours. Grave Seasons is being revealed by Blumhouse, and it’s scheduled to hit and consoles in 2026.
Escape Academy 2: Again 2 College
Escape Academy is of the previous 5 years and I’m inordinately stoked for the sequel, which turns the varsity into an open world of puzzles, riddles and cringey puns. With Escape Academy 2: Again 2 College, developer Coin Crew goes all-in on the coed roleplaying vibe, and your entire campus is suffering from mysteries. It’s additionally playable as a split-screen, sofa co-op expertise, which is without doubt one of the collection’ best strengths. Frantically screaming options at your pal simply feels higher in individual than over a Discord name, ?
I performed the unique Escape Academy with a neighborhood companion, in order that’s how I attempted out the sequel at SGF 2025. I dragged Engadget EIC Aaron Souppouris to the iam8bit sales space and we dove in, beginning in a classroom coated in sneaky environmental clues. In Escape Academy 2, the project is easy — get out — however the execution is complicated, and we had been quickly throwing out names, dates and math issues, making an attempt to resolve a collection of difficult, interconnected puzzles and depart the room. After getting only one trace from the builders, we made our approach to the hallway, which was lined with locker-based riddles, and finally reached the headmaster’s workplace, which was a contained playground of puzzle gaming. We had to make use of a pen and piece of paper to maintain monitor of some sections, and total, our interactions felt contemporary. Coin Crew isn’t simply rolling out the identical issues with totally different options for the sequel, and the brand new riddles had been intelligent, modern and tremendous satisfying. (The identical can’t be stated about all the puns, however that’s a part of the appeal.)
Escape Academy 2: Again 2 College options each native and on-line co-op, so that you’ll be free to yell at your folks in whichever format you like. Coin Crew remains to be engaged on the sport and there’s no launch date but, nevertheless it’s obtainable now to .
The information
The one factor worse than not disclosing AI use within the creation of a online game isn’t disclosing it after which deploying it so sloppily that gamers instantly discover. Indie developer and writer 11 Bit Studios discovered this lesson firsthand with The Alters, a futuristic base-building sport starring an astronaut and his alternate-reality clones. Inside every week of the sport’s launch on June 13, posts began and displaying AI-generated textual content within the sport, throughout a number of languages. On June 30, 11 Bit launched an announcement confirming its use of AI in creating The Alters, saying it was utilized solely in background textual content and to assist with last-minute localization efforts. “It doesn’t matter what we determined, we should always have merely let ,” the studio wrote.
I’d actually like to cease writing headlines like this. Microsoft is getting ready to put off numerous Xbox workers this week, as a part of a deliberate 3 p.c discount in workers throughout the corporate. That’s a lack of roughly 7,000 jobs in whole, and in response to , Xbox leaders expect “substantial cuts throughout your entire group.” The firings observe a spherical of at Xbox in January 2024, one other , and final 12 months’s of Arkane Austin, Alpha Canine Video games and Tango Gameworks (the latter of which lives on below Krafton). In the meantime, Microsoft reported a internet income of $25.8 billion within the first three months of 2025, with an 8 p.c yearly enhance in income from Xbox content material and companies. Congrats?
Netflix began beefing up its video video games division round 2021, with the Night time College and the rollout of an in-app gaming library providing widespread cell titles at no further cost to subscribers. Netflix presently helps greater than 100 video games, together with Loss of life’s Door, Hades, The Case of the Golden Idol, The Rise of the Golden Idol, Braid Anniversary Version, Katana ZERO and the Monument Valley collection — however these are disappearing in July. A complete of twenty-two video games will probably be deleted from Netflix at numerous occasions in July, and the culling follows related cutbacks within the firm’s interactive division, together with the current closure of an .
As a result of we all know you’re going to get one thing — what are you selecting up on the Steam Summer season Sale this 12 months? Share your spoils within the feedback! When you’re overwhelmed, permit me to humbly counsel , , or .
On a associated observe, remember to take a look at (the practically full) Playdate Season 2.
… nevertheless it’s positively not any extra. Resident Evil: Requiem producer Masachika Kawata and director Koshi Nakanishi clarified that their new sport is an offline single-player expertise, however they stated that early in improvement, the staff critically thought of making it on-line and open-world. This experimentation fueled rumors about Requiem introducing a brand new path for the Resident Evil franchise, nevertheless it seems the ultimate product will probably be a with the flexibility to swap between first- and third-person views. Spooooky.
