Hello! Welcome to the latest Geeky Brummie Games Release Roundup!

This week, pulp adventure, assassins and great mouse detectives!

We’re in October, which is known to those of in the games press as “oh god it’s October” because a ludicrous amount of games are releasing. This is just week 1, and we have a wide range of indies, AAA blockbusters and mid-range titles all clamouring for your attention. If you want my recommendations, Station to Station, Bilkin’s Folly, Disgaea 7 and Detective Pikachu all look excellent, as well as my Game of the Week, of course.

Quick heads-up too. By the time you read this I will have fled the country. And by that I mean I’ll be in the US for a week, so the next roundup will be on the 20th October. Thankfully the only quiet week of the month is next week too, so those releases will be slotted in the week after. So don’t panic, Forza fans!

New Releases

Let’s look at some Early Access games releasing on PC. Quasimorph is a roguelike tactics RPG about a futuristic paramilitary organisation where you throw wave after wave of men at space problems. Battle Shapers is an FPS roguelike which appears to combine the action of Doom (2016) with the aesthetics of Overwatch (2016). Stop Dead is a highly stylised FPS with parkour and telekinesis where, as the title says, if you stop moving, you die.

A Tiny Sticker Tale (PC, Switch) is a cosy adventure game about a donkey with a sticker book who can change the environment to his liking using stickers.

Knight vs Giant: The Broken Excalibur (PC, PS5, Switch, Xbox X/S) is an action roguelike starring King Arthur trapped in a mysterious magical dimension. To be blunt, it looks like Hades via Camelot.

Bilkins’ Folly (PC, PlayStation, Switch) is a game that appears to be addressing the fact that Monkey Island doesn’t have a dog companion. You play as (mighty) treasure hunter Percy Bilkins, who is searching for his missing family members with his dog Drayton. It’s a narrative driven adventure game about the high seas, cartography and solving puzzles.

The Fabulous Fear Machine (PC) is a management game with a unique premise. You are in charge of the titular machine, whose job is to spread urban legends and conspiracy theories across the world. Imagine Plague Inc but with ideas instead of contagions.

Station to Station (PC) is a game about building train lines, where each station you place causes the environment to thrive. It’s a game that teaches the importance of transport infrastructure and the positive effects it can have on the communities around it.

Silent Hope (PC, Switch) is a dungeon crawler from Marvelous set in a world plunged into silence. You and your team dive into a massive hole in the ground and battle creatures down below in order to restore the power of words to the world.

Disgaea 7: Vows of the Virtueless (PC, PlayStation, Switch) is the latest in Nippon Ichi’s comedy tactics RPG series about morally ambiguous demonfolk. This seventh game throws in some samurai aesthetics and new features such as…Jumbofication apparently.

Wargroove 2 (PC, Switch) is the sequel to the Advance Wars inspired Wargroove, where a group of factions are vying for control of the land of Aurania. This time, a nation of mouse-folk have arrived, bringing with them terrible arcane knowledge that your foes aim to exploit. I assume there is still a dog commander like the first one. I hope this one is less frustrating than the original, which I wanted to like but sadly could not finish.

Hey, what up sweet cheeks, guess who’s back? Yeah, that’s right, Detective Pikachu Returns (Switch) with his inexplicably gruff voice (which is very much not Ryan Reynolds). Much like the first game on the 3DS (and its subsequent movie adaptation), this sequel is a mystery adventure where a boy named Tim and a grizzled Pikachu with a coffee addiction go out and solve Poke-crimes. This was almost my Game of the Week, but I have yet to get round to finishing the first one. I should probably fix that.

Assassin’s Creed Mirage (PC, PlayStation, Xbox) is the latest in Ubisoft’s never-ending series that was once about secretive medieval orders that work in the shadows but have since become…hang on, what’s that? It’s gone back to that now? Oh. So yes, this Assassin’s Creed takes players to 9th century Baghdad, where you play as a for-real hashashin (like in the first game) in a smaller world where stealth and parkour are king. So no more oppressively large worlds full of markers in settings before the principal concept existed? Thank god.

Game of the Week

Game of the Week this week is The Lamplighters League (PC, Xbox), a pulp adventure tactics game set in an alternate history 1930s.

You play as the titular league, a band of rogues who are trying to stop a grim cult known as The Banished Court. This band of misfits features a mixture of skills and nationalities, all with their own goals and motivations that I could see causing problems. Mix up Indiana Jones, Call of Cthulhu and film noir with a bunch of XCOM, and that’s essentially what you have here.

I didn’t even know this game existed until this week, when I started seeing mentions of it in a few places and realised that, oh no, this is supremely my jam. Spooky artefacts, roguish adventurers and conspiracies? Hell yes. I think that’s more than enough for me to shove aside my original electric mouse shaped Game of the Week choice and place this in the slot instead.