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

This week, you don’t care about anything that isn’t Zelda, do you?

Quiet week for new releases this week. I have my theories about why, of course, and most of them revolve around it being the release week for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Seemingly no one wants to compete with what is likely to be one of the year’s big GOTY contenders. Maybe it’ll make the top spot of my annual top 50? It’s highly likely! So how can you compete with that?

That said, there are a few other titles. Nothing particularly standout from my perspective, although fans of the original Darkest Dungeon are no doubt excited that the sequel has its full release. Elsewhere, it’s mostly Early Access titles and a VR game, but maybe there’s something here that might catch your attention when you can put down your Switch for five seconds.

New Releases

A bunch of Early Access games for you this week. Midautumn is a roguelike dungeon crawler about a girl going out to the countryside for a relaxed trip at Grandma’s that turns into a fight to protect the Spirit World (hate when that happens). Voidtrain is a survival crafting game where you play as an engineer in the void maintaining crucial cross-world infrastructure. And Occupy Mars: The Game is sadly not an effort to take down Elon Musk but another survival game about colonising Mars.

Another Fisherman’s Tale (PC, PS5) is a VR game, a sequel to A Fisherman’s Tale. While the first game was about twisting space to solve complex puzzles, the sequel is more about detachable hands as you figure out the secrets of an island.

Voodolls (PC) is a co-op action game with tower defence elements. You play as a group of voodoo dolls trying to protect their master from terrible demons.

Darkest Dungeon II (PC) leaves Early Access this week. Much like the first Darkest Dungeon, you lead a team of adventurers into a randomised dungeon and battle monsters while trying not to go mad. It’s grimdark and hard and there are certainly dedicated fans of the original who are excited to see this get its full release at last.

Game of the Week

Look, if I give Game of the Week to anything else this week, the internet will find me and destroy me. So here we are, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (Switch) is the latest Game of the Week.

Of course, I’m not just doing this because of peer pressure, there are more legitimate reasons. The fact that Zelda is always a solid series to back. The fact that it currently has a 96 on Metacritic at the time of writing. And most importantly, because it has something that intrigues me even though Breath of the Wild put me off (oh no the internet are here and they have knives!).

It’s that crafting system. It reminds me so much of LittleBigPlanet and lord knows I am a simple man who will jump on board if there’s anything vaguely Sackboy-shaped. Okay, in practice I know it won’t be like LittleBigPlanet, but the possibilities of it seem so vast that Tears of the Kingdom has the potential to be glorious chaotic fun.

I’m not invested in it, but it’s so tempting. And for being a game that’s catching my attention in a way that its predecessor failed to, it feels deserving of Game of the Week. And no doubt many of you will struggle to dispute this decision.