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

This week, family mysteries, massive Chinese battles and cyberpunk Castlevania.

You know it’s a good week when practically every release was a Game of the Week contender. Sure, it’s not a big week for major releases (it is January, after all) but the strength of what we are getting is impressive.

However, every possibility got thrown out of the window as soon as a certain mystery game whose prototype I’d already become obsessed with got a surprise full release and took the prize. Read on to find out more, but let it be known that almost everything this week looks excellent.

Re-Releases and Ports

If you’re looking for some quality cult classic horror from Southeast Asia, the DreadOut Remastered Collection (PS5, Switch) is for you. It’s basically Indonesian Fatal Frame, where you fight off culturally specific ghosts with a smartphone camera.

Tales of Graces F Remastered (PC, PlayStation, Switch, Xbox) is the remaster of the PS3 reworking of the Wii entry into Namco Bandai’s long-running JRPG series. It’s an epic tale that sees Asbel Lhant going on a grand adventure spurred on by Sophie, a mysterious girl who seemingly returned from the dead.

Somehow, Donkey Kong returned. For a third time. Donkey Kong Country Returns HD takes the revival of the Donkey Kong Country series that debuted on the Wii and reworks it once again for Switch. Not quite as good as Tropical Freeze, which already had an excellent Switch port, but still a great 2D platformer.

Early Access

Plenty of games launching in Early Access on Steam this week.

Aloft is a co-op survival game set across a series of sky islands. Turn an island into your floating home while working to eradicate a fungal menace spreading across the sky.

Speaking of stuff in the sky, Airborne Empire is the second sky-based city builder from The Wandering Band after 2022’s Airborne Kingdom. The main difference, as far as I can tell, is that this one adds in more combat elements, as sky pirates threaten the stability of your mighty sky city.

Hyper Light Breaker is a new co-op third-person action adventure set in the world of Hyper Light Drifter. However, the retro stylings of that game are out in favour of a more modern look. Still stylish looking though.

New Releases

Things Too Ugly (PC) is an investigative horror game where you play as a Risk Assessment Data Processor for a mysterious corporation. It’s 1986 and your first shift will shape the direction of the company depending on what secrets you’re able to uncover.

Threefold Recital (PC) is set in a fantasy world inspired by East Asian cultures, where humans live alongside dragons and beastlings. You play as three of these beastlings, each with their own mystical power. Together, they uncover a dark secret brewing under the surface of their city, one that will require their combined powers to overcome. The trailer features a wolf man doing the Ace Attorney “OBJECTION” so that’s me sold.

Blade Chimera (PC, Switch) is an absolutely fantastic Metroidvania that I can best describe as a cyberpunk Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. You play as Shin, a demon hunter in a futuristic Japan, and gain the abilities of a haunted sword. I played a pre-release copy of this one for my day job and thoroughly enjoyed my time with it. The earliest draft of this roundup had it as Game of the Week, in fact.

Dynasty Warriors: Origins (PC, PS5, Xbox X/S) is the latest in Koei Tecmo’s relentless Romance of the Three Kingdoms hack and slash franchise. However, after the disaster of the last game, this latest game is determined to bring the series back its roots. Reviews are looking good, so if you want to cleave your way through some historical Chinese battles, you should be in for a good time.

Game of the Week

Game of the Week is The Roottrees Are Dead (PC), a mystery game about a family tree.

The Roottrees is Dead is technically not a new game, as a prototype browser-based version existed on itch.io for a couple of years, and it’s this prototype that cemented my decision to make this Game of the Week. Even in its rough, incomplete form, I lost hours to it after seeing a recommendation in an article (may have been Polygon?). Now on Steam, its visuals have been drastically improved (including changing character portraits from garbled generative AI to actual hand-drawn art), some quality-of-life improvements have been made (e.g. saving text highlight instantly to your notebook) and a helpful hint system has been implemented.

The premise is that it’s 1998, and the president of the Roottree Candy Company and his three famous model daughters have died in a plane crash. You, a genealogy expert, are hired by a mysterious stranger to go through the entire Roottree family tree to determine who the blood relatives are. All you have to go off are a list of the more famous members of the family and 90s internet.

The Roottrees Are Dead is a compelling mystery precisely because of how vague the whole experience is. You’ll dig up scraps of information from weird fansites and occasional magazine articles, and very little of it immediately looks like it connects together. You have to really examine everything with a fine-toothed comb to find the answers. If you liked Return of the Obra Dinn and want a more modern version of that, you NEED to play The Rootrees Are Dead.