This week in PC games: Pathologic 3, a fresh Pokémon rival, a mind-bending FPS and some crablike base building

Before we begin the year’s first round-up of new PC game releases, an apology: we skipped feeding the Maw for one whole week back in December. In a deceptively carefree comment, I explained that I had too much seasonal blogmange to prepare, but this was actually a PR excuse to minimise hysteria. You see, back in November the Maw ate me, and I have only just exited its digestive system. During past emergencies, I’ve done this by hooking onto gumlines and working my way from tonsil to tonsil. This time I forgot to bring my climbing axes, and was obliged to escape in… the other direction.

It is best not to share more. Thankfully, the Maw’s internal odours are only smellable in the 11th through 17th dimensions, though they can still be detected in Normie Spacetime – you may have noticed that all the reflections are pinstriped today. Anyway, now that I’ve properly explained the break in service, let’s gingerly dip our still-reeking fingers into the spumes of commerce.

Monday 5th January

• Last year was all about horses. This year, perhaps, is the year of crabs. Step forward (or more likely, sideways) Dunecrawl, in which you and up to three other players roam a desert open world atop weaponised crustaceans.

Tuesday 6th January

• Feed The Reactor is an incremental clicker in which you drop different types of fuel into a cosmic vortex. Generating energy helps you level up the reactor and unpeel the narrative layers of a “strange galaxy”. An alien fishperson complains that they are always at war with Crustacea. See, crabs again.
• Trigger-happy Satisfactory players and the mayoral kind of Helldiver might appreciate StarRupture, an early access game from the Green Hell devs in which you build outposts on planets and defend them against swarms of… crablike monsters?!?
• There are 19 bosses in the fetchingly ghastly pixelart metroidvania Death Machine and surely at least one of them is an invertebrate with eight legs, a carapace and large pincers.

Wednesday 7th January

• Our next two offerings come from the worryingly crab-agnostic Julian. Firstly, Oddcore - a deranged and fizzy FPS theme park of backroom spaces and dysfunctional corpo messaging. Seems lovely. No obvious crab presence though. Stop resisting progress, Julian.
• Now this is more like it. EvoCreo is a creature collector with old school console (specifically, I’m thinking Game Boy Advance) graphics and turn-based combat. There are over 170 critters or Creos to bosh and bag. If one of the Creos isn’t a crab, I am going to call the Pokémon Company and complain that ilmfinity aren't ripping them off correctly.

Thursday 8th January

• Ancient Farm is an ancient farm simulator set in ancient Egypt. The wily bastards at A2 Softworks thought they could shirk their obligations to crabs by setting this on dry land, but then they slipped up and added rivers. Acanthothelphusa niloticus is coming for your ass, A2.

Friday 9th January

• If you were hoping for a feelgood game to close out the dingy first week of January, tough luck, you’re getting Ice-Pick Lodge’s Pathologic 3 instead. 12 days to save the worst town bar possibly Silent Hill from a nightmare disease. Impose quarantines and roadblocks. Examine pustulating torsos. “Struggle to balance mania and apathy”. If there are crabs in this, they are the kind that live in your pubic hair.

Other vidyagame happenings this week: it’s time for another helping of hardware tradeshow CES in Las Vegas. James has set up a very large telescope on the Treehouse roof, and is combing the stalls for talk of GPU and RAM price changes, new screen formats, and novelty alarm clocks. For the most part, though, we’ll be spending this week firming up coverage plans for 2026. Like migrating Cuban red crabs, we must throw ourselves into the seas of discourse, striving to lay our writing-eggs before the tides return us to the shore.