At this year's Gamescom I got hands-on with Bytten Studio's Cassette Beasts, an upcoming monster-taming open world RPG in the vein of Pokémon, which is far more interesting to me than the basic concept of Pokémon. That's because you're able to fuse together any monsters you 'catch', but moreso because it's a monster collectathon where you become the monster, essentially fusing yourself with bomb dogs and hermit crabs with traffic cone-homes.

I like the way the game does away with the overdone shonen story of wanting to become the very best there ever was, and instead puts the spotlight on its cast of characters and the relationships you form with your buds. It's looking mighty promising.

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If you've ever wondered what the 1987 film Running Man might look like as a turn-based tactics game (see also last year's Netflix sensation Squid Game, if the Running Man reference doesn't quite do it for you), then Homicidal All-Stars probably comes pretty close. It's the debut game from Artificer, a new studio formed by a bunch of ex-CreativeForge devs who worked on the first Hard West and Phantom Doctrine, and it centres on a woman called Scarlett who finds herself competing in the deadly TV show that gives the game its name. Like Running Man, Squid Game and all those other 'deadly games' you know and love, Homicidal All-Stars is about folks who down on their luck fighting for their lives, where their only consolation prize in these dystopian bloodbaths is not getting pulped at the end of it.

For Scarlett, this means mowing down scumbags in classic turn-based fashion with a bunch of other friendly competitors she's teamed up with, but this is far from a straightforward XCOM-like. Between fights, you'll also be navigating its trap-filled arenas in third-person, dodging sniper turrets, disabling tripwires, and dashing over spiky/fiery/horrible pits to get to the end of each 'episode'. It's a refreshing mix based on an early preview build I've been playing recently, especially when its gameshow hook allows for its malicious host, Orion Ford, to start meddling with your success. "He’s the person behind the worst of the twists," creative director and Artificer CEO Kacper Szymczak tells me. "He’ll start filling the level with poisonous gas, he’ll turn off the lights, drop explosive barrels everywhere, to name just a few."

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Massively multiplayer games rapidly calcified around a specific set of design ideas (eg. World Of Warcraft) and so many other attempts to jam a load of players onto a single server quickly disappeared (eg. most games by Improbable or Amazon).

Foxhole is one of the few to do it successfully: a single, massive World War 2 battlefield in which players don't just fight at the frontlines, but form supply routes, build defenses, and otherwise take the reigns of the logistics of war. After five years in early access, Foxhole released version 1.0 today.

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Vampire Survivors will hit version 1.0 on October 20th. Developer poncle announced the release date today as planned, but didn't say what new features the full release would contain so that its additions remain a surprise.

Although reaching 1.0 means leaving early access, it's also not the end of Vampire Survivors development. Work on porting the game to a new engine continues with the aim to "release it by the end of the year."

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Valheim was a surprise hit early last year and to date has now sold over 10 million copies. As of today, you no longer need to buy the viking fantasy survival game if you want to try it, assuming you have a subsription to PC Game Pass.

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