Despelote is a living memory. Julián Cordero, the game's co-creator, invites players to spend a few hours in the city of Quito, Ecuador, in the early 2000s, and experience a nationwide soccer fever from the perspective of his own childhood. Wrapped in layers of static and shadow, Despelote follows an 8-year-old Cordero as he interacts with his family, attends school and kicks a ball around with friends. Pivotal national events, revealed in news reports and overheard conversations, color the game's runtime. But its focus remains squarely on Cordero's experience — a charmingly self-centered child viewing the world from hip height.

In Despelote, it’s the summer of 2001 and Ecuador is on the verge of qualifying for its first-ever World Cup, which has created a soccer frenzy across the country. Soccer is a storytelling mechanic in Despelote, as Cordero runs around Quito kicking a ball, playing a FIFA-style video game, watching World Cup matches on TV and generally annoying his neighbors.

Using actual recordings from Quito, Despelote captures intimate conversations, inside jokes and everyday chatter among Cordero’s friends and family members (in Spanish, obviously, with translations provided in speech bubbles). The game’s environments are built out of photographs of Quito that have been stylized to mimic the way memories feel — single-color, fuzzy backgrounds with people and important objects outlined in crisp black and white. Actual footage of the Ecuador team making its World Cup run plays out on in-game TVs, and you’re able to sit and watch an entire match on a small, staticky screen, if you wish. These true-to-life elements ground the game in reality, while visual flourishes make everything seem like a daydream, and the combination of styles is hypnotic.

Transitions come in the form of nearly imperceptible camera zooms and slowly blurring environments, and at every turn, there’s space to luxuriate in the simple activity of being a kid. The game’s mechanics are intuitive — flick the right stick to kick the ball; hold any trigger to run; press any button to interact; look down to check your watch so you can get home on time — and this simplicity helps Quito come alive. Poignant moments of magical surrealism cut through the flow like memories inside of memories, providing glimpses into Cordero’s future as a teenager and Ecuador’s evolution as a country. These scenes appear just enough to provide a sense of tension and context without breaking the immersion of the childhood memories.

Panic

There isn’t much in terms of a moment-to-moment storyline here, but Despelote effortlessly builds a sense of place and self with each new vignette. It’s night and Cordero is sitting in the back of the family van, idly listening to his parents’ conversation and drawing shapes in the window fog. His mom stands in front of the television and tries to pull his attention away from the video game he’s playing, exasperated. His younger sister asks him to draw a frog. A grumpy neighbor steals the ball that Cordero and his friends are playing with, so they start kicking around an empty bottle instead. These are the building blocks of Cordero’s childhood, and while they’re deeply specific, they’re also highly relatable. Despelote is a study in the beauty of mundanity.

I haven’t played many games like Despelote. I’m tempted to say I’ve never played anything like it, that this is the first true memoir in video game form, but of course that’s not entirely accurate. Games like That Dragon, Cancer and Dys4ia offer similar glimpses into their creators’ lives, and they’re similarly vulnerable and grounded. They’re also examinations of moments of acute pain — and while stories about trauma compose a substantial and valuable portion of the memoir market, there’s room for Despelote's slower, lighter reflection in this genre. Despelote is a stellar addition in the category of memoir video games, proving that a thoughtful rumination on one person’s childhood can translate into a powerful interactive experience. The key, as always, is authenticity.

Panic

Cordero breaks the fourth wall at the end of Despelote in a way that feels completely natural. The style of the game changes in an instant and Cordero narrates the scene, talking about how he and co-creator Sebastián Valbuena traveled to Quito to collect Despelote’s audio and location data. He discusses the fickle nature of memory and clarifies some of the game’s timelines. He says he really just wanted to get it right. He wanted players to understand the magic of this moment in Ecuador’s history, when soccer was everything, and he was just a kid.

I believe he succeeded.

Despelote is available now on Steam, PlayStation 4, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, published by Panic.

The extraction-shooter genre is getting a little more crowded and a lot more stylish with the announcement of Mycopunk, a four-player, first-person romp from indie studio Pigeons at Play and publisher Devolver Digital. Mycopunk is coming to Steam in early access this year.

Mycopunk stars four eccentric robots who’ve been hired by an intergalactic megacorporation to exterminate an invasive, violent fungus that’s taken root on a valuable planet. Each robot has a specific class and moveset, but players can use any weapon or loadout with any character — and that’s a huge benefit, because there are a ton of wacky guns, upgrades and ammo options in this game. For example, there are bouncing shotgun pellets, bullets that hover in place and then dive down when you press the trigger again, and a rocket launcher move that also makes you fly. Customization is a big part of the Mycopunk experience, and there are about 40 upgrades for every weapon, plus unique ability trees for each robot. A spatial upgrade system lets you activate abilities by placing their molecular strands on a honeycomb grid, combining effects in powerful and silly ways.

The main loop in Mycopunk involves gathering your team, setting mission modifiers, and then dropping onto a planet to kill hordes of massive, tentacled fungus monsters. With each run, you have to accomplish your corporate-directed goal, collect resources for future upgrades and generally survive the onslaught. Missions are fast-paced and the action shifts throughout, dropping new enemies, minibosses and environmental dangers until your final escape.

The hub world, where you hang out between missions, is surprisingly vast and packed with surreal touches, like a giant TV screen that only shows a sitcom about roaches. All abilities are unlocked in the hub so you can freely test out your character, plus there are vehicles to drive around, a sparring area, a recreation sphere, snack machines, and secret passageways to explore. It also has Roachard, your mission control contact who happens to be a big roach.

Devolver Digital

Visually, Pigeons at Play took inspiration from your coolest friend’s favorite comic book artist, Moebius, which lends the game a gritty, hand-drawn vibe. Mycopunk looks like a living graphic novel, blending retrofuturism with slick mechanics to create a rich, tactile experience. It specifically reminds me of Rollerdrome, a gorgeous game that I will never stop talking about.

Mycopunk started out as a senior thesis project for the Pigeons at Play crew, but it’s transformed into something much larger (kind of like a well-fed fungus). Mycopunk is charming and surprisingly deep, with dozens of cute touches that come straight from the developers’ history of playing co-op shooters together. For instance, to revive a teammate you have to literally find and reconnect two halves of their broken robot body, instead of just pressing X over their corpse in the middle of a hectic battlefield. Each character also has their own dance moves, and one of the available upgrades lets you move a swarm of bullets through the air like a murderous orchestra conductor.

A demo for Mycopunk went live on Steam today and the game is set to enter early access later in 2025.

Mixtape is a coming-of-age story about the reality-bending adventures of three teenage friends on their final night of high school, featuring a soundtrack of classic punk and alternative hits. It's due to hit Xbox Series X/S and PC in 2025, and it'll be available day-one on Game Pass.

Mixtape follows three friends on their way to their final high school party, as they relive their glory days to the tunes of a perfectly curated playlist. Their memories appear in dreamlike sequences, featuring songs by Iggy Pop, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Joy Division, Devo, The Smashing Pumpkins and other old-school hit makers.

The main trio in Mixtape provide plenty of teenage sass in the game's reveal trailer, and its art style feels like something between stop-motion and cel-shaded cinematics. It's a welcoming, stylish world. The Mixtape microsite includes the mantra, "Skate. Party. Avoid the law. Make out. Sneak out. Hang out." Sounds like high school to me.

Mixtape comes from Beethoven & Dinosaur, the studio behind the musical adventure The Artful Escape and fronted by Australian rockstar Johnny Galvatron. It's published by Annapurna Interactive.

Catch up on all of the news from Summer Game Fest 2024 right here!

South of Midnight, first revealed at last year’s Summer Game Fest, will launch on Xbox and PC sometime next year. During today's Xbox showcase, we got a first look at how the third-person action-adventure will play. 

Right off the bat, it reminds me of Square Enix’s fun-but-flawed Forspoken. In South of Midnight, protagonist Hazel is apparently pulled into a “Southern Gothic world” where reality and fantasy are blurred. Hazel is able to move around the environment fluidly, with the new trailer showing off gliding skills, double jumps, and some sort of magical grapple hook to speed up level navigation. 

We also got even more cutscenes to help flesh out this world, and they still have that Into The Spider-verse jumpy frame-rate trick to separate cutscenes from in-game actionYou’ll be able to fight monsters with close-up magical blade attacks and other midrange weaponry. Oh and you seem to befriend – and ride – a giant catfish around the magical bayou.

Catch up on all of the news from Summer Game Fest 2024 right here!

There's a new Doom in town. Doom: The Dark Ages is heading to PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S and PC, day one on Game Pass, in 2025. The game's first trailer showcases a world of hulking monsters in blood-soaked environments, badass new weapons and what looks to be a player-controlled dragon. At one point, the Doom Slayer steps inside a giant mech suit in order to battle a huge demon, buildings crumbling beneath their feet. 

The weapons and creatures in Doom: The Dark Ages have a distinct medieval flare, as is expected, with lots of sharpened blades, at least one flail and heavy armor all around. One new weapon that stands out in the game's reveal trailer is an automatic shotgun with a skull in the center of it, menacing and slightly silly at the same time. As is custom in Doom games, the level of gory, gruesome detail on display in The Dark Ages is exceptional, and it looks like the game is leaning into everything that makes this franchise so deliciously disgusting.

Doom: The Dark Ages is a prequel to 2016's Doom and Doom Eternal, developed by series shepherd id Software. Its story will illuminate the origin of the Doom Slayer. Spoiler: He will slaughter a lot of demons.

It's possible this is the rumored Doom: Year Zero that was mentioned in leaked documents related to Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard. The leak happened in September 2023 and it outlined Bethesda's roadmap over the coming years as part of the Xbox Game Studios brand.

Catch up on all of the news from Summer Game Fest 2024 right here!

Break out your blankets and settle in, everyone. It’s time for the cozy games.

The latest Wholesome Direct showcase offers an hour-long celebration of innovation and coziness in indie development, featuring more than 30 meditative, calming and absolutely adorable experiences. Some of the titles are brand new, some are getting updates, many of them have demos, and others simply deserve time in the spotlight. One thing they all have in common is an inherent ability to warm your heart.

The entire Wholesome Direct 2024 showcase is worth watching. It’s packed with brilliant indie gems and brand-new trailers, and many of the featured titles already have demos available to download. Here, we’ve collected four games that came out today as surprise drops tied to the showcase: Kamaeru: A Frog Refuge, POOOOL, The Palace on the Hill and Tracks of Thought. I spent some time playing the first three games on this list and each one is lovely in its own way; I’ve left my thoughts with the game descriptions below.

Watch, read about and then play a bunch of cozy, wholesome games — that’s not a bad way to spend a Saturday. Or a summer.

Kamaeru: A Frog Refuge

This one’s for the players who can’t get enough of games like Neko Atsume and Usagi Shima, or for folks who just really love adorable amphibians. Kamaeru: A Frog Refuge is a farming sim about building and maintaining a protected space in the wetlands where wild frogs can thrive, and it gets much deeper than simply buying new poufs for the animals to sleep on. In Kamaeru, players have to dig out the wetlands, harvest ingredients to make jam and other treats for selling at the market, monitor their environmental impact, and purchase items to create an inviting space for all of their frog friends. Players are able to take photos of the frogs, feed them, name them and even breed them, mixing their colorways in a tic-tac-toe Punnett square.

Kamaeru is a relaxed, methodical and surprisingly deep experience that happens to be filled with cute and colorful frogs. It’s much more than a passive animal-observation game, and it takes a fair amount of grinding — but like, in a really cozy, froggy way — for the on-screen rewards to start rolling in. After about an hour of play, I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface of this game. 

Kamaeru is available now on Steam, itchi.io and Nintendo Switch, and it’s verified on Steam Deck. It's developed by Humble Reeds and published by Armor Games Studios.

POOOOL

Count 'em, that’s four Os. POOOOL is a sweet and simple game with infinite replayability, much like the stick-and-ball sport that inspired it. In POOOOL, players fling bouncy balls of various sizes around a contained rectangle, one at a time, in an attempt to make spheres of the same color touch. When two matching balls collide, they instantly combine into a bigger ball, which can then be combined with another of the same size, and so on. It’s kind of like Threes! but with colorful balls instead of numbers. Eventually, the globes reach their limit and they disappear with a pop, leaving plenty of room for new balls to spawn. The round ends and the score is tallied when there’s no more room for the spheres to be flung.

POOOOL is a lovely little physics simulator with a friendly art style and soothing, repeatable mechanics. This is a game that rewards strategy, but it’s also incredibly forgiving of mindless clicking and dragging, and both play styles result in a satisfyingly bouncy experience. Put it in your pile of games to play while killing time or pretending to get work done, and you’ll get plenty of use out of it. POOOOL comes from developer Noah King and publisher digimoss, and it’s available right now on Steam.

The Palace on the Hill

This is a special one. The Palace on the Hill is a thoughtful and robust slice-of-life game set in a fictional town in rural India in the 1990s, starring a young man who’s helping his family earn money over the summer. Players plant, tend to and sell their crops, they work shifts at the local tea shop, and they pick up odd jobs in town, getting to know the residents along the way. The young man is an aspiring artist, and he finds inspiration for new paintings around the village, sharing stories about the area’s past in beautiful watercolor vignettes. There’s a rich history here and plenty of things to do in each moment.

The Palace on the Hill is a sweet surprise of an adventure game, riveting, methodical and illuminating. The rural town where it takes place feels alive and its boundaries expand delicately as the game progresses. Each NPC has a distinct personality and a unique relationship with the protagonist, and their world quickly feels familiar, even as it remains filled with secrets. I heartily recommend this game.

The Palace on the Hill is available today on Steam, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, iOS and Android, and it’s verified on Steam Deck. It comes from indie studio Niku Games.

Tracks of Thought

Tracks of Thought is a game about chatting, managing cards and solving mysteries, and it all takes place on a long-haul locomotive heading to an unknown destination. After passing through a strange tunnel, every passenger on the train forgets where they’re going, and it’s up to the protagonist, an amiable purple ladybug, to figure out what’s going on. The ladybug’s personality is shaped by the player’s interactions with other passengers, and conversations play out as card battles where the goal is to resolve conflict and help everyone get on the same page.

Tracks of Thought has a cartoony art style and a cast of cool, bug-like characters, and it seems to offer a clever blend of conversation and card battles. With today's showing, this game has been featured in a total of four Wholesome Directs (yes, that's nearly all of them), so it's especially great to see it out now on Steam and the Epic Games Store. Tracks of Thought comes from developer Tidbits Play and publisher Freedom Games.

Catch up on all of the news from Summer Game Fest 2024 right here!

Heart Machine is working overtime. The studio is gearing up to release Hyper Light Breaker, a big ol' online adventure game, and it just revealed another title that's in development and due out soon: Possessor(s). It's scheduled to hit PC and consoles in 2025.

Possessor(s) is a twitchy action sidescroller set in a sci-fi city overrun by interdimensional horror. In its reveal trailer, it looks absolutely beautiful — demonic, dramatic and hyper-chromatic. 

Possessor(s) is set in a quarantined metropolis that's been invaded by otherworldly forces, featuring 3D backgrounds and hand-painted characters coated in a sickly VHS glow. Combat involves lots of melee with found objects, sliding down long corridors and swinging from a grappling hook, with more weapons unlocked and upgraded as the experience progresses. 

Possessor(s) stars the host, Luca, and her problematic counterpart, Rehm. In order to survive, they need to learn how to coexist, and together they're on a mission to discover the source of the catastrophe that destroyed this city. There's an open-ended narrative with multiple paths to travel down, and a roster of characters to meet, each new story of devastation illuminating the larger mystery. 

Every cutscene in the Possessor(s) announcement trailer could be a screensaver and combat looks super smooth. It's developed by Heart Machine and published by Devolver Digital.

Catch up on all of the news from Summer Game Fest 2024 right here!

Phoenix Springs is a point-and-click detective game that looks like the cover of a mid-century sci-fi novel, and it’s due to go live on Steam on September 16.

Steeped in mystery and a vibrant neo-noir aesthetic, Phoenix Springs follows reporter Iris Dormer as she searches for her brother, Leo, in a mysterious community at the heart of a desert oasis. It’s a challenging puzzle game featuring voice acting and a minimal UI, and Iris’ inventory is designed to be filled with mental notes rather than physical objects, encouraging players to think in abstractions.

Visually, there’s no other game like Phoenix Springs. It mixes 2D and 3D animations, and it’s composed of hand-drawn scenes featuring heavy shadows and muted greens, with bright pops of yellow and red. The game looks old and new at the same time, and for puzzle fans, it’s one of the most intriguing titles coming out this year.

Phoenix Springs is developed and published by Calligram Studio, a four-person art collective based in London. Calligram launched a Kickstarter for the game in 2017 and successfully raised more than €10,000. Over the past seven years, Calligram has secured a handful of prestigious awards and nominations for Phoenix Springs, adding an extra touch of anticipation to today’s release-date announcement.

Catch up on all of the news from Summer Game Fest 2024 right here!

Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure is due to hit PC, Switch, PlayStation 5 and mobile devices on July 25.

Arranger is an adventure game with a simple and disruptive conceit: The world exists on a grid of sliding tiles. Moving the main character, Jemma, slides the connected row or column of tiles with her, shifting the landscape as she travels. This mechanic turns walking into a puzzle and it forms the basis of the game’s spatial riddles.

Jemma is a misfit who’s venturing outside of her cozy home for the first time, discovering all of the amazing and terrifying things the wider world has to offer. The land is ruled by a strange, static force, and Jemma’s mission is to make the place loosen up (quite literally, it would seem).

Arranger is developed and published by indie studio Furniture & Mattress, which includes Braid artist David Helman, Carto writer Nick Suttner, Per Aspera composer Tomas Batista and Ethereal developer Nicolás Recabarren. The mobile version of Arranger will be distributed through Netflix, meaning anyone with an active subscription should be able to play at no extra charge.

Catch up on all of the news from Summer Game Fest 2024 right here!

And now for a game that’s actually 50 games — at least.

UFO 50, the latest project from Spelunky studio Mossmouth, is due to hit Steam on September 18, about six years after it was originally expected to launch. That’s merely an observation, not a criticism — UFO 50 is an ambitious project that offers 50 full, retro-styled games in a single package, and it’s all coming from a team of just six people.

In UFO 50 lore, UFO Soft was a game developer who was active between 1982 and 1990, peak NES and Genesis years. The games collected in UFO 50 feature recurring characters and sequels from UFO Soft’s fictional past, and they’re restricted in terms of color and audio, as if they had actually been developed for bygone hardware. Mossmouth is manifesting an alternate timeline of video game history here, and it looks like a ton of fun.

“The story of UFO 50 is that the games were all created in the ‘80s by a fictional company that was obscure but ahead of its time,” the game’s FAQ reads. “They're also connected by a unique 32-color palette and other restrictions we decided on to make them feel more authentic. (However, we don't force sprite flickering or slowdown, as we didn't feel that it would make the games more enjoyable.)”

Every game in UFO 50 is unlocked from the start, and the collection features a wide variety of genres, including platformers, RPGs, roguelites and shoot-em-ups. None of the titles are mini- or micro-games, and while they’re all done in an 8-bit aesthetic, their visual and mechanical styles evolve with the years. Every game is playable solo, and half of them include multiplayer elements.

All that said, I think Mossmouth is selling itself short by calling UFO 50 a collection of just 50 games. Sure, it includes 50 individual experiences inspired by classic games of the 1980s, but there’s also one huge, hidden title in the collection — UFO 50 itself. Don’t forget to factor that into your pricing deliberations, Mossmouth.

Catch up on all of the news from Summer Game Fest 2024 right here!