This week’s new PC games are a treasure trove of the scary, eerie and occult, plus a charming Star Trek game

Happy this week, all! It’s time once again to load the Maw up with new PC games, that we may stave off the apocalypse till next Monday. This week covers a wide spectrum of flavours and textures: papery, Dodo-ish, ducklike, inky, formaldehyde-y, pasty, furry, feculent, and fishy. Once you’re done throwing up, get back here and run your protesting eyes over the full list. As ever, we welcome your urgent suggestions.

Monday 16th February

• Book Smugglers is a point and click adventure about circulating forbidden texts in 19th century Tsarist Lithuania.
• Stormbridge is a strictly horizontal blend of tower defence and city builder in which you stretch out a settlement rightwards, while raising defences against an encroaching tempest on the left.
• For people who want more randomisation and playdough faces in their Ogre Battling, Dobbel Dungeon is a turn-based tactics affair in which characters roll dice each turn to determine the moves they can perform.
• Out this day in early access, Astrobotanica is a somewhat Crash Bandicoot-esque puzzle ‘n’ survival game in which you are an extra-terrestrial botanist making sense of prehistoric Earth, feat. Neanderthals and Dodos.
• Let’s savagely rebut the chonky ‘take me to your chief mammoth hunter’ bonhomie of that last entry with Alien Morgue, in which you do autopsies on little green men. (You don’t appear to be playing a Neanderthal or a Dodo.)

Tuesday 17th February

• Time to once again dust off those parched and abraded Zelda memories with Under The Island, a top-down island dungeon puzzler featuring six biomes replete with grass you can slash to reveal health hearts.
• Friendslop’s bottomless chum bucket has claimed Cthulhu in Ritual Party, which is about four buds (or are you?) trying to perform a hellish ritual. Please, somebody help me think of a non-pejorative word for “friendslop” that rolls off the tongue as easily. The best I have are “Overcookie” and “Lethalcomp”.
• No time for friendslop, actually, for today marks the dawning of duck-builders. Placid Plastic Deck: A Quiet Quest (pictured) is a deeply suspicious card-battler.
• Beyond The Doors is a finicky surveillance sim in which you accept mysterious requests to bug your neighbours, while probing the enigmas of the architecture itself.
• Roach Post is a cheery roguelite puzzler in which you stick together postage stamps with the help of an army of cockroaches.
• Forgotlings is a posh-looking, VA-heavy action adventure set in a world of discarded sentient objects.

Wednesday 18th February

• Nice cavernous origami world you’ve got there, Blank. Shame if somebody were to platform all over it.
• Equal parts horny, despairing and whimsical, Kill The Witch is an early access 2D action platformer in which you are a witch with a baseball bat.
• The Killing Stone is an Inscryptic confection from the makers of The Blackout Club. You are in the Arctic, playing a cursed boardgame to save the souls of a noble family from the Devil.
• The criminal absence of licensed music notwithstanding, Star Trek: Voyager – Across the Unknown looks to be a pleasant “what if”-driven strategy management port of TV’s definitive trip to the Delta Quadrant. Off to the Transporter room with you, Neelix – you’re doing a one-man-raid on the Borg Cube.
• People who pre-fur the Star Foxy breed of space sim might want to throw their pennies at FUR Squadron Phoenix. Neelix’s tufty mug wouldn’t look out of place here, now that I think of it.

Thursday 19th February

• Today brings quite the haul. Let’s barge through them at pace. Firstly, PARANORMASIGHT: The Mermaid’s Curse is a sun-baked mystery horror novel in which an ensemble cast wrangle with some ghastly fishwomen.
• The N64-to-Gamecube era lives on in “expressive” platformer Demon Tides, which casts you as a transforming devil princess.
• Styx: Blades Of Greed is your latest helping of putrid and snarky open world goblin stealth.
• Love Eternal is an introspective horror platformer we might blithely summarise as Playdead X Celeste.
• Key Fairy is a “hand-drawn, pacifist, folkloric, bullet-hell” game in which you grapple past monsters, salvaging their shattered stars, and solve riddles in a forest of scratchy blood and ink.
• Nightsoil is possibly the first turd collection game I’ve covered, and certainly the first emotive turd collection game I’ve covered.
• Get the sense that all is not well on this particular gas giant moon.

Friday 20th February

• Just a couple more before we go gently into that good Friday night. Ys X: Proud Nordics is an updated version of a 2023 entrant in the sprawling Ys series, best known (to me, anyway) for popularising the concept of bumpslash combat.
• Horripilant is an incremental dungeon clicker about an old knight in a world of Junji Ito-esque filthbastards.

What’s going on in the Treehouse this week? James is biffing several larger hardware stories, and threatening to educate the rest of us about teraflops. Mark wants to walk the desert – hurting, longing, dancing to disco music. Julian may have an awkward tale to tell about a PC game he shouldn’t admit to have played. I am thinking about open worlds and city builders, because I am nothing if not shackled to genre. Callum is biding his time before the Requiem, and Ollie is eyeing the months ahead through a telescope (and also, possibly playing more Arc Raiders). Jeremy ain’t in yet. How about you?