This week in PC games: build a better zombie in Stupid Never Dies, glue together houses in Cutout Village, and settle brave new worlds in Star Trek: Outposts Unknown

What we're feeding the Maw

Hello all! Welcome to another wonderful week of PC games, and mounting bloodlust. As I type these words, a neighbour has started using a leafblower. I hate leafblowers. They are mutant hairdryers from Hell. They scatter my thoughts like the tiny, tiny quantity of leaves in the neighbour's garden – a quantity of leaves you could very easily sweep up by hand in two minutes, if you had even the slightest bit of gumption.

What's that? You think I should release vipers into the neighbour's toolshed? What a capital idea! But sadly I don't have any vipers to hand, and besides, I have to finish writing this list of new PC games. There are exactly as many games in the list as there are leaves in the neighbour's garden. He'll be at it for hours, no doubt. Please read, while I order in some fresh vipers.

Monday 19th October

• Out this day in early access, Athanasia blends Dino Crisis and System Shock into a chunky prehistoric gumbo you can probably use as a distraction item.
• Warding Witches is an upwardly scrolling bullet hell in which you get some finicky shielding abilities in place of the regular screen-clearing bombs.

Tuesday 20th October

• Star Trek: Outposts Unknown is a Star Trek game set on… the ground???? In which you build buildings???????? What next, a Klingon diplomacy simulator? (Please, somebody make a Klingon diplomacy simulator.)
• We Were Here Tomorrow is a co-op 80s Antarctic base escape game in which two castaways in spacesuits tackle dispersed, asymmetrical puzzles, using walkie talkies to communicate. Yes, you will need a mic.
• A Sister's Journey might sound like a melancholy epistolary narrative game, but is in fact a run-and-gun metroidvania with some of the prettiest waterfalls and precipitation I've laid eyes on lately.
• Out this day in early access, Baron is an open world mafia game set in Ankara.

Wednesday 21st October

• Stupid Never Dies (pictured) is a limb-swapping action RPG from a team led by former Capcom producer Hiroyuki Kobayashi. You are a puny zombie trying to resurrect your girlfriend. Your superpower is the ability to graft pieces of stronger monsters to yourself. This initial release is the DLC-garnished "Glorious Idiot" edition, with the cheaper base game landing on the 23rd. Not being a glorious idiot, I suggest waiting till Friday and saving yourself some pennies.
• WOIM is a sokoban puzzler in which you are an earthworm, eating dirt blocks and pooping them out behind. You can drag yourself across a pair of scissors to snip yourself in twain, allowing the surviving half to fit into smaller warrens. Gosh, being a worm really sucks.
• Speaking of scissors, here's Cutout Village, a city-builder in which you have to cut, fold and glue together the houses. I own several pairs of scissors IRL, and I do sort of wonder why I wouldn't just make a village out of actual paper.

Thursday 22nd October

• Final Fantasy Resonance is the first "HD-2D" Final Fantasy from Square Enix. If you're new to "HD-2D", it basically means old-timey character sprites on low-angle 3D dioramas. It's got all the usual moogles, airships and espers, plus a stagger system apparently derived from the Octopath Traveller series.
• One Piece: Grand Gourmet is a laidback pocket management sim from Game Dev Story studio Kairosoft. Amongst other things, it means I have to revisit my mixed feelings about the One Piece anime – wonderful Loony Tunes animation, but eesh, I find some of the hyperviolence unsettling. It's bizarre, because there are plenty of far bloodier anime I don't have issues with.
• It's definitely reductive to call Moadra "the Prince of Persia: Warrior Within of Metroid-alikes", but that hopefully gives you a steer on the art direction, at least.

Friday 23rd October

• It's time to claw seven shades of shit out of some thug squirrels in Warrior Cats: Clans of the Forest. Apparently, Warrior Cats is a "beloved" book series. This videogame adaptation features a procgen lakeland world, turn-based battles, and asynchronous multiplayer. Such insanity. You would never persuade a cat to take turns.

  On the Treehouse's mind this week: end-of-year list features; the recent rash of genAI-abetted decomps and recomps; the grim darkness of the far future; something involving a hammer that isn't the thing I've just alluded to. Let us know of any great games we've missed, even if they involve leafblowers. I can think of at least one genuinely terrific game that features a leafblower - Brutalist city-rover Babbdi.