This week in PC games: go helldiving in Gravhounds, wreck a hoverbike in Airframe Ultra, or feed humans to a cutaway spaceship in Hull Rupture

What we're feeding the Maw

Recently, I managed to dupe that preposterous hack Julian into signing a form committing him to alternate weeks of Maw-feeding duty. How he whined last Monday, as we strapped him into his neoprene bodysuit. How he begged for mercy, as we handed him his 12-foot Gallium toasting fork and elbowed him out the airlock.

Still, he's had his revenge. I don't know what Julian fed the Maw last week but he seems to have given it hiccups. I can only apologise to the population of Michigan. I'm sure all the zinc will come back eventually. Anyway, enough of Michigan: let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of new PC games. Here are several that are releasing this week.

Monday 2nd November

• Feed The Forest could be just another incremental game that is open about its own cynicism, but it does star a snail, and I like how the ostensibly cheery theme of growing a forest appears to teeter over into growing some kind of hell.
• What if you were a dog? OK, but what if you were a dog with a Gravity Gun? OK, but what if you were a dog with a Gravity Gun and 360-degree jet boosting? Gravhounds is out in early access today.
• What if you were a sentient oil puddle? OK, but what if you were a sentient oil puddle in a hazy pink 2D world of gears and spikes? OK, but what if you didn't even know why you are a sentient oil puddle and also, had to find 80 collectibles? Iron Sol is out today.

Tuesday 3rd November

• Ramen Shop Simulator isn't the first ramen shop simulator I've fed the Maw in the past month, but it might be the more adorable. It's single-player only, and has the loveliest crockery. I look forward to washing up in this game.
• just volleyball is an easily grasped offline or online volleyball sim with up to 6v6 multiplayer. I'm hoping the latter will let me and my countless volleyball-playing chums recreate episodes of Haikyu!!, but this seems more laidback and floaty. No bad thing in itself.
• There are a lot of foodie games in the round-up this week, but only Food Devils understands that food consumption is secretly a metaphor for fornication, gadzooks. It's a blend of tactics RPG and restaurant management sim with the strong possibility of some sweaty demon-booping.

Wednesday 4th November

• I am deeply tired of Balatro clones, but Sushiamo is the first one I've encountered that deploys Balatro as a means of making sushi. I will give this a Bestest Best if it lets you "power up" supermarket rice by dousing it in sauce you literally inherited from your grandmother. My top lifehack: if the umami is of sufficient intensity, it will kill any and all salmonella germs. Don't listen to those squares in the "National Health Service".
• May the cosmic gods help any human foolish enough to board my cutaway 2D starcruiser in Hull Rupture (pictured), a base-building tower defender with a – man alive, is that warp core shaped like a thrusting gonad? What are they putting in the videogames this week?

Thursday 5th November

• Oh thank goodness, a game set in medieval times - nobody ate anything or had any sex, back in the Middle Ages. Out this day in early access, County of Fortune is a strategy builder in which you oversee several settlements that grow by themselves, establishing trade routes and potentially falling into rivalry.
• Despair about the plague of incremental sims has bred a subgenre of games about feeding horrible holes. In Full Bloom has especially nice art direction.
• Where the Seeds Fall is a 3D platformer about escorting an eerie child to the bottom of the World Tree, hopping from bough to bough and using flowers as crashpads.
• AlteredBlood+ is a throwback movement FPS in which standing in pools of gore makes your guns go all weird.
• Hot dang, Airframe Ultra is my vintage of sci-fi. I haven't seen cityscapes like these since 1996. It's a hoverbike racer steeped in the vital fluids of WipEout and Destruction Derby, co-developed by the studio behind Rain World.
• Legends of Rock is a management game in which you manage the excavation of rare igneous deposits – ho ho ho! No, it's actually about running a rock band.

Friday 6th November

• People who enjoyed Elephantasy might like the tiny, interconnected blockworlds of Pith, a 3D puzzle-platformer with a touch of Metroidbrain.
• For a chillaxing end to the week, consider tending to a small population of evolving aliens in laissez-faire colony sim Tenebrarium. All you have to do, broadly, is figure out the effects of feeding them stuff.
• "I do not believe in aliens," you tell me sternly. "I trust only in the purity of numbers." Fine, here's Number Machine Math Factory - dreary title, beautiful presentation. If maths had looked like this when I was doing my GSCEs, I might have landed a real career instead of dribbling away my mortal energies having conversations with myself in videogame round-up articles.

Things being done in the Treehouse this week: much yelling about end-of-year feature coverage. We have all made our lists and now the lists are fighting, like rival nests of wasps, scorpions, ants and puppies. Yes puppies can form nests, or so Callum maintains. Also happening this week: strategy game coverage, editing of some really sharp freelance features, and hopefully not all that much else, because I kind of just want to play Airframe Ultra. How about you? Please, share the great games I have missed, so that I can spend the rest of today feeling ignorant and ashamed.