PWB June 2025

June already?!

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Monster Train 2. This is incredible. I've been a huge fan of the original for years (it's one of the very few things cavalcade and I have ever agreed on) and this is pretty much the perfect sequel, adding stuff and tweaking stuff and giving you more to do without fundamentally changing what made the original so great. The new clans are super-interesting, the new mechanics add just the right amount of variety, and (without giving anything away) one of the unlocks you get about 10 hours in is simply amazing. I love this.

Star Wars: Battlefront 2. 2025's most surprising revival. Off the back of Andor season 2, a Star Wars tie-in in Fortnite, and a few well-placed sales, this has exploded again, breaking its records for number of players online repeatedly over the last few weeks. I still think this is an absolutely great game (even for someone like me who isn't much into multiplayer stuff) and it's a real shame that they dropped support for it at just the point they'd managed to haul it back from the micro-transaction precipice into something genuinely great. Hopefully all the calls for Battlefront 3 may actually lead to something.

Want

I'm not on the Switch 2 hype train but I'll be watching to see what the reactions are over the next few weeks.

I've been playing a bit of Power Wash Simulator again, still love it, still got loads to do but there's a sequel coming out so that'll definitely be getting bought / downloaded on Game Pass.

Bin

Reluctantly I think I'll be shelving Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, I adore the setting and the vibe and the acting and really most things about it but I spend most of the game wandering around lost and I find whether I win or lose each battle really just a matter of luck. I don't think my reactions are really up to the task, if I do manage to parry anything it always feels like a massive fluke. Shame, it's obviously a really great game.

Doctor Who - what the fuck was that?

I was quite excited by the news. I haven't watched any of the current Doctor or the one before that, so learning what has happened has peaked my interest in returning.

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I'm technically not going to be playing it this month, but it feels unfair to put it in the Bin when I enjoyed so much of it, so here's Expedition 33. I know there's a lot more to be seen and done—the Continent map has so many icons I never visited—but I wasn't enjoying the grind, and the optional areas I did manage to finish were getting too parry-reliant. So I just beelined for the end, rather than letting the rest of it wear me out before I saw the credits. The final boss was pretty straightforward, after some of the sidequests, and the tone and the vibe will be sitting with me for a while, but I'm ready to play something less… French.

On which note, I was poking through my Xbox library and for some reason decided to stick on Shadow of Mordor, which I'm having tremendous fun with. I still forget the controls occasionally and parkour myself into a crowd of unsuspecting (and understandably annoyed) orcs, but I've got enough abilities in the arsenal now to separate the majority of them from their own heads. The "avoid death" QTE is a bastard, though. Move a cursor, then hit a mystery button? I'm 40 now, pal, I've got under a 50% chance of getting that.

Want

I'm not fully on the hype train either, but the Switch 2 can't get here soon enough, just so the kid will stop announcing how many days are left until it's out. Smyths still haven't taken the preorder payment—possibly because it's for in-store collection?—which is causing a small amount of concern, but I'm sure it'll be fine. Worst case scenario, I don't spend that £450 this month. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Next up on the ol' GamePass list for me is The Alters, which looks like it'll either be amazing or a complete car crash of mechanics that never quite fit together. I played the demo on Steam (our PC was not happy about it) and enjoyed/was intrigued by what I saw, but it only really hints at the larger structure so I'm curious to see how well it actually comes together in the full, final product.

Bin

Nothing for now. I'm sure reality will present something eventually, though.

I will say, the postgame of Expedition 33 is absolutely broken (but fun imo) and can feel like a victory lap most of the time thanks to the picto you get from beating the main boss of the story. They nerfed Maelle a bit but I doubt she's still gonna' struggle.

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Shadow Hearts 2 - I've nearly beat this, again, mostly at work where I went in like 2 hours early all week and just smashed dungeon after dungeon. My reputation in that place is already as someone who doesn't sleep and plays game all day and this hasn't helped (playing Project Diva without headphones was pushing it admittedly)

Final Fantasy XIV - whoaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa, yeah. They added the new game mode recently called 'Occult Crescent' which if you didn't play Eureka or Bozja is a very grindy instance in a massive open world map where yuou chain mobs like it's FFXI and fight super Fates that lock you in and are very high quality fights IMO. You do all this for a new currency to grind new gear but ultimately this is finally where we get our new relic weapons. After being so badly burned by my attempt to go back to raiding this expac (I do not enjoy wasting time/weeks off work on a single fight anymore) I wanted nothing more than to do extremely longform, chill content with friends in this faux FFXI style map.

Marvel Rivals - I got super annoyed playing this ages ago and realised it was also a waste of time, they've since added a few more characters and I briefly returned to it to try Thing who is a Tank and he's actually kinda' fun and honestly so is the game.

Fate/Stay Night - I really need to finish reading this, if I finish it before Tsukihime Remake is announced on Steam I'll buy it and read it on a Switch 2, deal.

Want

I really really miss fighting games, but my internet sucks. So why bother :<

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I guess I'll concede that I let Streets of Rage 2 get the better of me, my 1cc attempt ended because of that boxer sailor on the boat. Game fucking bangs though

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The ending of season 2 of the show was the push I needed to get back to my replay of The Last of Us Part II. Eased myself in with a few rounds of No Return, then it was time for The Descent - which is where I abandoned it about two years ago because I'm a wuss and I got too scared. Finished that, then realised that the next bit is Ground Zero.

I've intermittently been dropping into Star Wars Squadrons, which I really like; you can't get a multiplayer match for love nor money these days, though, so I've been going through the campaign at long last. It's quite inventive with mission design, which is fun, but there's a LOT of dialogue in between with characters I don't give two shits about. Just put me in a TIE Interceptor and point me at the rebel scum.

Want
Despite what my wishlist might suggest, not a lot. I've got some stuff that'd be nice to have (Indiana Jones), but nothing that I'm really champing at the bit to play. I'm very much in an Alien headspace at the moment (thanks, Free League!), but I don't think I could manage Alien Isolation.

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Star Wars Outlaws, I think, at long last. Briefly entertained the idea of chasing the platinum, but I have too many trophies left that are just too annoying. I might go back if the season pass drops to a top-tempting price, but not for a while.

June already?!

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Monster Train 2. This is incredible. I've been a huge fan of the original for years (it's one of the very few things cavalcade and I have ever agreed on)

That and the need to feed Jacob Rees-Mogg into a blender, I think.

I was quite excited by the news. I haven't watched any of the current Doctor or the one before that, so learning what has happened has peaked my interest in returning.

I am contractually obliged to say "piqued" here.

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I finally got to THAT BIT in Blue Prince. And all I need to do is go to THAT PLACE and I think I'll roll credits. Comparing notes with my middle son is wild, we both have gone about the game from different angles and seen completely different things at different times. It drives me up the wall at times (the game… and my son to be fair) but ultimately it is an absolute triumph and I keep coming back to it.

Clair Obscur - I assume @Garwoofoo you know about following the lampposts? But yes, it is a navigation nightmare and I find the combat a bit Gen Alpha, but holy fuck the story and characters are good.

Division 2 - as it came up on Gamepass I thought I'd give it a go as my other son and I were looking for something coop to play. I remember vaguely enjoying Division 1 and this actually seems pretty good, in a Ubigame sort of way. It's all the same systems and map icon hunts they normally churn out, but it looks nice and it might be some relaxing shootybangs for us through the uni holidays. Relaxing in a post-apocalyptic US sort of way obvs.

Avowed - now I can actually run this at a decent framerate I've been enjoying it. It's quite odd and very gamelike. I really don't care about the plot, but I do like running around and hitting giant spiders.

Doom: DA - I think this is great. Just very little time to play in the last few weeks…

Had a family come and stay with myself and new partner for a week and they brought a 7 year old with a Switch. So I have spent most of my recent time playing Mario Kart 8, Snipperclips, Rayman, Astrobears and Mario Wonder. Snipperclips is really great, I forgot how good it was. But as per usual - Astrobears was an absolute smash hit. Might be the best game on the Switch.

Just a general shout out to the ROG Ally and handheld PC gaming in general. Really has allowed me to just do a quick bit of gaming here and there in a really busy time.

Want
To get started on Monster Train 2.

I can't deny a vague pang of wanting a new bit of tech, but like Gar (who I share so much in common with), I will wait for the dust to subside and see what the consensus is. All the usual suspects on rllmuk have bought one, so there'll be 17 Switch 2s in the trading folder there within 2 months.

To watch Andor Season 2. Still haven't got around to it.

Finish Last of Us Part 2 on the PS5 - I've watched some of the TV show now, it's fine. But it reminded me how much I was enjoying the second game, and I'm not that far from the end I think, so just need to pull me finger out.

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Tiny Tina's Wonderlands - came free to Epic. I do quite like the concept, but it's really just a Borderlands mod. And I've played enough Borderlands. The new one looks fine (B4), but it's more Borderlands. Plus Randy P is a thing.

And obviously the world in general. Fucking Farage.

I assume @Garwoofoo you know about following the lampposts? But yes, it is a navigation nightmare and I find the combat a bit Gen Alpha, but holy fuck the story and characters are good.

No….?

Oh, I mean, there's a illumination visual cue in all levels (lamp posts, torches etc) which show the main path. All side paths usually don't have the illumination cue.

That said, even with that you will often find yourself 180 degreed after fights and following the lights in the wrong direction…. But, ultimately, if you want to know which way to head that's an indication. I'd still have preferred a map though.

Honestly, even a compass would have helped.

It’s got a compass, it appears on the screen when you press Y to see your objective.

It doesn’t help.

Thanks for the tip though cav, I’d genuinely not noticed that.

I know i'm in the minority here, but given how many RPGs tend to go for one of either massive open world or rooms connected by hallways I really respect E33 just having dungeons and putting little secrets all around them.

A map would have been fine though.

EDIT - new Want : Witcher 4, what the FUCK

It’s got a compass, it appears on the screen when you press Y to see your objective.

It doesn’t help.

Thanks for the tip though cav, I’d genuinely not noticed that.

I don't think it'll fix all your problems with the game, and there are some regions where I think the cues aren't clear enough/muddled, but once I tuned into it then I found navigation a lot better. The overworld does have a compass and map, but it's pretty fucking useless.

Well, the Final Fantasy Tactics Remaster is real and I am only crushed that's is several months away, it's looking great! The original is literally a Top 3 FF game imo.

Well SGF was a show huh

Dunno where else to put this, but Summer Game Fest was a bit of a trainwreck. If you had a drinking game around dark fantasy, soulslikes or imminently-cancellable live service shite, you should probably be asking someone to take you to A&E right about now.

Resident Evil Requiem was the big finisher, but most of the show kinda blurred together into one big grim, bloody blur.

Out of Words looks charming. There's a new Hitman DLC coming out today where you hunt Le Chiffre from Casino Royale (voiced by Mads Mikkelsen). I can't remember anything else that made an impression.

Hitman co op mode on the way too. The amount of development this game continues to get is amazing.

Dunno where else to put this, but Summer Game Fest was a bit of a trainwreck. If you had a drinking game around dark fantasy, soulslikes or imminently-cancellable live service shite, you should probably be asking someone to take you to A&E right about now.

These things always come in bunches. I remember one particularly grim E3 from about ten years ago where there were something like 5 games in a row featuring people being stabbed in the neck. I guess the soulslikes are the wave of games that were commissioned when Elden Ring was a big hit a few years back. I'm not sure who still thinks live service games are a good idea, though.

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Split Fiction - I'm playing this with my son, and goodness me it's fantastic. It's odd for a game that makes a big deal about how important the story and writing is to have such mediocre story and writing. It's also weird that a game that is about how terrible it is that AI steals people's ideas has such trite, cliched ideas. For the uninitiated you play as an unpublished writer who is invited to the headquarters of a sinister tech company, and the sinister tech company hooks you up to a sinister machine that sucks the ideas out of your head. The machine looks very expensive, and the whole endeavour must have taken an enormous amount of time, work, money, and technological research and advancement to put together. Then the first idea that gets sucked out of your head is Cyber Ninjas. I'd have emailed them the words Cyber Ninjas for a fraction of the cost.

Anyway, none of that matters because the co-op scenarios and puzzles the game throws at you are consistently entertaining, often hilariously mind-twisting, and sometimes just outright hilarious. At one point,

Spoiler - click to showWe were on a motorbike. My son was driving, veering through a series of jumps, tunnels, and chicanes while being shot at by helicoptors or something, and I was sat on the back of the bike trying to turn off a self-destruct sequence by going through a series of capchas on a phone. It was probably the most stressful thing I've done in a game.

It's pure, pure fun. If anyone has any way of playing through a 10-hour co-op game with the same playing partner (and I know that rules out a lot of people, particularly as the game isn't particularly gentle on either player and contains some tricky platforming) then I would thoroughly recommend it.

Space Marine 2 - 40K fans have been well-served with games recently, with this, Rogue Trader, Darktide, and Chaos Gate Demonhunters. This is a vivid realisation of the world of the Imperium, with a plethora of lovingly-recreated hardware for the 40K obsessive to gawp at. I know the names of more of the tanks, transport aircraft, and enemy troops than anyone really should, and there's not a weapon in the game that I haven't spent hours edge-highlighting. The gameplay is a visceral battle against huge numbers of squishy enemies (plus a fair few less-squishy ones) and a near constant scrum, the air thick with bullets and bits of tyranids that have been chainsworded off. The skyboxes are the best that have ever existed in a game. I don't know exactly what wizardey they are using to do it, but if you look into the distance, the game shows you thousands and thousands of combatants battling, swarms of tyranids in the sky, cathedral-sized ships being sliced in two, buildings falling, and explosions ripping through worlds. The sense of scale is incredible, particularly when that distant swarm of tyranids changes direction, heads straight for you, and suddenly is all around you as you rip and tear at them.

Metroid Fusion
My Odin 2 goes everywhere with me, and this is what I am currently firing up while waiting in the car for one reason or another, or sitting in bed unable to sleep. It is brilliant, a pinnacle of the genre in many ways, but there is a flaw that never seems to get mentioned with the 2D Metroid games - the constant reliance on hidden doors. Too many times I've had to resort to firing missiles or morph bombs at every surface, completely at random in order to progress. There's no signposting as to where these hidden doors might be. This isn't really exploration, is it? Not in any worthwhile way. Fortunately with modern advancements such as youtube walkthroughs, it hasn't become too onerous, but I do understand now why I failed to complete it when it first came out.

Want
A Switch 2, kind of.
My poor broken guitar to be fixed, which is one reason why I can't get a Switch 2.

Bin
Basically everything, obviously.

How old is your kid and is there anything that would be too inappropriate for an 8, nearly 9 yeah old?

He's 12.

Obviously it depends on the kid, but there's a bit of swearing - characters say "shit" several times. There's some guns and swords, but the enemies are all robots I think, so no blood or death generally, certainly nothing gratuitous. We're not all that far into the game, though. The second section has seen us both get eaten by piranhas and impaled on thorns, albeit in a fairly cartoonish manner.

However, there is one section that you'll have to judge for yourself because it is pretty messed-up, and your kid will either find it upsetting or hilarious. I urge you to read the following spoiler, but I'm putting it in spoiler tags to keep from spoiling it for everyone else.

Spoiler - click to show In the section in question, you both play as pigs. You make your way through a colourful farmyard in the style of a kid's game (one of the pigs propels themselves through the air by farting rainbows). This is all fine until you come across a group of pigs barbecueing another pig. So you ignore that and carry on, and the climax of the level involves both pigs leaping into a meat grinder, complete with a huge splatter of blood. You then end the level playing as sausages, cooking yourselves, jumping into hot dog buns, and being eaten. Posting a video will break the spoiler tags, but searching YouTube for "Split Fiction Pig Level" will allow you to see for yourself.

Edit - I'm assuming you're talking about Split Fiction, and not Space Marine 2. Obviously children should be introduced to WH40K as young as possible, in order to prepare them for the dystopian future that awaits them.

That spoiler sounds so wild

After It Takes Two’s “terrorise the soft toy” level, that sounds entirely plausible.

The side stories are a real highlight generally. Some of them are really quite hard though. We played one where you have to go through a series of increasingly-difficult obstacle courses while throwing a bomb back and forth to each other. If anyone holds the bomb for too long it explodes. We spontaniously high-fived after doing that one. It was a nice moment.

I'm consistently the weak link in our team, as is to be expected.

That spoiler sounds so wild

Have you read the earlier one about the motorbike? That was an all-timer gaming moment for me, realising "Oh wait, the game wants me to do THIS???"

I have and it sounded really cool but I mean, I kinda' expected cool moments like that not….vore

I appreciate that. I might leave that for now as she is already mostly veggie as finds the concept of meat disgusting and cruel, so she is particularly sensitive to that sort of thing.

Space Marine 2 it is then!

I've only just realised that this year's fake E3 has already happened. Those videos from Microsoft and Sony, plus whatever Geoff Keighley had, was our big gaming event of the summer.

I'm not sure whether Switch 2 stole the focus, or the shows were just so underwhelming that they failed to enter my consciousness.

I suppose Microsoft's show had a couple of interesting games. There are no ghosts at the grand looks great, and what a brilliant name. But on the whole, what a deflating few days for gaming news.

Yeah, they were all a bit dull. New Lumines was the only thing at the Sony show that really piqued my interest, other than 007: First Light (which I was already going to get, let's face it, but it does look good).

"characters say "shit" several times. There's some guns and swords, but the enemies are all robots I think"

That's pretty much the general vibe in South Wales anyway, even when you're not playing a videogame.

Sounds like Koudelka, minus the robots.

Been playing a bit of South of Midnight and really enjoying it - I'm not going to repeat what cav's already said about it because he's spot on really:

South of Midnight is an absolutely wild videogame for the current climate. It features a black female protagonist, with dreads (who isn't "conventionally" videogame attractive), in a deep south setting animated in a sort of stop motion with a sometimes dissonant, highly evocative folk soundtrack. In the initial few scenes it's largely women talking to women (and black women, no less) without a single man present. The husband has also been fridged, not the wife. It's like Republican nightmare fuel.
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It's absolutely beautifully put together, the animations are flawless and the flat storybook cutscenes between chapters are lovely. The opening level has some really impressive set pieces. The entire thing has the feel of a team really having a cohesive vision and absolutely executing on it. The issue is, ultimately, the actual gameplay is utterly generic. It's Uncharted wall climbing (complete with a blue tint to show climbable ledges - though weirdly, and frustratingly, no grab visual cue to know if you can jump on something or not) and a sort of creaky, button mashing combat where you kill videogame gribblies to clear locked glades.

I'm quite enjoying the gameplay for its simplicity though - it requires no thought (there's a big glowing white line that shows you where to go), you get all the upgrades in a specific order at specific points in the story, and every combat encounter is the same - and that's fine. It's the most 360 game that ever 360'd but the basic platforming and combat are allowing me to soak up the incredible atmosphere and set pieces. It's kind of the opposite of Expedition 33 really where the gameplay keeps on getting in the way of the atmosphere. A great Game Pass game anyway.

(Oh, one thing I don't like is that this would be quite a good game for older kids, with some pertinent things to say about slavery and inherited trauma and just generally a kind of magical realism vibe that you don't tend to get in videogames, apart from the fact that the main character shits and fucks her way through every conversation. I wish they'd toned that down, it's not a game that needs to be edgy in that way).

The Alters came out yesterday! I had a good time with the demo previously on PC (the PC, on the other hand, did not have a good time), so this has been on the wishlist for a while. I'm still early on, with the game still settling into its rhythm, but it's starting to layer up systems and I've unlocked some upgrades that are making the moment-to-moment stuff more varied. The time limit stuff is giving me some very low-level anxiety—but I've got the difficulty settings as low as they'll go, so hopefully I can get through the plot without under-resourcing myself into a Game Over.

Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time really is super nice and comfy, I absolutely love that I can just wind down and choose a 'Life' and roll with for a while either hitting rocks with a hammer or fishing and everything has its own skill tree and feeds into another Life's ecosystem, very simple minigames for each one but really chill.

And it's absolutely charming, my little dude just looks so happy to be out there, it's kinda' Animal Crossing-ey in that sense, the cute style matches the vibes of the game to a tee anyway.