Penguin Colony is not messing around with its statement on the Palestinian genocide, banning sale in Israel and calling out the games industry in-game

You might remember 2021's Umurangi Generation, developed by Māori studio Origame Digital. It placed its focus on its first-person photography system as much as its very direct anti-colonial and anti-neoliberal criticism, stemming partly from the Australian government's mishandling of COVID and the bushfires that spread across the country in 2020. Origame's second game, the newly-released Penguin Colony, is just as direct in its anti-colonial theming, with its target being the ongoing Palestinian genocide by Israel, and the games industry at large for its silence.

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Helldivers 2's GameGuard cheat policing "wasn't as effective as it could have been", cue a switch to Easy Anti-Cheat as part of a crackdown on cheat mods

Helldivers 2, a game that still appears to be missing in action from Steam here in the UK, is switching anti-cheat software. Developers Arrowhead are keen to tighten up security and crack down on the use of cheat mods that can influence the bug-slaying experience of folks beyond the person who's installed them.

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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

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.

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Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines remaster or remake rumours begin to flow, reportedly in part thanks to a metal band from the original's score

Rumours of Troika classic Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines potentially getting the remaster or remake treatment have surfaced. They've come from two places: one being the fairly standard source of poster on a game leak-obsessed section of Reddit, the other being rather more unorthodox. It's not often a metal band allegedly pause mid-concert to ask the crowd if they know an old game's getting a revamp.

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The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for firing up Twine again and thinking you know what, if this swanky IF plotter had been around when I was an undergraduate, I might have preserved all my exam revision notes in text adventure form. I still have two, reassuringly heavy boxes of tabbed and colour-coded index cards that you could plausibly lay out to form a maze, navigable by compass commands. Head down the western corridor from Middle English to the Renaissance, and – ah, bollocks, you have been eaten by a Grue. Surely somebody's thought of this, in the decade and change since Twine was released? I mean, we already have 3D museum exhibits extracted from Wikipedia.

Sundays are also for heading to the allotment and getting annoyed with the tomato plants, who have decided to go bonkers right at the end of the growing season. I thought you were done, pesky nightshades. I thought I could leave you alone for the rest of the year. Finally, Sundays are for sharing good criticism, like the below.

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Rain98 is a blue-hued, pre-Y2K, Serial Experiments Lain inspired visual novel about time travelling to the past to end the world

Picture this. You're me, and you boot up the demo for Rain98, an incredibly blue-looking, rainy visual novel set in Tokyo, 1998, about a woman who refers to herself as the Angolmois, a world-ending reference to the predictions of good ole Nostradamus. At one point you have to light this woman's cigarette in a lightly stylish sequence. You get to a bit where you're asked to put your name in, and you put it in because like its predecessors, this is surely a self-insert kind of situation. Only you get a Steam achievement for getting a game over for putting your name in. Rude! But curious, so you, and of course I mean I, pressed on.

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RimWorld meets Moebius-esque roguelite colony sim Trailblazers: Into The March welcomes you aboard its hulking landships with a chonky-sounding demo

With the devs behind RimWorld gearing up for their next game with a recent engine switch, it'd be entirely fair if you were hankering for something new (if still familiar enough) yourself. Trailblazers: Into The March is one such game, having introduced itself to us earlier this year, a mishmash of the aforementioned colony sim, Nausicaa, Moebius, Andrei Tarkovski, Jeff Vandermeer, and FTL: Faster Than Light by Edwin's measure. And now you don't just have to look at its trailers, because there's a demo for you to have a go at.

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