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Goodbye Jason Voorhees, hello Michael Myers: Friday the 13th developer and publisher return with a new multiplayer survival horror game based on Halloween
Product Reviews

Goodbye Jason Voorhees, hello Michael Myers: Friday the 13th developer and publisher return with a new multiplayer survival horror game based on Halloween

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Halloween: The Game Reveal Trailer – Future Games Show gamescom 2025 – YouTube

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Seven years after IllFonic and Gun Media had to say farewell to their hit multiplayer survival horror game Friday the 13th, they’re back—except this time, it’s Halloween. Announced at today’s Future Game Show, Halloween is a “one-versus-many stealth horror experience” in which players don the creepy mask of Michael Myers to hunt down the citizens of Haddonfield, or work together as his potential victims in a desperate effort to stop him.

“Stick to the shadows as Civilians, seeking out Haddonfield residents to warn them and searching for a way to contact the authorities,” the press blast says. “As Michael Myers, give them a reason to fear the dark and cut the phone lines to prevent the police from ruining his favorite holiday. Whether playing solo in story mode, against bots offline, or facing others in online multiplayer, each mode rewards stealth, strategy, and skillful play.

“Staying true to the original film, IllFonic masterfully recreates the eerie atmosphere of Haddonfield across multiple maps and authentic locations. With a haunting ambience and score inspired by the legendary movie, Halloween brings the terror home in a new experience that will keep both old and new generations looking over their shoulders.”


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I’m not much of a horror fan so I’m really in no position to speak to the distinctions between the Friday the 13th and Halloween franchises—it’s all just freaky masks, huge knives, and screaming teenyboppers to me. But I do find it very interesting, and amusing, that IllFonic and Gun Media are coming back with a game that, superficially at least, looks so much like Friday the 13th. There will definitely be differences in gameplay: Players will alert NPC townsfolk and police to the looming threat, for instance, leading to “increasingly powerful and thorough neighborhood patrols” that will help even the odds against the killer.

But the bottom line is that a small group of soft, squishy locals are going to have to work together to survive an unkillable maniac who exists only to hack those locals into little bloody bits, and, well… that sure sounds like tomayto, tomahto to me.

I might be reading too much into it, but IllFonic co-founder and CEO Charles Brungardt also seemed to throw a little shade at his former partners while praising his new ones.

“Working with Compass International Pictures and Further Front has been a dream,” Brungardt said. “As rights holders of the film and producers on the game, they’ve shared incredible insights to help us stay true to the soul of the 1978 film. Their tremendous passion for Michael Myers has pushed us to craft something that fans of the franchise will truly appreciate.”

Friday the 13th: The Game, you’ll recall, was brought low by a dispute over the ownership of the franchise between Victor Miller, the writer of the original film, and Sean Cunningham, the producer and director of the film.

Halloween is set to launch sometime in 2026 and will be available for PC on Steam and the Epic Games Store. For now, you can take a closer look at what’s coming at halloweengame.com.

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Dune Awakening
Product Reviews

Dune: Awakening review: an engaging survival MMO that’ll teach you to fear the sun

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Review information

Platform reviewed: PC
Available on: PC
Release date: June 10, 2025

Early on, while sprinting between rocky islands in Dune: Awakening’s desolate sandy seas, I began to wonder why it’s taken so long for Frank Herbert’s fascinating world to be translated into a survival MMO PC game of this scale.

Making the most of the mythic beasts, warring factions, and an unforgiving setting, Funcom’s latest offering reimagines the core material, providing players the opportunity to step beyond the existing lore and carve out their own place amongst the stars. With so much to see and die as a result of, I still feel like I’m only scratching the surface of this monstrously sized expedition into the desert. But, despite the sizable journey ahead, one thing is for sure – I’m thoroughly enjoying the grind.

Dune: Awakening doesn’t take place in the Dune world you know from Herbert’s cult book, Denis Villeneuve’s cinematic duology, or David Lynch’s 1984 space opera. Instead, it’s set in an alternate timeline where Lady Jessica has a daughter instead of a son, and Duke Leto Atreides survives the assault on Arrakis, leading to an all-out war with the opposing Harkonnen dynasty. Without Paul Atreides and his Lisan al Gaib status, the Fremen are missing in action. Naturally, with all this drama, Arrakis has become a battleground over the most important resource in the galaxy – Spice.


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(Image credit: Funcom)

Players enter this conflict as a prisoner, whose job is to find the Fremen people and awaken ‘the sleeper’. But before you dive into the many processes needed to uncover them, you first need to make some decisions about your character, namely what they look like and how they fit into the political landscape.

You’ll first get the chance to tweak the physical form of your character. There’s a decent variety of choices, from hairstyles to stature and tattoos, too. Naturally, I opted for a pre-distressed look, picking out murky blue eye makeup and some messy lipstick. Visual identity chosen, you’ll then pick some personality building blocks: your homeworld, social caste, and mentor.

Each option will provide you with alternative starting abilities and emotes. As someone who’s always wanted to use the Voice, I opted for a Bene Gesserit mentor and based myself in the frosty peaks of IX as a Bondsman. Sadly, it’s mainly your Mentor that factors into gameplay, with the other decisions acting more as role-playing flavor. Regardless, I was ready to feel the sand on my digital feet and test my survival mettle.

Fear is the grind killer

Needless to say, this planet is not exactly hospitable. (Image credit: Funcom)

You aren’t just dropped into Dune: Awakening without a clue, and are run through a pint-sized tutorial sequence first. Here, you learn the basics of combat and survival, which amounts to scavenging morsels of water drops from plants and swiping at enemies with a glorified box cutter, before witnessing a sandworm gobble up the remains of your ship.

Emerging into the open sand, your workload is split between maintaining your hydration and shelter while branching out into the surrounding areas of the map in search of story missions. Much of my first hour was spent cowering in the shade, fearing for my life as I followed my objectives to earn some scrappy sun protection and a ranged weapon. Suddenly, I wasn’t so afraid, and I began assaulting enemy camps with my newfound confidence.

As you run between pockets of shade, scavenging for resources and completing objectives, you’ll naturally start to earn Skill Points and Intel Points that fuel your skills, research, and crafting abilities. Soon, instead of scrounging around for a morsel of water and clipping enemies with a pea shooter, you’ll be drinking the blood of your enemies and hammering targets with the improved arsenal at your fingertips. Dune: Awakening has all the hallmarks of a classic survival MMO. However, it’s the clever grapple between feeling brave and weak that kept me interested beyond the climactic opening.

Best bit

(Image credit: Funcom)

To complete quests and rise up the ranks, you’ll eventually need to cross large portions of the desert. And, despite the isolation you might feel in the arid landscape, you’re never truly alone. In Dune: Awakening, Sandworms, otherwise known as the Shai-Hulud, are more terrifying than raiders or dehydration. If you’re unlucky, or simply not paying attention to your vibration meter, they can fleece you of all your precious items and leave you in the dust, literally, with nothing but your underwear. Regardless of how terrifying a prospect, the addition of these iconic creatures only makes the world of Dune: Awakening more immersive and entertaining to explore.

It’s not all desert roses, though, and unfortunately, as I sought out more enemies, I ran into issues with the rudimentary combat. You can block and parry, as well as deliver quick, slow, and ranged attacks, which is fine, if not a little underwhelming. Your limited toolbelt, early on, isn’t complemented by the limited enemy variation, and many of the baddies you face look much the same, and frankly, don’t seem too smart either.

On one occasion, while taking out a duo of scavengers, the firing stopped abruptly mid-fight. As I sheepishly wandered around the corner, I noticed that the second scavenger was standing frozen, as if they’d forgotten I was there. As you push into more difficult districts on the map, there are complicating factors like shields, and your opponents have more diverse combat skills, though that does little to make the combat more enticing, and as of right now, it feels like fighting still needs some fine-tuning.

Thankfully, when the combat excursions start to get old, you can tackle story missions called the Trials of AQL, which arrive as alternate challenges that test your dexterity while explaining the history of the Fremen. Hidden amongst the craggy horizons, the trials felt like a carefully constructed extension of the lore, rewarding your attention with gear essential to survival long term. It’s clear Funcom cares about the material that the studio is adapting, and the involved and thoughtful Trials feel like proof of that.

Hope clouds observational skills

See that weird glowing stuff? That’s Rapidium – and Jan’s going to need a lot of it to make more alters. (Image credit: Funcom)

While exploration will take up the lion’s share of your time, base building is another important aspect to your survival in Dune: Awakening. Say a sandstorm warning pops up on your screen, and you need to quickly assemble a dwelling. All you have to do is craft a useful 3D printing gun and pick a safe spot to place your cover.

Here, external walls and flooring all snap together nicely, while the inside of your home requires a bit more finicky work to get things to fit just right. If you do run into problems, the system itself is quite forgiving, and it’s easy enough to modify your floor plan to fit more appliances if things get a little tight. You can technically build a shelter almost anywhere you’d like, and with the speed at which items respawn, plopping down your possessions in open sand is an obvious no-go.

This brings me to the real antagonist of Dune: Awakening. Beyond the periodic sandstorms, trigger-happy enemies, or unwavering thirst, are the more terrifying and possession-destroying sand worms or Shai-Hulud. Hidden underground in the open sands, the worms are attracted to your movements, which you can track via a friendly vibrations bar that appears at the center of your screen.

Laying out your base smartly (as I have very much not done in this screenshot) is key to making the most of your limited resources. (Image credit: Funcom)

Simply put, the more you move in open sand, the more likely it is you’ll attract a sandworm. Once the bar turns red, it means your luck has run out and you need to sprint away to higher ground or risk losing everything you’ve worked so hard for. Short distances start to feel large, and I felt genuine pangs of fear as I tiptoed between the stone monuments that broke up this seemingly endless world.

Dune: Awakening looks solid in motion, but it isn’t always visually seamless, and there are plenty of frustrating bugs and bouts of texture pop-in that get in the way of the fun. Still, Dune’s desert landscape more than makes up for those small squabbles, and it’s easy to get swept up in the carefully constructed details Funcom has embedded on Arrakis.

Visual accents like the billow of a water seal as you cut through it, or the sand particle texture on your windows, help to build the fantasy and commit your exploits to memory. Yet considering how large Dune: Awakening is, I’m sure there’s even more to uncover on my journey to ultimate power, and I’m excited to keep digging and discover more of these details.

Should I buy Dune: Awakening?

Buy it if…

Don’t buy it if…

Accessibility

You can access the settings from the pause menu while in-game, or at the bottom left of the main menu before you join a server. From the accessibility menu, you can toggle on and off camera shakes, controller rumble, and motion blur.

From this menu, you can also toggle on and off subtitles, choose the font size, as well as select an option to have previous subtitles on screen for a longer period of time. You can also tweak the gamma setting from this menu, too. Dune: Awakening allows you to rebind all your keys from the dedicated Keybinds menu.

Where audio is concerned, you can use a slider in the Audio submenu to tweak individual streams of sound (Master Volume, Music Volume in-game, Sound Effects Volume, Cutscenes Volume, Dialogue Volume, and Radio Volume).

How I reviewed Dune: Awakening

I played Dune: Awakening on Steam, using an Acer Predator XB271HU gaming monitor, a Logitech MX Master 3S mouse, and a Logitech G915 TKL gaming keyboard.

I used my external Creative Pebble V2 computer speakers and Audio Technica ATH-MX50X headphones plugged into a Scarlett 2i2 interface for sound. My gaming PC is powered by an RTX 3080 and an AMD Ryzen 9 3950X.

First reviewed June 2025



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Survival Kids.
Product Reviews

Survival Kids review: a vibrant co-op adventure that lacks meaningful depth

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The Nintendo Switch 2 has finally arrived, and along with it, so have a handful of launch games. Some old, some new, and some, well, they land somewhere between those two categories.

Meet Survival Kids, a cooperative platformer, built on the bones of the 1999 Konami Game Boy Color game of the same name, and developed by the minds behind the wildly popular game engine Unity. Its inception is a mouthful, and yet when it comes to the reality of the game itself, it’s very simple – perhaps too simple.

Review info

Platform reviewed: Nintendo Switch 2
Available on: Nintendo Switch 2
Release date: June 6th, 2025

In Survival Kids, you play as a (you guessed it) kid who, after being capsized in a mythic storm, must craft their way across an ancient archipelago in the hopes of escape.


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The twist on this classic survival set-up is that the islands themselves aren’t static and are, in fact, living turtles that can cause the islands to flood. While it’s an interesting premise, Survival Kids commits to a more casual play style, and the submerging occurs only when the player is ready. It’s a reasonable choice for a game built for a younger demographic — I only wish there were multiple game modes for players of all ages, or those who may be more adept.

As you progress, you’ll uncover new biomes and take on chaotic environmental hazards like purple-goo firing turrets and body-barrelling wind tunnels, using earnable tools like fishing rods, trampolines, and comically large leaf fans to best them. Much like the premise, the levels are similarly straightforward and offer an occasionally moreish workload of mindless tasks to complete with friends or by yourself.

Rinse and repeat

(Image credit: Konami)

Every level in Survival Kids begins with a capsizing, and players wash up on the shore of a new island. From this point on, the aim of the game is to consolidate resources and move your base camp to the highest point, where you’ll construct a raft and start the cycle all over again.

The parts you need to complete this objective range from easily-accessible vines and stones (which can be harnessed by chopping down trees or mining rocks) to hidden aeroplane wings and half-buried propeller parts. It’s not as complex as something like Astro Bot by any means, but the diversity of islands and the platforming challenges embedded in them were varied enough to keep me entertained as I continued to explore.

In place of any towering challenges or punishing mechanics, the biggest antagonist you’ll face here is your stamina, which dictates how far you can climb on a climbing net and whether you can unearth objects. To increase your stamina, you need to find and cook food, making sure not to burn your precious meal in your camp’s cooking pot by leaving it on the castaway-hob too long. The more food you load into the pot, the better the quality of the meal, providing you with extra precious stamina.

Beyond staying fed, there aren’t really any stakes to speak of. Sure, you can fall off a cliff and lose your items or fail to wrangle a fish. But you can simply go back and pick them up again or just cast your line at the same fish a second time.

(Image credit: Konami)

You’re never really punished for your mistakes in any meaningful way, which has its pros and cons. By keeping the workload accessible and forgiving, Survival Kids feels like a great introductory game for kids who may not be familiar with the Survival genre. Still, at times, it feels as though it’s underestimating what younger players are capable of, especially when you consider the alternatives on the market like Nintendo’s own appropriately challenging Super Mario Odyssey.

Upon completing a level, you’ll earn stars depending on how quickly you escaped the island or how many collectables — called Treasure Stones — you found in the process. Early on, these stars mean very little, and you can breeze through the game – no questions asked. However, as you near the end, there’s a good chance you’ll need to revisit an island to collect a few more to surpass some star-based progress gates.

With little else to latch onto, Survival Kids often feels a bit dry and lacks the personality to really make its mark. It says something that not even a quirky British narrator can lift the tone. In fact, their chatter quickly started to grate.

Play nice

(Image credit: Konami)

Between island hopping, you’ll also get a chance to customise your cartoon avatar with a selection of kitschy castaway garb. There isn’t a great deal of diversity at first, but it’s plenty to set you apart from your co-op collaborators, and it’s good fun to tweak your hair colour, skin tone, and ocular scenario before hopping into a level. Thankfully, this small pool of outfits is just a jumping-off point, and you can unlock more by completing challenges layered throughout the game.

Alongside meeting the essential crafting criteria, you can complete optional tasks like fishing ten times in a row or cooking with a certain number of ingredients in your pot. By achieving these optional objectives, you can unlock themed outfits to jazz up your mini-me. Many will be achieved automatically as you play, but at the very least, I was pleased to have something else to shoot for outside the confines of the repetitive campaign.

Best bit

(Image credit: Konami)

Survival Kids is at its best when played with friends. Between the simple control scheme and the plethora of comfortably mindless processes to complete, I could chat to my heart’s content without needing to maintain an intense back-and-forth to complete objectives.

Survival Kids can be played in single-player mode, however, it’s just not nearly as much fun as it is when you’re playing with friends. Aside from helping collect loot, the most fun I had was antagonising, and subsequently being antagonised by, my co-op partner. On one occasion, I led my fellow-survivor into a wind tunnel where they were gust into oblivion.

The repercussion was that after spending ages fishing and cooking up a delicious meal, they threw it off the edge and out of my reach. When playing solo, these kinds of light-hearted interactions aren’t possible, and instead, you’re just left with the workload.

It’s clear there’s been an effort to scale things back in solo mode and make the levels more approachable, like reducing the stamina needed to pull up objects. Unfortunately, it still doesn’t make up for the tedious nature of completing the same tasks alone.

When playing through the later levels in the game, I found myself frustrated, not by the turrets shooting me off the map, but rather the boring nature of carting materials back and forth with no help. It’s admirable that the team at Unity wanted to give solo players a chance, but it doesn’t do justice to the obviously communal aspects at the core of Survival Kids‘ gameplay loop.

Should you play Survival Kids?

(Image credit: Konami)

Play it if…

Don’t play it if…

Accessibility features

In Survival Kids, you can access the settings menu from the main menu or anytime in-game by pressing the pause button and selecting the Options button.

From here, you can toggle on and off subtitles and a level timer, as well as level objective arrows and banners. In the Controls submenu, you can toggle between two layout options. Where audio is concerned, you can use incremental notches to tweak Music, SFX and Narration Volume.

How I reviewed Survival Kids

(Image credit: Konami)

I played Survival Kids‘ main campaign over twelve hours in a mixture of single-player, local co-op, and online co-op.

I used a Switch 2 console in both handheld and docked modes. When docked, I used an LG OLED C2 55-inch TV, with no additional soundbar or external speaker system.

First reviewed June 2025

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Dune Awakening is the perfect blend of survival, MMORPG, and house envy
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Dune Awakening is the perfect blend of survival, MMORPG, and house envy

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Dune Awakening is out at last, and it’s a strange, wonderful blend of an MMORPG and an open world survival game. This melding of genres results in a game of two halves, weaved together with a rich and deep care for the source material. Funcom, somehow, has managed to juggle these components expertly. The result? A game unlike any I’ve really played before.

The game itself is massive. Already I’ve sunk 30+ hours into it and still find myself with plenty to explore, heaps to build and the fog of war covering portions of the map. In that time I’ve explored the majority of the main map: Hagga Basin. I’ve narrowly avoided getting vored by a worm, and I’ve experienced something I only thought 40-year-old home owners get to experience: house envy.

The soul of survival in Dune Awakening is an ever-present core of every play session you’ll have with the game. When you start, you’re building scrap metal knives and plant fibre rags, but soon enough you’ll find yourself constructing more elaborate, more expensive goodies. The survival cycle is thus: build a base, gather materials, construct new gear.

Watch the Dune Awakening launch trailer here!Watch on YouTube

You repeat that until you’ve finished crafting everything you want from the tier of materials available, at which point you hop on a bike or buggy and drive into the perilous unknown in order to do it all over again. It’s a moreish process that even 30 hours in I’ve not gotten tired of yet.

There’s something about cutting an ore node apart with a laser that feels and sounds fantastic, something about the audio visual feast you get when floating down from great heights. Dune Awakening’s survival gameplay may follow a traditional cycle, but its repackaged in such fine wrapping paper it’s hard to get bored of.

As for the world itself, it’s rich in lore, secret hideaways, and well, sand. It doesn’t matter what shade the grain is, nor how rocky one zone is compared to another, the vast majority of Dune Awakening that I’ve seen so far is a sun-seared brown. Obviously right, it’s Dune. But it’s worth noting for those who quickly tire of a lack of visual variety.

Hope you like sand! | Image credit: Eurogamer

Those with a greater tolerance for such matters will find the initially minute differences between zones forces you to adapt the way you play. Zones I’ve entered appear to get progressively hotter, which means water management is more important, which means you may struggle to roam thirsty and carefree.

Bizarrely, the worms themselves take a back seat around the 15-hour mark, replaced instead with grand vertical spires of stone, covered with snipers, heavy gunners, and buffer enemies. Here you must learn to make use of your suspensor belt, practice good stamina management, and prepare for battles against four or five shielded foes at once. I found myself pleasantly challenged by the steady difficulty curve present here.

One worry I did have previewing the game prior to its launch was how easy and repetitive melee combat can be. Enemies weren’t dodging out of combos, and you could rinse and repeat slow stabs to make short work of even the henchest shielded foe. This has been addressed! Enemies do actually hold their own now, and if you find yourself overwhelmed, dying is not a rare occurrence.

You’ll want at least a basic base to store all your hardfought gains. | Image credit: Eurogamer

When you do die, you drop a portion of your materials and all your equipment suffers damage. You’ll then have to trek back to collect your lost goods, which thanks to a handy checkpoint system and craftable respawn beacons isn’t frustrating at all. The exception is the worms. If you get eaten, all your gear is gone. Permanently.

This may sound like a nightmare, and I’ll confess the one time I got all my steel gear and mark 2 bike eaten I was exceptionally tilted, but it ultimately adds to the experience. If the worms were a joke, the majority of the survival portion wouldn’t be nearly as enjoyable.

That’s the trick, you see. The trick to making both a great survival game and a faithful send-up to the Dune universe. Make it hard. Not unfair, not cheap, but difficult in meaningful ways. Funcom, by bringing in elements of the sci-fi classic and implementing them into a survival game structure, has created an endearing base from which it can build an MMO upon. A sturdy survival game which hundreds of hours can be perched atop.

Unlocking better gear itself is a lengthy process, one that is paramount to your survival in harsher climates. | Image credit: Eurogamer

As the survival elements start to become a laborious process of rushing back and forth between the nearest ironworks, or mineral extraction facility, the MMO portion starts to kick in. More often than not you’ll see an Orniphopter flying overhead, and driving through a region will present you with plenty of houses of other players.

As such the harsh desert of Arrakis quickly feels more like a suburb of stone shacks and more elaborate houses for the creatively inclined. Here I discovered a feeling I didn’t think I’d experience until I owned a real home of my own.

There is a player on my server, a short hop away from my front door, with a beautiful house. We both snatched up great real estate near Pinnacle Station and set up shop, except while I busied myself with contracts peppered across the map they seemingly busted out the CAD software and sketching paper, and built a mansion. Peering through their windows, I see they’ve put down a carpet, and a portrait on the wall.

Here’s someone else I’m jealous of. That row of wind generators may as well be Greg next door getting solar panels installed. Makes the whole street feel inadequate! | Image credit: Eurogamer

I hate them, for two good reasons. One, they have a nicer house and vehicle than me. I see them flying from their roof in their ornithopter while I slide down a makeshift ramp in my basic buggy. Second, they’re Atreides.

Early on in Dune Awakening you’re introduced to the two great houses, but your engagement with the politics of the situation remains almost entirely a PvE matter. Around the 30 hour mark things start to get a touch more player focused. Players with disposable income buy customisation for their clothes and bikes, so you can see which faction someone aligns with. They can also engage in the Landsraad system.

I haven’t interacted with the Landsraad yet, I am guildless and poor, but already it has interacted with me. By forming guilds and aligning with a faction, players can fight over the vote of smaller houses dotted around Dune Awakening. Put simply, if a faction has more votes than another, they get to vote on a powerful faction-wide boon for the next real world week. The Atredies won the first week, somehow.

On my server, the Atredies chose to gain access to a special vehicle shop that only they can browse and buy from. You see how the tensions between players naturally fosters in Dune Awakening? Not only does my neighbour have a nicer house and car than me, he also shops in the nicer part of town? Maybe next week I’ll work to win the Landsraad, and maybe I’ll build a flamethrower to help me do it.

While I’ve not yet reached the “end game” and all it entails, Dune Awakening has this beautiful gradual shift from a pure survival experience to a more MMO-centric one. It shifts slowly in the background, in a fluid manner that quietly encourages everyone (even those who may just be around to craft a cool car and drive it around) to take up arms against their fellow player, literally or through other endeavors.

It’s a tantalizing all out war of blades, guns, and minds built upon a wonderful survival game foundation that is well worth playing. So tantalizing in fact that it was hard to pull myself away from the game to write about it. You can thank a server maintenance window (coinciding with the weekly reset) for this set of thoughts existing.

It’s too early for a full review, but as of right now I see little reason not to recommend giving Dune Awakening’s unique offering a chance.



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Co-op survival game Blind Descent gets release window
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Co-op survival game Blind Descent gets release window

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Blind Descent is set for a 2026 early access release date. Players will be able to get a taste of the game’s adaptive world. For more information, read the release below:

Nicosia, Cyprus (June 7, 2025) | Today, META Publishing — a subsidiary publishing label of acclaimed RPG studio Owlcat Games — and Turkish indie studio Pokuch have officially revealed their flagship game: the co-op sci-fi survival title, Blind Descent. Revealed during Future Games Show, Blind Descent is set to launch via Early Access on Steam in 2026.Watch the Blind Descent announcement trailer here: YouTube Blind Descent invites players into a mesmerizing yet unforgiving world buried deep beneath the Martian surface. After a catastrophic mission failure, a lone survivor awakens in a vast, alien ecosystem. What begins as a desperate search for missing crew members evolves into a journey of symbiosis with a world that resists, adapts, and remembers.When developing this title, the team created a “Symbiosis System” — a unique, deeply immersive mechanic inspired by the haunting alien logic of Scavengers Reign. This system will shape how players interact with the world around them, with more specific gameplay details to be revealed later. Speaking of Scavengers Reign, its acclaimed production designer, Jon Juarez, created the game’s striking new key visual.Key Features of Blind Descent:Explore an Alien World that Pushes Back: Discover a sprawling underground biome teeming with mysterious life and reactive flora.Survival Through Understanding: Study the ecosystem, observe alien behavior, and craft tools that help you survive.Shelters with Consequences: Build log-by-log in a world where nature reclaims what’s left unattended. Your bases can be overgrown, devoured, or corrupted.Mutate and Adapt: Encounter biological phenomena that change you. Gain abilities through exposure to alien spores, fruits, and strange infections.Traverse Rugged Environments: Use advanced climbing gear to scale vertical shafts and navigate treacherous terrain with precision and agility.Endure Together: Team up with up to three other pioneers in online co-op. Venture through the unknown together to uncover the truths lying deep within Mars.Blind Descent arrives on Windows PC via Steam in 2026. Players can wishlist the game today.Stay up to date with Blind Descent by following the game on Discord, X (Twitter), Youtube, and TikTok.  

Stay tuned to GamingTrend for more news!


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Devolver Digital Reveals Ball x Pit, A Brick-Breaking Survival Roguelite That Looks Awesome
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Devolver Digital Reveals Ball x Pit, A Brick-Breaking Survival Roguelite That Looks Awesome

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Devolver Digital has revealed Ball x Pit, a brick-breaking, base-building survival roguelite that looks like the next indie time sink I can’t wait to jump into. There’s a demo out today on PC, and it’s launching on Xbox Series X/S, Switch, and PC sometime this year (here’s hoping it makes its way to PlayStation 5 one day, too). This was revealed as part of today’s Devolver Direct, which went with a different approach to its summer showcase this year. 

Instead of the zanier off-the-wall antics of the annual summer Devolver Direct, which usually contains multiple announcements, it released a documentary called “BALL x PIT: The Kenny Sun Story,” alongside a trailer for the game. 

You can view the Ball x Pit reveal trailer for yourself below: 

 

“In Ball x Pit, Ballbylon has fallen,” a press release reads. “After a meteoric and completely unexpected event annihilated the great city, all that remains is an ominous, yawning pit. Treasure hunters far and wide flock to the city’s tomb to seek their fortune, plundering the depths in search of Ballbylon’s scattered riches. Few return.

“The pit plays host to armies of barbaric creatures, hellbent on ending your quest before it even begins. Armed with a growing arsenal of magic-infused projectiles, batter your way through multiple levels of increasingly challenging obstacles to claim the ultimate prizes and rebuild New Ballbylon. With every glob you lob, gain valuable experience to develop overpowered spitball combinations, and recruit additional heroes to unlock new skills to send the gutter-dwelling goons packing.” 

As you can see in the Ball x Pit trailer above, it fuses quite a few different gameplay mechanics to create a roguelite. There’s classic brick-breaking action (with Vampire Survivors-like explosions of numbers all over the screen), base-building, and survival gameplay, all morphed into one experience as you attempt run after run. It features over 60 randomized balls to equip, 70 unique buildings for New Ballbylon that provide gameplay bonuses, power-ups, and characters, and more. 

You can try out Ball x Pit on PC via a new Steam demo right now before it launches on Switch, Xbox Series X/S, and PC sometime this year. 



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A monster from Tenebris Somnia, a deformed, two-faced woman.
Product Reviews

Here’s another terrifying trailer for that creepy retro survival horror game that’s half FMV, half pixel-art

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I’ve been spooked by plenty of pixel-art horror games, like Signalis or Look Outside. But I can’t think of an FMV game that’s truly frightened me. The bit in The 7th Guest where hands try to come out of the painting seemed eerie when I was a kid, but now it’s pure kitsch. Watching the first trailer for Tenebris Somnia made me think I might be properly frightened by FMV in a videogame at last.

The second trailer cements that feeling. It bounces back and forth between live-action and the kind of pixel art I associate with games like Maniac Mansion, and while the retro art leaves you to imagine all the gory details of a blood-soaked bed or a two-faced woman with a mouth like a gaping portal to eternal darkness, the FMV cutscenes straight-up show you that stuff and it’s pure nightmare fuel.

Tenebris Somnia – Trailer 2 – YouTube

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I’ve seen a couple of comments where people are suspicious of how good the cutscenes look, since they could pass for a decently budgeted horror movie and we’re used to seeing FMV that looks, well, cheap. “Has AI generation been used in the making of this trailer?” asked someone on the Steam forum. Dave Oshry himself, CEO of publisher New Blood Interactive, showed up to reply, “Absolutely ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ not.”


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So put your mind at ease. Nothing as terrifying as Stable Diffusion’s power usage appears in Tenebris Somnia, and the only thing we have to fear is the guy with candles for a head. And the flying things with white masks and gigantic teeth. And the round guy in the old-timey suit who vomits. And literally everything else glimpsed in the trailers.

We don’t have a release date yet for Tenebris Somnia, but there is a demo on the Steam page, should you dare to download it.



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Dandelion Void is a plant bastard survival horror from Project Zomboid modders
Game Updates

Dandelion Void is a plant bastard survival horror from Project Zomboid modders

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A sci-fi horror trope I quite enjoy is arboretums that provide oxygen to ships or structures, both because it’s a nifty (if spurious?) idea, and because I like the concept of people who’ve only seen iron bulkheads for months staring wistfully at small trees. I think Alex Garland’s criminally underrated Sunshine did it. Kenny Lentil’s Biological Shock did it. Dead Space too. The derelict ark you’ll be scavenging and surviving in Dandelion Void also has plants, but the caveat is that the plants can move. The other caveat is that the plants are bastards.

Watch on YouTube

This one’s a single-player bad place explorer ’em up where you play as a stranded astronaut, squirreling away supplies and making shelters for periodic life support shorts, crafting weapons, and traversing dangerous junglefied environs, while also trying to keep your morale up. Among the game’s features is a novel ‘asphyxiation or treats’ system, where you’ll pry open sealed doors, not knowing if there’s valuable supplies or just a horrible bit of space on the other side. More features! More!

  • Cut through jungle corridors in search of crafting supplies, exotic weapons, and rare decorations.
  • Pry open long sealed bulkhead doors — just pray the void of interstellar space isn’t waiting for you on the other side.
  • Patch up rotted spacesuits, lead lined radiation gear, and other protective garments to traverse dangerous new areas.
  • Stockpile for the next cold snap; life support is on the fritz after centuries of neglect, and you can never be sure when it might fail… for days or even months at a time.
  • The jungle is alive, and extremely hostile. Will you chance a run through the serrated tendrils of crawling plant life, or barricade up and hide somewhere safe?

Dev team Manzanita Interactive have roots in the Project Zomboid modding community, and they say they’ve carried this spirit of customisation forward. As such, the game will ship with a custom map editor and its Lua API. “A game made by modders, for modders, from modders”. I might have added that last bit. Release date is still TBA. Here’s tipper-offer Ewan Wilson on plant horror in the meantime.



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Subnautica is bringing its acclaimed underwater survival to mobile soon
Game Reviews

Subnautica is bringing its acclaimed underwater survival to mobile soon

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Subnautica, developer Unknown Worlds’ exquisite deep sea survival game, is making its way to iOS and Android devices this July, meaning you’ll finally be able to play it actually underwater (as long as your phone is waterproof, so please do check that first).


Subnautica, for some context, originally lauched in 2018 after a couple of years in early access, taking players on a mostly combat-free adventure far, far beneath the waves after crash landing on the ocean planet 4546B. It managed to combine its various strands of exploration, narrative, crafting, base building, and thalassophobia-inducing horror into a deeply satisfying whole, and ended up being a critical and commercial hit. So much so that a standalone expansion – Subnautica: Below Zero – followed, and a sequel’s on the way.


But back to Subnautica’s iOS and Android release. It’s being created in collaboration with mobile developer Playdigious and promises the full-fat Subnautica experience – the one Eurogamer called “oppressively beautiful” and “well-wrought” back in 2018 – albeit with some mobile-specific tweaks. It’s got an updated UI, for instance, alongside touch controls and support for MFi controllers if you’d rather play with proper buttons. That’s in addition to iPhone 15 optimisation, GameCenter achievements on iOS, and cloud save support enabling progress to be share between iOS or Android devices.

Here’s a quick look at Subnautica’s mobile release.Watch on YouTube


If all that appeals, Subnatica comes to iOS and Android on 8th July (via the App Store and Google Play respectively) for the entirely reasonable price of $9.99 USD. In fact, it’ll be even cheaper for a limited time, given the 10 percent launch discount that’ll bring it down to $8.99.


As for Subnautica 2, that’s currently set to launch into early access later this year. Unknown Worlds shared a tiny bit of first gameplay back in April, showing off a handful of new environments, some new aquatic creatures, and even a bit of base-building and co-operative swimming. Co-op is, of course, the sequel’s big new feature, and it’ll support up to four players. Subnautica 2 will initially be available for PC, Xbox Series X/S, and GamePass, and is expected to stay in early access for “about two to three years.”



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Physics-based survival city-builder All Will Fall is having an open beta test in June
Product Reviews

Physics-based survival city-builder All Will Fall is having an open beta test in June

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All Will Fall – Steam Open Beta Trailer | tinyBuild Connect 2025 – YouTube

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PC Gamer’s Lauren Morton said All Will Fall is nearly all of her videogame things stuffed into a single package: It’s a building game, it’s a survival game, and it’s a physics game. And in just under two weeks, it will also be a game that’s in open beta, so you’ll finally be able to see for yourself what it’s got going on.

What it’s got going on from a narrative angle is the end of the world: The oceans are rising, humanity is dying, and you, the leader of a small group of survivors on a rusty boat, are given the job of saving a small chunk of what’s left by building a ramshackle city on one of the few small chunks of remaining land.

The problem—aside from the whole “humanity on the verge of extinction” thing, I mean—is that this isn’t SimCity, where you can slam down buildings on a happily flat Earth and call it a day. The nature of the drowned world in which you’re trapped means you’ll be building vertically as well as horizontally, and it all looks, well, pretty delicate. The Steam page says “you’re essentially playing Jenga with human lives at stake,” which is nicely illustrative and also a reminder that people—tiny, digital people—will be living in whatever sort of city you build, or dying in it as the case may be.


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The good news is that shoddy construction standards won’t be solely responsible for the untimely deaths of your citizens—you’ll also have the opportunity to get Frostpunk on their asses now and then.

(Image credit: All Parts Connected)

And in the end, we’re probably all doomed anyway: “Each colony you build will deal with unique challenges, foundation layouts, circumstances and random events—like storms, mysterious structures emerging from the ocean, political coups, unexpected newcomers, food shortages, and more. Learn from your mistakes, unlock new locations on the global map, and embark on the next dangerous adventure once the inevitable calamity comes to destroy the city.”

Ah well, I’m sure we’ll all do our best nonetheless. All Will Fall doesn’t have a release date yet but it’s set to come out sometime in 2025. The open beta will begin on June 9 as part of the upcoming Steam Next Fest, and will run until June 16.



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