This week in PC games: a trio of surreal shooters, a big Stellaris expansion, and a new RPG from Octopath Traveller devs

"The mid-summer adust spell"? My friend, your naivete is exceeded lone by your boorishness. You should beryllium ashamed of yourself! This week is thing but dry. It's the week of different Steam Next Fest – a play of cautiously abbreviated, wishlist-baiting bounty, successful which we cram the Maw's galore jaws with demos and playtests.

There are besides a fewer existent caller games retired this week, including a posh Square Enix RPG, a robot bathing simulator, and a shooter that combines the disagreeableness of the US presidency with the disagreeableness of goblins. Behold.

Monday 15th June

• Stellaris: Nomads adds a clump of migrant civs with planet-scale spaceships to the seasoned 4X strategy game.
• Day Trade Coach is simply a banal marketplace trading simulator with a unrecorded quality provender and an accurate-seeming terminal UI. Any time traders speechmaking this? Care to comment?
• Mole is astir piloting a unspeakable drill arsenic you travel the voices of the dormant heavy beneath the Slavic soil. A realm of analog controls and achromatic rabbits.
• I deliberation I've exhausted each tendency to play self-styled "boomer shooters", but Alaric does person lamplit libraries, horrible barn owls, and open-ended metroidvania level design.

Tuesday 16th June

• A foot-the-ball absorption crippled successful the twelvemonth 2026, arsenic I unrecorded and breathe! Copa City seems applicable to existent events, somehow. It's really astir what happens extracurricular the ball-footing acquisition – you're trying to hole cities for armies of invading fans.

Wednesday 17th June

• Play each US president connected a ngo to halt Bedlam and hole past successful goblinAmerica (pictured), a "squirmy, bouncy" aboriginal entree FPS, "filled with beauteous sights and horrible places". This is the benignant of aesthetic that has maine hyperventilating arsenic I strain to deliberation of cleverer words than "rad".
• You bash not request Halo, for you person The Last Salvage Squad, successful which 12 metre gangly anime robots stroke up red-on-black UFOs. It looks rad as… as… ghwghwjefgjhbwefw.
• What if chess, but 4 dimensional?

Thursday 18th June

• R-Type Tactics I • II Cosmos is simply a collected, souped-up remaking of the turn-based PSP reimagining of the R-Type shmups. I thought the archetypal R-Type Tactics was fun, backmost successful the noughties - the sequel ne'er made it to our shores.
• The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales is simply a caller action-RPG from a fewer of the radical down Octopath Traveller and Bravely Default. It's got the accustomed "2D-HD" graphics, but dissimilar those different games, it's a real-time affair.
• Mech Spa gets a motion simply for the premise of being bully to mechs, for a change.
• Mythic Love: Iberian Legends is an otome ocular caller astir dating and perchance being eaten by creatures from Iberian folklore.
• The Quiet Things is an autobiographical probe of puerility maltreatment and battle that aims "to tackle the shame and unfastened conversations".

Friday 19th June

• Moon River is simply a short, gloomy, pixelly RPG successful which you are a mariner trying to scope the extremity of a stream that lone appears successful moonlight. This is the "full", "2.0" release, based connected an older escaped demo.

As for what we of the Treehouse are doing this week: Mark is going connected a large metropolis adventure, perchance involving a large sci-fi beingness of immoderate kind. Julian is engaged divvying up portions of penetration astir fungal brains. James is opening different Pandora's Box, portion hoping it won't outgo excessively much. Callum and Jeremy person blocky gardens and painterly expeditions connected their minds. I americium reasoning astir however the trillionaires volition manage, erstwhile the remainder of america are gone. How astir you, immoderate plans? And are determination immoderate chill games I've missed?