Welcome to Video Video games Weekly on Engadget. Anticipate a brand new story each Monday or Tuesday, damaged into two components. The primary is an area for brief essays and ramblings about online game traits and associated subjects from me, Jess Conditt, a reporter who's lined the business for greater than 13 years. The second incorporates the online game tales from the previous week that you might want to learn about, together with some headlines from outdoors of Engadget.
Please take pleasure in — and I'll see you subsequent week.
June has handed me by in a haze of air journey, delicate sickness, protests and Satisfaction, and it’s now formally time to shut the ebook on Summer time Sport Fest 2025. We printed greater than 80 tales round this 12 months’s present and so they’re all price a learn, however earlier than transferring on for good, I needed to focus on a remaining batch of video games that I can’t cease excited about. This week, I current three mini previews straight out of SGF 2025 — and solely two of them are horror video games, which is a stupendous show of progress on my half.
Crisol: Theater of Idols
Crisol: Theater of Idols wasn’t on my radar till I sat down and performed it on the Blumhouse sales space, however now it’s pinging loud and clear, as if the booms have been emanating instantly from the blood-soaked bowels of Hell. It’s a first-person survival-horror motion recreation set in a demented model of Spain that’s stuffed with monsters of contemporary folklore. Murderous marionettes and big, ornately adorned skeletons hunt you thru darkish streets and towering gothic buildings, lamplight glinting off of each gross 3D element. The entire demo felt like getting misplaced in a terrifying, nightmarish carnival, and I loved each little bit of it.
In Crisol, blood is your supply of ammunition, and also you drain the corpses of people and chickens to refuel your well being bar in addition to your weapons. Crisol is tense and beautiful, paying homage to Dishonored or Resident Evil Village, and enemies are each strong and tough to evade. Crisol is the debut recreation from impartial Spanish crew Vermila Studios, which obtained an Epic MegaGrant for the mission in 2020. It’s being printed by Blumhouse and is due out this 12 months on Steam, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Sequence X/S.
Grave Seasons
There’s one thing deeply fallacious in Ashenridge, the idyllic rural village the place Grave Seasons is about. At first look, Grave Seasons is a cute, narrative-based farming sim with detailed pixel artwork, juicy romance choices and layers of home-maintenance mechanics. You spend time planting, watering, harvesting, crafting gadgets, selecting up trash and chatting with villagers — and then you definitely dig up a severed hand. Pilar, your flirty neighbor who runs the tailor store down the highway, says one thing ominous concerning the destiny of your own home’s earlier proprietor. The vibe shifts; the shadows begin to look sinister. Night time falls and the true horror is unleashed, sudden, violent and all of the extra stunning in such a peaceable setting. A supernatural serial killer is on the unfastened in Ashenridge and, in between planting crops, it’s as much as you to research (and possibly date) the assassin.
Grave Seasons is a recreation that can dwell or die by its tone, and up to now, developer Excellent Rubbish has completely nailed the vibe of nefarious, creeping dread. Ashenridge is a lovely little city with tons of individuals to satisfy and actions to finish, and the character avatars are horny, candy and tremendous intriguing. A magical homicide investigation is just the cherry on high of a reliable farming and courting sim, and I’m desirous to take a chew out of the complete recreation. At SGF 2025, builders stated the entire Grave Seasons expertise ought to take about 20 hours. Grave Seasons is being printed by Blumhouse, and it’s scheduled to hit Steam and consoles in 2026.
Escape Academy 2: Again 2 Faculty
Escape Academy is one in every of my favourite video games of the previous 5 years and I’m inordinately stoked for the sequel, which turns the varsity into an open world of puzzles, riddles and cringey puns. With Escape Academy 2: Again 2 Faculty, developer Coin Crew goes all-in on the scholar roleplaying vibe, and the whole campus is plagued by mysteries. It’s additionally playable as a split-screen, sofa co-op expertise, which is among the sequence’ best strengths. Frantically screaming options at your good friend simply feels higher in particular person than over a Discord name, you understand?
I performed the unique Escape Academy with a neighborhood associate, in order that’s how I attempted out the sequel at SGF 2025. I dragged Engadget EIC Aaron Souppouris to the iam8bit sales space and we dove in, beginning in a classroom lined in sneaky environmental clues. In Escape Academy 2, the task is straightforward — get out — however the execution is advanced, and we have been quickly throwing out names, dates and math issues, attempting to resolve a sequence of tough, interconnected puzzles and depart the room. After getting only one trace from the builders, we made our approach to the hallway, which was lined with locker-based riddles, and ultimately reached the headmaster’s workplace, which was a contained playground of puzzle gaming. We had to make use of a pen and piece of paper to maintain observe of some sections, and general, our interactions felt recent. Coin Crew isn’t simply rolling out the identical issues with completely different options for the sequel, and the brand new riddles have been intelligent, revolutionary and tremendous satisfying. (The identical can’t be stated about all the puns, however that’s a part of the appeal.)
Escape Academy 2: Again 2 Faculty options each native and on-line co-op, so that you’ll be free to yell at your folks in whichever format you like. Coin Crew remains to be engaged on the sport and there’s no launch date but, nevertheless it’s out there now to wishlist on Steam.
The information
11 Bit Studios left AI writing in The Alters
The one factor worse than not disclosing AI use within the creation of a online game isn’t disclosing it after which deploying it so sloppily that gamers instantly discover. Indie developer and writer 11 Bit Studios discovered this lesson firsthand with The Alters, a futuristic base-building recreation starring an astronaut and his alternate-reality clones. Inside every week of the sport’s launch on June 13, posts began popping up on Reddit and Bluesky exhibiting AI-generated textual content within the recreation, throughout a number of languages. On June 30, 11 Bit launched an announcement confirming its use of AI in creating The Alters, saying it was utilized solely in background textual content and to assist with last-minute localization efforts.
“It doesn’t matter what we determined, we must always have merely let you understand,” the studio wrote.
Xbox layoffs incoming
I’d actually like to cease writing headlines like this. Microsoft is making ready to put off a lot of Xbox staff this week, as a part of a deliberate 3 % discount in employees throughout the corporate. That’s a lack of roughly 7,000 jobs in whole, and in line with Bloomberg, Xbox leaders predict “substantial cuts throughout the whole group.” The firings observe a spherical of 1,900 layoffs at Xbox in January 2024, one other 650 layoffs in September, and final 12 months’s closure of Arkane Austin, Alpha Canine Video games and Tango Gameworks (the latter of which lives on beneath Krafton). In the meantime, Microsoft reported a web income of $25.8 billion within the first three months of 2025, with an 8 % yearly enhance in income from Xbox content material and providers. Congrats?
Netflix is culling its games roster
Netflix began beefing up its video video games division round 2021, with the acquisition of Oxenfree studio Night time Faculty and the rollout of an in-app gaming library providing standard cellular titles at no further cost to subscribers. Netflix at present helps greater than 100 video games, together with Demise’s Door, Hades, The Case of the Golden Idol, The Rise of the Golden Idol, Braid Anniversary Version, Katana ZERO and the Monument Valley sequence — however these are disappearing in July. A complete of twenty-two video games will probably be deleted from Netflix at numerous instances in July, and the culling follows comparable cutbacks within the firm’s interactive division, together with the latest closure of an in-house AAA studio.
League of Legends and Valorant esports are betting games now
Riot Video games is opening up the League of Legends and Valorant esports scenes to betting sponsorships, enabling skilled playing on the highest degree within the Americas and EMEA. Riot president of publishing and esports John Needham introduced the brand new allowance on June 27, arguing that betting is already occurring off-the-books and an official market permits for regulation. It additionally permits Riot to eat a chunk of that money-flavored pie, however Needham doesn't say that instantly in his be aware. Regardless of the catalyst, put together to see DraftKings and FanDuel alongside Crimson Bull and MasterCard throughout your esports advert breaks.
The Steam Summer Sale is here to take your money
As a result of we all know you’re going to get one thing — what are you selecting up on the Steam Summer time Sale this 12 months? Share your spoils within the feedback! In the event you’re overwhelmed, enable me to humbly counsel Blue Prince, Home Safety Hotline, Look Outside or Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.
On a associated be aware, don't overlook to take a look at (the almost full) Playdate Season 2.
Once upon a time, Resident Evil: Requiem was an open-world game
… nevertheless it’s positively not any extra. Resident Evil: Requiem producer Masachika Kawata and director Koshi Nakanishi clarified in a video that their new recreation is an offline single-player expertise, however they stated that early in improvement, the crew significantly thought of making it on-line and open-world. This experimentation fueled rumors about Requiem introducing a brand new course for the Resident Evil franchise, nevertheless it seems the ultimate product will probably be a well-recognized, self-contained horror romp with the flexibility to swap between first- and third-person views. Spooooky.
This text initially appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/video-games-weekly-summer-game-fest-ends-when-i-say-so-213556598.html?src=rss