Following the success of cartoon-ish action RPG Nobody Saves the World, Guacamelee developer DrinkBox Studios has announced another action RPG called Blighted. Part of me is sad to see the studio isn't working on another Metroidvania just yet, because its Guacamalee series represents some of the best Metroidvania games around, but DrinkBox simply cannot miss, and Blighted looks great so far.

Where Nobody Saves the World had a flatter 2D perspective that found depth primarily through a variety of forms for the main character, Blighted has more of a 3D, Hades kind of vibe to it, just to give you a quick and commonly known point of reference. It's an isometric action game with silky smooth animations and a lot of projectiles flying around, where a "dynamic difficulty system" regularly changes "enemies, the player, and the world around them."

Blighted begins with, you guessed it, a blight. On Steam, the devs explain that, in a world where the knowledge of the dead is passed down through seeds of memories, "you are the lone survivor of Sorcisto’s rampage," a tragedy caused by a villainous monster who gorged on the brains of the living, and you're "fighting to reclaim the memories of your people, before your own Blight overtakes you."

Sharing knowledge preserved in the brains of the dead also plays into progression; you can power up by absorbing brains from bosses. This is where my Metroidvania sense starts to tingle, not just because it's DrinkBox, but because these upgrades are capable of "widening your skillset and opening up new paths."

Blighted was listed on Steam just hours ago and immediately had the Metroidvania tag, and I'm thinking that's not a coincidence. Let's not ignore this line, either: "Pay careful attention while exploring to unlock the many deep secrets of Blighted’s world."

"Combat in Blighted is nuanced and deadly," DrinkBox adds. "Carefully time your attacks to weave through enemies, chain together combos, and perform powerful finishers." We get a taste of that in the reveal trailer, which is heavy on scythe swinging and even heavier on parrying attacks with a blue flash.

DrinkBox hasn't put out a single bad game, even in the pre-Guacamelee days of Tales From Space: Mutant Blobs Attack, and Blighted is nearly tailor-made to my tastes. It's out in 2026, evidently just on PC for now, and it'll be on my wishlist until then.

Everything announced at Summer Game Fest 2025.

If you're anything like me, a Gen Z caffeine addict with the attention span of a fruit fly, ancient classics like Pong and Breakout don't do much for you. 'How am I supposed to play this without roguelite elements and heaps of stacking upgrades?' I cry, and if the lesson is that sometimes less is more, an hour with Ball X Pit has made sure I may never learn it. Sometimes more is more, and it rules.

Devolver dedicated its Summer Game Fest show to Ball X Pit, a brick-breaker turbocharged with new twists, and I was able to try a demo of it before the reveal.

Skeleton soldiers in the form of blocks and rectangles march down a vertical column trying to shoot you and reach the bottom, while you run around automatically firing balls which bounce around and deal damage. If you catch the balls mid-flight, they immediately shoot out wherever you're aiming. There's already some depth there: you can aim wide to take down a whole group with ricochets, or get up in an enemy's face and rapidly bat the ball back at them to focus one down.

The fun really starts, though, when you start leveling up and racking up special balls. Between a broodmother ball that "births" more balls as it flies around, a burn ball that lights enemies ablaze, and a midnight oil ball that turns burning enemies into living bombs, and all sorts of colorful alternatives, Ball X Pit goes from stark simple to nigh-unreadable chaos in a matter of minutes.

Each special ball gets added to your arsenal and comes with its own suite of upgrades and potential fusions with other special balls; before long, you're making split-second decisions in a sea of automatic laser fire and screen-coating explosions. Boss enemies will DPS check your build as the skeleton hordes get tougher and more numerous, and I was constantly itching to level up just one more time, get a little bit stronger, so I could live a few dozen seconds longer.

In-between runs, you hurry back to New Ballbylon (yes, really) and spend whatever cash you earned on the meta progression stuff. New buildings, new playable characters, new potential builds for future runs, and so on. The structure is nothing unusual, but I still walked away from the demo pretty taken with what I played—which speaks to the sheer, twitchy fun this game finds in its ball-bouncing brick breaking.

Frankly, I thought I was getting tired of the roguelike formula, and Ball X Pit packs in a lot of concepts you have seen before. But the action in its demo is so breakneck, such a potent distillation of that power-scaling madness I love in games like Risk of Rain, I came crawling back to the play button after seeing what the demo had to offer.

If you're keen to check out Ball X Pit, you can wishlist it or play the demo on Steam.

I'm an explorer at heart. Give me a big open world map and yes, I'll harvest resources and craft gear and build a base—but what I really want to do is get out and see the world.

I'm about 10 hours into survival MMO Dune: Awakening, I've got a snug little base, a couple flasks of water, and a fully-fuelled sandbike, so I thought I'd do a bit of exploring today. I jumped on my bike, pointed myself toward the horizon, and floored it—and immediately got stuck in a massive pit of quicksand. Roadtrip cancelled!

Also: life cancelled. This was my first encounter with quicksand and it wasn't exactly a surprise. I knew there were quicksand pits in the region because they're very helpfully marked on the map. In fact, I opened my map to see where the quicksand was, which accomplished two things.

First, it showed me I had already driven directly into the middle of the quicksand, and second, it slowed me down because you can't look at your map and maintain bike speed at the same time. Here, see it for yourself:

I might have made it if I hadn't slowed down, but now I was properly stuck. I tried the only move I had: flooring my bike and chanting "No, no, no." Strangely, that didn't work. So, I continued doing it for about another twenty to thirty seconds, while slowly sinking deeper.

That's when the sandworm appeared, breaching the dunes right behind me. I am terrified of sandworms because when they swallow you, they swallow all of your gear and you lose it forever.

It's the worst way to die in Dune: Awakening: your bike, your weapons, your armor, everything you've got with you is permanently gone.

So, I leapt into action… by continuing to floor it and chant "No, no, no." Still didn't work.

Finally, I had a bit of luck: my bike exploded and I was killed instantly! Hooray!

I know, it doesn't sound like something to celebrate, but dying by exploding bike meant I wasn't killed by the sandworm. I may have lost a few resources from my backpack, but I didn't get swallowed, so I still had all my weapons and armor and tools.

Is that a viable strategy if you're stuck in quicksand? Exploding? I'm not sure, but it's all I've got to work with right now, and I was afraid if I jumped off and ran my boots would sink into the sand, too. My plan is to stop exploring and get to work on crafting an ornithopter so I can just fly over this scary desert instead of driving on top of it.

I did have to build a new bike, and I couldn't collect my dropped items (I wouldn't have tried anyway), but at least my lack of caution resulted in me happily dying in a vehicle explosion. Believe me, there are worse ways to go in Arrakis.

Today at Summer Game Fest, Capcom brought a surprise gift for everyone: An announcement of a new Resident Evil, featuring a hell of a lot of unsettling hallways and what seems like the aftermath of a nuclear strike. You know, normal Resident Evil stuff. Resident Evil Requiem looks fascinatingly confusing and as upsetting as you'd want it to be, but the reveal isn't all good news: Breaking the hearts of roughly half the internet, there's no giant vampire lady anywhere in the reveal trailer.

Ah, well. They can't all be Resident Evil Village.

Developing...