Why do some people love sausages and other people hate sausages? No fucking reason. 

–Rubber, by Quentin Dupieux

Absurdism is the sausage made by feeding European flesh into the machinery of industrial slaughter. Before World War I, it had found expression among various high-falutin’ philosophers who explained that searching for meaning is futile. All is vanity, etc. But the horrors of World War I cultivated a global zeitgeist, kicking off the celebration of the non sequitur as a learned response to enormity. It was all the rage on French stages. The sort of thing you might learn in Paris, like drinking absinthe. Which is probably why I first encountered it doing student theater. You give a student a stage and some actors, and there’s no telling what kind of nonsense they’re going to make happen. Genet, Ionesco, Sartre. Then absinthe at cast parties.

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My personal biggest wallet threat this week is one of the biggest Diablo expansions yet: Diablo IV: Lord of Hatred. Mephisto, the Lord of Hatred, was introduced in the opening of Diablo IV’s main campaign in the form of a wolf who rescued the player character and has hounded him or her since then. Looks like we finally get closure on Mephisto’s story in this expansion. In addition to the two new characters you get to play, it sounds like they completely reworked the other characters in the game as well, so I’m looking forward to checking that out.

There’s also Invincible Vs, a superhero fighting game in the Invincible universe; Saros, a spiritual sequel to Housemarque’s Returnal; and Aphelion, the latest game from Life is Strange developer Don’t Nod, in which the discovery of a 9th planet is humanity’s last best hope. 

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Seven-year-old Tommy Chick was drunk with excitement at the prospect of seeing 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. It would be on Wonderful World of Disney, channel 7, this Sunday night. For as long as he could remember, he had doodled pictures of Captain Nemo’s Nautilus, often in the clutches of a giant squid. And at last, it was going to play out before his very eyes!

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I thought this week would be the calm before the storm — stay tuned! — but there are enough big releases to keep your wallet threatened in advance. We have a pottery-breaking game from Double Fine; a new Peter Molyneux god game entering early access; the follow-up to Vampire Survivors; the minimalist sequel to minimalist shapez; breakout game Caromble’s breakout from early access after 11 years; and the Seumus McNally Grand Prize winner from this year’s Independent Games Festival. Maybe this is actually the storm before the storm?

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It’s wonderful stuff, snow. Very multi-faceted.  Did you know that the Inuit have a hundred words for snow? Oops, that’s an urban legend. Oh wait, it is true, sort of. Anyway, leaving linguistics aside, snow can be many things. It can come down in great globs of Christmas magic. It can be hard as rock, strong enough to make an igloo. It can be heavy and full of water, perfect for making a snowman, or fine like sand, stinging your eyes as it is carried by the wind. It can even be soft underneath with a thin crunchy layer on top, like a crème brulée for your feet.

Snow deserves a video game worthy of its majesty. It’s so often treated as a mere change of scenery to be sandwiched between the lava world and the tropical world. Canadians eat snow for breakfast, they’ll know what to do.

Enter The Long Dark, a game about surviving winter in the Great North after “The Quiet Apocalypse”, a geomagnetic event that has made modern technology inoperative.

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This week we get Nintendo’s latest flagship title, Tomodachi Life. From the trailers, I honestly have no idea what this game is, except that it populates the world with your Miis from Nintendo Wii somehow? But I thought Nintendo didn’t even have access to our Miis from the Wii anymore? Does that mean we’ll have to recreate them? No thanks Nintendo!

Capcom’s latest third-person shooter features an astronaut with a companion who looks like a little girl. I have somehow remained immune to Capcom’s success in recent years. The last Capcom game I actually played for an extended time was probably their last flop: Dead Rising 3. And I’m very interested in Pragmata. I wonder if that’s a bad sign for Capcom?

Also this week, Windrose enters early access. This age of piracy game had such a successful demo that it’s one of the most wishlisted games on Steam. And we’ve been seeing the trailer for Replaced for years as a cool cyberpunk setting done using pixel art. Another game that we’ve been seeing trailers for is Mouse: P.I. For Hire, the first person shooter set in 1930s cartoon noir setting. All three of those may pose a potential wallet threat this week.

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Can former Just Cause developers make an interesting open world game with 70s muscle cars and melee fisticuffs instead of guns? If the answer is yes, Samson could be a serious wallet threat this week. Otherwise, beware People of Note, a musical RPG where each battle is a musical performance. Also beware ChainStaff’s dilemma of rescuing comrades or listening to the alien voice in your head telling you to harvest them. And beware Find Your Words’ attempt to capture the magic of watching your kids find their first friendships. And beware House of Hikmah’s adventure in the halls of Islamic scholars during its Golden Age. And DarkSwitch’s fusion of city builder and tower defense. Potential wallet threats abound this week from unlikely directions!

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My first encounter with Thomas Pynchon was indirect, though the filter of a filmmaker whose latest movie felt suddenly weird, unfamiliar, a little ill at ease, perhaps even “off”, as if he’d come under a strange new influence, or was maybe just drunk. Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice didn’t feel like any other Paul Thomas Anderson movie. When I first saw it, I was confused. What on earth had happened to this movie? Why was it so conspicuously and bizarrely different from his other movies, so unlike the Paul Thomas Anderson I remembered? What was this raucous audacity, this untidy shimmer as if it were shot through a distorted lens? What was this strange aftertaste, like some spice from a distant land surreptitiously stirred into the mix? What were these shifts in tone, these ludicrous outbursts, the slithering vulgar undercurrents of eroticism? Why the sensually indulgent voiceover from a fortune teller, invisible to most of the other characters, in an ethereal performance from a folk harpist named Joanna Newsom? Why does Martin Short abruptly show up, as ridiculously out of place as a talking dog? It wasn’t just detective fiction, it was detective fiction by way of something else.

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I’ve been such a sucker for 3D platformers ever since 1996’s Super Mario 64. Unlike 2D platformers, 3D platformers have built-in leeway. Instead of relying on lightning reflexes and pixel-perfect jumps, 3D platformers are okay with you getting the jump timing just a little wrong. Probably because you’re also in charge of controlling the camera. So when I first saw Super Meat Boy 3D news, I thought, well, finally here’s a Super Meat Boy game for me! I probably don’t have to be perfect to get through this one. But it turns out there’s a fixed camera so you don’t have to futz with it, and can devote all your attention to timing pixel-perfect jumps. Only now in 3D.

Among the other interesting games coming out this week are some wonderful looking Metroidvanias, platformers, and roguelikes. Or how about a new super-fast paced FPS named Guns and Nuns? One genre that I’m particularly delighted to see explode is city builders. There’s just something about watching little people expand their city and go about their lives that I find so irresistible. This week we get All Will Fall, which looks like a city builderinspired by the movie Waterworld.

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Two games stand out to me this week. Screamer is an anime-themed arcade racer, but I’m always nervous about arcade racers since they have to make up their physics. Sometimes I love the physics they’ve made up, sometimes I hate them, and sometimes I can’t even grok them. The other game that looks interesting is Damon & Baby. A demon teaming up with a baby is already an intriguing premise, but then there’s the top-down shooting and crazy traversals I’ve seen in the trailer.

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Is Crimson Desert going to be a compelling world to explore or a repetitive and janky hackfest? Have you been waiting to use your PC to hit the beach in Kojima’s Death Stranding: On the Beach? Will a relatively retro graphics engine bring the Starship Troopers universe and its swarms of flesh-rending bugs to teeming life? Is a Thomas and Friends game from the developer of Train Sim a potentially brilliant idea? Is the annual iteration of MLB The Show ready to play ball? Is Dragonkin: The Banished ready to compete with Grim Dawn, Path of Exile, and Diablo?

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Wallet threat level red for the sheer breadth of releases this week! No matter what kind of videogames you like, your wallet might be in trouble. If you and three of your friends are Left 4 Dead fans, John Carpenter’s Toxic Commando could be a quadruple wallet threat. If you’re a fan of the PS2 horror classic Fatal Frame II, load your film and brace yourself for the remake. Fans of the shmups and specifically the R-Types get a remake of R-Type Tactics 1 and 2 on all modern systems this week. If you’re a fan of prequels, Greedfall: The Dying World precedes its namesake. And if you’re a fan of city builders, get ready to sink your oversized incisors in the beaver-themed city-builder Timberborn, which promises one dam thing after another.

If you’re a Minesweeper fan, Dungeon Sweeper upgrades the grid clicking with an autobattler. If you’re a Dungeons & Dragons fan, the early access release of Solasta II will let you roll virtual d20s to your hearts’ content. If you’re a Japanese action RPG fan without a console, pining for the days of 2014 mobile games, the PC port of Granblue Fantasy aims to serve all your JARPG hack, slash, and loot needs. If you’re a parkour fan without a PC, the console ports of Parkour Labs brings fancy legwork to couch potatoes. If you’re a fan of old-school space sims, maybe Stellar Wanderer DX will be your ticket to the stars. And if you’re a fan of the bubonic plague in Medeval Europe, firstly, what is wrong with you? And secondly, 1348 Ex Voto is out this week.

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Tom reviewed Resident Evil Requiem and gave it a measly one star. But can you really trust Tom? That young firebrand accused Resident Evil 7 of “transpacific awkwardness”. I’m still not quite sure what it means, but I assume some people at Capcom were devastated.

Accordingly, I have been mandated by the Qt3 Department of Fairness to give the game a second opinion. First of all, you should know that I am a true fan of the series. I even have the figurines (don’t ask). I had an official fan club number too, but it turns out the whole thing is a way to nag you into giving the games free promotion on social media, so screw that. If you’re wondering about my journalistic integrity, well, the joke’s on you, I’m not a journalist and I have no integrity.

So what does a true fan think of Resident Evil Requiem?

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Jill Valentine has bleached her hair and gotten a desk job. When her boss sends her to a serial killer crime scene, zombies happen. This is when she realizes she’s in a Resident Evil and needs a male sidekick to do the combat parts. So Chris Redfield gets vectored in to take turns playing the game with her. They go to a — stop me if you’ve heard this one — creepy mansion with a secret lab underneath it. Resident Evil: Deja Vu. 

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A few potential behemoths arrive this week to threaten your wallet. In an event so rare it’s marked by decades, Bungie releases a new game, albeit with a very old title: Marathon. A new type of Pokémon spinoff comparable to the Xbox 360 “life simulation” Viva Pinita arrives in Pokémon Pokopia. And for the roguelike card deck building fans, early access begins for the sequel to the seminal Slay the Spire. For fans of indie strategy games and rogue AIs, the time has come at last for the full release of Arcen’s Heart of the Machine. Finally, vampire aficianados will be able to revisit a legacy favorite with Legacy of Kain: Definance Remastered.

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