Liquid Static Studio; PC
You take on the role of flight attendant in this clever and absorbing retro-style game that veers from daft horror spoof to genuinely disturbing

There was always something creepy about the job-simulator genre. All those mindless automatons queueing up to use your bus, bar or bed store, or whatever workplace you are trapped in for the duration of the game. The endless repetitive tasks. The emptiness of the world beyond your corporate existence. Together, these elements scream existential terror … which is perhaps why we are now seeing a new indie sub-genre of job sim horror games, including Home Safety Hotline, Dredge and more recently, Grease Trap ’99, a Lovecraftian mystery set in a Scottish chip shop.

Now, we have Night Plane, in which you take on the role of a flight attendant on a jumbo jet to hell. It all starts kind of normally. You turn up for the first day of your new job, meet your colleagues, then take your spot at the departure gate, checking in customers and being careful to root out anyone with invalid tickets. Once on the plane, you roll your trolley down the aisle, serving booze and inedible meals, and occasionally dealing with passenger complaints. Then the plane crashes and, frankly, it all goes downhill from there.

Whether you favour spooky fairtales, satanic card games or infernal hijinks at the chip shop there are all manner of fresh top scarers at large this witching season

Tis almost All Hallows’ Eve and naturally, the thoughts of all good video game players are turning to horror. 2026 has already been a bloody good year for the genre with Resident Evil Requiem and Silent Hill: Townfall leading the rabble. But this autumn sees a festering surge of indie horror releases, featuring everything from cursed card games to Nazi-hunting penguins. Here are eight terrifying titles we think you should sample while jack-o-lanterns burn and spirits walk the moonlit streets.

Allogloom (PC)

Activision; PC, PS5, Switch 2, Xbox
From parkour over Manhattan rooftops and car chases in Paris to the climactic battle at a North Korean air base, the developers have thrown absolutely everything at the game

And so we return perhaps one final time to Call of Duty’s Modern Warfare strand, with stories, “ripped from the newspaper headlines”, featuring shady terror organisations, nefarious rogue states and the brutally capable, monosyllabic war fighters who stand between us and Armageddon. Last year’s Black Ops 7 instalment was a sales disappointment for Activision, and that has no doubt put extra pressure on Infinity Ward, the studio leading Modern Warfare 4 development. Fortunately, this developer – like series heroes Price, Gaz and Ghost – seems to thrive on pressure.

As you may have read, this year’s campaign is based around a fictitious North Korean ruling family that has seized an opportunity to invade its southern neighbour. Amid the chaos, a small group of Korean and American marines must help lead the fightback, while in the shadows, SAS hard man John Price makes an unlikely new comrade in his own morally ambiguous quest to put the world to rights. Mads Mikkelsen pops up as evil mastermind The Archer, but like Kiernan Shipka in Black Ops 7 he’s rather wasted, with very little screen time.

As video games chase spectacle, Modern Warfare 4 makes a case for putting character and consequence at the heart of its biggest battles

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In these strange, subdued weeks before the much-anticipated release of Grand Theft Auto VI, there have still been some welcome surprises. Onimusha: Way of the Sword revived a half-forgotten samurai action series with much aplomb, while Silent Hill: Townfall transported all of the franchise’s bloody, dread-filled psychological horror to … the picturesque Scottish coast. Even more shocking to games writers, though, is the fact that the forthcoming Modern Warfare 4 has one of the best Call of Duty campaign modes for at least six years – and might even be up there with the original Modern Warfare trilogy.

The setting is an invasion of South Korea by its northern neighbour – a setup that could have fuelled a hundred instantly forgettable Netflix films, but has proved controversial in a video game. The authoritarian regime has a new (fictitious) ruler and a powerful experimental weapon, which it’s not afraid to use as the opening gambit in an explosive attack. You take on the role of Park Hyun Jun, a conscripted South Korean soldier who, along with his small unit of similarly inexperienced grunts, gets caught in the firestorm as cities burn and enemy paratroopers fill the skies.

After years of sprawling ‘forever’ games, players are rediscovering the pleasures of more focused experiences. Could a new wave of independent arcades bring back the social side of gaming?

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There’s an important semi-nostalgic movement happening in games, and I’m excited about where it’s heading. But I don’t want to get ahead of myself here.

Over the last five years, major publishers, obsessed with the success of “forever games” such as Fortnite, Minecraft and Roblox, have been throwing hundreds of millions of dollars into their own sprawling, endlessly updating, battle-pass-infested mega franchises – each designed to take all our time and money. The result has been astounding failures such as Concord, Mindseye and Tales of the Shire. Even the good games – Crimson Desert, Path of Exile 2, Blood of the Dawnwalker – are so bloated they have become the unyielding masters of our precious few hours of free time.

PC, PS5, Switch 2; Wych Elm Games, Team 17
Abandoned shops, ruined apartment buildings and rotting sewer networks make up a dark landscape in which you play a private eye searching for a missing singer-songwriter

In a weird deserted town miles from anywhere, a troubled detective searches for a missing musician and the girl he may or may not have murdered. It could be a Silent Hill game or a lost David Lynch movie from the 1990s – in fact, it’s neither. And also both. If that whets your appetite, stick around, there’s plenty more to come.

Developed by Scandinavian studio Wych Elm Games, Silver Pines is a dark Metroidvania-style adventure, where you play as shambling private eye, Red Walker, exploring a 2D universe of abandoned shops, ruined apartment buildings and rotting sewer networks. Officially, everyone has left because of an incoming storm, but very quickly you learn that something much darker is afoot. Someone has hired you to find singer-songwriter Eddie Velvet, but you don’t know why; your only contact with your client is via the payphones dotted around town, where you can also save your progress – as long as you have a dollar to pay for the call. Each location is filled with clues and puzzles – a weird newspaper story pinned to the wall, a strange statue that needs a missing piece – and through these artefacts you unlock new rooms and descend further into the mystery.

There’s no Leon, Claire or Ada Wong in Cregger’s adaptation. Instead, it re-creates something more fundamental – the strange, terrifying experience of actually playing the game

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I’ve been surprised by the number of Resident Evil fans complaining on social media about Zach Cregger’s cinematic adaptation of the survival horror series. “It’s not a real Resident Evil movie,” they’ve claimed. Were we watching the same film? Certainly, it doesn’t feature any of the familiar heroes – there’s no Leon, no Claire, no Ada Wong – and there’s a distinct lack of recognisable antagonists and well-known locations. Despite all of this, Cregger’s interpretation is one of the most accurate and interesting video game films ever made.

On the surface, it’s about a zombifying virus that gets accidentally released in Raccoon City by the Umbrella Corporation. These are, of course, the foundations of the Resi mythos. More interestingly, Cregger seeks to replicate and explore the structural and narrative conventions of the series. In the film, the player character, hapless courier Bryan Hodukavich, is thrust into a viral outbreak, with no weapons and no idea what’s going on. He is then submerged into an uncanny shadow world of escalating peril and body horror. The film takes us through a series of locations dragged straight from the games – an abandoned farmhouse, a road tunnel crammed with abandoned cars, a hospital and the obligatory sewer level. As he progresses, Bryan finds increasingly powerful weapons, from a handgun to an assault rifle – but he is always short on ammo. And there are typewriters in at least two scenes!

PlayStation 5; Insomniac Games
Logan is well realised by Liam McIntyre and some exquisite character art, but there are lapses in narrative and emotional arcs and some of the combat feels like a chore

It was always going to be difficult to follow Spider-Man. Insomniac’s three games based around the web-slinger are masterpieces of superhero wish fulfilment, allowing you to swoop above a depiction of Manhattan alive with graffiti artists, roving journalists and gun-toting gangsters. If anyone should be up to the task, it’s Wolverine. A beloved Marvel stalwart, his life much darker and bloodier than Peter Parker’s, he seems the ideal protagonist for a moody action adventure. Yet somehow this well-made game falls short of its potential.

Set years before the founding of the X-Men, Marvel’s Wolverine sees a disenfranchised Logan falling back in with Sabretooth and Mystique when their mentor Nathaniel Essex is kidnapped by mutant-hating billionaire Bolivar Trask. This archetypal tech bro has a disturbing plan for world domination and the X Team are out to stop him – but there is a secret buried in Wolverine’s past that’s about to cause an eruption. It’s a decent setup, filled with the sort of intrigue, violence and Freudian tension we expect from the X-Men.

As Rockstar’s blockbuster prepares to dominate the headlines, it’s time for the mainstream media to stop treating video games as a novelty that needs explaining

Predictably, the Grand Theft Auto VI “extended look” which premiered on Netflix last week was a success for all involved. The 30-minute preview scorched to No 1 on the viewing chart and even brought the site down for a few minutes as millions of gamers tried to watch what was, effectively, a very long teaser trailer. According to data collated by Eurogamer, more than 9,000 Twitch streamers covered the show leading to 5,227,798 hours of viewing there alone. And this was just the beginning of what will surely be two months of escalating hype – and unprecedented media attention.

Call me cynical, but I suspect the coverage of GTA VI in the media over the next few weeks will follow a familiar pattern. Mostly, it will be five-minute slots wedged in near the end of news bulletins in which games journalists, industry analysts and other pundits will be asked why the game is such a big deal, how much it cost to make and how much revenue it will generate. Perhaps a few will try to reignite the hoary old “violence in video games” debate, there will be presenters laughingly admitting they’ve not touched a game since Pac-Man, rolling their eyes and wallowing in their ignorance, in a way they never would while discussing any other art form. Somebody will venture the subversive view that “games are no longer just for kids”; somebody else will say “games make more money than films and music put together”. And that will be that, job done for another decade … or until there’s a funny story about Pokémon.

Last month, Microsoft’s gaming division told its workforce it was cutting 3,200 jobs, which some say will have big ramifications for game development – as well as taking a huge personal toll

On the morning of 6 July, an email went out from Asha Sharma, the chief executive of Xbox, to all of the division’s employees around the world. Under the headline “Resetting Xbox”, it announced the most significant restructuring in the history of Microsoft’s console business: 3,200 staff would be laid off throughout the financial year to 2027, and 1,600 of those roles would be eliminated immediately.

An hour later, at studios throughout company, the Teams meeting invites started arriving. “It was a virtual call with our studio manager,” says Anne Barrett, who was laid off from Bethesda Game Studios Austin. “All of our cameras and microphones were turned off so we weren’t able to say anything or react to anything. We were just brought in, told the news and it was like: ‘You guys are going to lose access to your Slack channel.’ So you saw a flurry of goodbye messages before everything was just shut off.”

There are juggernauts and indie gems aplenty for when the nights draw in, from an ingenious puzzle game to blockbusters such as Marvel’s Wolverine and Call of Duty
• See all of our unmissable autumn arts recommendations here

After 20 years away, Capcom’s hyper kinetic action adventure returns, pitting skilled samurai Miyamoto Musashi against hordes of warriors and demons in Edo-period Kyoto. Master the complex combat then prepare for flashing blades, disembodied limbs and geysers of spraying blood.
• 4 September; PC, PS5, Switch 2, Xbox

Under some strange circumstances, Rockstar broadcast the first (official) gameplay footage of Grand Theft Auto VI, the most-anticipated game of the year. Here’s everything you need to know.

Ah yes, it’s a drug den. We’re in familiar GTA territory here: narcotics, smart phones, tattooed gangsters and a police raid. The duo shoot their way out of the room – the gunplay is very familiar to the series – third-person over the shoulder. I’m getting a distinct True Romance/Leon vibe to this chaos.

These closeup slow-motion kill shots are giving me flashbacks to Fallout 3 and its slightly sickening VATS violence.

The flat routines of a dead end railway job screen out an approaching menace in a quietly intriguing game from the indie developer of Cat Lady and Lorelai

Lonely jobs have provided excellent material for independent video games over the years. From Papers, Please to Firewatch to The Stanley Parable, players have been happy to spend hours dwelling in depressing cubicles or rural hideaways, usually because there is an intriguingly hidden point to it all.

In Trainwatch, a character named Troy has taken a seemingly godforsaken job as a railway worker in an unnamed desolate backwater. His main task over the course of a single month is to manage a level crossing, closing the gate whenever a train comes, while also carrying out daily chores such as cooking and washing. It sounds serene, but Troy is also running away from something. The other stipulations are that he stays sober and calls his wife every night. And there is something lurking in the fog at the edges of the fields – one day he must face it.

An increasing tension between players and publishers about ownership of titles could lead to a divestment from the system the big companies are trying to enforce

At the time of press, there is a well-publicised protest taking place in the video games community. PlayStation 5 owners are being encouraged to log off from their consoles between 23 and 30 August – no playing games, no downloading new titles. The motivating factor is Sony’s decision to cease physical game disc production from January 2028. After that, games will only be released as digital products. In an act of poor timing or wilful defiance, Sony chose this week to send out a mass email reminding customers of their PS5 terms and conditions: “The software is licensed to you, not sold,” states the relevant clause. “You are granted a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, and personal license to play … ” It knows, of course, that most customers won’t open the email, let alone read it.

There has always been a tension between game players and game publishers – an underlying sense of mutual mistrust. Players are wary of their favourite franchises being canned, or games being delayed or released with bugs. Publishers and manufacturers are wary of piracy and the capricious tastes of consumers. But now the atmosphere among many game players feels more starkly political than ever. Microsoft has been targeted by the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement for its ties to the Israeli military; the consumer advocacy group Stop Killing Games is gaining support; players have protested over the purchase of Electronic Arts by a Saudi-led consortium – boycotts have been proposed in part due to the possible ramifications regarding LGBTQ+ content in titles such as The Sims. As the games industry has grown and globalised, its impact on culture, society and politics has increased. Yet, on an individual level, gamers and consumers are feeling increasingly powerless.

Players will get what they expect from the new CoD title: boots-on-the-ground military action with a slight tactical edge. But what’s with all the distractions?

There’s a lot riding on this year’s Call of Duty, the inescapable first-person shootfest that’s been lobbing a grenade into the autumn release schedule since 2003. Previous instalment, Black Ops 7, performed poorly compared to previous titles, forcing Activision to post a semi-apology to fans. And that’s not the only challenge Modern Warfare 4 is facing: there’s a new indie shooter, Wardogs, promising a feel somewhere between classic CoD and Classic Battlefield. Then, lurking on the horizon, in mirror shades and an exotic sports car, is Grand Theft Auto 6, which is surely going to smash and grab all the attention (and money) from the market in mid-November.

The good news is that, judging by the early access beta test that ran over the penultimate August weekend, we’re definitely getting what we expect from a Modern Warfare title: quasi-authentic boots-on-the-ground military action with a slight tactical edge. The weapons and general gunplay are highly effective, from default assault rifle, the Han 86 – a classic CoD beginner’s gun with decent fire rate and handling – to the bullet-spraying Nightshade SMG and the absolutely lethal KG-7 Vulcan sniper rifle. They all feel good to hold and fire, and there’s enough balance to let you experiment with slightly more offbeat numbers like the burst-fire Hyeon AR and the possibly overpowered Mar-9 marksman rifle.

As gaming’s biggest publishers retreat into safer bets, a new generation of independents are building an alternative from the ground up

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During the 1990s, a new strata of independent film studios and distributors revitalised the Hollywood movie machine. The likes of Miramax, New Line Cinema and October Films challenged the ageing behemoths of the industry and pushed forward offbeat directors such as Quentin Tarantino, Darren Aronofsky and Jane Campion. The decade is widely considered an artistic high point for western cinema after the bloated mainstream excesses of the 1980s. Could something similar now be happening in games?

Certainly, we have a comparable setup. The big players of the games business are in various states of creative disarray: Electronic Arts (EA) has been bought out by a Saudi-led consortium, which is likely to lead to more cautious, hit-driven decisions; Microsoft bought Activision and Bethesda and then ordered waves of redundancies; Ubisoft has cancelled several titles and is posting big losses. Those companies are also facing rising development costs, so they’re circling the wagons, focusing on legacy brands and freezing recruitment. It’s hard to imagine any left-field works of genius emerging from this imaginative quagmire.

Sonic’s creators explain how the speedy scamp has kept on running through generations as an enduring avatar of ‘attitude in the face of adversity’

One day in the early 1990s, I came home from university for the weekend and discovered that my dad had bought himself a Sega Mega Drive, bundled with a copy of Sonic the Hedgehog 2. I knew about Sega’s mascot of course. The launch of the original Sonic the Hedgehog game in 1991 was a landmark moment for the company, massively boosting the sales of its 16bit console in the west, ripping market share from the dominant Super Nintendo. While Mario was the family favourite, Sonic with his speed, attitude and brash visual energy encapsulated the edgy spirit of the early 1990s MTV culture. That weekend, Dad and I did little else but team up for daylong Sonic sessions, the game’s two-player mode letting us play cooperatively as we zoomed through those dense, beautiful play zones.

Thirty-five years later, I am still a Sonic fan. There have been plenty of rough times (Sonic 06, Sonic and the Secret Rings, Sonic Free Riders – sorry, I can’t go on), but there have been plenty of good ones too. (Rush, Mania and Colors, and I have a soft spot for Sonic R, a racer developed by Traveller’s Tales, which went on to make the Lego games). Few people know this rollercoaster better than Takashi Iizuka, who worked on Sonic 3 as a designer and has been series producer for almost 20 years. When he joined Sega in 1992 he wanted to work for the company’s arcade division, but after playing the original Sonic – especially Sonic 2 – he was seduced.

Big developers are discovering that the technical progress of photorealism doesn’t always translate into the creative spark that gives gamers joy – and keeps them playing

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Last week, Asha Sharma, the new head of Xbox, laid out her vision for the future of the console and interestingly, the two titles she picked out as potential areas of growth were Minecraft and Candy Crush Saga – games that don’t exactly scream next-generation entertainment. Neither relies on hyper-realistic visuals, which is the north star that games consoles and gaming PCs have been aiming at for the past 40 years. They are, instead, well-designed, well-loved franchises that you can play and enjoy on almost any PC, console or phone.

The fact is, the quest for visual hyperrealism is breaking the games industry. It’s becoming more and more expensive to put high-end graphics hardware into machines thanks to demand from the AI sector; at the same time, creating superrealistic visuals is an incredibly expensive and complex part of game development, leading to longer development periods. GTA VI, for example, has taken at least eight years to develop and is rumoured to have cost between $1bn and $2bn. By my back-of-an-envelope calculations, that’s around four times more than GTA V. Admittedly, the detail on everything, from the characters’ faces, to the cars, to the cityscapes, is astonishing. But will it be four times better than GTA V? Will it be four times more fun?

Playing as recent arrival Lena, your challenges include learning a new language and uncovering family secrets – its developer hopes it will spread ‘a little more compassion’

The cosy house-sorting sim has become a much-loved staple of the PC indie scene. Titles such as Unpacking, A Little to the Left and Momento charm players with their detailed interiors and quiet narratives of lives lived and shared within the same four walls. For Clean Start, Polish developer Serious Sim has taken a different approach – here you play as domestic cleaner, Lena, an immigrant who has arrived in an unspecified western country with little knowledge of the local language, and a family to support back home.

From here, you’re tasked with cleaning a series of houses and apartments, polishing tables, tidying shelves and scrubbing muddy pawprints from kitchen floors. It seems you’re able to rearrange the rooms, giving them a personal feel, which is after all one of the most pleasing elements of the genre. You can also, we are reassured, pet the dog.

Hidden gems can be unearthed, but you have to dig deep into the bargain bins of countless outdated Fifas, Wii Fits without the controllers and partially finished quizshow games

As an eternally optimistic charity shop fan, I hold on to the fantasy that one day I’ll walk into my local Oxfam and find a pristine copy of the Sega Saturn shooter Burning Rangers for £1.50. Or perhaps a box full of old Neo Geo carts for a quid each. Sadly, this is now unlikely. Charity shops have caught on to the fact that old video games – like old vinyl albums – are highly collectible, and so they’re putting the good stuff on eBay. That’s fine, it’s their job to raise money, not to provide opportunist swine like me with bargains. But what games can you find tucked away in your local branch of Barnardo’s? To find out I visited about 40 charity stores across the country. Here is what I discovered on the shelves … And please do share your own charity shop gaming finds in the comments!