PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch 2; Undercoders
Colourful, counter-cultural and captivating – this rail riding game set in a dystopian Japan is as weird as it is exhilarating

Every now and again a game appears with a premise so outrageous you stop in your tracks to take it all in. Denshattack!, a game about kickflipping trains across a dystopian future Japan, is the epitome of this feeling. Set in a post climate disaster world, people have retreated to corporate-owned domed cities to live out their days in air-conditioned, ignorant comfort. Save for a handful of outcasts, the rest of the country is a mess of broken infrastructure, where rival gangs battle it out on the ruins of Japan’s famously extensive rail network. Naive upstart Emi has one goal: become the best Denshattacker there is, one sick nosegrind at a time.

Taking the idea of an on-rails platforming game to its extreme conclusion, developers Undercoders have combined the best bits of the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series – grinding, flipping and spinning through an entire dictionary of tricks – with the anti-establishment message behind Jet Set Radio. The rivals Emi encounters showcase the history of Japanese misfits, pitting you against ageing rockabillies and violent girl gangs without a shred of judgment.

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© Photograph: Undercoders

© Photograph: Undercoders

© Photograph: Undercoders

PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2; Marimittu Games
A soft puzzle game makes a sharp point about the over-optimised future ahead

In the far future, on a planet that is not Earth, AI is in charge. This entity is no Skynet-esque killer robot but a machine that cares for humanity. Manifesting most visibly as cute droids, the technology is pervasive – embedded in everything from the design of the sleek architecture to the gorgeous, mostly sunny artificial weather. The so-called Optimization System has but one responsibility: ensuring the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people.

In less skilled hands this game might have felt like an undergraduate seminar on the limits of utilitarianism. But Japanese studio Marumittu Games elegantly marries its philosophical concerns with smart design choices. You play as a young, unnamed Facilitator tasked with tending to both the city’s bots and its human residents. Each morning you wake up, sleepily loping off to the bathroom before sitting down for an exquisitely rendered breakfast, and then embark on your day’s work. Like everything else in this near-future scenario, labour is designed to cause as little frustration as possible, amounting to simple maths brain teasers on a grid – nothing too taxing, but enough to keep you engaged.

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© Photograph: Annapurna Interactive

© Photograph: Annapurna Interactive

© Photograph: Annapurna Interactive

Genuine Parts Co. has attracted a cash bid for its auto-parts arm from O’Reilly Automotive Inc. as it seeks to refocus on its industrials business, according to people familiar with the matter.

The head of BlackRock Inc.’s beleaguered private credit fund is in the process of leaving the firm, a move that follows months of losses on soured loans and revelations of a US regulatory probe into the unit’s valuation practices.

Shares of Edgewell Personal Care Co., which makes Schick razors, rose nearly 18% in New York on Tuesday after the company rejected an unsolicited takeover offer from private equity firm Yellow Wood Partners.

Edgewell Personal Care Co., which makes Schick razors, has rejected an unsolicited takeover offer from private equity firm Yellow Wood Partners, according to people familiar with the matter.

A group of California consumers claimed in a lawsuit that gas station owners including Walmart Inc., Marathon Petroleum Corp., BP Plc and 7-Eleven Inc. are using artificial intelligence to illegally manipulate pump prices in the state that already has the highest rates in the US.

A group of California consumers claimed in a lawsuit that gas station owners including Walmart Inc., Marathon Petroleum Corp., BP Plc and 7-Eleven Inc. are using artificial intelligence to illegally manipulate pump prices in the state that already has the highest rates in the US.

PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox, Nintendo Switch; Vertigo Games
This clever update captures the 1990s magic of the original… including some of the technical issues

The 90s were a gold rush for adventure games. LucasArts kicked off the decade with its legendarily irreverent Monkey Island games. Then, Cyan Worlds materialised to deliver a series of atmospheric and boundary-pushing odysseys with Myst and Riven. Nestled between these primary genre texts is The 7th Guest, a lesser-known but still notorious adventure that earned plaudits for its unique FMV visual style, blending live-action filmed footage with pre-rendered 3D backgrounds. It was remade originally for VR, and now has been reconfigured into something playable on PC and consoles, its digital cobwebs cleared and tricky puzzles tinkered with for a fresh (or nostalgic) audience.

We are dropped into the ectoplasmic shoes of an amnesiac apparition, arriving at the gloomy haunted home of a toy-maker. Armed with a time-bending lantern and a Ouija board-shaped map, your job is to solve a historical whodunnit by literally illuminating events from the past. It’s a melodramatic, surprisingly campy adventure that effectively evokes the overzealous CD-Rom horror of its original era.

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© Photograph: Vertigo Games

© Photograph: Vertigo Games

© Photograph: Vertigo Games

Hundreds of video games were shown at June’s annual bonanza. After watching more than 15 hours of showcases, our video games editor picks the highlights

The sequel to a revered 2014 horror game from British developer Creative Assembly: this time you must evade the xenomorph on the surface of a storm-ravaged colony world.

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© Photograph: PR

© Photograph: PR

© Photograph: PR

Released just before the World Cup kicks off, this upstart football game is positioning itself as a credible alternative to EA Sports FC

This month something extremely unusual happened in the video game world: someone launched a new football game. It used to be that the market could support a vast array of contenders, from arcade kickabouts such as Super Sidekicks and Hat Trick Hero, to serious simulations named Actua Soccer or This Is Football, to eccentric oddities such as Namco’s LiberoGrande which made you experience the whole match as a single onfield player.

For the past decade plus, however, the scene has been dominated EA’s Fifa series, now EA Sports FC. With the exception of Konami’s Pro Evolution Soccer, now eFootball, there have been few competitors – and few plucky upstarts.

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© Photograph: Goals AB

© Photograph: Goals AB

© Photograph: Goals AB

India’s largest power producer NTPC Ltd. is looking to bring back sub-critical coal generators able to run at low capacity, to accommodate more renewables in the grid.

PC, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2, Xbox; Yacht Club Games
This brilliant adventure creates a whole world from one character with a unique ability

You could mistake Mina the Hollower for something found on the liquid-crystal display of a Game Boy Color around the turn of the millennium. Like the pocketable Zelda and Pokémon games of the time, it presents a kind of snow-globe reality that you peer into from above, relying on imagination to decipher each two-colour clump of pixels into a tree, or a skeleton, or a cloaked mouse wielding a hammer twice her size.

This is Mina, our hero: she jumps, she moves at a clip, and she can delve downward into the soil or floorboards, tunnelling underfoot for a moment or two before popping back up, like an inflatable forcibly submerged in a swimming pool. This is her signature move, perfectly elastic in sensation – the way the released button springs back against your thumb! – and in application. The burrow-jump is an excavation tool, unearthing any treasure you happen to dig through, and a navigational one, used to hop over gaps, reach high-up spots and nose into tiny hidden spaces, where more treasure almost invariably awaits.

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© Photograph: Yacht Club Games

© Photograph: Yacht Club Games

© Photograph: Yacht Club Games

Microsoft; PC, Xbox Series X/S (PS5 due later)
Dreamy vistas of the country’s natural beauties are stunningly delivered – but won’t distract from thrilling high-end driving adventures

The Forza Horizon games have always been about drama. Not just the tension and excitement of racing, but also the sensory impact of the natural environment – the sun rising over a dense city, rain clouds hovering above a valley floor. There are moments in this game – perhaps after emerging from a dense forest, or coming up from an underpass – where Mount Fuji briefly appears in the distance, hazy yet majestic, the Platonic ideal of a volcano – and it almost takes your breath away. Fans of this series have been waiting years for Japan and now here it is, the whole country, reduced, remixed and repackaged as a driving paradise.

In many ways, Forza Horizon 6 is a continuation of what this series has always been about. You enter a festival-style driving competition then drive around a vast map splattered with various races and challenges, earning reputation by competing well and buying new vehicles for your extensive garage. There are slight changes this time – you start as a rookie not an established legend, so you have to qualify to enter the festival, and Playground has re-introduced the need to unlock successive levels of competition bringing back the sense of progression from the earliest titles in the series. You start out clattering about in slower C-class vehicles on easier circuits and have to work hard to start lining up against super cars such as the Ferrari J50 or Lamborghini Huracán.

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© Photograph: Microsoft

© Photograph: Microsoft

© Photograph: Microsoft

NTPC Ltd., India’s largest power producer, said it would favor domestic reactor technology for its nuclear portfolio, and cautioned against over-dependence on a single innovation or source in order to fend off risks to supply chains.

The troubled private credit funds, by most any measure, are a sliver of the assets of investing giants KKR & Co., BlackRock Inc. and Apollo Global Management Inc.

The US Strategic Petroleum Reserve awarded 53.3 million barrels to companies including oil trader Trafigura Group and US refiner Marathon Petroleum Corp, adding to a wave of oil released to help tame surging prices stemming from the Iran war.

PS5, Xbox, PC, Switch 2; Annapurna Interactive
The nostalgic antics of a trio of tenacious teens make for silly yet undeniably enjoyable gameplay, framed by a playlist of bona fide bangers

The older we get, the more we tend to romanticise our teenage years. As bills pile up, we yearn for the simple days of drinking cider in parks. We often tend to forget the bad parts: the frustrating lack of autonomy, the unrequited crushes and the doofuses you’re forced to tolerate in the playground. But after four hours spent hanging out with the pretentious teens in Mixtape, I felt pretty relieved to be in my 30s.

Set in a nondescript town in northern California, Mixtape follows the exploits of tenacious trio Rockford, Slater and Cassandra as they head to a legendary party on their last day of high school. With Rockford about to leave her friends to move to the big city, she wants to immortalise the gang’s time together in musical form. Every song on a carefully curated mixtape triggers a totally tubular flashback to one of their shared memories.

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© Photograph: Annapurna Interactive

© Photograph: Annapurna Interactive

© Photograph: Annapurna Interactive

Hitman developer IO Interactive’s pluralistic take on the British secret agent – his first video-game outing in almost 15 years – promises a Bond for all eras. Here’s what you need to know

If you want to tell the tale of a young James Bond, you first need to pick which James Bond he’s going to grow into. This was the task handed to Hitman developer IO Interactive, the studio taking digital custody of the spy in 007 First Light, Bond’s first video game in almost 15 years. So what’s it to be? Will their agent take baby steps towards Sean Connery’s gruff masculinity, or is he practising Roger Moore’s arched eyebrow in the bathroom mirror? That’s if he’s a “movie” Bond at all. For a generation of gamers, the character exists most vividly as a hand at the bottom of the screen in GoldenEye 007.

As it turns out, 007 First Light’s Bond, depicted by Patrick Gibson (cornering a specific market, having played the serial killer-to-be in the Dexter origins show) is an amalgam: the facial scar is an Ian Fleming detail, but the sweet-talking charm is straight from the Pierce Brosnan playbook, and the second you barge a goon into a bookcase you know someone’s been studying Casino Royale on a loop. Trying to devise a Bond for all fandoms could risk satisfying none, but in the demo we played, the performance works. Crucially, Gibson brings an outsider’s unease that’s all his own, anchored by the arrogance that’ll one day be weaponised by MI6.

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© Photograph: IO Interactive A/S

© Photograph: IO Interactive A/S

© Photograph: IO Interactive A/S

PC; Grey Alien Games, Night Signal Entertainment
An innocent-looking charity shop find draws you into a compulsive world of demons, ogres and retro delights

For a while in the mid-1990s, meta horror movies were the genre everyone was talking about. Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, Scream, the Blair Witch Project – these films simultaneously examined and exploited genre conventions, seeking to scare audiences while also distancing them from the narrative action. You didn’t know whether to laugh or gasp in shock, you weren’t sure what was story or what was framing. Did that just happen or was it a dream sequence? You just had to go with it.

Now developers Grey Alien Games and Night Signal Entertainment have brought this multilayered approach to the card game solitaire, infusing a straightforward puzzler with a bloody gush of meta meaning and a dollop of nostalgia just for the self-reflexive hell of it. In Forbidden Solitaire, lead character Will Roberta picks up an old 1990s game called, yes, Forbidden Solitaire, in a charity shop vaguely recalling some internet myth about it being cursed. He discovers that the game is a sort of narrative card-battler set in a haunted dungeon filled with monsters and treasure – and then you, the player, are transported from his computer desktop into the game. So you’re both him and you.

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© Photograph: Grey Alien Games/Night Signal Entertainment

© Photograph: Grey Alien Games/Night Signal Entertainment

© Photograph: Grey Alien Games/Night Signal Entertainment