The horde survival genre grows weekly and a recent entrant is Pesticide Not Required, which tosses in familiar tropes from the ever-popular farm and life sim genres: Don’t craft or pick up your weapons, grow them instead. Defeat enemies for money, then buy seeds, plant crops, and harvest them for experience—or go mining and fishing, like you do.

Rather than each wave coming continuously in genre-standard Vampire Survivors fashion, Pesticide Not Included has each day and subsequent night spent avoiding and battling the oncoming horde. Survive that and you get a moment where the clock stops and the nearby Merch-ant opens shop for you to buy new weapon and crop seeds, expand your farming area, and even get pets like dogs, cats, elephants, toucans, capybaras, etc. to help you do farm tasks.

First, they said Sins of the Flesh wouldn’t be “the sex update”. Then they said, fine, since you weird little freaks seem to want it so bad, if Cult of the Lamb gets 300,000 followers on Twitter before the end of 2023, “we will add sex to the game”. And when that happened with unseemly haste, the developers at Massive Monster stuck to their guns and now the free expansion for their spooky-cute action roguelite management sim is almost here.

Among the things Sins of the Flesh will add is a Mating Tent, as seen in the trailer above. When two cultists love each other very much there’s a chance they’ll hop into the Mating Tent and, one Sims-style all-ages woohoo later, hop back out with an egg. That egg can be hatched to give yourself a new follower who will combine some of their parents’ traits Pokémon-style. You can also just eat the egg, because that’s how Cult of the Lamb rolls.

Blizzard is about to take a sledgehammer to the way Overwatch 2 is played. The change will take effect when season 9 launches later this month.

For the first time in the hero shooter’s history, every tank and DPS hero will heal themselves, loosening their reliance on support in a match. Through a new passive ability, tanks and DPS will gradually regain their health outside of active combat. It will be a “tuned-down version of the support self-healing passive,” game director Aaron Keller wrote in a blog post today. In addition to this, more changes to reduce “damage spikes in combat” will be detailed in another blog post closer to the season’s launch.

The holidays may be over, but Game Pass is the gift that keeps on giving. So wrap up warm, hunker down, and place your cup of joe on the USB-powered coaster gizmo that mom panic bought you for Christmas, because it’s time to fend off the January blues with some mid-winter gaming.

January is another fine month on Game Pass, featuring the return of some not-so-friendly spectral faces, as well as a Day One release for one of gaming’s unlikeliest heroes.

Hell Let Loose 

January 4

As a counterpoint to Battlefield’s glossy, glorified take on the First and Second World Wars, Hell Let Loose is an FPS that takes itself a lot more seriously. The 50-vs-50 online WWII shooter leans much more into simulation and realism, so a single bullet can kill you, and you often won’t know where it’s coming from.

Momodora: Moonlit Farewell is the final instalment in the Momodora franchise—designed, as the series’ creator states, to “close the book on many of the past games’ mysteries and questions”. While I’ve not had the pleasure of playing a Momodora game before, I do like a good metroidvania—and I’ve been pleasantly surprised so far as a latecomer to the series.

Moonlit Farewell starts off a touch too slow, guiding you through an introductory bossfight before dropping you into a chasm. You fall unconscious and wake up in your house, waking up in your people’s village with your fellow bell maiden fussing over you.