Five Games: ‘Feist’ And Everything Else You Need To Play This Week

PCs, handhelds, mobile, console, indies, triple A, free-to-play — the gaming scene gets more diverse and difficult to follow by the day, but thankfully I’m here every week to guide you through what’s happening with games.

As always, I’ll rattle off five games I think you might want to check out this week. Keep in mind, these articles aren’t meant to be comprehensive lists of everything coming out that week so much as a nice rounded tasting menu. So, let’s get to it…

This Week’s Episodic Game

Game of Thrones: Episode 5 – A Nest of Vipers (PC, Xbox 360, Xbox One, PS3 & PS4, July 21)

Warning: The above trailer contains spoilers for Game of Thrones episodes 1 – 4. 

This week Telltale’s Game of Thrones series arrives at its penultimate chapter, A Nest of Vipers. Based on that not-terribly-descriptive title, it sounds like we’ll be getting plenty of intrigue and backstabbing in this chapter. As always you’ll have to wait an extra day if you’re playing on Xbox.

This Week’s Pachyderm Platformer

Tembo the Badass Elephant (PC, Xbox One & PS4, July 21)

Okay, here’s an interesting one – Tembo the Badass Elephant is the work of Game Freak, the studio behind Pokémon. Despite working very closely with Nintendo, they’re still technically an independent studio, and Tembo will be the first Game Freak game to not appear on a Nintendo platform since 1994’s Pulseman for the Sega Genesis. So yeah, like I said, interesting. It also looks pleasingly goofy and fun, so check it out!

This Week’s 3D Remake

3D Streets of Rage 2 (3DS, July 23)

One of the best brawlers of all time returns in stereoscopic 3D form this week. Sega has remade several of their classics for the 3DS, and they’ve all been good so far, so 3D Streets of Rage 2 should be another solid effort.

This Week’s Retro-Styled Platformer

Olympia Rising (PC & Mac, July 23)

Olympia Rising is basically an unofficial sequel to Kid Icarus, except with Pit replaced by a young female warrior who’s been cast into Hades and has to climb her way all the way back up to Olympus. Not a lot of high-concept stuff going on here, just good old-fashioned Metroidvania-style platforming, and some very charming pixel graphics. Here’s the game’s Steam page.

Pick of the Week

Feist (PC, Mac & Linux, July 23)

Feist is hardly the first indie platformer to use silhouette-style graphics, but it may be the most visually striking to date. Feist tasks you with making your way through a dark forest while fending off attacks from a wide variety of strange, furry, Muppet-like creatures. The game doesn’t feature set level designs, instead throwing a variety of enemies and traps at you that will interact in unique ways to create emergent scenarios. Feist has been in development an exceptionally long time for an indie game (over seven years) but it looks like it’s turned out quite nicely. Here’s the game’s Steam page.

A good, quirky week. Any games you’re itching to get your hands on that I failed to mention? Hit the comments and let the world know.

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