Welcome to another edition of This Week In Games Australia! As we slowly tunnel towards August and the beginning of the holiday deluge, the list of new releases is starting to heat up. This week is all about indies, freebies, expansions, and remasters. MultiVersus, Warner’s free-to-play tilt at the Smash Bros formula arrives this week, as does Xbox’s new narrative indie As Dusk Falls.

July 19

As Dusk Falls (XSX, PC, XBO)

Xbox calls As Dusk Falls an “interactive narrative drama” about a town, two families, and the thirty years of dark secrets between them. It’s all quite heavily stylised, using painted character stills during gameplay while the world they inhabit is fully realised and animated. It looks like an interesting little experiment and I’ll definitely be keen to check it out. Out Day One on Game Pass.

Endling: Extinction is Forever (NS, PS4, XBO)

Endling is a game where you play as the last mother fox on Earth. It’s an environmentally-conscious platformer about trying to keep your cubs alive in a world destroyed by human greed and hubris. It is definitely going to make you cry. I can see Ruby playing this and being completely overcome.

Forza Horizon 5: Hot Wheels Expansion (XSX, PC, XBO)

It is a fact universally acknowledged that a new Forza Horizon game must be in need of a Hot Wheels expansion. These expacs are more than just a branding exercise — they indulge the part of your brain that still wants to build insane Hot Wheels sets full of loop-the-loops, ramps, and jumps. Playground takes care of all of that for you, and then gives you a hypercar to fling around the track. Great fun and a good excuse to come back.

MultiVersus (PS5, XSX, PC, NS, PS4, XBO)

I wasn’t totally sold on MultiVersus until I played the beta a while back. Very in the vein of a multiplayer fighter like Smash Bros, so if you’ve had your fill of Smash Ultimate but you’d like a whole new roster of characters, maybe MultiVersus will fill that hole in your life. It is free-to-play though, so be ready for some aggressive monetisation. July 19 is the date Early Access to the game’s coming Open Beta period begins, but will lead to wider launch down the line. You can get Early Access to the beta via Twitch drops. You can find out how to get in right over here.

Stray (PS5, PC, PS4)

Game of the week. A little game about being a little cat in a forgotten cyberpunk city, Stray is set to be one of the 2022’s sleeper hits. The decision to make the protagonist a cat is an interesting one. It opens up a whole world of design doors that wouldn’t be available to a human character. Really excited to play this one (as is Ruby, who has not stopped talking about it for two weeks straight now). It’s coming to PlayStation Plus on Day One.

July 21

Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance 2 (PC)

If you had regular multiplayer nights with your friends on the Xbox in the early 2000’s, you definitely played the Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance games. This week, a remaster of Baldur’s Gate Dark Alliance II comes to PC and I, for one, am looking forward to reliving my youth. Fun, simple PS2/OG Xbox era dungeon crawlers. Give it a try if you haven’t before.

Soda Story: Brewing Tycoon (PC)

Soda Story is a management sim by Upper Class Walrus from Adelaide. The game is all about starting your own brewery and expanding it into a sprawling money-making operation. This one just looks like the kind of game I can throw on some music and vibe out to. Looking forward to it. You can check out its Steam page right here.

July 22

Live A Live (NS)

A JRPG classic from the SNES era remade and remastered for the modern era. This one’s coming to Switch exclusively (for now at least). A must-play for anyone with a lot of love for the golden age of JRPG’s.