This week in PC games: a new Hooded Horse city-builder, some PS2-style horror, a school-day RPG and an absolutely tremendous catfish

Urgh! What's happening? The air feels dreadfully recycled all of a sudden. Food dissatisfies, music grates, punchlines flop like stunned seagulls - everything seems somehow overfamiliar. We have entered a Lull. There are few Big Games out this week - little in the way of Big Sequels or New IPs From Triple-A Veterans or other projects that make you say "oh! That one" - and the Maw is making up the shortfall by siphoning novelty from the building blocks of reality itself.

To the pumps, colleagues, before we become so jaded that our wrists and elbows lose all elasticity! There must be a meatier morsel down there. There must be a new PC game gargantuan enough to appease the creature.

Monday 23rd March

• I am an enormous fan of the vampire-sherbet colour choices in Journey of the Garden Rose, in which a princess duels marauding insects while touring her low-poly palace. I am less keen on the spiders.
• Hop around a spooky/cosy island and mix cocktails by means of Tetris mechanics in Frog Holm. Hang on, if you mix "spooky" with "cosy" you get "spookosy", which also evokes the premise of running a bar??? There it is, the one moment of brilliance I will have this week.

Tuesday 24th March

• If Monday's recommendations were too hearty for your resentful eyes, perhaps sir or madam will prefer No Vacation for an Executioner, a PS2-style action-horror in which everything appears to be made of balled-up, mildewed paper. Some nicely baroque monsters in this one, with more than the regulation allowance of faces.

Wednesday 25th March

• Help unemployed aliens who look like rolls of LocoRoco scenery find work at Misfortune Cookies Inc by unpuzzling their speech in Come Again, Chachii? I don't think this is just an exercise in cracking wise about Foreign People Who Talk Funny.
• Your hoovers are trying to murder each other in top-down multiplayer jape Roombattle. Solid pun, that, but it's not up there with spookosy.
• Mado Monogatari: Fia and the Wondrous Academy is a new dungeon-crawling RPG from Idea Factory, featuring happy schoolgirls and happy slimes and a few swinging axeblades, happiness component TBD. Apparently this is an ancient series, reaching back to the 90s - it's the source material for the original Puyo Puyo.

Thursday 26th March

• Beast Breaker is a tactical pinball game in which you launch a heavily armed mouse at various kaiju made up of differently scored segments.
• Nova Roma (pictured) is the latest Hooded Horse-published early access joint, a city-builder with a strong interest in the control, distribution and destructive properties of water.
• Damon and Baby is a top-down action-adventure from Arc System Works, offering a mix of laidback exploration and twin-sticky combat. You are a baby riding a demon king. There's also co-op featuring a floofy dog with a moveset reminiscent of Street Fighter's Cammy.
• Screamer is a cyberpunk anime racer with a lot of drifting. James and Mark have already kicked the tyres, noting that it "slides sideways into success with its colourful, characterful driving".
• Project Songbird is about dealing with writer's block by going to a remote log cabin and having shotgun fights with tree monsters, who may possibly be hallucinations of your editor breezily asking how it's going, my love, no pressure at all haha but the art team can't get started until they have that draft hahahaha.
• EverSiege: Untold Ages is the frightful title of a new character-led action-strategy game from the people behind Aliens: Dark Descent and Battlefleet Gothic: Armada.

Friday 27th March

• It's Friday! Let's go to another planet and scoot around snapping pictures of mushrooms in Rova.
• It's still Friday! Time to build a mycelial web/root network across a charmingly sleepy forest in ChloroLink.
• Friday continues! Time to beat up some vintage supervillains in Marvel Maximum Collection.
• Friday is relentless! Where is your sister Anna? Let's all go looking for her using this authentically crackly VHS camera in Too Well Hidden. Surely nothing paranormal is in store.
• Friday casts Kasplash! You are banished to the depths of an alien ocean, this being the setting of Venus in Transit. Your job is to harvest fuel for your ailing mothership. Please try not to break your submersible.
• Enough, Friday, enough! I am officially overstimulated and now you would have me contend with The Wide Open Sky is Running out of Catfish, a game about turning clouds into sea creatures and sharing pics on Dolphin Chat. You are taking the piscine, Friday! I am floundering. I regret carping on about the shortage of major reel-eases. I will never speak ill of the Spirit of Videogames again. Please, let us advance to the blessed oblivion of the weekend.

What are we doing at the Treehouse this week? Writing guides for Crimson Desert, appraising the evolving fortunes of Slay The Spire 2, sizing up bits of hardware, doing a preview event, playing an [EMBARGOED], and in my case, playing more of Lucid Blocks, the best occult procgen game in a while. How about you?