We survived another October, folks! The busiest month for big game releases is officially coming to a close as we prepare to coast into the holiday period and the backlog season that lies beyond. And yet even now there are more great games needling their way out of the wood work at every turn. Here are three new games that came out this month that you’ve probably never heard of before and the reasons why we can’t wait to go back to playing them.
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It’s been a long-time coming but Super Fantasy Kingdom is finally out in the wild in Early Access. It’s a mashup of roguelite bullet heaven RNG and careful city planning that sort of feels like if you took an old TurboGrafx-16 RPG overworld, ratcheted-up the color saturation, and turned it into tower defense game. You search for warriors to recruit, manage your resources and kingdom’s expansion, and try to keep the enemy hordes at bay. Finding the secrets to balancing expansion and defense requires a lot of trial and error and I could see it starting to get repetitive at some point if I can’t break through to some higher tiers of strategy but for my first few brief sessions it’s kept me coming back hoping to eventually unlock the right recipe for success. — Ethan Gach
The Seance of Blake Manor
Play it on: PC
Current goal: Check into a spooky, isolated hotel
Traditionally here in the Weekend Guide, we sing the praises of a game we’re already playing. But I’m gonna be upfront with you: I haven’t even touched The Seance of Blake Manor yet. It came out earlier this week and I just haven’t had time. However, I’m definitely looking forward to digging into it this weekend. I’ve seen so many folks praise this game for its puzzles and atmosphere, and a spooky, supernatural mystery that puts my powers of deduction to the test sounds like just the thing to curl up with on Halloween weekend. Over in Polygon this week, Giovanni Colantonio called it “an ingenious exploration of grief, occult magic, and Irish folklore that’s bound to take over your free time.” And on Bluesky, head of Noclip and actual Irish person Danny O’Dwyer called it his “favorite game of 2025 so far” and “the best game about Irish history [he’s] ever played.”That’s high praise. So I’m off to an isolated, spooky, maybe even haunted Irish manor for the countryside. Maybe I’ll see you there, wandering the halls. – Carolyn Petit
Dispatch
Play it on: PC, PS5
Current goal: Meet the team
One nice thing about AdHoc Studios releasing Dispatch, its new management sim/superhero/adventure game, in pieces, is that I will have something to reliably fall back on for the Kotaku Weekend Guide for the next few weeks. I was a bit mixed on the first two episodes, but I can’t deny I’ve been jonesing to get back to it now that episodes three and four have dropped. Not to mention I keep narrowly avoiding spoilers on social media, so I can’t really afford to dilly dally. But where we last left off, Dispatch told me in no uncertain terms I’d be getting more face time with Robert Robertson III’s team of angry ex-villains, who I only really got to know through their radio banter in the first two episodes. So it will be nice to actually get to know them rather than making inferences based on how mean they are to me over a headset. — Kenneth Shepard
