I’m going to go out on a limb and say that when you think of penguins and video games, Club Penguin is probably the one that comes to mind for you (or the Surf’s Up adaptation if you’re nasty). There aren’t really a lot of games about these flightless birds, and they’re normally on the sillier side when there are because penguins are funny little critters. Penguin Colony, the next game from the devs behind Umurangi Generation, doesn’t completely abandon that silliness, but it does throw in some cosmic horror and the hubris of man in for good measure. And its first demo certainly sets the stage for an old experience.

In Penguin Colony, you are a penguin. One of many, any penguins actually. You can slide on your belly, jump, and swim, a Shadow of the Colossus style stamina meter limiting your ability to walk up steep, icy cliffs and the like. But you do not have to stay as this penguin. The tuxedo wearing animals are found all over the game, of varying sizes and species and benefits and negatives. If you walk up to a baby penguin and switch to it, you can climb under a gap in a fence, but if you try to swim you die, whereas embodying a fully grown adult nets you more stamina.

Controlling the penguin(s) is admittedly a tad awkward, in a way that feels incidental over purposeful, and yet it still lends itself well to the experience. Waddling along feels stiff and unsatisfying, but when have you ever seen a penguin be graceful while moving on its two feet? This is why you must slide as much as you can, for that’s where things smoothen out.

And then there is the Lovecraftian madness. As you make your way forward, ever forward, at first towards the flare of a human stationed out there in the Antarctic, later towards an obelisk structure that the Nazis (the original ones) claim is linked to an ancient, Aryan race, the voice of Disco Elysium’s Lenval Brown warningly narrates at you his experience in this frozen tundra. It is disquieting and somehow isolating, and I look forward to more in the full game.

You can pick up glowing orbs along the way to restore some stamina, random words appearing as you collect them like indigenous and encyclopedia. They don’t just litter the land either. At one point I came across a man who fell to his knees, violently shaking his head before it exploded, producing an orb for me to add to my portfolio. The word it produced was “sex.”

Penguin Colony’s demo is short, but does at least set the groundwork for a unique critique of fascist ideology. Who could have thought you’d get something like that while playing as a penguin! Right now it doesn’t have a release date, but it is due out in 2026, and you can try out its demo on Steam for yourself right now.

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I spent this morning in the new demo of angler-detective mystery About Fishing – an updated and expanded sampler from the one that Oisin tried last year – and as a piece of playable marketing, it’s done the job. I am intrigued by its tale of mermaids and missing persons; I am absorbed in its creepy rural backdrop of dead streets and churches with prison cells in the basement; I am impressed by how it handles its cold, drizzly weirdness without ever going hey-hey wacky. Even when it introduces a thieving goose.

Basically, this place is horrible, and I want to spend more time in it. Despite the fact, and I’m aware that this might be an issue, that I wish I didn’t have to do so much goddamn fishing.

Not unlike how Arctic Eggs, developers The Water Museum’s previous work, demanded careful mouse waggles to flip frying panfuls of burning breakfast, About Fishing has you wrestling with your peripherals to keep panicking catches on the hook. It’s obviously a move to add some interesting friction to what is a notoriously dull hobby, as is the occasional need to trick-shot your hook through obstacles to tempt the hiding fishies below.

Both actions, however, have an unpleasantly imprecise wibbliness to them. Manoeuvring the hook mid-cast feels like trying to sign your name on a passing wasp, and one you get a nibble, dragging back the thrashing fish relies on good fortune as much as competent mouse-wrestling. They seem magnetically attracted to underwater hindrances – one needlefish I snagged in the tutorial managed to wrap the line around a jetty pillar five times over – and the game’s camera is prone to bumping into scenery as well, making it even less clear whether mouse movements are having a tangible effect.

Luckily, About Fishing makes another, much more enjoyable use of its tackle. Successfully bagged fish can be sent back out, line re-attached, as directly controllable scouts, allowing for subaquatic exploration and puzzle-solving. With the latter, getting the line caught stops being a random frustration and starts being an applicable skill: one section requires orbiting a sunken statue head to wrap it in makeshift rope, before a pull on the reel clears the obstruction and allows passage into the conveniently fish-sized hole beneath.

I’m still not keen on how this offbeat troubleshooting first requires the actual fishing part, but again, there’s enough going on in About Fishing that I’m willing to endure its namesake activity. Not many games have what it takes to show a goose eating curly fries and make it look genuinely disturbing.

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Delta is a slick, zooming first-person shooter built around smooth, physics-based movement, with the field of view cranked up several notches to add as much feeling of pure speed as possible, reminiscent of titles like Mirror’s Edge and Neon White.

Levels and movement pair together to create an experience begging to be torn apart by speedrunners. The low-poly design allows Delta to focus on the lightning-quick gameplay, where speed and precision are key to success.

Much like in F-Zero X for the N64 — a game that ran at a flawless 60 frames per second back in 1998 — the loading times and processing strain have been minimized for a gameplay experience that never takes a break. Immediate resets and frame-based timing make Delta an adrenaline-pumping adventure through every minute of playtime.

Delta just announced its free demo, with developer 0xc3pti0n maintaining a planned release date later in 2026. It will be available to play on PC (Steam).

Here’s a description of Delta’s features from the developer, plus a trailer:

This is movement as a discipline – strafe-jumping, ramp sliding, air control, plasma boosting, rocket jumping and much more across variety of hand-crafted maps. It’s not about style points. It’s about speed, flow, and intent. Every surface is an opportunity. Every mistake is yours. Compete for the leaderboard worldwide or versus your friends.

Features:

• Physics-Based Movement: Built around authentic FPS movement systems, with full support for classic CPM-style physics.

• Speedrun-Focused Design: Instant resets, no loading times, and accurate frame-based timing. Every map is a test of control and execution.

• Style & Mastery: Go beyond time attacks – use the environment to express fluidity, creativity, and technical mastery.

• Multiplayer: Join friends and other players to explore maps together, share tricks, race ghosts, or just vibe. You might learn a new line – or invent one no one’s seen before.

• Ghost & Replay System: Race against your best runs or download world-record demos to analyze movement down to the frame.

A presence – glitched, unreachable, but not gone. As you perfect your lines and push deeper into the system, you begin to follow a signal. A trace. A ghost. Is it real, or are you just chasing echoes?

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Sony has confirmed that, as we all suspected, Cosmic Smash is being revived for PlayStation VR2.

Just for a quick bit of background, Cosmic Smash initially launched all the way back in 2001. On its release, the game tasked players with traversing a futuristic subway-style map, with each ‘stop’ on the line challenging them to clear blocks at the end of a long room within a certain amount of time. This was all done by using a ball and racquet, offering players an experience somewhere between Breakout and squash.

Now, 22 years later, the game is being brought back and reimagined for the PSVR2. This upcoming release is known as C-Smash VRS (the VRS stands for “VR” and “versus”) and is being developed by RapidEyeMovers along with VR veterans Wolf & Wood (which is known for VR games such as The Exorcist: Legion VR and Hotel R’n’R). You can see a brief trailer for C-Smash VRS below.

While there is currently no release date for C-Smash VRS, the developers are releasing a PS VR2 demo, which will be available from 23rd March. In a PlayStation blog about this upcoming release, game director Jörg Tittel stated this demo will include both online play and a solo training mode.

“I cannot wait to show you a virtual reality we could have only dreamed of until now,” Tittel shared, while also promising a full release date will be announced “soon”.

Meanwhile, if you are keen for more on the PSVR2, you can watch Ian’s unboxing video here (and his cat Tilly makes a showing as well).

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