On an average day about a dozen new games are released on Steam. And while we think that's a good thing, it can be understandably hard to keep up with. Potentially exciting gems are sure to be lost in the deluge of new things to play unless you sort through every single game that is released on Steam. So that’s exactly what we’ve done. If nothing catches your fancy this week, we've gathered the best PC games you can play right now and a running list of the 2022 games that are launching this year.
Steam page
Release: July 14
Developer: James Bendon
Launch price: $18 | £13.49 | AU$26.05
Dinkum is a laid back town builder and survival game set in the Australian outback. "Australian outback" and "laid back" are two things that may not sound right together, but Dinkum has a mood and presentation more akin to Animal Crossing than, say, Rust. Released into Early Access last week to "overwhelmingly positive" Steam reviews, you'll explore the island setting, gathering resources, fending off predators, while working towards constructing a comfortably inhabitable town. Keeping your fellow townfolk happy is a big part of Dinkum, so keeping the town well-decorated and pleasant is important, but maintaining farms, and maintaining a good flow of fish (via fishing!) and materials is just as important. Dinkum supports online cooperative play and is already a tidy offering, but during its one year Early access stint you can expect more villagers, activities and new "bugs, fish, crops, clothing" and more.
Steam page
Release: July 15
Developer: MinMax Games Ltd.
Launch price: $18 | £16.19 | AU$26.95
Clanfolk looks a lot like medieval Rimworld, all the way down to the misleadingly cutesy character models. Launched into Early Access last week, Clanfolk is set in the Scottish Highlands, and the name of the game is survival, and if you're really good at it, prosperity. Starting as a small family unit, you can be as insular or ambitious as you like: Will you expand and attract other clans, or will you keep your focus solely on keeping a small, tightknit community well fed? Whichever you choose, you're going to have to contend with the weather—it gets bloody cold in the north—and how that affects soil conditions, the health of your livestock, and just generally, whether your people will live or die. Clanfolk will stay in Early Access for a least half a year, with plenty of new additions and improvements to be made in the coming months.
Steam page
Release: July 13
Developer: Estudios Kremlinois
Launch price: $15.29 | £12.14 | AU$21.55
It's a great time to be a fan of the city builder genre, and Urbek City Builder is yet another for the pile. A little more conventional than most modern offerings, Urbek lets you lay out your town as you see fit, but you'll have a lot of freedom when it comes to defining the character of your city's suburbs. Depending on how you populate certain areas, neighbourhoods will blossom into familiar real world archetypes: bohemian neighbourhoods and bourgeois neighbourhoods are two examples offered (for the former you'll need bars, for the latter, parks and luxury shops). Interestingly, you won't be using cash in Urbek City Builder: Instead, you'll need to manage resources such as food, skilled work, and other plundered natural resources.
Steam page
Release: July 15
Developer: Kai Hutchence
Launch price: $3 | £2.09 | AU$4.50
When you think of criminal activities in "cyberpunk" settings, illicit cheese trading probably doesn't spring to mind. But that's what Cheese Runner is: It's a retro-styled ASCII trading game about moving illegal cheese from dealers to their customers. Sure, it sounds funny, but the justification for this weird trade is deliciously dystopian: in a future world dominated by synthetic foods, the core ingredients of cheese are not only rare but illegal. So the stakes are high, but the pay-offs are very lucrative, if you can build your criminal enterprise into something massive. And there's plenty of opportunity because even in a nightmarish future setting, people are gonna want cheese. I know I would.
Steam page
Release: July 15
Developer: Uneducated Game Studio
Launch price: $12.59 | £9.89 | AU$17.95
This week's inevitable horror game is a little left of centre: It's about a young girl stuck is a "tiny, cute animal village". As you can probably guess, the reality of this village is far from cute, and the animals, alas, want to murder you. Ideally, you'll murder them first, but that is achieved in some fairly unconventional ways. For example, you'll need to bribe rabbits with carrots in order to gather some important tools for progress, one of these being a hammer, with which you can show some of the other cute animals who's boss. Honestly, I'm not entirely sure what's going on here, but it has a fascinating art style and is amusingly bleak.
