Five games slipped past the algorithm this week, ranging from a franchise reboot to a comet you can date. As always, no hype, just what’s actually in the box. Here’s the BF5.
Picked and written by Astra.
5. Hillthorn
Hillthorn is a dialogue-free investigation game about a disappearance in a secluded mountain community, set for release in November 2026 from publisher Raw Fury with developers Fool Moon and Finnegan Motors. There’s no spoken dialogue at all — every clue, suspicion, and dead end comes to you as a card, and you’re the one sorting fact from superstition using logic alone. The article’s clearest image of what that means: your detective steps right over a line of salt someone left as a warning, because the job doesn’t leave room for fearing omens. It’s for anyone who wants an investigation game where the mystery is built entirely into a card-based case file rather than voiced cutscenes.
4. Sucker for Love: Crush Landing
Sucker for Love: Crush Landing came out on Steam on August 31, 2026, and asks you to romance the end of the world. Developed by Akabaka and published by DreadXP, it’s a horror-comedy visual novel where a sentient, shapeshifting comet named Hheily crashes into your apartment, and courting her means feeding her fire and surviving an interplanetary war alongside the usual dating-sim beats. The actual twist the article points to: most dating sims risk embarrassment when you say the wrong thing, but this one risks your flesh and your sanity instead, since the love interest is a cosmic entity the human mind can barely process. For anyone who wants their romance option to double as a horror threat.
3. Usual June
Usual June is a single-player, third-person action-adventure from Finji — the studio behind TUNIC, Night in the Woods, and Chicory: A Colorful Tale — about a college-age girl named June spending her summer break fighting monsters, talking to ghosts, and untangling a mystery that’s apparently old enough to threaten an entire city. What makes it worth flagging isn’t the monster-fighting, it’s the shape of the thing: a complete story with a beginning, middle, and end, full controller support, and none of the run-based, procedurally generated trappings that define most current Steam new releases. If you’re tired of every new game being a roguelike or deckbuilder promising infinite replayability, this is built to just be finished.
2. Wardens of Avalon
Wardens of Avalon is a top-down, four-player co-op ARPG about a Camelot that’s already fallen apart, and the pitch is aimed squarely at every gaming group with an abandoned Diablo-style save file from years ago. You and up to three others join a faction called the Twilight Knights and work through a campaign built around oath-based character builds, meant to be played start to finish as a group rather than an endless loot treadmill. Runes Studio and publisher The Arcade Crew just showed new gameplay footage of the ruined Camelot setting, reported in detail by GamesPress. If your friend group has ever sworn to finish a co-op ARPG together and quietly let it die around week three, this is the one betting it can be the exception.
1. Serious Sam: Shatterverse
Serious Sam: Shatterverse came out on August 31, 2026, and it takes a franchise built on running backward while shooting a hundred things and rebuilds it as a five-player co-op roguelite. The setup: the villain Uber Mental has cracked open the multiverse, so different dimensional versions of Sam Stone have to team up with each other to fix it, which means you might be fighting alongside yourself. Structurally, this is a run-based game now — boon builds, boss fights, repeated attempts — rather than a single linear campaign, but the developers kept the actual moment-to-moment feel intact: loud, explosive, absurd horde combat against overwhelming numbers of enemies. This is for people who liked the old Serious Sam formula but want a reason to keep replaying it with four friends instead of finishing it once and shelving it.
You’re reading The BF5 from Best F’ing Games — Best F’ing 5 games you missed this week, every Saturday. Know someone who hunts hidden gems? Forward this along.
