Milky Way Prince dev's dark, stylish summer adventure Mediterranea Inferno arrives this month

Jupiter Corporation — the studio behind Nintendo's long-running Picross series — has unveiled a new Picross-style puzzler, Logiart Grimoire, which launches into Steam early access on 11th September and Switch sometime next year.

But you know. In a good way. My waking hours are, currently, beset by stress and anxiety from a number of different directions, and I've only had time to play about about an hour of Mediterranea Inferno so far. It's quite a short game, though, and I'm sort of transfixed. It's about three men in their early 20s who, pre-pandemic, were the toast of their party scene in Milan, and after a couple of years apart enforced by a lockdown they're reuniting for a summer mini-break. Having blazed through my early 20s I no longer really remember that unique, potent mix of feeling simultaneously fragile and invincible, but it's captured in this almost occult, yet hyper-real visual novel.

Even cursed years such as 2020 can occasionally hide small nuggets of greatness. One such nugget was the curious visual novel Milky Way Prince, which beautifully mixed surreal 2D images with even more surreal 3D backgrounds, all wrapped up in a toxic love story. Just when you thought a visual novel couldn’t get any more stylish, developer Lorenzo “Eyeguys” Redaelli comes back to one-up themself with Mediterranea Inferno, a rare game that makes you want to gobble its colours up with your eyeballs. Oh, and it’s out right now.

AEW Fight Forever will get its promised 30-player mode this week, just as the Steam version’s average player count has dropped below 30 for the first time.

The games industry moves pretty fast, and there's a tendency for all involved to look constantly to what's next without so much worrying about what came before. That said, even an industry so entrenched in the now can learn from its past. So to refresh our collective memory and perhaps offer some perspective on our field's history, GamesIndustry.biz runs this monthly feature highlighting happenings in gaming from exactly a decade ago.

Cyberpunk 2077 is ramping up to its release of Phantom Liberty this month, and with it, a new update brings new ways to play the expansive RPG.

11.6 million console and PC games were sold in July across Europe, up 34% over the same period in 2022.

No one under the age of 18 wants to think about going back to school, but Bus Simulator 21’s upcoming expansion will make the event a pastime for millions of players across PS5 and PS4. Officially licensed by real-world US school bus manufacturer Blue Bird, the add-on will incorporate numerous new public transport missions – including all-important school trips.

Happy Friday, Polygon readers!

Ubisoft has confirmed anotherSkull and Bones closed beta test for later this month. 

Creative Assembly's scifi heist 'em up Hyenas received a new trailer yesterday, showing its teams of three doing battle in zero-G. It also got dates for a new closed beta due to begin on August 31st.

You have to give credit to Ubisoft for persistence: Another developer might've scuttled Skull and Bones ages ago, but Yves Guillemot and co. keep blowing into its sails, trying to propel it forward, and so it is that another Skull and Bones closed beta is coming next week.