Welcome to Video Games Weekly on Engadget. Expect a new story every Monday or Tuesday, broken into two parts. The first is a space for short essays and ramblings about video game trends and related topics from me, Jess Conditt, a reporter who's covered the industry for more than 13 years. The second contains the video game stories from the past week that you need to know about, including some headlines from outside of Engadget.
Please enjoy — and I'll see you next week.
June has passed me by in a haze of air travel, mild illness, protests and Pride, and it’s now officially time to close the book on Summer Game Fest 2025. We published more than 80 stories around this year’s show and they’re all worth a read, but before moving on for good, I wanted to highlight a final batch of games that I can’t stop thinking about. This week, I present three mini previews straight out of SGF 2025 — and only two of them are horror games, which is a stupendous display of growth on my part.
Crisol: Theater of Idols
Crisol: Theater of Idols wasn’t on my radar until I sat down and played it at the Blumhouse booth, but now it’s pinging loud and clear, as if the booms were emanating directly from the blood-soaked bowels of Hell. It’s a first-person survival-horror action game set in a demented version of Spain that’s filled with monsters of modern folklore. Murderous marionettes and giant, ornately adorned skeletons hunt you through dark streets and towering gothic buildings, lamplight glinting off of every gross 3D detail. The whole demo felt like getting lost in a terrifying, nightmarish carnival, and I enjoyed every bit of it.
In Crisol, blood is your source of ammunition, and you drain the corpses of humans and chickens to refuel your health bar as well as your guns. Crisol is tense and gorgeous, reminiscent of Dishonored or Resident Evil Village, and enemies are both robust and tricky to evade. Crisol is the debut game from independent Spanish team Vermila Studios, which received an Epic MegaGrant for the project in 2020. It’s being published by Blumhouse and is due out this year on Steam , PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.
Grave Seasons
There’s something deeply wrong in Ashenridge, the idyllic rural village where Grave Seasons is set. At first glance, Grave Seasons is a cute, narrative-based farming sim with detailed pixel art, juicy romance options and layers of home-maintenance mechanics. You spend time planting, watering, harvesting, crafting items, picking up trash and chatting with villagers — and then you dig up a severed hand. Pilar, your flirty neighbor who runs the tailor shop down the road, says something ominous about the fate of your house’s previous owner. The vibe shifts; the shadows start to look sinister. Night falls and the real horror is unleashed, sudden, violent and all the more shocking in such a peaceful setting. A supernatural serial killer is on the loose in Ashenridge and, in between planting crops, it’s up to you to investigate (and maybe date) the murderer.
Grave Seasons is a game that will live or die by its tone, and so far, developer Perfect Garbage has absolutely nailed the vibe of nefarious, creeping dread. Ashenridge is a beautiful little town with tons of people to meet and activities to complete, and the character avatars are sexy, sweet and super intriguing. A paranormal murder investigation is simply the cherry on top of a competent farming and dating sim, and I’m eager to take a bite out of the full game. At SGF 2025, developers said the complete Grave Seasons experience should take about 20 hours. Grave Seasons is being published by Blumhouse, and it’s scheduled to hit Steam and consoles in 2026.
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