The Video Games And More You Should Play This Weekend – October 30, 2026

Phantom Blade Zero is one of the best action games I’ve ever played, and it’s certainly one of the most impressive to watch. Beijing-based developer S-Game uses China’s Wuxia brand of action (which was actually banned for some time during the 20th Century by the country’s government) to create a stylish, fluid, and hyper-engaging combat system. It will constantly leave you in awe that action combat can look this good. But looks aren’t everything. Fortunately, Phantom Blade Zero delivers on all fronts, with weapon mechanics so detailed that picking up a new blade can feel like unlocking a new character in a fighting game. The story won’t blow your socks off, but it’s certainly engaging and enticing enough to bring you through Phantom Blade Zero’s 40 or so hours of content. If you’re not interested in the “perfect ending,” which is the only satisfactory one in my opinion, you can complete the game in less than 30 hours. S-Game mixes high-octane combat with sprawling and rewarding exploration to create a must-play during this already busy season of games. You can read more of my thoughts in the Game Informer Phantom Blade Zero review, and if you are hopping in this weekend, be sure to check out my list of Phantom Blade Zero tips and tricks I wish I knew before starting it.

If you have any fond memories of IllFonic’s ill-fated Friday the 13th: The Game as I do, you simply must play the studio’s latest, Halloween: The Game. It is essentially Friday the 13th with Michael Myers instead of Jason, but with a decade of lessons learned from the team’s teeth carving in other horror properties and games. You’re either Michael or a citizen; the former wants to kill you and all the NPCs in various suburban maps, while the latter must rescue as many NPCs as possible while staying alive themselves. It’s that classic cat-and-mouse formula IllFonic is the master of, but with all the style, substance, and synths of John Carpenter’s Halloween masterpiece. Plus, Halloween: The Game features IllFonic’s first crack at a single-player campaign, and while it’s largely a tutorial for playing as Michael, if you’re a Halloween mega-fan like me, it’s worth checking out if only to take part in some of the film’s most iconic kills. You can read more of my thoughts in the Game Informer Halloween: The Game review here, and if you’re hopping in this weekend, there’s a new map, additional Halloween-themed cosmetics to unlock, and more waiting for you.

Overwatch is in the midst of its Halloween event, which have always historically been pretty interesting. This year it’s Mystery Madness: Graveyard Games. In it, you begin by picking one of three characters in a random role. And then, as the game progresses, you choose perks that upgrade, alter, or completely change what your character can do. It can get really chaotic where by round three characters like Orisa might be three times her normal size or Torbjorn might have placed a giant turret on Mercy’s making her a flying death machine. There are also Halloween skins, as well.

Tom the Postgirl is an odd little adventure that I’d recommend to fans of Untitled Goose Game. You play as Tom, a creepy girl who’s tasked with delivering packages to the people of her wacky town, which is depicted with storybook-style illustrations and a color palette limited to black, white, and red. On the surface, you’re delivering packages, but the game’s real story is based on Tom’s tendency to peep where she shouldn’t, peering into townsfolks’ windows to watch their odd lives. On house is full of kids who live like dogs; another has a couple with a bizarre obsession with tickling. You never know what each window might reveal, and I quickly sympathized with (and enabled) Tom’s compulsion. You also have the capacity to cause quite a bit of trouble by stomping on flowers, haphazardly snipping strings and cords, or even stealing packages and using them for your own mischievous purposes. It’s a pretty short experience, completable in just a few hours, making it a nice palate cleanser between the massive releases at the end of the year.

This Devolver Digital-published game has a simple but head-turning premise. You’re a profoundly angry woman who returns to her small hometown armed with nothing but a sledgehammer, which she uses to smash everything in sight. The town is also inhabited by robots possessing human consciousnesses. Swinging the hammer can either punch holes through walls or, with enough force, reduce entire buildings to rubble. But why is she doing this? Why is she so mad? A big part of Virtue and a Sledgehammer’s allure is its fascinating and well-written tale about the protagonist’s strained relationships with her sister and mother. Learning more about their lives requires you to keep smashing, but the more you learn, the more you begin to question whether smashing everything is actually a good idea.

This bizarre indie blends fun match-3 puzzle-solving with tower defense gameplay wrapped around a funny but surreal story. The match-3 gameplay involves sliding tiles to match geographic elements like castles, trees, and rivers to collect resources that feed into the tower defense portion. Depending on how the board looks when the puzzle portion ends, you send troops (sustained by the resources you collected) to attack/defend against rival castles and gather more items; board positioning determines how well this can go. The two mechanics feed into each other to create a fun loop that grows in complexity as new mechanics are introduced. Did I mention the game is also very weird? The silly tale centers on a medieval court designating you the chosen savior to rescue their lost queen (and many other tasks), and the dumb tone adds personality to a sometimes dry genre. Titanium Court charmed and impressed us when it launched on PC earlier this year, and now console and mobile players get their chance to hold court.

Sword of the Sea is a beautiful, 2025 game about surfing through the sand atop a floating sword. It recalls Journey, the emotional 2012 PlayStation game, which makes sense as it comes from the artists and developers that worked on that game, developer Giant Squid. Giant Squid also made 2016’s Abzû and 2020’s The Pathless. It’s a talented team and Sword of the Sea maintains that reputation. And now you can play it on Switch 2. You can read my full review of the game (though this review pertains to the PlayStation 5 version) right here.

Cities: Skylines arrived on PC more than a decade ago, but is still revered as one of the greatest modern city-builders. Even now, three years after the sequel’s release, Paradox continues supporting and porting the original game. A couple years after its initial release, Cities: Skylines received a strong console port, which did an admirable job of adapting the controls to gamepads, but the Switch version was always the weakest of the bunch. As of this week, Switch 2 owners can play a less compromised version, expanding the Switch’s 9-tile limit to a much larger 25-tile limit, as well as better performance and textures, better control panels, and a ton of DLC and added content. And on top of that, if you own the Switch 1 version, you get a deep discount on the Switch 2 version.

While not specifically about this new Switch 2 version, you can read our original reviews of the base PC version here, and the base console version here. 

Minecraft has held its dominant spot in pop culture for so long that it’s easy to forget a simple fact about it: the game is awesome. This week, it’s coming to Switch 2, giving potential miners another platform to explore procedurally-generated caves in. You’ve certainly heard of it, and you’ve probably played it, but I still feel it often doesn’t get the flowers it deserves in high-level critical discussions about games, despite its regular cadence of major updates. The opening gameplay loop is so satisfying that for many of my peers, whether they regularly play video games or not, it’s only a matter of time before they boot up a new world again. While you can never play the game for the first time again, if you haven’t checked it out in a couple years, you might be surprised by the amount of new blocks, materials, and mobs they’ve added in recent updates. And if you’ve never played before, the Switch 2 launch is as good a time as any to see what all the fuss is about.

The card game incarnation of Arkham Horror remains one of the best narrative-driven and horror-themed tabletop games around, and it’s an easy recommendation if you’re looking for something engaging to dive into on Halloween night. Rooted in the monsters and mysteries of the Cthulhu Mythos, this living card game is built on major core sets and expansions. But unlike a TCG, each new installment has the same cards included, fueling the cooperative adventures you’ll undertake together with your fellow players. Last year Arkham Horror: The Card Game did something of a soft relaunch for a chapter 2 of its narrative, and that new core set is an ideal place to jump on  play. Players each control an individual investigator as they explore arcane and weird mysteries, confront monsters, and unfold plots of cultists, ancient entities, and forbidden lore. For fans of cosmic horror storytelling, it’s an easy pick.