Wholesome Games teamed up with The Game Awards today for an indie game broadcast showcasing over 20 upcoming titles. Dubbed Wholesome Snack: The Game Awards Edition, the 30-minute show revealed a surprise sequel to Toem, an update on Winter Burrow, and a handful of proper “world premieres.”
Wholesome Games is known for running indie game showcases that primarily focus on “cozy” games. Previous Wholesome Directs have featured plenty of reveals and surprise releases. This Game Awards edition was no different, with a few of its games and updates launching today and later this week.
The biggest news of the show is Toem 2, a sequel to 2021’s black-and-white photography game Toem: A Photo Adventure. No details were revealed beyond a quick logo reveal, but the project is currently in development. That wasn’t the only sequel reveal. This year’s Duck Detective: The Secret Salami is also getting a new installment, Duck Detective: The Ghost of Glamping.
The show featured a few release date reveals. The minimalist river exploration game Naiad is available now after a surprise release during the show. Idle game Rusty’s Retirement also got a free update released during the show, which adds new crops and a winter biome. Narrative adventure Pine: A Story of Loss, a hand-drawn game about a woodworker dealing with grief, is set to launch this Friday.
Over 20 games were highlighted in total, and there were plenty of standouts. Winter Burrow, a game revealed during Xbox’s 2024 summer showcase, got a new trailer during the presentation. The clip showed off more of its winter survival mechanics, including its cooking system. We got a new trailer for Despelote announcing that it’ll be coming to Switch as well as previously announced platforms. My personal highlight of the show is Piece by Piece, a game about repairing broken items set to launch in 2025.
You can find the full list of games shown during the broadcast below. You can now wishlist most of them on Steam, and a few games have new demos out now.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Gaming laptops and I have a complicated relationship. One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it. I was a broke college kid, and that was the best I could afford. So trying out high-end gaming laptops is always fun. But ASUS' ROG Zephyrus G14 is a lot more than a laptop that can run AAA games. It is portable, so you're not lugging around a 2.5kg machine everywhere you go. It is built well, none of that plastic chassis, and can even function as a normal laptop outside of just gaming.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.