In this week’s newsletter: This autumn may not deliver its usual raft of franchise mega-titles, so use this time to embrace the weird, wonderful and original instead • Don’t get Pushing Buttons delivered to your inbox? Sign up here Earlier this week, the culture desk asked me to recommend four games for our annual autumn arts preview. Reader: I struggled. The period between September and November is usually stacked with AAA releases as publishers jostle for space in the historically lucrative run-up to Christmas. Even in this era of “live service” games such as Fortnite, Destiny and Genshin Impact (which ignore external sales patterns in favour of their own ever-updating season passes) you’re usually guaranteed an autumnal belch of major gaming releases. But this year … not so much. September is mostly about The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom (below). October is the Silent Hill 2 reboot, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 and at a stretch Sonic X Shadow Generations. We have to wait until November for a truly busy blockbuster lineup with Slitterhead, Football Manager 2025, Assassin’s Creed Shadows and Stalker 2: Heart of Chernobyl all lining up for our wintery delectation. The long anticipated role-playing game Avowed has been delayed until 2025, while Indiana Jones and the Great Circle still hasn’t been given a release date beyond “2024”, which doesn’t seem promising. Continue reading...

Our video games writers get their children to play the games they loved as kids – and get to grips with the ones they adore now. Will they be bored, baffled – or hooked? Keza MacDonald plays Pokémon Shield Continue reading...

The makers of Italian action game have endured the longest development journey in history. Their game is now finally out – on the long-discontinued Game Boy Advance In 2002, a group of five Italians made the local news: they were going to be the first company in the country to develop a game for Nintendo’s popular portable, the Game Boy Advance. The cadre pulled together a few hundred euros and some computers to prepare for the project. They had no experience making games. They didn’t even have a programmer. All they had was a love for video games, a shared hatred of working for bosses and endless optimism. For the next two years, the group worked away. Late nights were common and the team barely took any time off. It was a grueling time, but they were determined to make an ambitious game with complex features. Its name was Kien. If you haven’t heard of it, that’s because it never came out – until now. The action platformer didn’t see the light of day until this year, by which time most of the original team had long since moved on. Only one member of the group of five remained: game designer, Fabio Belsanti, who never lost belief in the project. Continue reading...

Nintendo Switch; Nintendo As ever, Mario’s brother is a scream, but this remaster is haunted by the spectre of its much better sequel – and the price might spook you My favourite thing about the Luigi’s Mansion games is the detail. The way Mario’s cowardly brother nervously hums along to the music as he bumbles through spooky stately homes. The slapstick animations when he falls through a fireplace or gets catapulted into a secret room by a fold-down bed. The cackles and goofy expressions of the ghosts as they get up to their hijinks. As you use Luigi’s trusty ghost-capturing vacuum cleaner to pull back rugs and expose secret trapdoors (or secret spiders), and suck up the banknotes and golden coins that are hidden everywhere, you can’t help but notice how each little sound, scene and secret has been carefully arranged to give you a small dose of delight. This ghost-busting puzzle game was such a delightful surprise sequel in 2013, when it was released for the Nintendo 3DS. Its diorama-like mini-mansions and peepholes gave Nintendo’s artists ample opportunity to show off that console’s stereoscopic 3D effects, activated with a little slider at the side of the screen. But now it’s out on the Switch, 11 years later, and two things have changed. Firstly, the 3D effect that it was designed around is no longer a thing. And secondly, Luigi’s Mansion 3 now exists, and it’s significantly better. Luigi’s Mansion 2 HD is available now for £49.99 Continue reading...