You’ve played through countless immersive sims as a cyborg, a thief, and a cyborg thief. Now, try doing it as a scuttling demon dominatrix. Brush Burial: Gutter World is the sneaky and frenetic new dollop of squalor from Knife Demon Software. It casts you once again as Fennel, a swamp devil with a pronged tail you can use as a whip and a grapple, knocking props around and swiping crossbow bolts out of midair.

Fennel seems as agile here as in the previous, excellent Brush Burial, pouncing from head to head like a tic, but they’ve bolstered their moveset with an injection of overclocked koppōjutsu. You can snare foes to perform sinuous, bone-crunching takedowns, the catch being that you’re vulnerable during the execution. It’s deeply, moreishly unpleasant. Those little fatal jerks at the end of the animation are more visceral than anything in Doom Eternal. I’m not sure I can bear to watch the trailer again. Here it is.

There’s a demo for Gutter World on Steam. The full thing will have four levels, with an emphasis on replaying to experiment with bending spines in different directions, and to unlock cosmetics. I like Fennel’s wardrobe. Adam Jensen never got to rock a corset and thigh highs and he was all the poorer for it.

The game’s environments are wiry, occult creations in which all the objects look like they’ve been crushed into shape. Mournful and decrepit spaces that seem both wildly improvised and carefully engineered. This is a realm of ugliness and deprivation, and you are under no obligation to be nice to it. “Lose your way in the slithering guts of the colonial undercarriage,” comments the Steam page. “Make wealth out of misery.” Here’s a bulletpoint rundown from the developer.

• Tightly designed and interconnected levels with numerous paths to the objective, full of hostile or friendly NPCs who react to crimes like stealing, trespassing, and murder.
• Fast paced, instantaneous combat that is simple but robust, encouraging the use of improvised or stolen weapons, environmental objects, and a unique hand-to-hand takedown system.
• Dozens of unique cosmetics to be unlocked through gameplay challenges, as well as progression through the game’s levels.
• One ‘Greater Contract’ and Three ‘Lesser Contracts’ to complete. Four levels in total, built to be replayed.

I caught wind of the new demo from Problem Attic developer Liz Ryerson, who has rounded up a few Next Fest gems on Bluesky. Ryerson also mentioned 「TERROR」type:【A.L.C.H.E.M.Y.】, which I’m quite drawn to despite its frightful typographical choices. Loosely, it’s an immersive sim in which you play a bombmaker, mixing up reagents as you hurry through the shadows.

If you’ve taken a dislike to immersive sims, after watching Fennel turn guards into pretzels, maybe catch the demo for Evil Egg – a coruscating shmup that puts me in mind of the old Macintosh hit Crystal Quest. Thanks Liz.