My brain is a strange machine. I feed it trailers, previews, rulebooks, and Kickstarter pages, and suddenly it decides a handful of those things deserve permanent residency in the “must have immediately” part of my thoughts.
That’s basically how I ended up coming up with Wishlist Wednesday, a weekly peek at the games, comics, and tech that have been rattling around my head long enough that I’ve accepted I’m probably going to cave eventually.
This week’s lineup is a particularly dangerous mix, for my wallet, that is.
We have a mysterious dungeon-crawling RPG with town-building vibes, an indie comic series that keeps spiralling deeper into monster-filled madness, a board game expansion that literally brings all the Formula One chaos I’ve been missing, and a piece of tech that promises to let us smell our games.
Let’s dig in.
Emberville
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In Emberville, you wake up trapped inside the Vitromotus, a sprawling underground prison where death isn’t quite permanent and the rules of reality have clearly been tampered with.
With no memory of how you got there, the only way forward is to fight, explore, and slowly piece together the truth behind the strange world you’ve been dropped into.
What really grabbed me is how the game ties its dungeon crawling to rebuilding a broken community.
As you venture deeper into the Vitromotus, you rescue survivors from a ruined town called Emberville. Each person you bring back adds new skills, professions, and mechanics that help rebuild the settlement, slowly turning it into a living hub shaped by your decisions.
It scratches that wonderful RPG itch where exploration actually changes the world around you instead of just ticking off quest markers.
The dungeon itself sounds wonderfully weird. Over time, a mysterious emotional energy called kymia has warped the prison into strange biomes filled with bizarre monsters and forgotten settlements.
The deeper you go, the more the world reveals its secrets, and the more dangerous the enemies become. Combat leans into positioning, timing, and weapon combos, while the class system lets you mix abilities from different paths to create your own fighting style.
Add in town building, character customisation, crafting, and a personal estate you can decorate and expand, and suddenly Emberville starts looking like one of those games that eats entire weekends without apology.
Mark Spears Monsters
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There’s something incredibly charming about comics that unapologetically embrace classic monster mayhem, and Mark Spears Monsters does exactly that while throwing in just enough twists to keep things unpredictable.
The story is set in the early 1980s and follows a former monster slayer who thought that chapter of his life was long behind him.
Unfortunately, the supernatural world has other plans. When word spreads that a legendary vampire has returned, he’s dragged back into a war against creatures that should probably have stayed buried in folklore.
What makes this series particularly exciting right now is the momentum it’s building. The comic exploded onto the indie scene and quickly became one of the highest-selling independent issues in recent years, and the story keeps escalating in wonderfully chaotic ways.
The latest arc, Unholy Ground, promises to push things even further with massive revelations and the fallout from a villainous plan that’s apparently about to change everything.
Mark Spears handles both writing and art, and the result feels like a love letter to old-school monster stories with a modern indie edge.
It’s pulpy, weird, and clearly having a blast with its premise, which is exactly the kind of comic energy I can’t resist.
Heat: Rocky Roads
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If you’ve played Heat: Pedal to the Metal, you already know how tense a good race can get when every gear shift feels like a gamble. Heat: Rocky Roads looks ready to crank that tension up a few notches.
This expansion adds two new tracks, and one of them immediately caught my attention for a very specific reason: the South Africa Grand Prix.
Instead of smooth racing lines, drivers have to deal with loose gravel scattered across the circuit, forcing careful planning and some serious nerve when pushing through corners. It’s the kind of unpredictable chaos that makes racing games memorable.
The second track takes you to Germany, where newly built chicanes along a long straight demand precise control at high speeds.
Both courses seem designed to reward players who can manage their engines, timing, and positioning without panicking when things inevitably start going wrong.
On top of that, the expansion adds a new 1966 championship season and introduces a mechanical innovation called the sliding skirt, giving players new ways to slipstream and outmanoeuvre rivals.
If the base game already feels like a tabletop Formula One highlight reel, Rocky Roads looks ready to add even more dramatic overtakes and last-corner heartbreaks.
Zestum The Scentbar
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Every so often, a piece of gaming hardware comes along that makes you pause and go, “Wait… what?” Zestum’s Scentbar absolutely falls into that category.
The idea is surprisingly simple: it adds smell to games and movies. The device sits near your setup and releases scents that sync with what’s happening on screen, using a system of fans and scent cartridges to deliver quick bursts of aroma that fade before they start mixing together.
The hardware includes ten ScentPod slots, meaning you can load a variety of scents at once, while a fan system pushes the aroma toward you so it arrives within a couple of seconds of the on-screen cue. The goal is to avoid that dreaded “everything smells like a perfume shop exploded” effect by keeping scents brief and controlled.
What really fascinates me is the software side. The Scentbar connects to a companion app that manages when smells are triggered and how strong they are. The developers even plan to add AI tools that let users tune how sensitive the system is, so you can customise scent cues for games that don’t officially support the device yet.
Will smelling a burning forest or a seaside breeze actually make games more immersive? I have no idea. But the sheer weird ambition of the concept makes me incredibly curious to see it in action.
That’s this week’s collection of things currently living rent-free in my brain. A mysterious underground RPG with town-building ambitions, a monster comic that keeps getting wilder, a racing board game expansion that literally brings the chaos to South Africa, and a piece of tech that wants to make your gaming setup smell things.
Wishlist Wednesday is supposed to be about restraint.
Unfortunately, history suggests it’s mostly about enabling my bad purchasing decisions.