Weddings, Secret Projects, and Soulframe Prep: Inside a Game Editor's July Weekend
Key takeaways
- Multiple staff members are playing or previewing unannounced titles, including a suspected Assassin's Creed remaster and Ubisoft preview code.
- Edwin is preparing for Tennocon by exploring Soulframe's early access, putting Digital Extremes' new RPG back in the spotlight.
- Ollie is co-developing a game prototype with his brother this weekend, highlighting the creative overlap between games journalism and game development.
Summer weekends rarely slow down for gaming journalists, and the latest roundup from the team at a prominent games publication proves exactly that. With weddings, concerts, and a full slate of titles both released and unreleased, the crew's weekend plans read less like a casual hobby list and more like a window into the overlapping worlds of professional coverage and personal passion. Editorial Director Julian Benson is juggling a Robyn concert and a family wedding while still planning to carve out time for Minishoot' Adventure, where he admits he's hit a personal skill ceiling and is eyeing a strategic farming run to boost his stats before tackling tougher enemies.
Senior staff member Jeremy is spinning several plates at once. He's continuing a walkthrough of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, grinding through Lords of the Fallen — picked up on sale for just five pounds — and previewing an unannounced Ubisoft remaster that sounds suspiciously like an Assassin's Creed title. He's also eyeing the demo for Onimusha: Way of the Sword, the upcoming revival of Capcom's classic samurai action series. The combination of budget pickups, preview coverage, and franchise nostalgia is a pretty accurate portrait of how gaming journalists actually spend their downtime.
Elsewhere on the team, Edwin is doing homework ahead of Tennocon, Digital Extremes' annual fan convention, by dipping into the limited early access build of Soulframe. The action-RPG blends the elaborate cosmetic systems of Warframe with slower, more deliberate dungeon-crawling combat — a notable tonal shift for the studio. Meanwhile, James is hoping to revisit Lullabies Made of Static, a more contemplative indie experience he demoed earlier in the week, as a counterbalance to the gore-heavy and rally-racing titles dominating his recent sessions.
Perhaps the most intriguing entry comes from Ollie, who plans to spend part of his weekend not playing games at all, but building one. He and his brother are developing a game prototype together, with Ollie hoping to reach a working build quickly — partly to test the concept and partly, as he puts it, to discover just how bad at game development they actually are. It's a self-deprecating but genuinely relatable admission from someone who covers games professionally yet still feels the pull to create them. Mark, meanwhile, is keeping his weekend plans firmly under wraps, teasing only that 'all will be revealed at some mysterious point in the future.'
This kind of team roundup, while informal in tone, serves a real purpose for readers. It surfaces smaller titles like Lullabies Made of Static and Titanium Court that might otherwise fly under the radar, and it humanises the people behind the coverage. With Tennocon on the horizon and several unannounced titles quietly circulating among press, next week looks set to bring a fresh wave of gaming news — making this weekend the calm before a busy editorial storm.
The bigger picture
Weekend gaming roundups might seem like light editorial content, but they consistently function as useful barometers for what's actually resonating in the industry at any given moment. The fact that Lords of the Fallen earned a mention — bought during a sale, enjoyed despite reservations about its publisher's public statements — reflects a broader tension players navigate constantly: separating the art from the business decisions surrounding it. CI Games CEO Marek Tyminski's comments have attracted significant criticism, and the candid acknowledgment here suggests that even enthusiast press isn't shying away from that context.
The Soulframe mention is worth watching closely. Digital Extremes has built Warframe into one of the most quietly successful live-service games on the market, and Soulframe represents a meaningful creative gamble — slower, more atmospheric, deliberately less frenetic. Tennocon coverage next week could meaningfully shift perception of the title, for better or worse. If Edwin's early access impressions inform substantive coverage, readers will get one of the more informed takes on a game that's still largely a mystery to the wider public.
Ollie's side project is the detail that lingers longest. Game development hobbyism among journalists and critics is more common than the industry acknowledges, and it often produces genuine empathy for the developers they cover. Whether the prototype amounts to anything commercially is beside the point — the experience of building something, however rough, changes how you write about games. That kind of editorial texture is exactly what separates passionate coverage from algorithmic content churn, and it's something readers should genuinely value.
We cover weekend gaming threads like this one because they offer something increasingly rare in games media: unfiltered honesty about what people are actually playing, not just what's been assigned or embargoed. At LagPing, we believe the most interesting stories often live in the margins — a five-pound sale pick, a secret prototype, an indie demo squeezed in between rally games. This particular roundup also touches on some live conversations worth tracking, including the Soulframe build ahead of Tennocon and an unannounced Ubisoft remaster that's clearly generating quiet buzz. We'll be watching those threads closely next week. More than anything, we think it matters that the people writing about games are genuinely, messily, enthusiastically playing them — weddings, concerts, and skill ceilings included.
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