PAX West 2026 started off the weekend with some great looks at upcoming games. From the highly anticipated remaster of Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters, to new titles like the mysterious The Final Cut of Lilith Cunningham, PAX West had no shortage of exciting games to play.
The Final Cut of Lilith Cunningham
I’m always a sucker for a good mystery, and even more so when you add a spooky hotel to the mix. The Final Cut of Lilith Cunningham is exactly that, as you explore the Alpine Movie Manor Hotel and Drive-In in search of your missing daughter Sara.
Gobble
Gobble was a neat little game I played at the NIS booth this weekend. It’s a 2D action platformer whose central gimmick is that your hero, Rute, is in possession of a talking bird called Kamael that can turn into a sickle that can eat anything you kill. Rute just wants to find his family, but there are monsters in the way; Kamael wants to eat the things in Rute’s path: seems like some mutually aligned goals to me. I only got to play a single stage, but I had a good amount of fun fighting off hordes of monsters and eating them up.
Gobble’s presentation immediately impressed, with its snappy combat controls and gorgeous comic-inspired art style. The game would throw a good amount of critters at you, but it was effortless to dance around the area, taking them out. Eating these pigs allowed Rute to summon fiery pillars that would roast enemies and smash rocks blocking my path. I had a pretty fun time overall with Gobble and am curious to play more to see what sort of other powers you can consume.
Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve
It’s been a hot minute since we’ve been able to take to the skies in an Ace Combat game, so it’s nice to see Bandai return with Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve. Even though my demo was brief, it was exhilarating. The mission I played tasked me with shooting down two massive planes, each equipped with a dozen turrets, that were trying to bring my ship down. I immediately got into the rhythm of doing strafing runs on the aircraft, as I would swoop in to fire some missiles, destroying a handful of turrets/propellers, before flying off to loop for another go.
Destroying enough of the plane’s wings would cause chunks of it to fly off, eventually flying lopsidedly as it was missing most of its left wing before I took out the right, and it completely exploded. Alongside these two hulking planes were smaller jets protecting them, and I got into occasional dogfights with them between my attacks on the bigger crafts.
Unfortunately, the timer on my demo ran out before I could finish the mission, but that just left me eager to play more when the game releases later next month.
Hello Kitty Party Land
Hello Kitty Party Land from Bandai Namco was, naturally, my first stop of the weekend once I made it to the convention center. It was an adorable jaunt through the Sanrio universe, though you didn’t necessarily need to be a Sanrio fan to recognize the exciting colors and recognizable character designs. When I made it to the station, I was able to customize my own character to walk through the demo with me, as well as pick a Sanrio “partner” to accompany me. The character designer was more extensive than I was ultimately expecting for a fifteen-minute demo, full of plenty of facial features, hair, and clothing options to choose from.
Once I customized my avatar, my partner, Cinnamoroll, accompanied me through three minigames. Overall, they were the type of minigames you would expect to see in a family party game: a bouncy minigame with Pompompurin, a fishing minigame with Little Twin Stars, and a baseball minigame with my friend of the hour, Cinnamoroll. The instructions for each game were easy to follow, and I could see the appeal of sitting on the couch with friends and enjoying what the game has to offer at full release in October, or even a cozy night curled up by yourself. Low stakes, and immaculate vibes.
I NEED SPACE
I NEED SPACE is a title from Indonesian studio Khayalan Arts, where you play as a Space Traveler accompanied by an adorable Cosmic Cat, and you’re both on a journey across space and time to attempt to revitalize your own home planet after a mysterious Galactical Pandemic that spanned across the universe.
And, needless to say, I was hooked from the get-go. The character design is simple and adorable, and the demo was paired with a dreamy soundtrack that followed my brief adventure. The demo itself kicked off with your Space Traveler having to corral the mysterious Cosmic Cat in order to give it a cosmic item as a snack to settle it down. Once my new buddy was in tow, the two of us had to gather some items to repair a generator within the space pod to get to the bottom of a mysterious entity that seems to have caught the Space Traveler’s attention. When the entity was found- some sort of galactic, monolithic being- I eventually learned a small amount of backstory about the Space Traveler, mainly how something seemed to have happened to his big sister that he hasn’t seen since the Pandemic ravaged the universe.
Unfortunately, the demo itself was relatively short. I would have loved more of an opportunity to interact with more of the NPCs you see within the preview, or the chance to explore the planets a bit more, but it was clear that I NEED SPACE carries some emotional weight, and paired with the cozy graphics and music, it seems like it would be ideal for a rainy evening.
Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee
We used to be a proper nation once, where you could go to your best friend’s house after school and beat the virtual shit out of one another as one of Toho’s classic Kaiju. Then, for some reason, we moved on, not understanding that this was the pinnacle of human experience.
Thankfully, more than two decades later, Atari and Piperworks have decided to remake their beloved kaiju couch brawler. And by Godzilla, it rips. It’s simple: you pick a kaiju from the pantheon of Godzilla’s rogues, and you duke it out. You fire atomic breaths and gravity beams, you chuck the space needle at each other, you roll around on the ground after getting hit to best position yourself for a return smack. It’s great; it feels like home.
It goes without saying that it’s great to replay a beloved classic and see that it still holds up and still has a place in the conversation. Remastering the graphics to more modern sensibilities is just icing on the cake.
