The Voivod game is close enough to finished to be handed to strangers. Chaosmonger Studio, the independent developer making Voivod: The Nuclear Warrior, has shown a new trailer for it and is putting a free playable demo into Steam Next Fest, which runs from 19 to 26 October. The demo carries two separate modes of play.
It is a narrative driven run and gun Metroidvania, which is a precise enough description to be worth reading twice: a side on game of rooms that open as you find the means to open them, built around a story rather than a score. What it is built out of is the band, meaning the music, the sleeve art and the dystopian science fiction world that has been running through their records since the eighties. The Nuclear Warrior is their own figure, not a licence borrowed from somewhere else.
The full game is set for early 2027 on PC and consoles, which puts it in the same stretch of calendar as the record Chewy Mongrain has been writing around a teaching timetable. Few bands get a game made out of their own universe rather than their logo, and fewer still get one from a studio that treats the artwork as the source material.