Someone finally did it. Someone looked at the grease-stained, rivet-popped glory of alt-history dieselpunk, strapped it to a mech, handed that mech a machine gun, and said: “yes, parkour.” Diesel Knights is a 6-v-6 mech/movement shooter set in a pulp-inspired dieselpunk world, and it funded on Kickstarter in forty-two minutes. FORTY-TWO. The Formula approves of this velocity.

The pitch is Titanfall’s fluid movement and mech combat DNA, dressed up in an aesthetic that looks like The Rocketeer crashed into Iron Harvest and they both liked it. No battle passes. No loot boxes. Just mastery, momentum, and the satisfying thud of a diesel-powered war machine doing something physically improbable at high speed. The Kickstarter closed at $526,576 from 7,763 backers, blew through every stretch goal, and the dev posted a fresh update on July 20, so the engine is still running. Wishlist it on Steam now, before the Ancient Gods wake up and ruin the servers.

Via: Steam / Kickstarter

The nominees for the 2026 ENNIE Awards have been announced, and voting is open RIGHT NOW. Go cast your ballot. Winners get announced at Gen Con in Indianapolis at the end of July, so the clock is ticking. This year’s field is legitimately stacked: Daggerheart, Legend in the Mist, Vaesen: City of My Nightmares (yes, please), and the Crooked Moon VTT are all in the mix, plus Call of Cthulhu products showing up in roughly half the categories because Chaosium apparently does not sleep. Good for them.

Also new this year: a dedicated Best Solo Game category, which means the TTRPG community has officially acknowledged that some of us roll dice alone in our laboratories at 2am. The Doctor neither confirms nor denies. The point is: if you play tabletop RPGs and you have opinions (you do), you have until Gen Con to make them count. The ENNIEs are a fan vote, which means the results are only as good as the people who bother to show up. Be the person who bothers to show up. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal, but a well-placed vote comes close.

Houston, your weekend orders have arrived. Delta H Con 2026 is on the ground right now, July 17 through 19 at the Marriott Westchase, and it has a dedicated Steampunk Track that would make the Formulae proud. The centerpiece: a full Steampunk Ball headlined by Aurelio Voltaire and Addisyn Madd, framed as an Un-Birthday Party complete with tea dueling, parlor games, and door mouse prizes. Because of course. The con’s art theme this year is Neuroverse: Code Houston (cyberpunk plus anime plus gaming plus space fusion), which is basically the Formulae running a five-way merge and daring you to argue with the output.

Unwoman is also on the schedule for two evening sets inside the Steampunk Track, which means you get cello-driven industrial folk AND Voltaire doing his delightfully macabre thing in the same building across the same weekend. For a three-day pass that apparently goes for $45, that is a frankly irresponsible amount of value. The Doctor does not make financial recommendations, but the Doctor also is not NOT making a financial recommendation here.

If you are in Houston and you are not at this convention, I genuinely cannot help you. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal. Via: Delta H Con

Two guys. One enormous dieselpunk spider-turret. A 1920s Castillian monarchy held together with hydraulic grease and bad decisions. IRON NEST: Heavy Turret Simulator just became the number-one most wishlisted game of the June 2026 Steam Next Fest, and its demo is sitting at 99% Overwhelmingly Positive. That is not a rounding error. That is the universe telling you to pay attention. The Formula recognizes this game immediately: take a colossal interwar war machine, lock a lone operator inside it with teleprinters, ballistic calculators, hydraulic levers, and enough moral ambiguity to last a decade, and you have DieselPunk distilled into a first-person box of clanking, groaning, morally compromised steel.

Here is the thing nobody tells you: you will spend approximately zero percent of your time actually firing the cannon. You will spend the other hundred percent reading coordinates, charting ranges on a map the size of a kitchen table, calculating powder charges, manually rotating a turret that weighs more than a battleship, and then questioning whether High Command actually has any idea what they are pointing you at. (They do not. High Command never does.) It is part math test, part immersive sim, part ethics seminar nobody signed up for. The full release drops August 6, 2026. The free demo is still up right now. Go. The Doctor will not be held responsible for the hospital.

Via: Steam

It is July 16. The sun is a diesel-powered furnace welded directly above your skull by a malevolent engineer who clearly never had to work outdoors. Heat indexes are lying to you in real-time. Somewhere, a politician is promising relief that will never come. The ice in your drink surrendered eleven seconds ago. This is Summer, raw and unprocessed.

Now watch what happens when I apply the Formulae.

Apply the Omega7Red Formulae and Summer becomes: brass valves bleeding off overpressure steam on a copper boiler the size of a cathedral, zeppelins trailing condensation over a crowd in full kit (goggles down, corsets tight, nobody sweating because the aesthetic demands it), the smell of machine oil and gunpowder and something that is definitely not legal at a county fair. It is SteamPunk Summer: oppressive, gorgeous, completely worth it. Whitby XX just wrapped. Papplewick Pumping Station turned ten. The Brass Screw Consortium has already convened and dispersed. TeslaCon is heading to Oz. The Formula is running hot this year, and for once, that is not a complaint. High-5. Stay hydrated. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal.

The Clockpunk genre has a problem, and that problem is that most Clockpunk games look like someone put a gear decal on a generic fantasy RPG and called it a day. Duskfade, however, is not that. Indie studio Weird Beluga (yes, that is their actual name, and the Doctor approves) has built a full clockpunk world out of suspended architecture, intricate mechanisms, and painterly landscapes that shift from ethereal forests to underwater ruins to cloud-piercing heights. The whole land has been plunged into eternal night by a mysterious Clock Tower and its enigmatic Master Clockmakers, which is exactly the kind of villain backstory that makes sense when you think about it for two seconds and then makes you furious that you didn’t invent it first.

You play Zirian, a workshop apprentice accompanied by his mechanical bird sidekick Cuckoo, who must shatter the shackles of time (their words, and they earned them) to rescue his sister and restore the world. The traversal looks genuinely fluid: jumps, dashes, grapples, glides, swinging from floating chains, running suspended rails. GameSpot called it “the spiritual successor to Jak and Daxter that we’ve been waiting years for,” which is either massive hype or the truest thing anyone has said about a game in a decade. The demo is live right now on Steam and PS5, so you have zero excuse not to find out which one it is. Launches August 13 on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PC, and Nintendo Switch 2.

Nothing can beat old age and betrayal, but a clockpunk kid with a mechanical bird and a vendetta against the concept of time might come close. High-5, Weird Beluga. Wishlist it. Play the demo. You’re welcome.

Via: Chalgyr’s Game Room

The people behind the Great Dickens Christmas Fair have gone and done it again: they’re turning Pier 35 on the Embarcadero into an 1849 Gold Rush settlement for two days only, August 22 and 23. We’re talking immersive Victorian-era San Francisco, sea shanties pouring out of saloon doors, high-kicking can-can dancers, artisan wares, oysters, sourdough, and hopeful prospectors who will absolutely try to sell you a shovel. In partnership with the San Francisco Historical Society, no less. Red Barn Productions calls it “theatrical living history.” The Doctor calls it GoldPunk, and he will not be taking questions.

Think about what’s actually being proposed here: a fully immersive port city circa 1850, crammed with period clothing shops, sketch comedians, sea captains, gold panners, and enough local ale to float one of those great sailing vessels. This is the Omega7Red Formulae applied to Manifest Destiny, and the result is completely canonical. The Formula doesn’t care about your eras; it just asks what the most interesting version of a moment in history looks like. Turns out it looks like San Francisco before the earthquake got to it, staffed by 150 actors and built on Pier 35. Tickets are $40 for adults. Get in there.

Via: The Steampunk Explorer

Britain has a Victorian waterworks in Nottingham that fires up its original 1880s James Watt beam engines, opens the underground reservoir, and once a year lets the Steampunk community take over the whole magnificent, gear-laden, boiler-heated cathedral of a building. This weekend was that weekend. The 10th Annual Steampunk Steam Event at Papplewick Pumping Station ran July 11-12, and if you weren’t there, you were somewhere objectively worse.

The lineup: Alice Strange on Saturday, Professor Elemental on Sunday (with a noon Rap School, because of course), Tea Dueling with Steampunk Shenanigans, over 30 trade stalls, and the engines in full steam the entire time. A Victorian pumping station that is a Scheduled Ancient Monument running its 1883 Lancashire boilers while costumed gogglers duel with teacups. The Omega7Red Formulae did not need to be applied here. The universe already did the work.

Year ten. High-5, Papplewick. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal, but ten years of keeping this alive on volunteer power comes close.

Flying pirate ship. Steampunk floating islands. Ancient Gods who want you very, very dead. Turn-based tactical combat where one bad move ends the whole run. Oh, and Lovecraftian atmosphere baked straight into the pixel art. The Doctor approves, and The Doctor does not approve of just anything. Dead Weight drops on Steam July 16 for the extremely reasonable sum of $12.99, and it has already racked up over 120,000 wishlists, which means you people have taste.

Here is what you are signing up for: captain a steam-powered airship across a procedurally generated world, recruit a crew of four distinct characters through branching skill trees, and then get absolutely worked over by compact tactical battlefields where every single hex counts. The dev cites Into the Breach and Final Fantasy Tactics as combat inspirations, which is a sentence that should make any self-respecting tactician sit up straighter. Throw in random events, fatigue, madness mechanics, and late-game crisis events that can blow the whole run sideways, and you have a roguelite that will eat your weekend like an Ancient God eats a poorly-positioned barbarian.

There is a free Prologue available on the Steam page right now, so you have zero excuses not to wishlist it and give it a spin before launch. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal, but a well-placed broadside from a flying steampunk pirate ship comes close. High-5, Klukva Games.

Via: Steam (Dead Weight)

Today is Nikola Tesla’s birthday, which means the Punk calendar is already winning. But if you’re anywhere near Jacksonville, Florida tonight, you’ve got exactly zero excuses not to be at Nemo’s Steampunk Gala. Hall of Heroes is throwing the first-ever Jules Verne-themed blowout at Goozlepipe & Guttyworks (yes, that is the actual name of the venue, and yes, it was already perfect before any steampunks got their hands on it), running 9pm to 2am. The upstairs is the Nautilus Engine Room: DJs, live performances, full food and drink menu. The downstairs is called The Abyss, described as a journey “20,000 leagues under King Street” into the Kraken’s Lounge. If that sentence doesn’t make you want to put on a frock coat and a diving helmet, the Omega7Red Formulae cannot help you.

There’s also a Steampunk Market with independent creators on the floor, so you can spend money on things you absolutely do not need but will treasure forever. The Doctor approves of any event where the aesthetic is “Victorian submarine nightmare” and the cover charge is cheaper than therapy. Get your tickets before they’re gone, or spend tomorrow reading about it on the internet like a surface-dweller. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal.

Via: Hall of Heroes Events