The week ahead has two different kinds of blockbuster energy. One is immediate and watery, with Subnautica 2 finally opening its Early Access doors. The other is slightly unusual, with Forza Horizon 6 playable through Premium Edition early access before its standard launch lands next week.
Around those anchors, the next seven days are unusually good across horror, licensed adventures, dense management games and oddball card strategy. Xbox and PC get the biggest calendar moments, Switch 2 gets another major third-party adventure and smaller studios fill the gaps with ideas that do not feel interchangeable.
Subnautica 2
Subnautica 2 enters Early Access on May 14 for PC, with Xbox Game Preview also bringing it to Xbox Series X|S, Xbox on PC, ROG Xbox Ally and Game Pass. Unknown Worlds Entertainment is developing and publishing the sequel, which means this is the studio returning to the underwater survival formula that made the original such a word-of-mouth hit.
The big shift is co-op. Subnautica worked because loneliness made every dive feel dangerous, beautiful and slightly wrong. Subnautica 2 keeps the alien-ocean premise but lets up to four players explore, build bases and push into deeper biomes together. That changes the rhythm without erasing the hook: you are still scanning strange life, watching oxygen, upgrading tools and wondering what enormous thing is moving somewhere beyond your lights.
Early Access is the right lens here. Unknown Worlds is starting with a live build that will grow through more biomes, creatures, craftables and story, as detailed in the Xbox Wire launch preview. Survival fans get to join at the beginning of a long community-shaped build. Everyone else gets to see whether co-op can make Subnautica feel more social without sanding away its tension.
Directive 8020
Directive 8020 launches May 12 for PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. Supermassive Games is developing and publishing it as the next Dark Pictures game, but the setting gives the studio a sharper change of texture than another haunted town or gothic nightmare.
The setup is pure deep-space pressure. Earth is dying, the colony ship Cassiopeia crashes near Tau Ceti f and the crew discovers an alien organism that can mimic its prey. Supermassive has always been drawn to distrust, split-second decisions and characters making a mess of survival under stress. A shapeshifter loose on a starship gives those habits a clean mechanical and dramatic frame.
This one also looks more active than the studio’s older interactive horror template. Real-time threats, improvised weapons, stealth, couch co-op movie night play and a Turning Points story tree all push it beyond pure choice-and-consequence drama. If Until Dawn and The Quarry were party-night horror movies, Directive 8020 is aiming for the Alien and The Thing side of the shelf.
Forza Horizon 6 Premium Edition early access
Forza Horizon 6 does not have its standard launch until May 19, but Premium Edition players can start on May 15 on Xbox Series X|S and PC via the Microsoft Store and Steam. Playground Games is once again at the wheel, with Xbox Game Studios publishing.
Japan is the draw. The series has spent years turning real places into festival playgrounds, and this time the map is selling the contrast between Tokyo density, rural roads, industrial districts, seasonal scenery and car-culture pilgrimage. Forza’s own overview lists more than 550 real-world cars, Touge Battles, Legend Island, a larger urban area than any previous Horizon game and a build-anywhere upgrade to EventLab called CoLab.
That is a lot of feature language, but the appeal is simpler: Horizon is comfort food for car people who also want a lavish open-world holiday. It is racing for players who like collecting, tuning, photographing and cruising as much as podium finishes. It also lands during a crowded Game Pass stretch, with Gamers Now already tracking how Forza Horizon 6 and Subnautica 2 headline Xbox’s May lineup.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle on Nintendo Switch 2
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle comes to Nintendo Switch 2 on May 12. MachineGames developed the first-person adventure, Bethesda Softworks publishes it and the Switch 2 version gives Nintendo’s new hardware another substantial third-party test.
This is a port, not a brand-new game, but Great Circle is not a small lift. MachineGames built it as a globe-trotting, puzzle-heavy adventure that uses Indy’s whip, fists, disguise work and curiosity instead of turning him into a standard shooter hero. On Switch 2, the appeal is seeing whether a cinematic current-gen adventure can feel at home on a hybrid system without losing too much of its physicality.
The Indiana Jones license also fits handheld play better than it might first appear. The Great Circle is full of documents, environmental clues, hidden passages and smaller digressions between set pieces. If the Switch 2 version holds together, it gives players a blockbuster adventure that can be played like pulp chapters rather than one long couch-bound spectacle.
Call of the Elder Gods
Call of the Elder Gods launches May 12 for PC via Steam, with Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S versions also part of Kwalee’s launch plans. Out of the Blue Games returns after Call of the Sea, this time with a darker Lovecraftian puzzle adventure.
The first Call of the Sea had a useful trick: it made observation feel emotional. The puzzles were not just locks and symbols, they were tied to illness, marriage, obsession and impossible discovery. Call of the Elder Gods keeps that lineage but adds dual protagonists, Harry Everhart and Evangeline Drayton, plus a story inspired by H. P. Lovecraft’s The Shadow out of Time.
The pitch should click with anyone drawn to atmosphere without action-game noise. Object and observation puzzles return with adjustable hints, journal support and a bigger sense of place, from New England interiors to the Australian outback and stranger spaces beyond normal time. It is the kind of adventure game that lives or dies on mood, voice acting and how satisfying the final chain of deductions feels.
Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes
Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes launches May 11 on PC via Steam. Alt Shift, the studio behind Crying Suns, is developing it with Dotemu publishing, which is exactly the kind of pairing that makes sense for a tense fleet-management roguelite.
The game understands the core fantasy of modern Battlestar Galactica. You are not chasing clean victory. You are trying to keep civilians alive, manage shortages, survive politics and jump away before the Cylons finish the job. Fleet management phases force hard resource calls, while real-time battles with tactical pause are framed around buying enough time to escape.
That gives Scattered Hopes a different flavor from most licensed strategy games. The interesting question is not whether you can build the strongest fleet in the galaxy. It is how long your battered convoy can hold together when healthcare, maintenance, faction tension and possible Cylon infiltration are all pulling at the same command table.
Outbound
Outbound launches May 11 for PC via Steam and Xbox Series X|S, followed by PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2 on May 14 through Square Glade’s updated launch timing. Square Glade Games is developing and publishing this cozy open-world game about turning an electric camper van into a moving home.
The hook is van life without the Instagram gloss. You start with an empty camper, then build inside and on top of it with modular parts, craft workstations, grow plants, cook meals and power the whole thing through sun, wind or water. It can be played solo or in online co-op for up to four players, which gives it a softer social angle than most survival crafting games.
Outbound should speak to anyone who likes the idea of survival games more than their hunger meters and punishment loops. There is still resource gathering, tech progression and base-building, but the fantasy is slow movement through a colorful world instead of grinding against a hostile one. After several years of cozy farming clones, a house-on-wheels builder is a welcome change of scenery.
Space Haven
Space Haven reaches its full 1.0 release on May 13 for PC, Mac and Linux via Steam. Bugbyte Ltd. is developing and publishing the spaceship colony sim, which first arrived in Early Access back in 2020.
That long runway matters for a game like this because colony sims are all about edge cases. Players will always find strange crew behavior, broken production chains, impossible layouts and resource problems that only appear after dozens of hours. Space Haven’s pitch is tile-by-tile shipbuilding with gas management, crew moods, derelict exploration, factions and the constant desire to make one more room fit inside a ship that is already too cramped.
The 1.0 launch makes Space Haven easier to approach after years of Early Access iteration. It sits in the same broad mental space as RimWorld, Dwarf Fortress and Oxygen Not Included, but the starship structure adds a clean fantasy: your base is not a settlement you defend forever, it is the thing carrying your people through the void.
Black Jacket
Black Jacket launches May 12 for PC, PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo Switch through Skystone’s multiplatform release. Mi'pu'mi Games is developing it, and the premise is wonderfully clean: gamble your way out of hell through a roguelite deckbuilder built around blackjack.
Deckbuilders have become crowded because the core loop is so flexible. Black Jacket gets around that by choosing a familiar card game with a built-in emotional language. Hitting, standing, overcommitting, cheating the odds and reading the table already feel dramatic before the supernatural layer arrives. The game then adds artifacts, curses, changing card values, opponent manipulation and underworld characters with their own stories.
That makes it a smart fit for the Slay the Spire crowd craving a different card vocabulary. It is not asking you to learn a giant ruleset from scratch. It is taking something most people understand in seconds, then twisting it until every hand feels like a bad bargain with someone who knows more than they should.
Between underwater survival, open-road racing, space horror and smaller strategy swings, the middle of May has more personality than a release calendar usually suggests.