New Slots Round Up: 24th January – 30th January 2026

This week’s new releases mostly stick to known mechanics – can their themes and a few smart twists keep them feeling fresh, rather than formulaic? Let’s find out.

Celestial Buffalo from Relax Gaming follows in the footsteps of Pharaoh’s Last Wish from a couple of weeks ago – there’s a central progressive element with 5 stages, so landing wins unlocks new features like Stacked Symbols, Countdown Wilds, and an expanded grid. Basically the more you play, the more features enter the game.

On one hand, it gives a sense of expansion every few minutes, but in an era where attention spans are shorter than ever, I’m not sure it’s the best move. Essentially the game is pretty dry when you first load it up, so could this feature put off more players than it attracts?

Hacksaw loves to mine Japanese culture for its slot themes, often to great effect – Toshi Ways Club being a prime example. This time the studio has taken a hefty amount of inspiration from Junji Ito’s Uzumaki manga to create Dark Spiral. Uzumaki literally means ‘spiral’ in Japanese, and the iconic black and white art style from the series, along with the strange, trippy horror feel has been turned into a stunning slot, at least in terms of theme and visuals. Where things fall down a little is in the gameplay.

This is an all ways pays slot, and the main special feature is called Summoning Symbols. These can be 1×2, 1×3, or 1×4 when they land, and all instances reveal the same symbol while splitting into further rows. This gives the chance for multiple winning lines of that symbol, and it reminds me a lot of Nolimit City games and their xWays and xSplit mechanics.

It’s a neat system here, but this is all the game really has to offer, so Dark Spiral can feel a little one dimensional. That being said, it’s totally worth playing just to experience the creepy, Uzumaki-inspired theme.

Speaking of Nolimit City, let’s take a look at its new slot: Golden Shower. Not an appealing theme for me personally, but each to their own! As for the gameplay, we can describe this fairly succinctly as similar to Duck Hunters with the doubling multipliers on squares that house wins. However, instead of scatter pays, Golden Shower opts for cluster pays.

It’s a little surprising we’re getting this only two weeks after we got Duck Hunters: Happy Hour (the sequel to Duck Hunters). That series has been one of NLC’s biggest hits lately, so I guess this is the studio trying to cash in on that mechanic even more. That being said, the RTP and max win here are a little lower than Duck Hunters: Happy Hour. Also the theme is just plain gross and looks rather cheap to me.

Bringing things out of the gutter, Lemur Levels is the most enjoyable Bullshark Games slot I’ve played in a while. It works much like the classic Gems Bonanza game with 5 different Grid Boosters triggered by the action on the reels, and these Boosters affect the game in various ways: Multipliers, Wilds, Reloads, Replacements etc. The main character reminds me a lot of King Julien from Madagascar, but the background music is not at all like “I Like To Move It” – it’s actually very relaxing and chill.

There are some differences from Gems Bonanza worth noting. For example, this is a cluster pays game rather than scatter pays, and the bonus round is not triggered by building up a meter of wins, rather by landing scatters. Also the Grid Boosters are triggered by random Lemur King symbols rather than highlighted squares, but for the most part the analogy holds. In the bonus round, you cycle through the 5 Boosters and hope you score enough wins to make it to the next level, and it’s just great fun.

We round this section out with Joker X Love from BGaming; a slightly unexpected title, so I was curious to see how the ‘love’ concept would play out. I’m not the biggest fan of Joker games as they tend to be pretty basic, and it quickly became clear this was no exception.

Gameplay takes place on a 3 × 3 grid with classic fruit machine symbols and 5 paylines. As for the ‘love’ angle, it barely features at all – maybe this was designed as a loose Valentine’s Day tie-in? The bonus round is a simple 3-reel mini game where you land a 3-digit number that gets multiplied against your wager. Overall, it’s straightforward and ideal for players who don’t want to learn too many new rules.

Game of the Week

By contrast, there’s a lot going on in Lucy Luck and the Quest for Coins from Slotmill. To be honest, it probably helps to have played this game’s two sequels, Lucy Luck and the Crimson Diamond and Lucy Luck and the Temple of Mysteries – particularly the former.

While this new sequel switches to cluster pays (from scatter pays), it brings back the Treasure Chests feature from the Crimson Diamond game, but now the Treasure Chests unleash magical masks with their own special perks.

On top of that we have a Collect Meter, collecting wins to trigger perks like added Wilds, Multipliers, and Coins. Yes, the Collect Meter and Coins are big part of this new game, and we can say these features have been pulled from another previous Slotmill game: Coin Quest.

Here, Coins can form clusters just like the other base symbols here, but when you land a Coin cluster, the multiplier values on all the Coins will be combined and applied to the wager for that spin.

In the free spins, it’s easier to uncover Treasure Chests because the covering tiles don’t reset with each spin, and it’s easier to fill up the Collect Meter because it doesn’t reset either.

It’s one of those games you’ll just have to spend a while with to truly understand the flow, but everything has been balanced well. And as we’ve come to expect from Slotmill, the theme, with its excellent visuals and music, is atmospheric, even cinematic. Think the female version of Indiana Jones!

RTP here is an average 96.01%, but the max win is decent at 20,000x. All in all, this is another great sequel in an already strong series, with plenty of bonus buys to play just the way you want.

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