The special, almost intangible loveliness of the Plucky Squire isn't down to either the game design itself or the way it's presented. It's down to both of these things, combined so thoroughly, and with such imagination, that it's hard to stir them apart.

To put it another way, it's not just that this is a fantasy-action game in which your hero receives a bow and arrow from a beautiful elf. It's that, to win that bow and arrow, the hero first has to venture across the authentic wilderness of a child's cluttered bedroom desk, and into a cardboard castle. There, at the top of a tower formed by a stack of beloved books, the hero and the elf must do battle inside the stiff confines of a knock-off Magic: The Gathering card.

This completely rules. And that's just one moment from the preview build of the game I've been playing over the last few days that has elicited such a gasp of wonder and delight. A battle inside a battling card! And then I walk away from it with a golden bow. Yes please, Plucky Squire. Yes please.

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I've been playing Arco on and off for the last few weeks on Switch and PC. I'm loving it - I think Arco's pretty wonderful. But the builds I've been playing on are also rather buggy, and I haven't been able to get to the end, either because of show-stopper bugs or random crashes.

What we're going to do in this case is hold back the review until next week, when I'm able to play retail code and know how the final thing runs. Until then, I wanted to give you a brief taste of what this game is like and why I think tactics fans should be excited. Hopefully next week we'll find that the final code is a lot more stable.

I'm going to focus pretty tightly on the combat today, which is an absolute gem. Just to set the scene, though, Arco's a Western story of indigenous people and greedy colonisers, and it plays out across a number of acts with the player shifting between different roles in each act. You take on missions and move from one area to another, helping people, fighting, and generally learning the story of this place.

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I'm not sure how funny Buster Keaton movies are these days - I assume there are moments that still work as pure gags. But these films of his remain wonderful, because Keaton was kind of the Tom Cruise of his age - or rather Cruise, who namechecks Keaton often in interviews - is the closest thing we have to the original. Keaton's gags were almost always stunts, dangerous, brilliant, clearly visual stunts that moved the action forward while giving audiences something to gasp at. There's nothing on the surface to make me think of the World of Goo games, and yet I think of Keaton constantly when I play.

Keaton's world moves. I think that's it. Its physics are dependable - and predictable, which is important for gags and for games - but the ground itself cannot be trusted. If Keaton's sat on a steamboat's wheel and he thinks he's safe, we know that wheel's going to start turning. If he's climbing a ladder, we know that the ladder itself will start sinking into the mud. What then? Keaton has to vamp - to make the moment work. He has to over-engineer things to create a sense of new stability. That's where you get the gag, where you get the fun.

This is everywhere in World of Goo. At the heart of the first game, which helped usher in the Indie era, and at the heart of the second, which has just arrived, bringing with it both new ideas and a lot of fond memories - at the heart of both you're dealing with treacherous foundations. These games are bridge builders at their simplest. (Granted, they never stay simple for very long.) You have a pile of black goo lumps, and you can extend the lumps outwards to create rudimentary frames. The goal for each level is a pipe you have to reach, which will suck in any remaining goo balls. So build upwards in a tower to a pipe that's lurking above you! Build outward as a bridge across a nasty gap.

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At ten past nine every evening he sends you out into the darkening world. He's the presenter of Krypta FM - pronounced with the chopped staccato of every good radio announcer as Kryp! Ta! FM! - and you are his eager listener and hopeful protege. Sniff the evening air. Breathe deep! The small town world that lies sleeping all around you is just teeming with cryptids, surely. Anyone seen a mothman lately? A werewolf? Grab a camera and get out there - but be safe, okay?

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At ten past nine every evening he sends you out into the darkening world. He's the presenter of Krypta FM - pronounced with the chopped staccato of every good radio announcer as Kryp! Ta! FM! - and you are his eager listener and hopeful protege. Sniff the evening air. Breathe deep! The small town world that lies sleeping all around you is just teeming with cryptids, surely. Anyone seen a mothman lately? A werewolf? Grab a camera and get out there - but be safe, okay?

Read more

One of those rare clarifying moments in my life came when I was told that the whale in Moby Dick didn't symbolise anything. Or rather, it didn't symbolise any one single thing in a fixed and coherent way. The whale might symbolise a handful of things, and those things might contradict one another and you'd just have to live with it. Also the whale was simultaneously a whale - no just or merely a whale, because there is never anything "mere" to be had when a whale is involved.

This was a brilliant thing to learn, and I still think about it often. Symbolism and things like that were very exciting when I was first learning about art and literature, but the danger, I guess, is that they become binary, a kind of substitution cypher. If the whale is a single thing, then Moby Dick is a puzzle that can be solved and we can all move on to other things. But it's not a single thing. It contains multitudes, to borrow a handy phrase from a contemporary of Melville. This frees it and sets it loose in the wild oceans of the mind. It is forever a thing of inference and speculation, of contradiction and dark wonder.

I may have written about this before. No bother. At the moment, anyway, these thoughts very much remind me of Elden Ring, which is getting a DLC this week in the shape of Shadow of the Erdtree. Inference and speculation, contradiction and dark wonder. I have my own relationship with Elden Ring, as I do with almost all FromSoftware games. I have played them a bit, some of them really quite a bit, and always enthusiastically. And then I have inevitably stalled on a skill issue or a simple matter of cognitive overload: too many threads to keep track of, so when I step away for a week or two, further progress becomes unthinkable. But this is only part of my relationship with these games, and it may actually be the weaker part. I love FromSoftware stuff and I think I love it passionately. I just love to talk about it, think about it, and most of all hear about it.

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Periphery Synthetic, by ShiftBackTick, is a glorious thing. It's an exploration game and a playable EP. Existing somewhere between MirrorMoon, Soundvoyager for GBA, and Outer Wilds, it casts you out across a series of different planetary surfaces and asks you to make your own sense of everything.

When I play the current demo, the screen draws an undulating alien terrain in little blocks of light. But I can play the game even when I close my eyes. Periphery Synthetic is made to be fully playable without seeing the screen. Players can use echolocation and "terrain sonification" to navigate its spaces, while using screen readers to move through menus. It's a wonderful thing to try out, sounds changing in pitch to tell me whether I'm ascending or descending, whether I'm turning back on myself or headed somewhere new.

I found out about Periphery Synthetic in this year's Access-Ability Summer Showcase, which is created and hosted by accessibility consultant and author Laura Kate Dale. Like last year's show, it brings together a bunch of games that have brilliant accessibility options, and is itself available in ASL, BSL and audio-described versions.

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My position on things is that you can't really finish Spelunky. In Spelunky, a brilliantly malevolent yet dependable roguelike and platformer, there's always something more to try, something new you might learn.

Even so, the degree to which I personally had not finished Spelunky lay far beyond what most people would mean by not having finished the game. More clearly: until this week, I had not defeated Olmec, the very first final boss, if such a formulation is possible. Anyway, now I have. And so Spelunky is our game of the week as a result. Go and play Spelunky! It's still brilliant.

I don't know why I hadn't defeated Olmec until now. My clock reads 220 hours on Steam alone, and I've spent what feel like whole lifetimes playing the game on the 360 and Switch, and even the original version on PC. I would say I'm probably 400 hours in all told, and also: Olmec isn't even that hard to beat. Open up shortcuts and you can be there in minutes, and all you need to cheese him is five bombs. And also also: he's a reference to the final boss of Super Mario 3, which I defeated when I was 12 or thereabouts.

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Dystopika is a city-building toy, but it's also a place. It's a place loading before you drop your first superscraper in or pan the camera to frame the luminous smog of the eternal sunset. Just start the game up and there's a sense of urban life twinkling in the darkness, while the soundtrack moans and warps and chatters to itself. Dystopika is already here. It can feel complete before you've started.

A note at the start of the current Steam demo reveals that this design toy is the work of a single creator, Matt Marshall, and it's been inspired by a year of travelling in Asia and walking huge cities at night. The cities you can make in the game have a definite sci-fi, cyberpunk edge to them, but they wouldn't be too out of place in the work of photographer and game designer Liam Wong, a poet of the late night urban experience.

Everything is wonderfully straightforward. I suggest setting things to random, and then every click adds a skyscraper to the city you're building. You can go in deep and choose between a range of different districts, if you want, but a huge part of the appeal of cyberpunk has always struck me as being a sort of hypermodernism, with buildings of different eras, uses, and cultures smooshed together in the night. "Smooshed together" is an architectural term, incidentally.

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What's at stake? In Dungeons of Hinterberg, refreshingly little. But the more I played of this strange and lovely combination of dungeon diver and life sim, the more I realised that wasn't quite the case. Sure, in terms of the stakes of a lot of video games, Hinterberg's are definitely quite low. You're on holiday and your job, in essence, is to relax. But sometimes just getting away and having a break is really pretty important. A few hours in, I realised that I wanted to do it properly.

Dungeons of Hinterberg is a game about Luisa, who's training to be a lawyer and is young and thoroughly burned out. She's come to Hinterberg, which is a sweet Alpine town touched by magic, to do what all tourists here do. They stroll and eat cakes and sit by the lake, certainly. But they also descend into a range of dungeons to whack enemies around with swords and magic.

The dungeons I've played so far are delightful, combining puzzles and combat in a way that feels like you're playing a really good Zelda shrine. Dungeons often have their own gimmicks - one is about manipulating jelly-like platforms that pop in and out of the walls allowing you to access specific areas. Another is all about mine carts, with puzzles that involve switching the tracks around and opening gates.

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This piece is a retrospective rather than a review and contains spoilers for Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door.

Simply the thing I am? Oli Welsh, gone and much-missed (he didn't die), once made an excellent point to me about the Mario RPGs. There's this brilliant running joke in some of them that I had not spotted until he mentioned it. The joke's simple: nobody recognises Mario when he first arrives in a new location. They don't recognise him up to the moment when he jumps. Jumping is Mario's thing. Jumping, the games seem to be saying, is Mario. Without jumping, he could be anyone.

What this joke gets at is the notion that there's this...how to phrase this? I don't think it's fair to say that there's a hole at the centre of the character, because lots of people feel very strongly about Mario, particularly if they grew up with his games. He hasn't got a hole through the middle of him! But there is a plasticity to the character that allows you to do a lot of different stuff with him. Look at his visual design, which is brilliant but was also originally conceived because of animation limitations. Look at the ease with which a brother was conjured from him via a simple palette swap. Look at the way he's been dropped into sports games, educational games, RPGs over the years. It's because we know who he is, but there isn't so much of him to stop things from being harmonious wherever he ends up. Trevor Phillips from GTA 5 is a huge star, particularly in our house because my wife loves him. But you couldn't put him into an SSX. (Okay, bad example, that actually sounds freakin great.)

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Year three, at least, and I continue to play Dark Souls very, very slowly. Actually, that's not true. Sometimes I play in frantic bursts. At others I let it lie for months and months with no progress at all. I'm still relatively early on, deep in a dungeon that looks like the inside of someone's ear, about to fight a spidery boss. In Souls terms, I'm nowhere, a total novice. Yet I never would have gotten this far if it wasn't for bonfires.

Bonfires in Dark Souls are fascinating. In a game filled with incredibly good ideas, they may be my favourite incredibly good idea. They're actually at the heart of everything I love: I love the fact that in these games you move a little lens of available health around an incredibly deadly environment, always feeling like you're making progress, but simultaneously feeling like you're over-extending yourself. It's why progress feels so illicit: I got this far, but I'm sure I'm about to die in amongst all the new things I'm seeing. Bonfires are at the heart of that system, because they provide the base you return to, they provide the network of bases, like handholds on the game's rugged cliff face.

I love the way the environment interlocks, too: the way you'll head off upwards or downwards, see some incredible stuff, and feel thoroughly lost. But you trust the game and you know that if you keep going far enough, if you follow a trail with sufficient patience, it will inevitably oxbow in some fascinating way and bring you back to where you started, but facing in the other direction. Magic! Absolutely magic, if you ask me, and guess what: bonfires are at the heart of all that too. In a game of loops and snarls and dangerous tangles, they provide clear junction points, a moment to rest and say: ah, I'm here. I'm somewhere.

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There's a lot of good stuff out this week. For starters, Indika looks weird and fascinating, while Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, the latest from the geniuses at Simogo, promises to tie my brain into bows for the next few months: more on that game soon. Either of these would be an ideal game of the week. But then Danny DeVito entered the picture, with the hopeful suggestion that he would be playing Wario in a new Mario movie. And after that there was only one game - one game, and, simultaneously, hundreds.

(Quick aside here: Danny DeVito is probably up there with my favourite directors. He has never missed. But also, Throw Momma from the Train is a legit classic and a case study in how to creatively update Hitchcock. Please give it a(nother) watch soon. It's a Midnight Run-tier movie. "This is like Fred Flintstone's car wash!")

I remember being slightly freaked out by Wario when I first saw him as a kid. I think it was an advert for Mario Land on the Game Boy, and this digital Wario popped out at the end of the ad and properly did a number on me. Scroll forward, though, and his appearance on the GBA in the form of the first WarioWare game marks one of the most joyous moments in all of gaming.

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Calm seas and sunny skies. I had not been back to Redfall in a while before this week, when events meant I suddenly knew I had to check in again. Spring has finally arrived in Sussex, so when I turned the game on one morning and sat down to play, a warming sun was already slanting in through the windows. The promise of summer! Redfall, of course, worked its spell. On the screen, a US flag hung limply from a pole against louring skies, while a stray breeze gathered and then scattered dry leaves, eddying, dithering, round and round. It was like stepping out on an Autumn evening. October Country. Everything that I wanted.

My idea was just to wander. Like a lot of people I struggled with Redfall as a fast-paced co-op action game, because it so clearly didn't want to be a fast-paced co-op action game. In my mind, perhaps unfairly, I see the pitch that I imagine was handed down from above as being something like: can you get us Stranger Things and Left 4 Dead in a single package? Arkane Austin was - feels weird and grim to say "was" - a famously smart bunch of people. I cannot believe the team didn't know where its strengths lay. Its strengths lay in slowing down, savouring the environmental storytelling and tactical options. Slow down, and this is still the game that Redfall is - the storytelling part at least. But you have to play across the game design to see it. You can't meet it head on. You have to go hunting for the magic, ducking around the gunfights, which are fine, and the bottlenecks they create. But the magic is here waiting for you.

My favourite moments playing Redfall the first time around were all on the first of two open-world maps. I loved the locations that spoke to a realistic, slightly up-itself seaside town in New England. There were boss fights and magical-realism moments in which you travelled inside a doll's house, but I preferred finding the gorgeously restored old cinema, itself a kind of doll's house contrivance with its brass railings and tip-up seats and classic movie posters. My favourite bit of storytelling wasn't about how vampires had taken over and messed with the sun. It was about a safe house that had once been a painfully contemporary smoothie bar where influencers could film themselves drinking luminous protein-and-berry blends filled with activated almonds.

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I don't know if you're familiar with the Mr Gum books, but I read them with my daughter when she was seven or eight, and I don't think I'll ever get over them. They're ingenious and hilarious and weird, and they all have this lovely sense of having been written at great speed, just conjured on the spot, with jokes and characters and plots flinging themselves together on the page at the pace of the author's typing.

Sadly, this isn't a Mr Gum fan-site - yet - but I want to talk briefly about one of the books which has really stuck with me. I can't remember which book - oh no you'll just have to read them all then - but Polly, the hero, is lost in the woods, and whenever she tries to leave a landmark behind - it's a windmill - she walks off and then finds herself, moments later, back where she started.

It's a scene right out of The Prisoner, but what makes it special here is that each time she finds herself back at the windmill, we get a new chapter. So her confusion in the woods impacts the structure of the book, with a bunch of short repetitive chapters one after the other, while the joke is how long the book will keep this loop going.

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In the dripping midnight glade there is a telephone resting on the earth. It's an antique. I can tell that from the limited 2D pixel art. Although it's just a few lines and dots and smudges of light, I can imagine the weight of the receiver in my hands, almost feel that strange matte chill of the Bakelite.

The telephone is important here in Animal Well. It's how you save the game, for starters. But the more I have explored, making those long looping journeys left, right, up and down, the more I have found myself heading further out in these directions than I had assumed was possible, and the more I worried that I had left the actual game design behind and was moving through a landscape of personalised glitches and oddities? The more I did all this, the more the sight of another telephone came as a sweet relief. A save point, yes, but also a sign that someone had been this way before me. A sign that even as I navigated bright mysteries, I was still on the right track.

There's more. The telephone is also a sign of a second world imposed on the first one, of technology, communication, cablings and wires and electrons, of messages buzzing through an artificial network threaded into this glade and into this world of trees and grass, rock and ruin that lies beyond it. If you're trying to understand Animal Well, to get to the bottom of it - good luck with that one by the way - or if you're trying to just get even the slightest grip on this game's dense, intriguing, endlessly playful and engrossing world, the telephone is probably a good place to start.

Read more

Sequels are always difficult, I imagine. How to capture the core brilliance of a thing and build on it? What to add, what to remove? I've always loved Sid Meier's rule of thirds for Civilisation games: one third remains the same, one third is improved, one third is totally new. But not every game is Civilisation.

Sequels for roguelikes, though? Cor. Difficulty cubed. This is because roguelikes, with campaigns composed of endlessly repeated runs, all with their own fine chances for variation? Roguelikes are games that already carry an infinite number of sequels within them. I have Spelunky runs even now which feel like sequels to the first game, where something unprecedented happens, and where I feel like I see the whole challenge in a new way, completely reframed. If Spelunky struggles with this, what hope for everyone else?

Hades 2 seems very happy being a sequel, even a sequel to a roguelike. Everything from the swift-pen art style and the evocative, pensive soundtrack, down to the menus and the fonts and the UI choices speak of a desire for continuity. After years of racing through baddy-filled rooms packed with classical horrors as Zagreus, there was almost no period of reorientation needed before I started racing through baddy-filled rooms packed with classical horrors as Melinoë. I've spoken to a few people about this, actually, and it's almost perverse: the sense of being right at home from the off is almost the most confusing thing about Hades 2.

Read more

It was Digital Foundry's John Linneman who first made me see the truth. The truth, in this case, being that Crackdown, the deliriously great open-world blaster, is not a platform game so much as it's a climbing game. Crackdown casts you as a supercop in a city in which you can race up skyscrapers as easily as if you're tooling down the street in a sportscar. Crackdown is all about the window-ledge grip, followed by the boost, followed by the grip and so on until you hit the troposphere. When you scan the side of a building in Crackdown's Pacific City, you're not really looking for platforms, but handholds.

Funny it should take me so long to realise this. I've always been a fan of climbing - not doing it, although I have dabbled, skill-lessly, in my youth, but following it, reading about it, dreaming about it. I have friends who are climbers and I am always full of questions. I've read the complete works of people like Alex Honnold and Chris Bonington. Bonington was my mum's childhood - and adulthood - hero, incidentally. I'm named after him, and on my desk at home I have a postcard of him as a young man, wearing a dark, surprisingly formal jacket, up somewhere high, and with a thick cord of ropes over his shoulder. It's a picture of pure adventure. What a disappointment to him I must be.

At that desk, though, I do quite a bit of climbing. I climbed through Crackdown, without realising it, and recently I climbed through Jusant. With the release of a new climbing game this week, I've been thinking about how it all fits together. Climbing feels, of all activities, uniquely physical to me, because it's about rock and about hands and about clasping. It's about connections, points of contact, cleaving to a part of the natural world and holding on tight. How do games do that?

Read more

Calm seas and sunny skies. I had not been back to Redfall in a while before this week, when events meant I suddenly knew I had to check in again. Spring has finally arrived in Sussex, so when I turned the game on one morning and sat down to play, a warming sun was already slanting in through the windows. The promise of summer! Redfall, of course, worked its spell. On the screen, a US flag hung limply from a pole against louring skies, while a stray breeze gathered and then scattered dry leaves, eddying, dithering, round and round. It was like stepping out on an Autumn evening. October Country. Everything that I wanted.

My idea was just to wander. Like a lot of people I struggled with Redfall as a fast-paced co-op action game, because it so clearly didn't want to be a fast-paced co-op action game. In my mind, perhaps unfairly, I see the pitch that I imagine was handed down from above as being something like: can you get us Stranger Things and Left 4 Dead in a single package? Arkane Austin was - feels weird and grim to say "was" - a famously smart bunch of people. I cannot believe the team didn't know where its strengths lay. Its strengths lay in slowing down, savouring the environmental storytelling and tactical options. Slow down, and this is still the game that Redfall is - the storytelling part at least. But you have to play across the game design to see it. You can't meet it head on. You have to go hunting for the magic, ducking around the gunfights, which are fine, and the bottlenecks they create. But the magic is here waiting for you.

My favourite moments playing Redfall the first time around were all on the first of two open-world maps. I loved the locations that spoke to a realistic, slightly up-itself seaside town in New England. There were boss fights and magical-realism moments in which you travelled inside a doll's house, but I preferred finding the gorgeously restored old cinema, itself a kind of doll's house contrivance with its brass railings and tip-up seats and classic movie posters. My favourite bit of storytelling wasn't about how vampires had taken over and messed with the sun. It was about a safe house that had once been a painfully contemporary smoothie bar where influencers could film themselves drinking luminous protein-and-berry blends filled with activated almonds.

Read more

I don't know if you're familiar with the Mr Gum books, but I read them with my daughter when she was seven or eight, and I don't think I'll ever get over them. They're ingenious and hilarious and weird, and they all have this lovely sense of having been written at great speed, just conjured on the spot, with jokes and characters and plots flinging themselves together on the page at the pace of the author's typing.

Sadly, this isn't a Mr Gum fan-site - yet - but I want to talk briefly about one of the books which has really stuck with me. I can't remember which book - oh no you'll just have to read them all then - but Polly, the hero, is lost in the woods, and whenever she tries to leave a landmark behind - it's a windmill - she walks off and then finds herself, moments later, back where she started.

It's a scene right out of The Prisoner, but what makes it special here is that each time she finds herself back at the windmill, we get a new chapter. So her confusion in the woods impacts the structure of the book, with a bunch of short repetitive chapters one after the other, while the joke is how long the book will keep this loop going.

Read more

In the dripping midnight glade there is a telephone resting on the earth. It's an antique. I can tell that from the limited 2D pixel art. Although it's just a few lines and dots and smudges of light, I can imagine the weight of the receiver in my hands, almost feel that strange matte chill of the Bakelite.

The telephone is important here in Animal Well. It's how you save the game, for starters. But the more I have explored, making those long looping journeys left, right, up and down, the more I have found myself heading further out in these directions than I had assumed was possible, and the more I worried that I had left the actual game design behind and was moving through a landscape of personalised glitches and oddities? The more I did all this, the more the sight of another telephone came as a sweet relief. A save point, yes, but also a sign that someone had been this way before me. A sign that even as I navigated bright mysteries, I was still on the right track.

There's more. The telephone is also a sign of a second world imposed on the first one, of technology, communication, cablings and wires and electrons, of messages buzzing through an artificial network threaded into this glade and into this world of trees and grass, rock and ruin that lies beyond it. If you're trying to understand Animal Well, to get to the bottom of it - good luck with that one by the way - or if you're trying to just get even the slightest grip on this game's dense, intriguing, endlessly playful and engrossing world, the telephone is probably a good place to start.

Read more

Sequels are always difficult, I imagine. How to capture the core brilliance of a thing and build on it? What to add, what to remove? I've always loved Sid Meier's rule of thirds for Civilisation games: one third remains the same, one third is improved, one third is totally new. But not every game is Civilisation.

Sequels for roguelikes, though? Cor. Difficulty cubed. This is because roguelikes, with campaigns composed of endlessly repeated runs, all with their own fine chances for variation? Roguelikes are games that already carry an infinite number of sequels within them. I have Spelunky runs even now which feel like sequels to the first game, where something unprecedented happens, and where I feel like I see the whole challenge in a new way, completely reframed. If Spelunky struggles with this, what hope for everyone else?

Hades 2 seems very happy being a sequel, even a sequel to a roguelike. Everything from the swift-pen art style and the evocative, pensive soundtrack, down to the menus and the fonts and the UI choices speak of a desire for continuity. After years of racing through baddy-filled rooms packed with classical horrors as Zagreus, there was almost no period of reorientation needed before I started racing through baddy-filled rooms packed with classical horrors as Melinoë. I've spoken to a few people about this, actually, and it's almost perverse: the sense of being right at home from the off is almost the most confusing thing about Hades 2.

Read more

It was Digital Foundry's John Linneman who first made me see the truth. The truth, in this case, being that Crackdown, the deliriously great open-world blaster, is not a platform game so much as it's a climbing game. Crackdown casts you as a supercop in a city in which you can race up skyscrapers as easily as if you're tooling down the street in a sportscar. Crackdown is all about the window-ledge grip, followed by the boost, followed by the grip and so on until you hit the troposphere. When you scan the side of a building in Crackdown's Pacific City, you're not really looking for platforms, but handholds.

Funny it should take me so long to realise this. I've always been a fan of climbing - not doing it, although I have dabbled, skill-lessly, in my youth, but following it, reading about it, dreaming about it. I have friends who are climbers and I am always full of questions. I've read the complete works of people like Alex Honnold and Chris Bonington. Bonington was my mum's childhood - and adulthood - hero, incidentally. I'm named after him, and on my desk at home I have a postcard of him as a young man, wearing a dark, surprisingly formal jacket, up somewhere high, and with a thick cord of ropes over his shoulder. It's a picture of pure adventure. What a disappointment to him I must be.

At that desk, though, I do quite a bit of climbing. I climbed through Crackdown, without realising it, and recently I climbed through Jusant. With the release of a new climbing game this week, I've been thinking about how it all fits together. Climbing feels, of all activities, uniquely physical to me, because it's about rock and about hands and about clasping. It's about connections, points of contact, cleaving to a part of the natural world and holding on tight. How do games do that?

Read more

Calm seas and sunny skies. I had not been back to Redfall in a while before this week, when events meant I suddenly knew I had to check in again. Spring has finally arrived in Sussex, so when I turned the game on one morning and sat down to play, a warming sun was already slanting in through the windows. The promise of summer! Redfall, of course, worked its spell. On the screen, a US flag hung limply from a pole against louring skies, while a stray breeze gathered and then scattered dry leaves, eddying, dithering, round and round. It was like stepping out on an Autumn evening. October Country. Everything that I wanted.

My idea was just to wander. Like a lot of people I struggled with Redfall as a fast-paced co-op action game, because it so clearly didn't want to be a fast-paced co-op action game. In my mind, perhaps unfairly, I see the pitch that I imagine was handed down from above as being something like: can you get us Stranger Things and Left 4 Dead in a single package? Arkane Austin was - feels weird and grim to say "was" - a famously smart bunch of people. I cannot believe the team didn't know where its strengths lay. Its strengths lay in slowing down, savouring the environmental storytelling and tactical options. Slow down, and this is still the game that Redfall is - the storytelling part at least. But you have to play across the game design to see it. You can't meet it head on. You have to go hunting for the magic, ducking around the gunfights, which are fine, and the bottlenecks they create. But the magic is here waiting for you.

My favourite moments playing Redfall the first time around were all on the first of two open-world maps. I loved the locations that spoke to a realistic, slightly up-itself seaside town in New England. There were boss fights and magical-realism moments in which you travelled inside a doll's house, but I preferred finding the gorgeously restored old cinema, itself a kind of doll's house contrivance with its brass railings and tip-up seats and classic movie posters. My favourite bit of storytelling wasn't about how vampires had taken over and messed with the sun. It was about a safe house that had once been a painfully contemporary smoothie bar where influencers could film themselves drinking luminous protein-and-berry blends filled with activated almonds.

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I don't know if you're familiar with the Mr Gum books, but I read them with my daughter when she was seven or eight, and I don't think I'll ever get over them. They're ingenious and hilarious and weird, and they all have this lovely sense of having been written at great speed, just conjured on the spot, with jokes and characters and plots flinging themselves together on the page at the pace of the author's typing.

Sadly, this isn't a Mr Gum fan-site - yet - but I want to talk briefly about one of the books which has really stuck with me. I can't remember which book - oh no you'll just have to read them all then - but Polly, the hero, is lost in the woods, and whenever she tries to leave a landmark behind - it's a windmill - she walks off and then finds herself, moments later, back where she started.

It's a scene right out of The Prisoner, but what makes it special here is that each time she finds herself back at the windmill, we get a new chapter. So her confusion in the woods impacts the structure of the book, with a bunch of short repetitive chapters one after the other, while the joke is how long the book will keep this loop going.

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In the dripping midnight glade there is a telephone resting on the earth. It's an antique. I can tell that from the limited 2D pixel art. Although it's just a few lines and dots and smudges of light, I can imagine the weight of the receiver in my hands, almost feel that strange matte chill of the Bakelite.

The telephone is important here in Animal Well. It's how you save the game, for starters. But the more I have explored, making those long looping journeys left, right, up and down, the more I have found myself heading further out in these directions than I had assumed was possible, and the more I worried that I had left the actual game design behind and was moving through a landscape of personalised glitches and oddities? The more I did all this, the more the sight of another telephone came as a sweet relief. A save point, yes, but also a sign that someone had been this way before me. A sign that even as I navigated bright mysteries, I was still on the right track.

There's more. The telephone is also a sign of a second world imposed on the first one, of technology, communication, cablings and wires and electrons, of messages buzzing through an artificial network threaded into this glade and into this world of trees and grass, rock and ruin that lies beyond it. If you're trying to understand Animal Well, to get to the bottom of it - good luck with that one by the way - or if you're trying to just get even the slightest grip on this game's dense, intriguing, endlessly playful and engrossing world, the telephone is probably a good place to start.

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Sequels are always difficult, I imagine. How to capture the core brilliance of a thing and build on it? What to add, what to remove? I've always loved Sid Meier's rule of thirds for Civilisation games: one third remains the same, one third is improved, one third is totally new. But not every game is Civilisation.

Sequels for roguelikes, though? Cor. Difficulty cubed. This is because roguelikes, with campaigns composed of endlessly repeated runs, all with their own fine chances for variation? Roguelikes are games that already carry an infinite number of sequels within them. I have Spelunky runs even now which feel like sequels to the first game, where something unprecedented happens, and where I feel like I see the whole challenge in a new way, completely reframed. If Spelunky struggles with this, what hope for everyone else?

Hades 2 seems very happy being a sequel, even a sequel to a roguelike. Everything from the swift-pen art style and the evocative, pensive soundtrack, down to the menus and the fonts and the UI choices speak of a desire for continuity. After years of racing through baddy-filled rooms packed with classical horrors as Zagreus, there was almost no period of reorientation needed before I started racing through baddy-filled rooms packed with classical horrors as Melinoë. I've spoken to a few people about this, actually, and it's almost perverse: the sense of being right at home from the off is almost the most confusing thing about Hades 2.

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It was Digital Foundry's John Linneman who first made me see the truth. The truth, in this case, being that Crackdown, the deliriously great open-world blaster, is not a platform game so much as it's a climbing game. Crackdown casts you as a supercop in a city in which you can race up skyscrapers as easily as if you're tooling down the street in a sportscar. Crackdown is all about the window-ledge grip, followed by the boost, followed by the grip and so on until you hit the troposphere. When you scan the side of a building in Crackdown's Pacific City, you're not really looking for platforms, but handholds.

Funny it should take me so long to realise this. I've always been a fan of climbing - not doing it, although I have dabbled, skill-lessly, in my youth, but following it, reading about it, dreaming about it. I have friends who are climbers and I am always full of questions. I've read the complete works of people like Alex Honnold and Chris Bonington. Bonington was my mum's childhood - and adulthood - hero, incidentally. I'm named after him, and on my desk at home I have a postcard of him as a young man, wearing a dark, surprisingly formal jacket, up somewhere high, and with a thick cord of ropes over his shoulder. It's a picture of pure adventure. What a disappointment to him I must be.

At that desk, though, I do quite a bit of climbing. I climbed through Crackdown, without realising it, and recently I climbed through Jusant. With the release of a new climbing game this week, I've been thinking about how it all fits together. Climbing feels, of all activities, uniquely physical to me, because it's about rock and about hands and about clasping. It's about connections, points of contact, cleaving to a part of the natural world and holding on tight. How do games do that?

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One of the hallmarks of a great studio - I'm deciding this as I type it, but it definitely sounds legit - is that they can take on surprising themes and topics and genres and still feel like themselves. This week's game of the week had to be a Roll7 joint, and while I could have picked literally any of the team's games - they never made anything that was less than glorious - I've gone for Not a Hero, which was published by Devolver Digital back in the day.

For players expecting another skateboarding game after the first two OlliOllis, Not a Hero was both a genuine surprise and something that ultimately felt just right. It's an action game - there aren't many games that cram in more action - and it plays out in a side view as you race through various locations, smashing windows, taking cover, picking your moment and blasting enemies to pieces.

Yes, it's an action game, but it's also a sports game, of the same strain as the OlliOllis that preceded it. You're racing against the clock, but you're also following, or trying to uncover, that magical thread that will take you from the start of the level to the finish. The rules are very clear and the fail states are very obvious. Picking up ammo and stuff like that triggers a little timer, while your rechargeable health is there to separate a one-off mistake from an approach that is just a terrible idea. OlliOlli is yet another one of those action games - there are a lot of tactics games in this category too - that really reminds me of American Football. The full-ahead approach, but with a bit of thought to it. The precision use of non-precision aggression.

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A few weeks back, Mattel launched a new version of the board game Scrabble, called Scrabble Together. While it's far from the first new version of Scrabble ever made, it's a super interesting idea. Scrabble Together arrives on the back of the traditional Scrabble board, and the concept is that it's a cooperative affair. Players sit down with their own letter stacks but then work together. Each turn, everyone has to place a word on the board, but rather than using the numbers on the letters to build a score, the word must complete the conditions listed on at least one of the goal cards that's currently in play. It's the Scrabble equivalent of joining together in Monster Hunter to take down something massive.

Speaking of touchstones, these goal cards are very similar to the ongoing missions you get in a lot of mobile games. One card might ask you to play a word containing a tile worth 5 points. Another might ask you to play a six-letter word. You have three on the go at any one time, and they're replaced when they're completed. Complete 20 goals and you all win the game together. Fail a goal card - and fail after you've run out of one-shot helper cards, which do things like refresh the goal pile, allow players to trade tiles or make blanks - and you all lose the game together.

As has been widely reported, this has made some people a little angry. Fox News' Greg Gutfeld apparently said that playing a game without scoring "is anti-human", which is a fairly serious context in which to place a word game. Mattel, meanwhile, has said that Scrabble Together is for people who might find the original game intimidating. I think this is fair. And, actually, I think Scrabble Together has a very specific use that I'm extremely keen on.

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Sad news this morning with the death of Paul Auster at 77. Like a lot of people, I suspect, I discovered his books in my late teens and early 20s. I read The Music of Chance at school after I'd spotted it at the library and, of all things, found the cover intriguing. Later, at university, I had a lecturer who was a serious Auster fan and was foolish enough to lend me his signed copies of Leviathan and Moon Palace. I say foolish - I treated those books like holy objects while I had them in my house.

For a few years I read everything he wrote, going backwards mainly. I loved his strangely serious playfulness - postmodernism was big at the time and this was his response, I think. I remember thinking it was incredibly freeing the way he would just drop a character with his name into one novel, and then another. I read his autobiographical stuff, which read like fiction, and his fiction which had these long stretches that felt like real life, and had probably come from real life.

Two books stick with me though: Moon Palace, which I think is the classic Auster, compact and roving, curious and distinctly miserable in spots, wildly inventive yet moving, somehow, within tight rules imposed by the author prior to writing. And Hand to Mouth, a memoir that I remember as being largely concerned with being really skint in your 20s.

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Endless Ocean Luminous is the third game in a series I have never played, but that hasn't mattered a bit. It's a diving game and I can barely swim, but that hasn't mattered a bit. It's a game in which nothing much happens, and what does happen only happens very slowly. Don't mind. It's a game with a thirty-player multiplayer component, which is theoretically the big draw, but feels like the wrong way to play.

All of this is to say: I'm not sure that Endless Ocean Luminous is particularly good - and I certainly wouldn't want every game to be like this. But I've really enjoyed it so far.

This is a diving game. You're deep beneath the oceans, wet-suited up, and you're a scientist of some kind, which in this game means you point at fish. Fish come past? Point at them. Flock of fish in the distance? (Is flock the right term?) Point at them too. Point at big fish and small fish. Point at sharks and minnows. You get the idea.

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I'm switching back and forth between Hades 2 and Rotwood at the moment, which is probably why I've found myself tangled up in how the two games are similar and how they're different.

On paper, you can make them sound really quite similar: Like Hades 2, Klei's latest is an action-RPG in which you take your character and head out through a series of enemy-filled rooms, defeating all the monsters you see in each room to earn a choice of perk or upgrade of some kind. You slowly build your character for each run, then, by picking upgrades and then picking the next room based on the kind of upgrade it's going to offer. Throw in bosses and permanent character upgrades and different weapon classes and, hey, isn't that sort of Hades?

In reality, though, nobody would mistake these two games. It's a bit like how I can instantly tell whether the LA-based luxury realtor reality show on television is Selling Sunset, Million Dollar Listing or Buying Beverly Hills: sometimes the similarities are superficial, while the differences go deep.

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Hello! Our Game of the Week is Life Eater, and let's just look again at that opening sentence from Bertie's review: "Few game ideas will turn your head quicker than one about abducting people and murdering them." That feels fair! There are lots of games about murdering people, sure, but the rest of it?

Bertie wasn't entirely convinced by Life Eater, I gather, but I think he remains pleased that it exists. And that brings me nicely to the topic of this week's column: I am incredibly glad that Life Eater's developer, Strange Scaffold, exists. And I'm going to try and explain why I feel that so strongly.

Strange Scaffold is the development label of Xalavier Nelson Jr., who is one of the most interesting creators in games. The label's made lots of games and it seems to make them quickly. It doesn't feel like it was that long ago that I was reviewing El Paso, Elsewhere, and before that it doesn't seem like it was that long ago that I was playing Skatebird or Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator.

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Hello! Our Game of the Week is Life Eater, and let's just look again at that opening sentence from Bertie's review: "Few game ideas will turn your head quicker than one about abducting people and murdering them." That feels fair! There are lots of games about murdering people, sure, but the rest of it?

Bertie wasn't entirely convinced by Life Eater, I gather, but I think he remains pleased that it exists. And that brings me nicely to the topic of this week's column: I am incredibly glad that Life Eater's developer, Strange Scaffold, exists. And I'm going to try and explain why I feel that so strongly.

Strange Scaffold is the development label of Xalavier Nelson Jr., who is one of the most interesting creators in games. The label's made lots of games and it seems to make them quickly. It doesn't feel like it was that long ago that I was reviewing El Paso, Elsewhere, and before that it doesn't seem like it was that long ago that I was playing Skatebird or Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator.

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I don't know if you've ever taken off in a plane from somewhere like Gatwick. There's this moment, about thirty seconds into the flight, where you get enough height and you look down and England has become a cheery parody of itself. It's all green and grass and roughly stitched together fields. There's even a train tootling through it all, although sadly you'll only see smoke coming from it if the electrical wiring has caught fire.

Anyway, this is what I think of as being Dorfromantik height. It's the height from which that beautiful, thoughtful, mesmerising puzzle game is played. The farms and forests and rivers and towns all pass by beneath you as if you're just out from Gatwick. You're making your decisions about where to play tiles as you wait for the seatbelt sign to come off and the coffee trolley to make its first pass.

Planetiles is quite similar to Dorfromantik in many ways. It's not a clone by any means, but it feels like it belongs on the same family tree as Dorfromantik. You scroll over the landscape and place tiles, which all come in different shapes here, made up of different congregations of squares. There are field tiles, sand tiles, mountain tiles, forest tiles. As you place them you get points for bunching like with like, but there are also missions that rack up points more quickly. Make a five-tile field. Box in at least one sand tile. It's a perfect game to prod your way through over morning coffee, seemingly breezy but actually subtly taxing. Before you know it you've run out of tiles, or out of space and the whole thing's over. Restart.

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There is an island in the Aegean, an island of stray cats and tumbling bougainvilleas, that has an instagram account devoted exclusively to its many doors. This account is a catalogue of variations on a theme, the theme being how you get in and out of a building, the variation being - well... Where to start? Modern doors, ancient doors. Doors of wood and doors of iron. Doors that are perfectly kept up, doors that are leaning, addled, barely hanging in there. Doors set with glass and doors set with grillwork. The doors are great individually, but it's together that they truly shine. You glimpse something of us as a species, I think, in their endless twists and reconfiguring, their fitness and anti-fitness for purpose.

If you are the kind of person who likes the idea of exploring the endless variation found within doors, Summerhouse is for you. And it's not just doors. Oh, the doors are great. They're nifty! Metal doors with an industrial feel, but also wooden double doors, perfect for an old junk shop. Sliding convenience-store doors. A round Hobbit number - painted green, of course.

But there are windows, rooves, finials and oddments like signage, rattling drainpipes, posters and hoardings. Fancy a polite little noticeboard? Fancy a lone payphone set, lollipop-style, upon a stick? Fancy trees and shrubs, wild and in pots? Walls of stone, walls of wood. Keep scrolling; even before the unlocks bring you a ghost amongst long grass and a cat lounging on an air-con unit, it's all here.

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Odd as it sounds, part of me misses those old licensed games. Everyone who came up in games journalism in the early 2000s will have been given some of these things to review, and it was always a fascinating challenge. I remember a former editor of Eurogamer telling me that the first game they ever put a score on was The Golden Compass, the spin-off game for the wonky big-budget adaptation of His Dark Materials. Now I think about it, my first review was Miami Vice for the PSP. Better than The Golden Compass, at least. Actually, it was quite good?

That was the thing. Sometimes these games were quite good. Sometimes they were more than quite good. But there was always a sense around my friends who took video games really seriously that licensed games were not worth messing with. Over the years I kept a fond eye on them, though. I have pleasant memories of a Hey Arnold! GBA game, and then there was the developer who once told me that licensed games occupied a role that sounds a bit like the role occupied by the church in medieval painting: providing a nice commission where you could work out some of your own interests while crowbarring in what the patron wanted. So maybe you used a film license to nail rain animation for your own non-licensed game. Raphael would be proud.

Things are different now, though, and that rambly introduction brings me to our game of the week: Snufkin: Melody of Moominvalley. Somehow, I played this simultaneously aware that it was a game about Moomins, but unaware, really, that it was a licensed game. I knew that the Moomins were a thing, I just didn't think of that thing as being a license.

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You can't throw a rock in Brighton without hitting a moomin. There are boutiques and galleries devoted to them. They're on our teacups and our beach towels. They're on plant pots by our windows and on the rough-papered covers of fancy Tove Jansson reprints stocking our libraries. It's not surprising that they've made it to video games, but it is surprising - to a moomin outsider, at least - to discover that the sort of thing that middle-class Southern idiots like me lap up so readily has a little bite to it. Snufkin: Melody of Moominvalley, a musical stealthy exploration game, is the best kind of surprise.

What kind of bite does the world of the moomins bring? Yesterday, I was wandering along in Moonminvalley taking Snufkin, the series' pipe-smoking philosopher, for a bit of a stroll. Beyond the rocks and trees we spied a carefully laid-out park, the shrubs suddenly cut into polite shapes, the desire paths we'd followed through scrub and long grass replaced with neat little paving slabs riddled between polite lawns. Trees suddenly had low fences around their bases. There were fences around everything, in fact, and patrolling police officers, too, or people who looked very much like it. Park officers!

This called for stealth - for muddling out patrol routes, avoiding visibility cones and sneaking from A to B. But it also called for a series of set-piece moments in which Snufkin reached a sign of some kind - a sign telling people not to loiter, or step off the path, or whatever else it is that signs tell people not to do. Whenever Snufkin reached one of these signs, he pulled them out of the ground. And once he got them all, there was a fabulous cut-scene that showed Snufkin trashing the park in general, wiping it off the surface of Mooninvalley, and returning the whole thing to a place of messy, freeform nature. What a brilliant goal for a game such as this.

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Cataclismo is the new game from Digital Sun, the team behind Moonlighter, so I was waiting for the twist from the moment I started. Moonlighter's a straight-up dungeon crawler, until you crawl out of the dungeon with all your loot and have to face a far more terrifying foe than any monster you encountered in the depths: supply and demand. Moonlighter was a dungeon crawler, then, and also a game about stocking a shop and making a profit. Risk your life to find stock, and then return to the surface and try to find the right price for it. The horror!

So what's the twist with Cataclismo? My recent demo began in a dark autumnal woods. I'm controlling an archer, clicking to move them through forest paths between spectral, bronzing trees and dark abysses that make the whole thing feel very claustrophobic. Is this an action RPG? No, up ahead I find another troop type, a lobber, who flings bombs or rocks or somesuch. Height and distance come into play as we fend off an attack by mysterious horrors, who all look like plucked but uncooked turkeys. Oh, this is an RTS!

And it is. But then we come to a clearing with a broken bridge and no way to get across. Here is the twist! It's an RTS in which you can build. It's an RTS in which you have to build, in fact. Pretty soon I'm fixing the bridge with wooden pieces, making sure that each piece I place is supported and safe. Further on I get a staircase that needs repairing with stone, so I'm dealing with cheap, flimsy wood, and heavy, more dependable stone. Next comes a proper castle, already built, and night is falling so I place my troops and fend off hordes of those turkey enemies. It's tower defence! Stop it already.

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Up front: I have never played Final Fantasy 7. I'm one of those unbearable hipsters who has only played 12, and won't shut up about it. But with the new game out, I've discovered that I have fond memories of FF7, this massive game that I have never played. Also: although I didn't play it, there was a period, around its release, when I was super into the idea of it. And I watched it a lot once it was out. And these memories and how odd they are have made me realise that games have changed a lot over the years, and FF7 marks one of the really big changes.

I played computer games as a kid and video games quite a bit as a teen, but I checked out somewhere in the 16-bit era because there were other things going on. This meant when I went to university in 1996, I was flung together with games again: people in halls had battered SNESs, and a few had PlayStations. I didn't get back into games, but as someone interested in film at the time, I found these early 3D games completely fascinating just as artefacts that I watched unfold themselves as other people played.

Listen: this is all distant history to me now, and I'm not going to go back to untangle the chronology, so apologies if I have games and their releases in the wrong order. What follows is how I remember it, and the first PlayStation game I remember making a big impact on me - again, I didn't play it at the time - was Tomb Raider.

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There's a certain kind of game that has you running in circles. This isn't because it's poorly designed or lacking waypoints. It's because it's frantic, endlessly generous, and loves to throw horrible things in your path. It's unfair in the very best way. It's an arcade game. Specifically, it's a twin-stick.

All twin-stick shooters bow at the altar of running in circles, often the altar of running backwards in circles. Now I am a grown-up and know a little of the mysteries of baking, I often think of Robotron and its glorious ilk as being Churning Games. You're in the kitchen, spoon and bowl in hand, and you're getting the air into that egg mixture.

Going in circles isn't just the optimal way to play something like Robotron, it's also the most beautiful way to play. When you're going in circles you get to see the emergent heart beating at the centre of everything. Different enemy types, obeying slightly different rules of engagement, break into separate patterns. Grunts flock together into a bait ball. Brains seek out family members. Enforcers work their way to the corners. Hulks just hulk about, the big idiots.

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There's a lovely line in Rick Lane's review of Star Wars: Dark Forces. Actually, the piece has no shortage of lovely lines, but one stood out for me in particular. "The result is a game that looks sharp and fresh, but crucially, not new."

Dark Forces is our Game of the Week, of course, and I think this line gets at why. It's an old game - 1995, so it's as old as Elastica's first album, for those of us who use that metric. A remaster has to bring it up to date without losing that thrilling sense of oldness. The right kind of oldness, though. Complicated.

Remasters are on the rise. They have been on the rise for a number of years, as games have more and more history worth revisiting. But questions like this - of how to make a game look sharp and fresh, but not new, are going to get more important. Dark Forces hits the sweet spot perfectly, I think: look at the screens and it's clearly an old shooter, but your eyes don't reject it as being an interesting relic that's probably unplayable. Subtle tweaks have been made to ensure it looks modern-old rather than relic-old.

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A week into Balatro - Balatro were jesters and fools in ancient Rome; I googled it - I'd say that this is the Goldberg Variations of Poker. It's Poker: Possibility Space Edition. It's a roguelike deckbuilder that starts with the basic poker hands and then allows you to level up the winnings of those hands, add new cards to the deck and alter existing ones, and bring in a range of jokers that modify the game rules in bizarre ways. And yet, it's still poker underneath it all. (Actually, the solo dev says it's Big Two, and I will take their word for it.) So, like the Goldbergs, it's expansive, ingenious, eager to turn every closet over and every pocket inside out. But also, like the Goldbergs, its invention is a thing of precision, of sounding out specific possibilities. So it feels really, really big - bottomlessly big - and also extremely compact: localised, particular.

Over the last few weeks it has taken over the gaming world completely, and I can see why. A poker roguelike is such a brilliant idea you almost don't need to make it to see how clever it is. There are a few of these, and Balatro is comfortably the best I've played. It really is ingenious - and it's also ingeniously simple. Let us get into this.

It's poker. Honestly it is. And for the first rounds of a new run, before you've started to flare things in weird directions, you'll be playing pretty straight poker. You are dealt cards. You make poker hands. A flush? Nice. A straight? Absolutely fine. When it comes to real poker in the real world, I am the earnest, plodding friend of two pair. Two pair is it for me: nice try, not going to blow people's minds, you did your best.

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Hello. One of my favourite pieces of writing about games, not that anybody asked, is from Sid Meier. It's the fourth, I think, of his 10 rules for game design. The first rules have laid out the scene: choose a topic you have passion for, define your axioms, refine your axioms. All good stuff. And then, suddenly:

Double it or cut it in half.

This is what really good film cuts are made for. We have moved from the theoretical to the densely practical. We were at the blackboard, we were pontificating, and now we're right in it, locked in the kitchen, spaghetti sauce everywhere, and we're trying to turn things around before the cooker explodes. Double it. Or cut it in half. This moment calls for big things, not small things. This moment counts.

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I will always have a soft spot for simultaneous turn-based games. These are the games, taking a cue from the likes of Frozen Synapse, in which I make my move in secret, my enemy makes their move in secret, and then both moves play out at once and there's nothing we can do about it. The pleasure of these games comes from intuiting your enemy's move and foiling it. The humour comes from failing to do that utterly.

Arco takes this idea and makes it sing. It feels a lot more real-time than these games often do. During a battle, I move a cursor around that highlights how far I can move, and I shift through options covering things like heal, shield, and various kinds of attacks. In the Steam Next Fest demo I've been playing, I'm often fighting frogs and bugs, and learning to anticipate when a frog is going to jump and try to squash me and when it's going to explode and do me massive damage.

I am as poor at these games as you might imagine, even though I completely love them. But what gives me an almost-edge in Arco is that running away and getting a bit of distance is a legit useful tactic, because it allows mana to recharge while putting you outside of the radius of enemy attacks. Running away is something I have a natural talent for, and so the first few levels of the game passed in a kind of familiar bliss: I would rush in, try to attack, fumble it, and then leg it again.

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When my daughter was learning to write her own stories at school - learning composition, I guess, in the language of education - she'd come home with poetry and essays about animals and little bits of this and that, all of which she was fine with, but never more than fine. When it all clicked is when they wrote stories - specifically silly, scary stories with ghosts and people falling on their butts and all that kind of jazz.

Silly, slightly scary stuff really clicked in fact - not just with my daughter, but with the whole class. For a few glorious weeks, alongside spelling and long division and the bus-stop method (something to do with division too I think?), the class was busy turning out pulps. She loved it. They all loved it. I loved it.

This came to mind this week when we realised that Helldivers 2 wasn't just a success, but a massive, horizon-filling smash. This sequel to a game that I have fond memories of, but not a lot of other people seem to remember playing, is suddenly everywhere. It's our game of the week, inevitably.

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I will always have a soft spot for simultaneous turn-based games. These are the games, taking a cue from the likes of Frozen Synapse, in which I make my move in secret, my enemy makes their move in secret, and then both moves play out at once and there's nothing we can do about it. The pleasure of these games comes from intuiting your enemy's move and foiling it. The humour comes from failing to do that utterly.

Arco takes this idea and makes it sing. It feels a lot more real-time than these games often do. During a battle, I move a cursor around that highlights how far I can move, and I shift through options covering things like heal, shield, and various kinds of attacks. In the Steam Next Fest demo I've been playing, I'm often fighting frogs and bugs, and learning to anticipate when a frog is going to jump and try to squash me and when it's going to explode and do me massive damage.

I am as poor at these games as you might imagine, even though I completely love them. But what gives me an almost-edge in Arco is that running away and getting a bit of distance is a legit useful tactic, because it allows mana to recharge while putting you outside of the radius of enemy attacks. Running away is something I have a natural talent for, and so the first few levels of the game passed in a kind of familiar bliss: I would rush in, try to attack, fumble it, and then leg it again.

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When my daughter was learning to write her own stories at school - learning composition, I guess, in the language of education - she'd come home with poetry and essays about animals and little bits of this and that, all of which she was fine with, but never more than fine. When it all clicked is when they wrote stories - specifically silly, scary stories with ghosts and people falling on their butts and all that kind of jazz.

Silly, slightly scary stuff really clicked in fact - not just with my daughter, but with the whole class. For a few glorious weeks, alongside spelling and long division and the bus-stop method (something to do with division too I think?), the class was busy turning out pulps. She loved it. They all loved it. I loved it.

This came to mind this week when we realised that Helldivers 2 wasn't just a success, but a massive, horizon-filling smash. This sequel to a game that I have fond memories of, but not a lot of other people seem to remember playing, is suddenly everywhere. It's our game of the week, inevitably.

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The Switch is safely into its Vegas residency era now. So safely, in fact, that with the greatest hits out of the way it's offering up some deep cuts and B-sides. I am all for this. Following on from the Super Mario RPG remake, here's Mario vs. Donkey Kong, a gentle reworking of an old Game Boy Advance charmer. It's lovely stuff.

And it's interesting, too. It makes one think. Not just because it's Mario at its most puzzley, with each mini-challenge playing out like the weird equivalent of a Mario Sudoku or some other newspaper brainteaser. It makes me think because it's another reminder of how Mario, of all game series, is sort of a language that players like me have spent the last few decades learning to speak.

As with language, I'm still learning to recognise how much of the grammar I didn't consciously know that I understand, as it were. What I get in a game like this, then, is a series of actions and reactions I am surprised to learn I can anticipate. Ice will cause me to slide, sure. But when precisely did I learn that a certain kind of block will cause me to teleport, while another will vanish if a switch is flipped? Elsewhere, from a truly ancient part of my brain I somehow retained the information that I will climb up faster if I'm holding two ropes, but descend faster if I'm only holding one. This kind of recall? From a man who regularly calls his dog "doghead", because her precise name cannot be grasped in the moment? (It's Cricket - I just checked.)

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