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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I've had a week of vampires. I finally managed to get my thoughts together in a V Rising review after being quite frustrated with the game, then quite smitten by it, and then I wrote about vampires for Five of the Best, and I'll be writing about vampires again for Bertie's Evil Adventures. Blimey - let's hope I still have something incisor to say after all of that! I promise you that introduction wasn't just an elaborate set-up for a terrible pun. But as much as I want to write about vampires again for Game of the Week, there's another game I simply can't ignore (even though Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is trying its best to vye for my attention) and it's Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2.

You'll be forgiven for not even noticing it's come out. Microsoft hasn't particularly advertised it, which I find strange, given the lack of high profile exclusives Xbox currently has to crow about. Perhaps you were also somewhat distracted, like we were, by the news Eurogamer has a new owner in IGN. That's a development I'm sure you're keen to understand the finer points of - I'm planning to record an episode of Inside Eurogamer in a week's time to explore it more, once we have a bit more to say there. But: back to Hellblade 2.

Hellblade 2 reminds me of an old kind of game, which isn't supposed to sound in any way shady - it's actually complimentary. What I mean by it is Hellblade 2 is not surrounded by modern business model trappings, like live service elements and microtransactions. It's a one-and-done story-led, cinematic adventure, produced in a way that screams "that's enough", but still given room to be experimental with the form. I feel strange saying it but it's unusual. It's special.

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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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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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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

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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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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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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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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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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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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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.

Read more