Sony is pulling Horizon Forbidden West from its PS Plus subscription service in the coming weeks.

The first-party Sony game is now listed under the 'Last Chance to Play' section on PS Plus, along with the likes of NieR Replicant, Marvel's Midnight Suns and Alien Isolation.

This upcoming removal of Forbidden West comes just a few months after Horizon Zero Dawn was also removed from the service, which as Tom wrote at the time seemed a surprising move by Sony.

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The next Epic Games Store freebie as part of the company's ongoing Mega Sale promotion will be Marvel's Midnight Suns.

That's according to Dealabs' always-reliable billbil-kun, who notes the game will be available to download next week from Thursday 6th until Thursday 13th June.

If you're yet to give it a go, Marvel's Midnight Suns is a brilliant character-centric role-player with Firaxis' trademark turn-based combat. Actions are made by cards, yes, but don't worry too much about that. It's fun, it's well-written, and being able to build up a secret base full of interesting Marvel superheroes is a blast.

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I love Uatu, the Watcher. I love to reference him in conversations. I like to use him in elaborate Marvel-themed analogies when winning arguments. I love to put him in articles, although he often gets edited out. Uatu is one of my favourite Marvel characters. I am Uatu 4 Life.

Now, if you play Marvel Snap, the collectible card game based on Marvel's heroes, you'll know that there's an Uatu card in there. He's interesting, too. Uatu comes with one cost, two power, and when he's in your deck he reveals the right-most location to you at the start so you can plan ahead a little. Uatu's one of the first cards people generally get to play with, and he speaks in a cool voice when you use him, and the reveal effect is nice and dramatic. But there's a problem. He's not a junk card, but he's a card you should probably move past pretty early on in most cases. There are better cards out there that do more useful things and give you a bit more bang in the early game.

Here is my specific problem, though. As an Uatu mega-fan, I am never going to not use him. And this means that my deck basically has one fewer functional slots than most people's decks. Call it fan tax: a seat is always reserved for Uatu, and so my other cards have to work around him.

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The games industry is in a worrying state of flux right now. Beloved and storied studios are being shut down left, right and centre; others are having their teams gutted from the inside out. It's hard to know which games and teams will even still be around next month, let alone in a year's time, and it must be daunting in the extreme for new, independent developers trying to make their debut games.

But XCOM and Marvel's Midnight Suns designer Jake Solomon is used to dealing with chance and probabilities. During his 23-year career at Firaxis, Solomon helped transform the turn-based tactics genre into what it is today, teaching us just how dramatic a well-timed overwatch shot could be, as well as how to howl in agony as our gunners repeatedly missed a 99%, point-blank hit chance window. Now, he's taking an even bigger step into the unknown, as today he's not only unveiling his brand-new independent games company, Midsummer Studios, but he's also given us a tease of what he's working on: a next-generation life sim where players "can't help but write an interesting story" as they steer their characters through the ups and downs of modern life.

Well, perhaps it's not too much of a step into the unknown, as Solomon reveals to me that his new base of operations for Midsummer is actually the very same place where he first cut his teeth as a games designer. "This building we're in, these are actually the old Firaxis offices," he says. "This is where me and a bunch of people [at Midsummer] started our careers, and a lot of people at Midsummer are people that have worked with me for a long time." And his first hire? The son of his former mentor, Sid Meier.

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