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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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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Alan Wake developer Remedy Entertainment has announced it's acquired the full rights to its Control series from publisher 505 Games for €17m.

As detailed in an investor announcement on Remedy's website, the rights acquisition - which includes those for publishing, distribution, and marketing - cover the full Control franchise, including the supernatural third-person shooter's 2019 debut game, the upcoming Control 2 and multiplayer spin-off codenamed Condor, and all future titles in the series.

Remedy's publishing agreement with 505 Games for Control 2 and Condor terminates immediately, and 505 will continue to serve as the publisher of Control until 31st December this year, when the transition period ends.

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Hidetaka Miyazaki didn't envision originating an entire genre. Yet such is the popularity of the Dark Souls games - right up to the more recent Elden Ring - that they've become collectively known in the gaming community as Soulslikes. That's shorthand for games with calculating combat, high levels of challenge and repeated death, though this is of course reductive of the awe and grim majesty Miyazaki's games evoke.

Soulslikes are everywhere now. From indie games utilising specific mechanics, to larger projects specifically trying to out-do FromSoftware at its own game. That's testament to the influence of Miyazaki's work, though he remains humble when discussing his oeuvre with me ahead of announcing the release of Shadow of the Erdtree, Elden Ring's upcoming major expansion.

"We certainly didn't come up with the term Souslike and we didn't envision it as a new genre or a new term for the industry," he tells me. "So of course when it first started cropping up... we were very surprised.

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