Clean a whole planet with a toothbrush in Moon Sweepers, the PowerWash genre's latest crime against perfectionists

I don't much go for PowerWash Simulator-likes, but there is something appealingly unwholesome about a game in which you have to wipe the dust off an entire moon. Using a toothbrush. True, you can upgrade to beefier hoovering equipment in Moon Sweepers by cashing in shipments of lunar dirt, but that strikes me as a dangerous concession to brute mass production thinking – it risks consigning centuries of artisanal knowledge to, well, the dustbin.

Take pride in your craft, colleagues! If we become over-reliant on hoover-me-dos, we'll lose the skill of cleansing celestial objects by hand, and sooner or later, they'll give our jobs to the bots. You can keep your new-fangled vacuum mops. If anybody needs me, I'll be over here in the Sea of Tranquility, collecting individual motes with a pair of tweezers.

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This week in PC games: Run a shady cyberpunk boutique in Probably Stolen, autobattle Viking towns in Northgard Battlegrounds, and trash homophobic robots in Virtue and a Sledgehammer

I've been tricked. Deep within the fine print of the Health and Safety and Wild Eldritch Creature Control License Edwin convinced me to apply for is a stipulation that I alternate shifts of Maw care with him. I've unwittingly signed up to cleaning the beast's cage out once a fortnight, bringing you news of upcoming PC games while not hosing down the creature from a distance.

Well, as is my regulatory obligation, here are some of the PC games coming out this week that caught my eye while scrubbing out the the sluices.

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Mass Effect 5 was named Universe partly because it let players generate alternate timelines based on their choices in previous entries, technical director says

In case you missed it, an internal trailer for the new Mass Effect game which BioWare were working on prior to EA shutting them down hit the net late last week. It offered a peek at what the studio were cooking with this new entry, dubbed Mass Effect Universe. According to its technical director, one of the reasons the game was given that name was that it had a system aimed at letting players form alternate timelines based on their choices in previous Mass Effects.

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The Sunday Papers

Sundays are, again, for running taxi duty for relatives visiting from overseas. If I had a nickel for every time I had an early morning Gatwick run in tandem with a Sunday Papers post, I’d have two nickels, which isn’t a lot but it’s weird than I’m being paid in USD when I live in the United Kingdom. In that international spirit, here are some fine writings from around the globe.

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Abelina is a strange, platforming romp through a natural afterlife from a former League of Legends animator and the composer of Zach Cregger's Resident Evil

I have no particular thoughts on what the afterlife may look like, namely because if there is one, and I'm allowed to hang out in it, I don't want to be disappointed. What if I have the expectation that it's a hedonistic paradise and am met with only having a guy named Gary who only eats cheese sandwiches for company? How embarrassing! No, I'll leave the imagining to others on this particular front. Doing so bears some ripe fruit for me occasionally, too, as is the case today with Abelina, a surreal platformer about a man who died and finds himself tending to gardens and carving masks and trying "not to think about what this place might really be."

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"System Shock and Deus Ex, they were RPGs. People called them RPGs": Gloomwood's publisher isn't too keen on using the term immersive sim despite it being one

You know, I think at this point in my life there is a non-zero chance I will die before anyone is able to settle comfortably on what defines an immersive sim. I'm not going to even try to! The idea is too annoying and I'm sure someone will disagree with some aspect of it. And if you ask New Blood boss Dave Oshry, when it comes to trying to flog an immersive sim, it's probably best to not even refer to it as one.

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Paralives' first major update slips to next year, but when it comes you can expect some pretty meaty improvements for all of its main features

Since launch back in May of this year, life sim Paralives appears to have been trucking along nicely, with the dev team offering up fairly regular updates with all sorts of tweaks big and small. Certainly confidence-inspiring for an early access game, especially one as systems-driven as it is. And now, the Paralives team have outlined their plans for the game's first major update, which seem very catered to improving the core experience.

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