The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for firing up Twine again and thinking you know what, if this swanky IF plotter had been around when I was an undergraduate, I might have preserved all my exam revision notes in text adventure form. I still have two, reassuringly heavy boxes of tabbed and colour-coded index cards that you could plausibly lay out to form a maze, navigable by compass commands. Head down the western corridor from Middle English to the Renaissance, and – ah, bollocks, you have been eaten by a Grue. Surely somebody's thought of this, in the decade and change since Twine was released? I mean, we already have 3D museum exhibits extracted from Wikipedia.

Sundays are also for heading to the allotment and getting annoyed with the tomato plants, who have decided to go bonkers right at the end of the growing season. I thought you were done, pesky nightshades. I thought I could leave you alone for the rest of the year. Finally, Sundays are for sharing good criticism, like the below.

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Rain98 is a blue-hued, pre-Y2K, Serial Experiments Lain inspired visual novel about time travelling to the past to end the world

Picture this. You're me, and you boot up the demo for Rain98, an incredibly blue-looking, rainy visual novel set in Tokyo, 1998, about a woman who refers to herself as the Angolmois, a world-ending reference to the predictions of good ole Nostradamus. At one point you have to light this woman's cigarette in a lightly stylish sequence. You get to a bit where you're asked to put your name in, and you put it in because like its predecessors, this is surely a self-insert kind of situation. Only you get a Steam achievement for getting a game over for putting your name in. Rude! But curious, so you, and of course I mean I, pressed on.

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RimWorld meets Moebius-esque roguelite colony sim Trailblazers: Into The March welcomes you aboard its hulking landships with a chonky-sounding demo

With the devs behind RimWorld gearing up for their next game with a recent engine switch, it'd be entirely fair if you were hankering for something new (if still familiar enough) yourself. Trailblazers: Into The March is one such game, having introduced itself to us earlier this year, a mishmash of the aforementioned colony sim, Nausicaa, Moebius, Andrei Tarkovski, Jeff Vandermeer, and FTL: Faster Than Light by Edwin's measure. And now you don't just have to look at its trailers, because there's a demo for you to have a go at.

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As too much of the industry embrace their own death through genAI, Konami say it's real people that are most important for making good games

I've taken a habit, recently, to proclaim my desire to explode in lieu of anything more realistically violent I could wish upon myself when I feel stressed. And, in what would likely be more concerning if I were a sentient bomb talking to a bomb diffusal squad, I've been saying that a lot lately, primarily because of the copious amounts of AI nonsense I've been seeing… everywhere. Epic Games, the ever-boycottable company called Microsoft, the decompiling community, the poison has found its way into everyone's veins and it's making me want to, say it with me now, explode! So you can imagine my relief to hear a developer say they don't think AI will make a massive impact. The developer? Perhaps surprisingly, Konami.

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Oh dear, half a year after launching Samson, Swedish developer Liquid Swords have filed for bankruptcy

Earlier this year, Swedish developer Liquid Swords released Samson, a GTA-ish, open world beat 'em up about dealing with debt, driving sturdy but battered cars, and saving your sister. It wasn't received all that well, including by us, notably because it was quite broken. While subsequent patches did seek to address those issues, it doesn't seem like it was quite enough, as the developer has gone bankrupt.

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What are we all playing this weekend?

Saturday's are for having your mind read. Or, at least, this Saturday is because I'm seeing Derren Brown's new show. I'm a little self-conscious about it, not because I'm worried the mentalist will hypnotise me and make me profess a false love for consoles over PC games but because my partner and her family have never seen me at a magic (or magic adjacent show).

Reader, I am an awful audience member for conjurors, illusionists, and psychics.

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Valve roll out Steam Achievement Sets in beta, splitting up games’ perpetually growing trophy masses into DLC and season buckets

Steam has a new feature in beta aimed at helping completionists feel like they've got a bit more of a handle on their never-ending quests to 100% games whose trophy lists keep on growing and evolving. Steam achievements can now be grouped into sets determined by the developers, creating a means of separating off the likes of DLC trophies from the base game's to-do list, thereby making it clearer what you've done so far and where you might want to focus next.

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