The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for getting up early and testing the legs are still in working order after potentially overdoing it with a crosscountry ride. All week, climbing stairs has been a struggle, like the muscles contain only vapours of energy. Just a little test cycle out to the woods to see if everything's tickety boo.

Then, inevitably, when I collapse into bed afterward, it will be time to settle into some heavy reading. Exercise for the old noggin, you know?

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Ron Gilbert talks the untraditional way he got Thimbleweed Park 2 funded, and his frustrations with modern publishing deals

I think it would be a tad fair if you heard that Thimbleweed Park 2 is in the works and thought, "who funded that?" Not because it doesn't deserve funding, but because adventure games aren't exactly in vogue (even though it's not as dead a genre as many think), and also there's that whole video game industry crumbling around us day by day thing. When it was announced last month, creator Ron Gilbert said that it was thanks to the help of a private investor, and now the developer has shed a bit of light on how that came to be, and how that relationship works.

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O EMPIRE! WARD OFF THY ROT puts you in an abandoned, dithered world with a cursed object and asks you to do one thing: survive the journey

Do you remember, or do you even know, about the Game Boy Camera? It's exactly as it sounds, a little camera attached to an original Game Boy cartridge that you could plug in and take photos with. You could even get a printer! The aesthetic therewithin is a particular one, utilising a tiny 128x128 pixel sensor, the end result being an incredibly dithered and pixelated yet charming look. There are few games that capture such a vibe, but O EMPIRE! WARD OFF THY ROT, a game about carrying a cursed object through an abandoned world, might just manage to.

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"For a few weeks, women were just dropping their babies": The Witcher 3 lead on designing NPCs that react appropriately

Gone are the days where a developer could give an NPC maybe two lines of dialogue and call it a day. The steady shift to realism essentially enforces the idea that characters must behave realistically, which is why whenever some kind of glitch or bug makes an NPC move about in an impossible manner it does numbers on Your Favourite Social Media App. And according to CD Projekt Red quest designer Philipp Weber, getting The Witcher 3's NPCs to react appropriately was a tad tricky.

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Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl's meaty 2.0 update brings functional fog, a suite of A-Life improvements, and more when it arrives next week

Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl's big 2.0 update is right around the corner, and developer GSC Game World have shared a plethora of details of what you can expect from it. For starters, the shooter is getting a visual upgrade, with a particular emphasis on lighting adjustments. Indoor lighting should look more realistic, the general landscape and foliage should look more natural, and hundreds of items that were previously inadvertently floating have been fixed too.

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What are we all playing this weekend?

Bit of a quiet one this week, gang. Half the RPS team are on holiday, ill, or off at some preview event, maybe in a less melty part of the world like Scandinavia, the lucky bastards. Games, however, must be played, and if it happens to be over a weekend, well...

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I love the Dark Soulful architecture of The Canon of Balls, a rolling open world game inspired by Sega, Fumito Ueda and Minecraft parkour

What do Dark Souls, Super Monkey Ball, Shadow of the Colossus, and Minecraft have in common? They are all explicit inspirations for The Canon of Balls, a spooky and unforgiving new open world platformer in which you are a horrified statue's face with a fleshy pink tongue, floating inside a rolling cage. You can use your tongue as a springboard.

Look, stay with me on this. I think The Canon of Balls could be good. Yes, I know that we've done "Dark Souls in a ball" already this month, but I think this game stands apart. It reminds me a little of Straftat in being a very specific, even obstinate throwback project that's less about nostalgia - less about sheer recreation, and more the feeling that a deserted vein of weirdness has more to give, that there's another future down here somewhere.

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