Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week - our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! Did you know that the word 'book' was originally spelled with several extra 'o's in it? This was changed when it was collectively decided that telling someone to "please, just read a book" was resulting in several more murders a year than anyone could be bothered to keep track of. This week, it’s Obsidian vet and Pentiment creator Josh Sawyer! Cheers Josh! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf? Read more ..read more

Turn-based tactical RPG Wildermyth is one of the best games Sin has ever played. It got a second DLC, Omenroad, which turned it into a roguelike earlier this month. Omenroad turns out to be the end of the road, however, both for Wildermyth and - for now - for the team that made it, Worldwalker Games. Read more ..read more

It feels as if every action-RPG can be described in terms of its relationship to genre daddy Diablo. Wolcen:Lords Of Mayhem, for example, launched a few months after Diablo 4 was announced and helped to satiate some early click cravings. Briefly. Early positive sentiment was quickly scuppered by bugs, slow updates and more. Now its developers say that they're ending support for the game, and multiplayer functionality will be switched off this September. Read more ..read more

Merry weekends, everyone! It's time for a chill couple of days, I think. A bunch of us have recently returned from trips down to the Brighton office to meet some new faces. Weird to think I'm now the most far-flung of the lot, living way up here in Glasgow. Maybe that's why I elected to take over these Playing This Weekend posts, to help fill the friendless void growing inside my heart. So just know that if you don't sound off in the comments below with news of what you're playing this weekend, the void in my heart will grow, until one day it consumes me. And then who will write these posts ..read more

Arkane Austin's ailing vampire shooter Redfall has received its final update, as the developers themselves are purged by parent company Microsoft. Announced a few weeks back, Redfall game update 4 introduces a much-requested offline mode and single-player pausing, together with some new in-game progression features and activities: a Community Standing bar whereby Support currency can be spent on rewards from the Safehouse Skill tree, and Elder Nests, aka vampire nests with specially modified vampire bosses. That's in addition to new enemy encounters in Redfall Commons, improved AI and a new U ..read more

I regret not covering Skald Colon Against The Black Priory when its developer told us about it 2019. I'd get to be so smug now. Skald is terrific. I've tried to come up with a clever angle on its journey, but they all wind up saying the same thing: For all its retro stylings (right down to party portraits taking up an unnecessary quarter of the screen at all times), it's an accessible, charming treat, and the best modernisation of 80s RPGs that I've ever played. Read more ..read more

I fear we may have swum the Rubicon of diminishing returns where multiplayer horror games inspired by Lethal Company are concerned. The recent Content Warning has sucked up all the remaining oxygen in the room, and oxygen is pretty important in Murky Divers, for reasons that are hopefully self-evident. Still, Murky Divers has some fairly eye-catching USPs. It's got underwater physics, of course, and it puts you and - unhelpfully - your friends in charge of a submarine. Read more ..read more

There is a time for perfect clarity in a shooter, for clean walls and clear-cut character silhouettes. But this is not it. Retro first-person gunwaltzer Selaco is a messy machine gun dash through an office exploding with glass, concrete, splinters, and sparks. The glock-toting wreckage 'em up first hit our radar when it was announced as a modern combination of F.E.A.R. and Doom, promising both the fiendish AI enemies of the former and the satisfying blasting of the latter. Well, it's out today. Bursting forth into the corporate lobby of early access with uzis akimbo, peppering the walls with ..read more

Between this, my supporter post later, and the fact I decided to watch Office Space again this week, I’d like to make it clear to any colleagues or management reading that I value and love them all dearly, and am 110% committed to the eternal grind machine of covering videogames online. Workday malaise is universal, however, whether or not you’re lucky enough to enjoy your job as much as I do. Enter Office Fight, a stylish physics action game where you, a ghost, posess office equipment to cause as much physics-based chaos as possible. The PR did some Office Space jokes in the email, so I pret ..read more

Riot games have committed to a series of new measures to curtail harassment and hate-speech in the Valorant community. In a video entitled ‘Keeping Our Community Healthy // Dev Updates,” studio head Anna Donlon took to Xitter to outline the new measures for the competitive FPS. Below is a graphic detailing the changes, which include new penalties such as hardware bans for offenders, and an expanded role for the game's Voice Evaluation tech, which monitors chat for bad behaviour. “If you want to make evil statements under the guise of '[naughty word SEO doesn't like being in the first paragrap ..read more