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Ever since Crimson Desert dropped that audacious trailer at Gamescom 2023, I’ve yearned to soak in its medieval Just Cause 2 vibes. It’s hard not to be moved by the exaggerated kineticism of it all – the magic-enhanced swordfights, the jumping off cliffs and turning into a flying shadow monster, the ability to drift horses. Yes. Yes!

I’m therefore somewhat unnerved to report that my enthusiasm has been tempered significantly by actually playing it. I’ve since used all the straws I’ve clutched at to spell out "It’s just a demo" on my floor, but the fear remains that Crimson Desert’s fantastical open-world exploration is going to be interrupted by regular bouts of twangy, unwieldy, unsatisfying combat.

When playing a new Soulslike, there’s an element of translation involved while you figure out the language of the game. What are the upgrade materials called? What’s the equivalent of poison? What are experience points and checkpoints called, although you’re going to call them souls and bonfires anyway? I’ve done this many, many times, but on this occasion there was a surprising twist, one which would have notorious pearl-clutching racist HP Lovecraft spinning in his grave. Enotria: The Last Song’s arcane Soulslike language is actually just Italian.

Disney Epic Mickey: Rebrushed is a remaster of Disney Epic Mickey, a cult classic 3D platformer first released a decade ago on the Wii. In the original you controlled the titular Mickey Mouse who, armed with a magical paintbrush (wieldable by waving the Wiimote about), could paint or rub out surfaces to solve puzzles. It was the work of Junction Studios led by Warren Spector, best known for being The Deus Ex Guy. No, sadly Mickey could not nano-augment his brush for better target acquisition, nor project laser-guided anti-tank rockets from his podgy white mitts.

And no, Rebrushed doesn't let him do anything of these either. Clearly a missed opportunity. But is it better nonetheless? With an updated look, some added secrets, more moves for Mickey, and controller/M&K support, I'd say longtime Mickey heads will adore this nostalgia trip. For total newcomers like me, I'd say it's a platformer that's certainly charming and clever and wonderfully experimental, but a bit flat in places too.

Valve are likely up to something hardware-related again, report NotebookCheck. Their next chunk of plastic and wires – following the Valve Index, Steam Deck and Steam Deck OLED – could swap PC gaming’s favoured x86 architecture for ARM, the type of processor favoured by the Nintendo Switch, Macs, and mobile phones.

Shirley Curry, aka the "Skyrim Grandma", is no longer posting gaming videos, she's told her viewers. An upcoming eye surgery is going to leave her recovering for some weeks and (more importantly to her) she is simply tired of playing games for an audience.

"It isn't fun anymore," she says in a video. "I'm tired of it. I'm bored with it, bored to death with it. So I am making the decision now - totally, finally - I am not going to be making any more gaming videos and uploading them."

Spoilers throughout. TLDR: fun, generous, beautiful animation and cinematography. Worked mostly fine on my PC. I would not have given it the best narrative award if it were up against Gran Turismo 7.

Writing of the frigid framing of Clockwork Orange’s atrocities, the film critic Pauline Kael asked: “is there anything sadder - and ultimately more repellent - than a clean-minded pornographer?” The lavishly directed and animated universe of God Of War Ragnarok is far from repellent, but it also feels spiritually squeegeed; a world of pulpy violence so chirpy and chaste as to strain belief that the scars that haunt its reformed anti-hero could have ever been inflicted there.

Earlier in the month, we learned that Stray and Neon White publisher Annapurna Interactive’s entire staff resigned after a dispute with boss Megan Ellison. Reported by Bloomberg as a disagreement over attempts to "spin off the video-game division as an independent entity," the details were nonetheless somewhat scant. A new report from Rebekah Valentine at IGN has since shed some more light on the walkout, which reportedly involved “disagreements over the direction of the Interactive division, chaotic departures, communication breakdowns, and a perceived lack of leadership transparency.” It’s a thorough account of some messy events I recommend reading in full, but here’s a brief rundown.

Raise your thumb if you’ve ever impaled it on a HeroQuest skeleton’s scythe. Country’s gone soft these days, I tell you. I’ve seen those new Heroquest skellies. You couldn’t injure yourself on those scythes if you tried. It’s polearm-ical correctness gone mad! Well, good news if you’re nostalgic for a simpler time, where tiny scythes could maim you for life, and binary digits came in lots of eight and not a binary digit more. RPG Beyond Shadowgate is a vastly-expanded, modernised sequel to the classic NES adventure, created by the original’s designers, and it just released last week.

This week's Maw, quantified: one compound eye with nine hundred and two quicksilver facets. One and a half wings with the texture of freshly peeled orange. Fifty tentacles, proboscises or flagella, some slender as cheesewire, some thick as a conifer. Ten sets of amethyst dentures shared by ten thousand mouths. One utility coat of muscles. One bowler hat. And now, an accompanying inventory of this week's most eye-catching new PC games.

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! Once again, the dastardly autumn breezes have blown my schedule all out of whack, so no cool industry person this week. Instead, here is a short excerpt from another weird story I starting writing, also containing poultry for some reason.

Sundays are for eating Biscoff spread and rewatching Better Call Saul, again. Crunchy, ofc. Before that, let’s read some writing that I, Nic Reuben, personally found interesting about games (and game related things!)

Homeworld 3 is condensing its release schedule for post-launch updates. Instead of free and paid content arriving into 2025, it will all - three free updates, and two paid DLCs - arrive together in a "one major update" in November.

The Finals' fourth season approaches. It'll kick off on September 26th, with a new map, a new tutorial and the restoration of Cashout as the core ranked mode. There's a new trailer below, which is worth watching even if you don't play The Finals, says I.

Grunn is a self-described "extremely normal gardening game", in which you tend to a garden, explore different realities, and try not to die. We've been excited to get our hands on its shears for a while, thanks in part to an excellent demo, and in part due to it being from Sokpop Collective member and Bernband developer Tom van den Boogaart.

Now it has a release date: October 4th.

Sad news, all. I'm currently being sued by Nintendo for making myself a nice soft boiled egg for breakfast on Tuesday, the bright yellow yolk of which was apparently too reminiscent of Pikachu’s ballsack. They’ll likely take everything I have, including my typing keyboard, so this is goodbye from me. With my last digital breath, I only wish to inspire a bit more joy in the world, so I’m demanding everyone in the comments give me cat updates whether or not they own a cat. Just make up some lore for the cat you don’t have and tell me about it. Here's what we're all clicking on this weekend.

It's a pirate's life for me, and it's a pirate's life for Goro Majima, recurring eyepatched anti-hero of the used-to-be-called-Yakuza series. He's the star of the just-announced Like A Dragon: Pirate Yakuza In Hawaii, a game I can only applaud for the brazen straightforwardness of its title. Whatever Sega were drinking when they signed off on Metaphor: ReFantazio, they were not drinking when they signed off on this. They were definitely drinking something, though. Here's the reveal trailer.

God of War Ragnarök initially looks like it has little trouble with squeezing itself into a Steam Deck. Yet like a flask of mead laced with Odin’s raven piss, the seemingly crisp treat of Ragnarök’s handheld performance masks a nasty blend of technical troubles and what is, essentially, an always-online requirement by stealth.

“We have been sold this myth for a very long time that unions have to be for blue collar workers in an industrial setting in the early 1900s,” Autumn Mitchell tells me. “The very simple definition of a union is just you and your co-workers coming together and forming a collective body. You can do that anywhere.”

A QA tester with Zenimax currently on union leave, Mitchell joined the Communications Workers Of America (CWA) as a full-time organiser after she and her colleagues formed what was, at the time, the biggest union in videogames - ZeniMax Workers United. Now she helps the CWA do what they did for her and her colleagues at Zenimax: provide support, training, resources and guidance for workers in the videogame industry who have decided, for whatever reason, that they want to unionise.

Is there anything more satisfying in Total War: Warhammer 3 than watching a tide of rats, so numerous to be previously inconceivable outside of a world-spanning alley filled with old yoghurt pots and Dairlylea Dunkers, break against a beardy phalanx?

This is a fairly broad generalisation, but I think there are two types of armies in the game: those you win with on the battlefield with micromanagement, and those you win before the battle has even started, through composition and arrangement. The former may be more tactically gratifying and exciting, but the latter is so cinematically enjoyable to me that it’s something I can’t get anywhere else. It also perfectly suits the Dwarfs, who not only excel at defence, but I imagine are deeply unwilling to admit to their plans are anything but perfect, even upon making contact with the enemy. It’s the same joy I imagine players of sims like Factorio and Satisfactory get when setting up a bit of perfect automation.

I'm reasonably sure Final Fantasy 16 isn't the longest Final Fantasy I've ever played, but it feels that way, for a multitude of reasons. The major one is that a lot of its quests exist to create distance between places and plot beats. They are overwritten errands such as bringing people lunch or fetching herbs or carrying letters - dessicated, MMO-ish fare, thrust into a moderately enjoyable action-RPG for the sake of incremental worldbuilding and scale.

The post-apocalyptic wastelands of Rain World are stunning, brutal, and full of strange creatures that would like to eat your kittenish face. It's a landscape of wonder and pain, and it's about to get a little more wonderful and painful. The upcoming Watcher expansion, which adds new places to visit and a new type of slugcat to play as, will be coming out early next year, say the developers. There's a trailer to say so. Look at this slippery gastropodal feline, standing calmly in the rain, as if the torrential and lethal weight of the water will not crush that little fuzzy head. The gall!

Me, I'm a simple sort. All I want from my flight simulators is an unerringly accurate recreation of dozens of aircraft, a perfect physics model that includes the spectacle of relevant weather events, and a complete, photorealistic and 1:1 scale depiction of the entire planet earth.

You, you might be one of those fancy types, you might want to be able to get a job in your flight simulator, like crop duster or fire waterer. That's what Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is adding to the package when it launches in November. We now know its system requirements.

If I took my kid to a dinosaur museum and the gift shop and hallways were full of Sonic merchandise, I think I'd be kind of confused. I think that makes the inclusion of such items as pre-order bonuses for Two Point Museum - alongside Knuckles staff costumes and Sonic-themed interactive exhibits - a pretty strong extra incentive not to pre-order.

But hey, at least the next management game in the growing 2.universe now has a release date: March 4th, 2025.

A few months ago, Minecraft's original console developer 4J Studios showed off a new in-house engine they had created, called the Elements Engine. Now they've announced what game they're making with it. It's called Reforj, and it's an "open-world multiplayer survival sandbox." But it's not aiming to be Minecraft 2, they say.

GTA Online is no longer officially supported by Steam Deck, thanks to the introduction of some anti-cheat software which can, in fact, be made compatible with Steam Deck. Say what now?

Fifteen months on from its PS5 release, Final Fantasy XVI – that actiony RPG of emo-fringed hack ‘n’ slashing and disquietingly sexy Ralph Ineson characters – is now on PC. Enough time, you’d think, to do a proper job of rejigging it with Windows spanners, especially after Final Fantasy XV’s port got so much stick for its lack of features and performance issues.

FFVXI does make some improvements, adopting a full set of DLSS and FSR upscalers and frame generators, and its mouse and keyboard integration feels generally slicker than XV. Sadly, it’s still no first-rate adaptation, neglecting numerous PC features and giving low-end systems an even deeper kick in the plums. Cutting the quality settings can help, as per the guide down below, but overall performance is so up-and-down than you’ll likely never achieve a perfectly smooth ride.

Rather sheepishly, I must admit that my own experience with Armenian art begins and ends with System Of A Down. Cheers then, The Bird Of A Thousand Voices, for showing up in my inbox and giving me a second reference point next to Sugar. This one’s a simple though very striking platformer, inspired by folk legends and scored by composer Tigran Hamasyan. It’s part of a multimedia project based Armenian folk tale Hazaran Blbul (Firebird). It’s completely free, and you can find it here.

The mad lads at Square Enix have released a demo for their remake of 90s RPG Romancing SaGa 2: Revenge Of The Seven, in which you play a whole dynasty of customisable protagonists fighting vengeful ancient heroes. It’s a turn-based battler with an empire-building component in which you play as several emperors in succession, passing on abilities and knowledge to your heir. In what I consider to be a poetic complementary flourish, you can also pass on save data from the demo to the full game. Look, this is what counts as “poetic” just before lunch on a Thursday.

How many bones have you broken? It sucks, the snapping sound they make is impolite. I prefer to break virtual, non-corporeal bones. Slackers: Carts Of Glory looks like a co-conspirator in this endeavour. It's basically that one bit in Jackass where the gang blast downhill in shopping trollies at great risk to their bodily and mental health, as is their wont. The arcade racing game came out yesterday and features online multiplayer, so you can break someone else's bones too. Let's see it in action.

“Guided by your moral compass: reflect on themes of home, loneliness and belonging through a complex, three-act story told effortlessly through three hours of video game narrative,” the press release for cat simulator Copycat told me. Morals? Daddy Karch, it’s happening again!