Category: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week – the only regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books that has no conception of space, time, responsibility or consistency. Also, I can’t read. Still, I’m feeling confident we can get through this together. In that, I have no other choice. This week, it’s editor and author for books like Digital Love and Well Played, and writer on games like Orion Trail and Bramblewood, Heidi McDonald! Cheers Heidi! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

Read more

Whenever possible, I like to sucker-punch everybody’s weekend plans by blogging the release of a huge 4X strategy game, factory sim or other managerial timesink last thing on Friday. In this case, I’m ambushing you with the avid rodent carpentry of Whiskerwood, the new city builder from Railgrade developers Minakata Dynamics and Manor Lords publishers Hooded Horse. It’s got 40 different commodities, an elaborate weather simulation, and a demo out now on Steam. Haha, yes! You are welcome.

In Whiskerwood, you are a mouse mayor setting up island colonies on behalf of some bastard fat cats. Yes, this one’s a straight-shooting allegory, but going by the release date trailer, any transferable learnings about the plight of the mouse proletariat come a distinct second to the joy of plaiting conveyor belts.

Read more

A group of game industry folks including Reigns studio Nerial, Saturnalia creators Santa Ragione and Streets Of Rage 4 outfit Lizardcube have launched Palestinian Voices in Gaming, an international volunteer network to support current and emerging independent Palestinian developers.

First convened in May 2024, the network are currently looking to connect Palestinian game devs with volunteers and funding partners. They’ll provide administrative help to any developer trying to get access to funding, and assistance managing resources and volunteer contributions, once secured. They aim to follow and boost each project from “production to announcement to publication”, and are already working with a range of smaller independent games, many of which explore recollections of pain and loss through speculative fiction and fantasy.

Read more

I confess, after reading the comments on yesterday’s Endless Legend 2 early access impressions, I am mortally afeared that I’m one of those accursed “positive outliers” I keep reading about in the Gamer Witchfinder Almanac. Seemingly, a fair portion of you were turned off by the recent Steam demo. You may be interested, then, to read specifics about how Amplitude have changed the game in response to demo feedback.

Read more

There was really only one way to enhance the prospect of an Antarctic open world game with a choice of playable penguins that’s actually a fractious retelling of Lovecraft’s Mountains of Madness, created by the developers of Umurangi Generation. And that one way was to hire Lenval Brown, narrator for Disco Elysium‘s special edition, to voice the first proper trailer. And also, make the trailer look a lot like John Carpenter’s The Thing. No further words from me are needed or desired. Find the footage below.

Read more

The great ‘dematuring’ of videogames continues with reports that Valve are now forbidding “post-launch NSFW content” for games on Steam, even those that are already “adult-only”. That’s according to Crimson Delight Games, the developers of fantasy RPG Tales of Legendary Lust: Aphrodisia. They launched it on September 15th with adult content warnings, after submitting it to Valve’s review process in August, and had planned to add sexy scenes through updates while working on a big DLC expansion for 2026.

These updates are not going to happen anymore, apparently because everybody’s favourite PG-rated cartoon villains, global payment networks, are putting pressure on Valve. Instead, the updates will need to be submitted as proper official DLC so that Valve can give them a formal review.

Read more

Gearbox have released another Borderlands 4 update for technical problems on PC, with a particular focus on game stability and crashes, though they’ve also fixed a progression blocker or two in the process. Unlike that other Borderlands 4 patch from earlier this week, this one has an actual changelog. Gosh, wait till Mark hears of this! Oh nuts, he’s already gone on holiday, presumably in sheer consternation over the shortage of bullet points. Look what you did, Randy Pitchford. Look what you did.

Read more

This afternoon, a choice of two raging videogame lawsuits to report on. Firstly, a snippet from the on-going courtroom scrap between former Unknown Worlds executives and Krafton over the state of Subnautica 2‘s development, in which the former accuse the latter of changing their story about why the executives were fired.

I’ve decided not to write that one up because it feels like we are entering the realm of potshots over minutiae, rather than learning anything genuinely new about Subnautica 2 or its creators, but if you’re interested, GamesIndustry.biz has your back. The parallel Tencent/Sony bust-up has the virtue of relative novelty. It gives me a whole different kind of headache. What’s going on with this one, then?

Read more

Something Hollow Knight: Silksong-related has happened at an Australian museum again. This time, rather than the game being confirmed for an appearance back when it was still infinitely mysterious and sans release date, it’s Team Cherry devs addressing just how difficult their creation is, following plenty of post-release discourse on the subject.

This follows the metroidvania‘s first patch making a couple of its early bosses a bit easier to tackle, amid debate as to whether it’s just good and hard, or pushes into unnecessarily annoying slog territory via the likes of bench placement and hazards being able to deal out two masks of damage. As with every FromSoft game since time itself began with the release of Demon’s Souls, where you stand on that bickering will likely depend on how prepared you are to spend hours battling one foe over and over again.

Read more

As the ravening shitbeetles of the Edwinphage overran the coral fortifications of the neighbouring Aspect kingdom, filling the air with the moist crunch of mandible on polyp, it occurred to me that I don’t feel as much like a horrible doomsday cockroach as I should. We’ll circle back to that feeling. Endless Legend 2 launches into early access on 22nd September, and I’ve now spent around 20 hours with it. I’ve previously praised its new/reborn factions and retreating ocean mechanic, and I plan to carry on praising, but there are definitely some more comprehensive issues I’d love Amplitude to address as this splendid scarab of a turn-based strategy game rumbles toward 1.0.

Read more