The Maw – 20th-25th May 2024

This week on RPS: secret plans and clever tricks. Also, a bunch of new videogames, none of them particularly Enormous or Crocodilian. We open on Monday 20th May with the extremely Alice B-friendly combo of Little-Known Galaxy, aka Stardew Valley meets Star Trek, and A Tower Full Of Cats, a hidden object puzzler featuring a tower full of dogs, I mean cats. All very upbeat. Well, hold that thought, because on the 21st, it’s time for Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2, another slice of Celtic sort-of-psychosis from Ninja Theory, which is as grim as the accompanying Paper Trail is *checks Nic’s review* incredibly annoying?

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What’s on your bookshelf?: Inscryption and Pony Island’s Daniel Mullins

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’ is actually an ancient Sumerian greeting, short for: ‘can I have that book back I lent you eight months ago you said you’d have finished in like, two? This is going to be another one of those, isn’t it?.’ Truly, language’s many permutations are a font of limitless wonder. This week, it’s Pony Island, The Hex, and Inscryption maker Daniel Mullins! Cheers Daniel! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

I’m just not sure where I’m going wrong, readers. I keep choosing great guests with great answers, and yet, they keep missing the subtext in my emails requesting that they name every book in existence. Another round next week it is, then! As a bonus this week, it turns out Edders and I are reading the same book, completely accidentally. That being Jake Adelstein’s The Last Yakuza. Edders got it is as a gift, and I moved on to it after finishing Adelstein’s first book, Tokyo Vice. I think I prefer the scrappiness of Tokyo Vice so far, but they’re both fascinating.

Also, Alice Bee done a second novel! I’m sure she won’t plug herself, so I’m doing it here. She writes novels after work! I can barely microwave pasta post 5pm! Let me know what you’ve been reading below, and remember: a rushed sign off will be forever bad, but a delayed sign off will just needlessly drag out the length of this sentence to disguise the fact I still haven’t come up with a good sign off.

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The next Call Of Duty will launch on Game Pass on day one, reports say

The next Call Of Duty will arrive on Game Pass on day one, according to anonymous sources. Microsoft’s strategy has long involved releasing all their first-party games on Game Pass, but there had been doubt over whether the same would be true of the first Call Of Duty to be released since Microsoft’s $69 billion acquisition of publishers Activision.

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Hades 2 will likely be in early access until 2025, with first big update to add new enemies, maps and features

As you might’ve heard, Hades 2 is out in early access, offering up the much-anticipated sequel to Supergiant’s mythical (and delightfully thirsty) roguelite. Though the sheer amount of polish and Stuff in even its pre-release form might have you thinking that a full 1.0 release can’t be too far down the line, the game’s creative director reckons we’ve still got around a year to wait before it’s considered all finished up.

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Lorelei And The Laser Eyes doesn’t let its surreal creativity strip its puzzles of logic

“In one of Nero’s many manifests,” reads a books in surreal puzzle-box Lorelei And The Laser Eyes, referring to its eccentric (read: tastefully deranged) antag-artist, “there is a satirical proposal claiming that only dictators should be allowed to direct films.” Developers Simogo – of well-deserved Sayonara Wild Hearts and Device 6 acclaim – seem to agree that’s a position worth satirising. Lorelei, despite its single-solution puzzles, is not dictatorial. It’s far too interested in collaborating with you for that. It wants you to observe, consider, and interpret its many mysteries. What’s really hooked me here is how those puzzles are kept coherent and logical, despite you getting delivered a letter by dog and occasionally visiting a floppy disk bizzaro world where you converse with a magician who manifests from his own discarded hat.

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