Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome to Booked For The Week - our new Sunday feature where we ask a selection of cool industry folks questions about books! The very first book was famously written in the 1200's by notable scholar and six-time wrestling world champion Booker T, a fact you'd know if you simply read more books. This week, it's voice of Horizon Zero Dawn's Aloy and many others, writer, singer, and endless other cool stuff, Ashly Burch! Cheers Ashly! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

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Sundays are for sorting the tangle of busted pipes under my sink out so I don’t have to change my socks twice a day after forgetting to wear my designated Kitchen Crocs. Before I remember this time and instantly become a style icon, let’s read this week’s best writing about games (and game-related things!)

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How like Ollie to volunteer to take over Playing This Weekend and then go on holiday, or whatever it is he's done that means he isn't here today - I don't know, he's a law unto himself. What am I, his mother? Thus it falls to me to ask the other staff what they're playing, and thence communicate that to you. Jeeze, why can't you just text each other or something, why all this middleman-ing. What am I, your mothers? But we're playing a bunch of different stuff, so have at it.

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Well, swaggle me horns and fasten me timbers so they stop shivering like that, because the noise is quite irritating. Welcome back to another edition of Plundertales - my quest to conquer strategy game Total War: Warhammer 3 without ever stepping foot on dry land. If you don’t know the other rules by now, I can only assume you’ve been living under an extremely specific type of rock that changes nothing about your life except preventing you from reading the previous two editions of this column. Who would carve such a rock? How would it even work? These are lubber-tier queries and shall remain unanswered, because it’s plundering time. Avast!

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Despite my desire for a real life herb garden, I don't really like farming or gardening games. Distant Bloom could be an exception, except I'm not sure it even qualifies as either, really. It is a little bit about exploration, a little about very light puzzles, and mostly in its heart, about cleaning up and making everything pretty.

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Indika is a good game about a good nun, and I’ll talk about why in a sec, but first - a complaint. ‘Low’, ‘Medium’, or ‘Ultra’ graphics settings? Really, Indika? Where is 'High'? Where’s it gone, eh? This isn’t cute when Papa John's do it, and it’s not cute now. You’re lucky you’re an extremely interesting game, Indika. Let’s talk about that instead.

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I gave that Pools game a go recently - you know, the first-person traipse through some liminal spaces that happen to be pool themed. At one point it was trending on Steam and since then it's garnered loads of positive reviews, with people saying it's unsettling and drips with atmosphere. Reader, I do think it's quite atmospheric, but I do not think it's all that unsettling. If anything, I find it a bit dull, in a way that's semi-frustrating. Am I missing the liminal space-liker bit of the brain a lot of people have? Am I an anomaly here?

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Leonardo Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man is a legendary drawing of a nude with his arms and legs reaching towards the rim and corners of a circle and square. It's often invoked as an archetype for the humanist worldview of Man the Measure and Centre of all Things, holding a perfectly proportioned universe in shape. Rin D'Lorah, the heroine of new narrative RPG Sky Of Tides, is a bit like the Vitruvian Man, and the result is a game I find at once bewitching and powerfully offputting in its refusal to satisfy the conventions of the genre.

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Logitech have kicked off its Playdays event for 2024, with some of their best headsets, mice and keyboards on sale across various retailers in the UK.

That list includes one the current best Wireless gaming keyboard, the G915 Lightspeed wireless, which is now on sale at Currys with two different form factors on offer: the full size model and the more compact tenkeyless (TKL) version.

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Over the past while a few games have had post-launch patches, the exemplars being Starfield and Stardew valley, which have post-launch patches of different kinds and for different reasons. We take some time on the Electronic Wireless Show podcast to talk about this patch of patches, and what it was like in the good ol' days, where a broken game came out and stayed broken, gosh darn it!

Nate isn't here today, which means I can make fun of him for owning fish, or whatever it is he does, but in his stead James steps up with an RGB lighting-themed game where I have to guess what accessories people stuck lights on to turn into gamer accessories. This is because Razer stuck RGB lights on a pandemic mask and are in trouble over it now. Naughty Razer. Plus, we talk about the games we're playing right now, and dish you up some juicy recommendations at the end of the show.

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