Confession: I bought Heroes of the Storm’s Founder Pack. Sometimes, even professional bargain hunters are brought low by the seduction of immediate gratification. (Or something. Hi! Are you playing too? You should add me on Battle.Net if so. casshirek#1483 is the battletag in question.) Moving on, this week’s bargains are an entertaining montage of genres. Bundle Stars is the clear winner of the “holy crap, those are some shiny offers they’ve put together” competition, beating out even crowd favorite Nuuvem. This week’s plushie is from kfix! I am nursing a fever. Halp.

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I don’t know about you, readers, but it is ruddy cold in my flat at the moment. It’s January, so we’ve come to expect this sort of thing, but it’s not helped by our storage heaters. Ever lived anywhere with storage heaters? They work like this: they use lots of money to store a small amount of heat, and then they keep it for themselves and don’t let you have any.

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Ponds, ponds, ponds – they’re all I talk about nowadays. Yesterday I had a lovely swim in 2C water with crackling ice in the center, and I’m leaving now for today’s dip. I never know what’s beneath me in the murky waters, but it might be handy. I get paranoid when a cormorant’s diving near me, wondering if I’d even notice if it plucked off a numbed toe, and last week I think I kicked a fish.

Obviously, I’m delighted to find lake ecosystem simulator Among Ripples free on Steam.

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The first time I ever wrote anything about games, it was because I was still brokenhearted about a relationship that had dissolved years ago. PC Gamer edited the 4000 word essay into a six pager about Dota in 2012 and it is still one of the best things I have ever written. But wherever I go, whatever I do, games participate in a meaningful way in many of the relationships I see. Welcome to a special edition of S.EXE: the love letters edition. Brace yourself, you are in for chop. Here are seven stories about falling in love next to a loading screen.

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Sounded nice, Dying Light‘s ‘Be the Zombie’ mode where you get to invade other players’ co-op games as a super-zombie, didn’t it? Sounded awful, how it’d initially be available as pre-order bonus DLC, didn’t it? In a rare display of stopping-being-silly, that pre-order guff is now off. The mode will be given to everyone for free, developers Techland have announced alongside word of a messy release that’ll see boxed copies delayed by a month in some places.

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Be a good vanger and take the nymbos to Incubator, would you? Grab a jar of phlegma while you re there – the Podish bunch are due a good smearing. Maybe snap up a tabutask or two if you think your mechos can take it. What s that you got? An Oxidise Monk? Pfft. Still, if it s Plump-Up, you might try and run an Eleerection – though take care of that eLeech, vanger. They might just be reincarnated pod-eaters who plumped-out to death, but they still deserve better than to cark it in the back of some rattletrap raffa driven by some know-nothing rambler who crumples into the first stinker he sees. And if you don t win Eleerection you aren t ever going to reach Glorx, much less anywhere else in the Chain.

If you understood that, then you probably already have some idea why Vangers – re-released on Steam and GOG last year – is one of the oddest, most original and overlooked games in history. If you didn t understand it then you are in the position everyone else was in June of 1998, bewildered by their purpose in a gameworld designed to be explicitly, unintelligibly alien in almost every respect.

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You’ll remember (probably) I posted last week about the live action trailer for the new Payday 2 heist? Well, developers Overkill have finished drip-feeding details about the new DLCs and actually released them, so here’s some more information for your eyes to absorb.

First up: yes they’ve separated the heists and the new character into two distinct DLC purchases again.

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Sam Barlow has one of the most impressive CVs in gaming. By my reckoning, he only has six releases to his name but two of those games are comfortably inside my list of all-time favourites – the experimental interactive fiction of Aisle and the masterful Silent Hill: Shattered Memories. The latter might never come to PC but hopefully it’ll arrive in digital download form on the Wii U’s eShop sooner rather than later.

Barlow’s next game, Her Story, has elements of true crime, police procedural and confessional monologue. During a sprawling conversation last week, we discussed how it continues to play with interactive storytelling techniques, and how it has as much in common with Alan Bennett as True Detective.>

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Ubisoft have announced Grow Home, a climbing game about nurturing plants and producing seeds.

The idea is that you’re playing a robot called BUD who wants to oxygenate his home world and thus you must persuade a beanstalk from another planet to produce seeds. I will tell you more about the game but I also have questions.

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Have You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.>

You hear combat in the distance.You feel a sense of loss.You hear something die in combat.>

Brogue is a freeware roguelike with attractive ASCII graphics, intuitive mouse controls, and monkeys who will steal your heart and your portions.

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