Amazon is currently offering a significant discount on one of the best microSD cards for the Steam Deck. The Lexar 1TB Play microSDXC Memory Card, an ideal storage solution for portable gaming devices like the Steam Deck, ROG Ally X, and others, is now priced at just $66.49, or £61.74 in the UK. This is a substantial drop from its original $129.99/ £129.99 list price, making it a great deal while the sale lasts.

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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! I’ve moved on to Wolfe’s Sword Of The Lictor this week and, readers, I’m starting to think that Severian might not be a very good dude. This week it’s Still Wakes the Deep, Little Orpheus, and Robocraft designer (along with many others) and current lead technical level designer at Half Mermaid, Robert McLachlan! Cheers Robert! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

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Sundays are for more cat. She’s reached the “follow me into the bathroom when I go downstairs at night for a wee” stage, but still won’t come upstairs - which means I have to leave her alone for long periods while I work, which makes me feel bad. Before I unsuccessfully arrange yet more treats on the stairs, let’s read this week’s best writing about games (and game related things!)

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Time to set the record straight! I wasn't> too busy playing Black Myth: Wukong to write up last weekend's Playing This Weekend. I'd never fail you all thus! Instead, I had one of the worst flu illnesses I've ever had, followed by a nice bout of tonsillitis, for which I'm still on antibiotics. Thankfully, I can now look at a monitor screen for more than an hour before feeling sick, so gaming is no longer out of the question for this weekend. Let's see what we're all going to be clicking on!

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In the first post for my series on "saving" open world design, I complained that many of today's open worlds feel like checklists of formulaic tasks and rewards, their geography a vaporous staging ground for itemisable, cycling content-gathering opportunities, which flies in the face of the sense of freedom and wonder they're supposed to inspire. My interviewees, Elder Scrolls veterans Matt Firor and Nate Purkeypile, argued that this reflects the expense and scale of today's open world productions, which constrains experimental design both at a practical level and in terms of overall direction.

CD Projekt open world designer Jakub Tomczak doesn't, as far as I know, have an answer to the issue of production bloat, but he does have a disarmingly obvious solution to the 'checklist problem', based on his time creating missions for Cyberpunk 2077 and its Phantom Liberty expansion: get better at hiding the checklist. Weave it into the landscape and setting more artfully, with an elegant balance of randomisation and responsiveness to the player's behaviour which keeps everything fresh.

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I do like a combat system that resembles an overflowing dressmaker's draw, full of bouncing rubber thimbles and coils of bunting. While it's not quite as chaotic and entangled as say, Disgaea, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is one of those games. I'd call it "baroque", but that would be out of synch with developer Sandfall Interactive's stated influences: the new RPG takes place in a molten and fragmented fantasy world based on the Belle Époque or "beautiful era" of late 19th century France. Your job as player is to stop a sorcerous Paintress from painting everybody over a certain age out of existence. We'll circle back to the plot, though. First, the excessively ornate battlin'.

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The slugcat of Rain World is a distinct little character. He flops around, squeezing through narrow tunnels with a movement that's both cute and mildly gross. When he is eaten by a passing disco lizard or ravenous skull-faced vulture, it is because he is basically a delicious Squirmle existing in a horrifying cryptozoological ecosystem. He is, however, never stepped upon by a mech with a missile launcher. He is never given a shotgun and tasked with shooting the other animals. Yet that basically seems to be the elevator pitch for Uruc, a sci-fi metroidvania set in a distant future where strange life battles mechanical monstrosities.

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Almost a decade after his acrimonious departure from Konami, the shadow of Hideo Kojima still looms over Metal Gear Solid. He's there, barely camouflaged, in the undergrowth of Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater - a remake of the fifth Metal Gear game, originally released in 2004, which tells the tale of a lone US special operator hunting superweapons and old mentors in the jungles of the southern Soviet Union.

I say "remake" but this feels more like a re-release, in spirit. True, it now runs on Unreal Engine, with the option of a manual, third-person perspective and cover-shooter controls in addition to the old top-down viewpoints. Yes, it boasts new flourishes, such as wounds now leaving scars, and clothes picking up stray leaves. Yes, there's a new interface with floating in-world menus, which makes shuffling between the layers a bit less awkward. It's the product of much labour, with development split between Konami and external support partner Virtuos. But where Konami's other big restoration project, Bloober's Silent Hill 2 remake, is a creative dialogue with the original game, Delta seems consumed by faithfulness to Kojima's original design.

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