I never completed the original Red Dead Redemption, but not for the usual reasons of being terrible at the game, or thinking that open worlds are too big and boring these days and I just want to lie down forever and watch anime. I never finished it because my Xbox 360 version was not, in practice, an open world game, but a lonely farm at the bottom of a vortex of butchered spacetime. In the prologue, reformed outlaw John Marston confronts an old bandit acquaintance and gets himself roundly shot to bits. He’s rescued by local rancher Bonnie MacFarlane, who nurses him back to health and gives him a few odd jobs to warm him up for the next plot point.

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If I am ever murdered, please do not ask Max Caulfield to investigate. I've already written our review for Life Is Strange: Double Exposure, in which I celebrated the touching moments of Max's return to the series, and lamented the clunky plot that she finds herself in. In this adventure game, you're looking into the killing of a close friend, shot by an unknown assailant. You hop between two dimensions to solve the case - one world in which your pal still lives and the other in which she's dead. Unfortunately for the murder victim, you play a bona fide hot mess who could not perform a cross examination if she were standing in front of a crucifix with a magnifying glass.

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Going by three hours with a preview build last month, the Indiana Jones of Indiana Jones And The Great Circle has the hungriest hands this side of Thief 2014. They're always surging into view, reaching restlessly toward objects as you explore, for there is ever so much to touch: photos and letters; pipes, frying pans, and other blunt implements; relics that translate into "Adventure Points", used to "unlock" books of skills; camouflaged levers and other chunks of fusty comicbook exotica that harbour clockwork secrets. Sometimes, Indy's magic fingers help you glean an object you need from the game's religiously-sourced piles of Lucasfilm memorabilia. Sometimes, they exhaust you: please, Dr Jones, for the love of George. Stop trying to pick things up. Let me look at "ancient history" for a while.

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It’s always nice to say that a big, look-how-much-we-spent-on-pore-rendering AAA game actually runs quite well on PC, as Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 does. Unfortunately for Bl6ps, and for us, that technical success is balanced on the knife tip of some seriously overwrought infrastructure. Mainly in the form the UX nightmare that is the Call of Duty HQ launcher, as well as a meddlesome always-online requirement, itself serving a feature that doesn’t even work that well.

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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! Most of us know about the novel, the novella, and the rare novito, but did you know that Penguin briefly tried to market the ‘big nov’ - single sentences of much larger works, bizarrely serialised into hardbacks weighty enough to club the equally rare giga-seal? Some things are best left forgotten, but not Dragon Age! It’s Dragon Age month, and here’s Dragon Age veteran and good YouTuber, Mark Darrah! Cheers Mark! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

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Sundays are for doing things you haven't done in a long time, like a long stretch after years trapped in a languorous hunch.

Former Edge designer Andrew Hind has launched On, a premium print magazine in which he and editor-in-chief Nathan Brown invite writers to produce their dream article.

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Weekends are for walks in the woods, washing your whites, wolfing down waffles, and other domestic pursuits that start with "w" - please, continue the list. Alternatively, play some video games. I will not insist that you alliterate your video game picks, but I won't tell you not to, either. Here's what the Treehouse are up to.

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Windblown looks rad. It's an action-roguelite for 1-3 players in which you dash-and-slash in rapid combat on floating islands, and I am extremely interested in feeling its game-feel for myself. Good news! I can get my game-feelers on it now because it's out in Early Access today.

If you watch its launch trailer below out of context however, you might be fooled into thinking it's actually the emo second half of an Isekai anime series.

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A huge scary bearded man has just kicked down my door. His face and shoulders are doused in tactical Dorito dust. His eyes are heavily redacted. He's got assault rifles and comparison screenshots poking out of his ribcage, which are making an absolute mess of the hallway plaster. He says he is Call Of Duty Man, and he is here to let me know about Black Ops 6's day one patch. The new Activision FPS is out tomorrow 25th October, I gather. Call Of Duty Man speaks only in three-syllable bursts and rolling bombardments, but I think if I listen carefully I can make out the highlights. Here's what that patch involves, in nickel-plated bulletpoint form.

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In order to make Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 enjoyable, Saber Interactive had to make the Space Marines less like Space Marines. That's to say, less like "semi-lobotomized, hypnotically indoctrinated slave-soldiers in thrall to an uncaring (and possibly non-existent) god", in the words of Rick Priestley, primary writer for the original Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader rulebooks back in the 1980s.

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