I dunno about you, but I usually dig a big Skyrim mod that threatens to make my number of hours spent padding around Tamriel even more ludicrous. Lordbound is the latest danger to the free time of poor folks like me, having just soft launched after ten years of development spent creating a fresh region bigger than the Dragonborn DLC's Solstheim and filling it with stuff to do.

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Oh boy. Unfortunately, it's one of those days. You might remember that last week, Dune: Awakening developer Funcom laid off an unspecified number of staff. Yep, that same Dune: Awakening that appeared to be doing pretty well for itself. Go figure! Today, there's more bad news, as it turns out that Metal: Hellsinger studio The Outsiders will be shutting down completely as part of said layoffs at parent company Funcom.

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Assassin's Creed Mirage's free Valley of Memory DLC, reportedly the product of a partnership between the publishers and the Saudi-backed Savvy Games Group, releases in November.

Announced back in August, the free DLC takes players to 9th century AlUla, an ancient oasis city and governorate in Saudi Arabia. Ubisoft's announcement post didn't mention the country by name.

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Enginefall is as much about fabricating bandages and building hovels as it is about mad locomotive sci-fi, but upon being invited to try out an early build, its concept proved compelling enough to punch through my survival crafting fatigue like a runaway... I dunno, bus. Basically it’s a first-person Snowpiecer-em up, where a typical session sees postapocalypse survivors raiding enormous trains, fighting (or joining forces) from tail to tip to usurp the conductor’s position and steal precious fuel cores before escaping back to their own private engine.

Again, I like the idea. I especially like that Enginefall isn’t massively fussed how you deal with other Tailies – alliances, truces, and armed banditry are all permitted and accommodated for. What I played last week, sadly, was awkward, janky, and undercooked, to the point where the one thing more ambitious than the game’s railriding concept might be its Q1 2026 release plan.

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Last Monday I spent three paragraphs crying havoc over a shortage of tasty new releases to feed the Maw, our resident headline-guzzling cosmic kaiju. The week didn't go so terribly in the end. True, the Maw did swallow the colour purple on Friday, but Mark managed to distract everybody with a bulky Baldur's Gate 3 mod while I administered the emetic.

This week, several monkey paw fingers have curled, and there is an embarrassment of groovy material that spans the whole spectrum of budgets, brand recognisability and pricepointage. So let's get right to the listing.

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