Sundays are for trying to fill several pairs of enormous shoes and shuffling around awkwardly in them while I get my bearings. Before I start wobbling at the lip of the top stair and have a near death experience prior to grabbing the railing, let’s read this week’s best writing about games (and game related things).

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Dragon's Dogma 2 is seemingly a superb game, when it's not buggy or surprising its players with microtransactions.

CD Projekt Red are no stranger to releasing buggy games, but they're less keen on microtransactions - at least for singleplayer games. In an interview with a Polish investor site, CDPR's chief financial officer Piotr Nielubowicz said that they "do not see a place for microtransactions in the case of singleplayer games", but they wouldn't rule it out for multiplayer.

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The Oculus Quest launched back in 2019, just five years ago, but come May new apps released in the Quest Store won't be playable on the Quest 1. This isn't because the Quest 1 isn't powerful enough to play them anymore, but because developers will no longer be able to upload them and players won't be able to see them.

It's part of the planned obsolescence of the Quest 1 which Meta announced last year.

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I still think of Rain World as the beautiful, brutally hard game about accidentally going down tunnels butt-first and being crushed to death by weather, but it's grown and expanded a lot since its release almost seven years ago. It's about to grow again with a new DLC: The Watcher.

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TimeSplitters Rewind, a fan-made remake of the zany shooters’ multiplayer in a single game, might well represent the last gasp of the beloved first-person shooter franchise following the closure of resurrected original developers Free Radical - who were working on their own TimeSplitters reboot - at the end of last year. With over a decade of work already invested in the fan project, however, the team have now released a call for help to overcome development hurdles caused by the ongoing troubled state of the games industry.

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CD Projekt Red are continuing to bulk up the team developing The Witcher 4 - officially codenamed Polaris - with two-thirds of the studio now working on the follow-up to The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Meanwhile, the team working on Cyberpunk 2077 has shrunk to fewer than 20 people, less than half the number working on its upcoming sequel.

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It’s been close to three years since Celeste and TowerFall developers Extremely OK Games revealed their next project, the similarly gorgeous-looking and sumptuous-sounding 2D exploration platformer Earthblade. While the studio didn’t give any indication of a release date at the time, we now know not to expect Earthblade until 2025 at the earliest.

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Dragon's Dogma 2 has dropped its first update, addressing one of the fantasy action-RPG’s most baffling decisions - the inability to start a new game once you’ve begun your first adventure - and letting you acquire a home of your own earlier, providing a reliable place to rest and save. There are some other small tweaks too, while Capcom dare to raise the question about future DLC in the wake of the game’s controversial microtransactions.

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It's been a while since I played a game as effortlessly cool as Underdogs. This VR mech-fighting game has you pilot a giant mechanical gorilla, pummelling robots and human-controlled mechs with arms the length of lorries in grungy, trap-filled arenas. The combat alone is chest-thumpingly good, but Underdogs couples it with a fantastically evocative cyberpunk setting, and a smartly implemented rogue-like structure.

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Windowkill is the most inventive arcade shooter I've played for years.

It's twin-stick shooting in a tiny window that temporarily expands in that direction when you shoot its edges. You have to actively manage and maintain the play space itself for that to even be an option. Soon static monsters appear in their own isolated windows you'll have to shoot your way towards (their attacks can cross the void between), and before long there are the horrible hateful little blue bastards who sit there passively, soaking up shots and never attacking but actively pulling the edges of the window towards them.

It's a clever and great little thing and I sort of hate it as much as I like it.

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