I've been trying to work out if I'm keen on Soulframe only because I feel guilty about missing the boat with Warframe. I reviewed Digital Extremes' hit free-to-play shooter in 2013, back when people were still calling it a spiritual successor to the developer's boomerang-throwing action game Dark Sector. I didn't like Warframe much at the time. Think I gave it a 6/10. Warp forward a decade, and that 6/10 game has become a thriving live service phenomenon - fifteenth on the Steam Most Played charts at the time of writing, and profitable enough to spawn its own annual TennoCon expo. It's also become an intoxicating, confusing morass of dynastic sci-fantasy politicking and genre-shifting expansions, ranging from capital ship mechanics to questions of time travel, wrapped in layers of cosmetics that make Destiny look about as colourful as Gears Of War.

I definitely didn't see all that coming. I doubt Digital Extremes saw it coming either. Warframe today feels like a lab experiment run amok. I love its appetite for novelty, but there's a lot for a returning player to catch up on and, frankly, it feels like homework. As such, I had a couple of broad motivations for playing Soulframe's pre-alpha "prelude": I'm keen to see what Digital Extremes can do when they aren't encumbered by 10 years of world-building, and I want to get in on the ground floor before they absolutely swamp this thing in updates.

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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! This week, it’s Game Maker’s Toolkit and Mind Over Magnet mechanics knower, explainer, and designer, Mark Brown! Cheers Mark! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

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I will spend this Sunday nursing a chest infection, probably by wrapping blankets around myself and watching YouTube videos until sleep comes. Let's first round up some good links with writing and videos about videogames.

This is surely the best link this week: an hour-long video on how to beat "every possible game of Pokemon Platinum at the same time". That is, coming up with a set of game inputs that can win billions of possible permutations of the game, as determined by its RNG, when played simultaneously. It's an impressive feat, but the video itself is great too, patiently breaking down the process with motion graphics and video editing flair. Delightful.

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It's a strange new world we find ourselves in. Previously, we'd only feared for those of you playing games with names like "The Addresses Of All Notable Public Figures in Terra Gaia VI" and "Xtreme Bomb Maker: Easily Obtainable Household Objects Edition". Alas, the automod decided that what a healthy comment system really needs is a blanket ban on the entirety of language. Typical robot. Anyway, that should be sorted now, so please welcome this most hallowed of RPS traditions back with aplomb. No. Aplomb>. Christ. It's coming for us now. Here's what we're clicking on:

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Four thousand words of notes. Hoboy. Field of Glory Colon Kingdoms is definitely thought-provoking.

It was also complaint-provoking in the fairly long period where I didn't understand what it's trying to do. Reaching that point, luckily for you, means we can cut out a lot of the "confused whingeing" subsection of those notes. Though it still has its shortcomings, I've come to appreciate that I was reading Kingdoms all wrong. Although it talks big about characters, politics, and religion, they're not what it's about. It's about building>.

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In Rue Valley you role play a guy with poor mental health. He wanders around a crappy motel, stuck in the same old patterns of life, seemingly unable to escape his inner demons. When confronted with the premise for this upcoming RPG you may have one of two reactions. The first: you will say "lol, it me" with enough humour to wishlist it on Steam and earmark it for the future. The second: you will mutter "ugh, it me" and be immediately put off by the idea of having to tolerate an entire second layer of psychological hangups.

There is a third secret reaction though... you might think: oh, this looks a lot like Disco Elysium, but in the real world.

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I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: running away is the best feeling in videogames. More specifically, being chased is the best feeling in videogames, a sentiment I’d happen to share with my golden retriever if you replaced the word “videogames” with “the universe”. He is a purer being, but he’ll also never know the joy of executing a rail-dismount into a dashing corner-jump escape in Deadlock, and for this he deserves our pity.

It’s easy to miss if you haven’t played for at least a few hours, but Deadlock packs one of the most engaging movement systems this side of Tribes Ascend.

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The gaming keyboard market is currently tripping over itself, trying to equip everything with the technology most commonly known as Snap Tap: a feature that promises hyperfast inputs of two alternating keypresses, making you an unkillable side-strafing blur in your FPS of choice. Introduced on Razer’s Huntsman V3 Pro series and quickly followed by Wooting’s (functionally distinct but effectively identical) Rappy Snappy, Snap Tap is now wearing multiple names as it takes over the world of RGB peripherals, from SteelSeries’ Rapid Tap to Corsair’s FlashTap and Keychron’s... Last Keystroke Prioritisation. Which doesn’t sound as sexy, but still.

However, Snap Tap is also drawing a level of ire that exceeds the usual baseline scepticism of hardware marketing. Because it enables a form of input automation – where you can quickly move in two directions by rapidly tapping one key, while holding down another – it’s considered by some as tantamount to cheating, allowing players to cross the line that divides unfair play from the accepted comforts that come with simply using a responsive Hall Effect keyboard or high-refresh-rate monitor. It’s even become a bannable offence in certain games, most notably in Counter-Strike 2.

Neither side is backing down; in an astonishingly worded tweet, Wooting went as far as to concede Snap Tap "should be considered cheating. But if it’s allowed, you need it." But do you?

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After nearly a year of public beta honing, the Nvidia App – Team Green’s new one-stop shop for desktop GPU management – is out in full. Not alongside the upcoming RTX 50 series, as rumoured, but right-now-today-this-minute. I’ve been testing out the launch version and while it’s not without some dud features, it does agreeably achieve its stated goal of combining the functions within Nvidia Control Panel and GeForce Experience. And if installing it means never having to use the latter again, well, that’s 149MB well spent.

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"A lot of puzzle games can leave you staring at the same static screen for ages, but here, I’m always pushing you forward," says Mark Brown of Game Maker’s Toolkit. For a decade now, Brown has been releasing accessible deep dives on game design for his popular YouTube channel, like "How Game Designers Protect Players From Themselves" and "The Two Types of Random in Game Design." This week, he’s releasing his own for the first time.

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