The bar for getting me to write up a new roguelike has never been higher. I don't care how many twists you throw into the formula, developers. I don't care how imaginatively you have reinvented the wheel of permadeath and unlocks. I am tired of this genre/wantonly adhesive cultural phenomenon. I wish for it to die in shame and ignominy.

You've made a roguelike in which attacks are performed by assembling a manga page, you say? Well... go on then. Here's a trailer for The Fable: Manga Build Roguelike.

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Look, we all know The Sims is a weird little series. You can torture your Sims, meet fairies and werewolves and vampires, have half alien babies. So I feel like I shouldn't be all that surprised by The Sims 4's next expansion pack, Adventure Awaits, seeing the return of imaginary friends. And yet here I am, taken aback and slightly horrified by the game's interpretation of imaginary friends in its first gameplay trailer.

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Have you brought batteries for your torch? Good. Elden Ring Nightreign's Deep of the Night update's primed to arrive in the wee hours of tomorrow, September 11th, and there's a pretty hefty balancing patch to dissect before it arrives.

I've cracked the notes open already and I'll be honest, I'm a bit surprised. Well, maybe concerned is the best way to put it. You see, the word increased is used an awful lot in relation to stuff you can do hurt an enemy. That seems fishy. Just what have you got planned to make lives miserable again once Deep of the Night drops at 2:30AM BST, FromSoft?

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Historical strategy game Ara: History Untold will get new culture mechanics in its 2.0 update, developers Oxide Games and publishers Stardock have announced. As with culture features in certain Civilization games and - well, the only other specimen that comes to mind right now is Sins Of A Solar Empire, this will allow you to claim territory without firing a shot, by dint of being way fancier and more refined than all those yokels across the border. Should the aforesaid yokels remain unmoved by your splendour, there's also a new Agitator unit that can be sent into foreign parts to foment rebellion.

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Hola, big Steam update alert, featuring some stuff you might already have tried in beta and a crap tonne of other stuff you might not have. Either way, it's all in the hands of the masses now, so worth being aware of. Yes, "removed a setting from music settings that wasn't hooked up to anything" is a change you need to know about, don't question me!

You can find the full notes for this latest Steam update here, and I advise you whip out your best Sunday Papers pipe and slippers when you do, because there are bullet points for days. In the meantime here's a quick rundown that you can safely consume without old man tobacco and weird indoor shoes.

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Do you not> know gun fu? Briefly and baldly, it's the cinematic practice of making a gunfight look like something out of a martial arts film, with participants using firearms in ways that are borderline unbelievable - punting themselves backward along the floor with the recoil from two pistols, like Chow Yun Fat in The Killer, or slide-walking down a bannister while firing, like Chow Yun Fat in Hardboiled.

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Microsoft have announced plans to roll out a policy which will mandate that staff return to working from the office at least three days per week, with a first phase of it set to come into force as of February 2026.

In a memo about the move shared by The Verge, Microsoft executive vice president and chief people officer Amy Coleman asserted that it's "not about reducing headcount". The mandate comes just a couple of months after the company's mass layoffs which saw about 9,000 employees let go and several games cancelled. The bloodletting hasn't stopped since that point either, with The Seattle Times reporting this week that Microsoft have laid off a further 42 employees, bringing the total to 15,000 since May.

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When was the last time you turned the radio on? I imagine for some of you younger readers, the answer is probably never. To be clear I'm not judging you here if that is the case, or even if it's just been a while, it's a format that feels hard to reckon with when its main point - listening to a range of pieces of music - is made borderline moot in the era of streaming services. All of which makes Omega Point, a game where you control a mech but the only thing you can do in it is change which radio station you're listening to, all the more interesting. A severe epilepsy warning is needed for this game as it has a lot of flashing images>.

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