Burden Of Command is a lot like me, in that it deserves a lot of love but it's too frustrating and annoying to get it for long.

The concept is promising: tactical battles with a small batch of soldiers, but as a "leadership RPG" instead of a regular wargame. Occasional glimpses kept my hope alive over its long development, perhaps predisposing me to forgive more than usual when it finally arrived last month. I'm glad I did. But wow, did this game get me yelling for a while.

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If you caught The Witcher 4's tech demo at yesterday's Unreal showcase, you likely spent an above-average amount of time for a Tuesday being impressed by horse muscles. Still, however excited you were about that horse, I'd wager you weren't quite as happy as Alice Ruppert - consultant on the upcoming Windstorm: The Legend of Khiimori, and owner of the very best website about video game horses on the internet. Ruppert's initial reaction? "Tears of joy in my eyes when they showed the slow mo horse movement".

"I'm a big fan of the of the Witcher books, and so I knew that Ciri has a horse named Kelpie in the books," Ruppert tells me over a call, "so, that's part of it". But it's also the care that's been put in. "Like: here's our gorgeous horse. We care about it, and we know you care about it. And that made me feel very seen. I think that's what brought the tears to my eyes. Of course, I am so profoundly a horse girl that you can, depending on my mood of the day, you can show me a slow mo footage of a horse galloping and I will cry in any case. That's just my horse appreciation brain rot."

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It begins as every Japan-set dating sim worth its salt does — with a transfer student.

It's Aya's first day at the ominously-named 'Love-Love All-Girls High School', and they're (understandably) a little nervous. Shy and socially anxious, they hope they'll manage to make a friend or two. Turns out their classmates are eager - perhaps a little too eager - to get acquainted. Aya is set upon by a stampede of besotted young women, but Aya doesn't have romance on the brain themselves. "I Just Want To Be Single!" they yell. Cue chirpy acapella theme music.

I Just Want To Be Single!!: Season One, recently released on Steam in Early Access, is a game you'd be forgiven for overlooking on a Steam Store that today is packed with visual novels from Western indie devs. A handful carry a reverence and understanding of the medium (the excellent VA-11 HALL-A, for example), but many take a mocking, ironic approach, or exist primarily to titillate, such that fans have grown wary. Tsundere Studio's debut, I Just Want To Be Single!! stands out from this crowd.

Billed as 'aromantic, asexual, and nonbinary', I Just Want To Be Single!!'s player protagonist, Aya, is a reflection of its mononymous lead developer 'm.'. "I'm still figuring things out about myself and this game is an extension of that," m. tells me over Discord. "The story in this game is largely about finding yourself and who you want to become."

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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! Did you know that adopting language altered the position of the human larynx, making us more susceptible to choking on food? I learned this because I've finished Blood Meridian, and was reading McCarthy's musings on the evolution of language as a chaser. Proof, then, that the only truly fitting way to leave this world is to die choking on a book. Perhaps this week's guest can recommend a good one?

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An eerie wind blows through the treehouse this weekend. The floorboards creak, though no one stands upon them. The fairy lights flicker, though they have not been plugged in since January. The screens in the corner where we all pretend to work lie cracked and cold. Here's what some of us - those who remain - are clicking on.

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Elden Ring Nightreign might replace its source material’s sprawling RPG exploration with a mad dash around tightly-nestled hotspots, but under the bonnet, this is still essentially just Elden Ring with a quicker sprint and character models of hitherto-unseen birdpeople. Even the system requirements are, save for a minor CPU bump, a copy and paste job, confirming the feathers aren’t even that high-poly.

As a result, this spinoff runs equally well on the Steam Deck, even appearing to take advantage of the same SteamOS/Proton tweak that made Elden Ring less stutter-prone on Valve’s handheld specifically. My Steam Deck settings guide for the base game works here too, though having been yanked around Limveld at greave-splintering speeds by loothounds Nic and Ollie, I actually think further quality cuts could be prudent. This is FromSoft at their paciest, and it makes sense to help framerates keep up.

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"Greebling" is George Lucas's term for the decoration of spacecraft models with showy, superfluous details - clumps of antennae, bulky rivets, bulging pipes, anything that whiffs of function. Speaking as the human grown from the ashes of a child who once built the Death Star out of LEGO, I do enjoy a good greeble now and then, but it very easily becomes a parody of itself - like turning a machine inside out, but none of the exposed parts are meaningfully connected. Liliana, founder of Eridanus Industries and lead developer of space tactics sim Nebulous: Fleet Command, has more practical objections to greebling, based on her eight years in the US Navy: excess surface details are an absolute dust trap for radar waves.

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There exists in this world much which, if stripped of even one of its components, would be rendered naught but a frail illusion. Roast pork without applesauce? An insult to god and man alike. A sword without a hilt? Merely sharpened iron, stripped of use or dignity. As our band of eight rode into Heuwiller - Thillmann at the head as befitted his command, Slackbladder at the back as befitted our nostrils - a dark cloud fell upon us. For what is a village without a single poxy alehouse in sight? Nary a trough full of fermented carrot juice. It was going to be a long day.

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The dirt-speckled WRC racing games that were dumped by Electronic Arts a few weeks ago have already found a new partner in Nacon. The French publishers are promising a "complete reboot" of the rally game series, and have exclusive rights on the grubby wheelspinners until at least 2032. This isn't the first time the publisher have had stewardship of the WRC either, so it all kinda makes sense.

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