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 the word 'book' was originally spelled with several extra 'o's in it? This was changed when it was collectively decided that telling someone to "please, just read a book" was resulting in several more murders a year than anyone could be bothered to keep track of. This week, it’s Obsidian vet and Pentiment creator Josh Sawyer! Cheers Josh! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

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Sundays are for counting down the days to the new Doom reveal, unless it's happened already? In which case, wow, bold of Hugo Martin to cast himself as the Doom Slayer, but I like the moxy. Before I barge into the comments uninvited and argue with no-one in particular that Doom Eternal’s lateral expansion of its gameplay loop was ultimately a fantastic choice for the long-term health of the series, you swine, let’s read this week’s best writing about games (and game related things!)

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Merry weekends, everyone! It's time for a chill couple of days, I think. A bunch of us have recently returned from trips down to the Brighton office to meet some new faces. Weird to think I'm now the most far-flung of the lot, living way up here in Glasgow. Maybe that's why I elected to take over these Playing This Weekend posts, to help fill the friendless void growing inside my heart.

So just know that if you don't sound off in the comments below with news of what you're playing this weekend, the void in my heart will grow, until one day it consumes me. And then who will write these posts? Here's what we're clicking on this weekend!

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In Mike Judge’s 1999 cult comedy Office Space, there’s a scene where Ron Livingston’s Peter - a programmer working a tedious corporate job - visits a hypnotist. “Is there any way that you could, sorta, just zonk me out so I don’t know that I’m at work, in here,” Peter asks of the hypnotist, pointing to his head. “Could I come home and think that I’ve been fishing all day, or something?”. That’s basically the high-level concept for brilliant sci-fi comedy show Severance, right there. Not wanting to spoil any more than I absolutely have to, I’ll present you with two facts up top. 1. It features a touching queer relationship between John Turturro and Christopher Walken and 2. It’s some of the best television I’ve seen in the last few years. Throw in some Stanley Parable, Control, Gilliam’s Brazil, and some more meta undertones of general musing on gamified reward loops, and you’ve got Severance.

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So ends another month of the RPS Game Club, which means another chance to gather together and swap video game opinions like scary stories ‘round the campfire. The topic, comedy rock RPG/door-kicking sim Deathbulge: Battle of the Bands, was picked by a sadly absent Alice B, but you know what they say when beloved colleagues become ensnared in the kind of Kafkaesque employment limbo that only a corporate acquisition can engineer: the show must go on. We’re therefore sticking to the schedule, and will launch the liveblog at 4pm BST today, Friday May 31st.

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I should be further in than this. My supposed rebellion has thus far eked out a territory that could be described as "where?". My personal reputation is great only among people who love mushrooms and hate deer. It's been long enough that I should probably be a fierce warlord running a large chunk of the kingdom in opposition by now, but instead, I have the skillset of fifty peasants, and the outstanding work of fifty three. And I know why. Bellwright has taught me what I already knew in theory, but had not truly appreciated:

Good managers are rare and precious. And I'm not one of them.

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Understanding any given sentence in Wuthering Waves is like trying to discern sensible meaning from the back of a rain-bleached Doritos packet you found while cleaning your gutters. Last week, players of the character action gacha asked for more freedom to skip story scenes and dialogue. Having sunk a bunch of hours into the game, I can see why. The combat may be swish and the traversal across its rolling landscape flowing and carefree, but the lore-obsessed babble of its characters is mind-numbing. Wuthering Waves has been this month's lightning rod for hype. But it's worth dissecting what it's actually like to play.

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We have been cursed with a terrible devouring monster. Each harvest, one villager must don the ceremonial, mildly magical mask, and enter the fields alone, to gather the precious life-giving ambrosia before the beast can befoul it. For five nights you must do battle, or evade its ravenous clutches.

Those of you who have known your own Devourer are surely thinking: Only five nights per year? Luxury.> Harvest Hunt is good, though.

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To kick off with some extremely half-arsed mytho-geometry, the original Frostpunk was a testament to both the design utility and the inexhaustible political symbolism of circles. When people wish to found a community of equals they commonly form a circle, with each participant visible and audible to the rest. A circle is also the best shape for defending against an engulfing ambient threat such as a global ice age, because it has no weak points, and it makes a great centrepiece for a videogame interface, a symmetrical motif that can be tuned and adorned to either suck your attention into the screen or distribute it evenly in all directions.

Created by Polish developers 11 bit, Frostpunk takes place in the middle of a circle, an Arctic crater with a huge coal generator at its heart. Your city rises in rings around that generator, each additional layer of dwellings corresponding intuitively to decreasing temperature, and the result is one of the most focused and thematically consistent specimens of its genre - a building game that feels as intimate and urgent as tending a campfire. Frostpunk 2's new campaign mode breaks the circle open. It starts where you (hopefully) ended, with the crater now fully colonised and evolved into a glaring, blue-orange geode of high-density housing and clustered chimneys. But the view has been pulled back, and construction now unfolds along the plains and canyons beyond the crater, which consist not of circles but of hexagons - another UI designer's favourite - on which you'll plot out upgradeable districts rather than assembling individual buildings.

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The first scene in RPS Game Club pick Deathbulge: Battle Of The Bands - a genuinely funny and innovative riff on turn-based RPGs - sees candyfloss n’ superglue-haired guitarist Faye frantically search for her missing guitar as the crowd for the titular battle grow impatient. You’ll quickly realise this a school-with-no-trousers-esque dream sequence, but the matted mess of thick black cables that carpet this dingy side-stage is painfully accurate. Pissing around with gear is roughly 70% of the band experience, in my limited experience of being in bands. This probably changes when you’ve got roadies or dedicated tech people, but we did not, because we were skint. And also terrible. Several hours of Deathbulge has brought me more joy than several years of being in actual bands. I had some isolated good times in some of those bands, but I’m having a very> good time with Deathbulge.

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