Nightsoil is a sombre little top-down narrative adventure about a gong farmer – that is, a collector of human waste – in 1854 London, at the height of the cholera epidemic. Gong farmers were, I understand, required to work after sunset, to avoid causing revulsion among the decent folk. In this case, you’re a gong farmer at the end his tenure, working his final shift alongside his trusty carthorse Ol’ Boy, while reminiscing about his bygone youth and the happier days that might have been.

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The thing you need to understand about Fogpiercer is that this deckbuilding roguelike, in which you control a train battling Mad Max-style road bandits, knows the secret joy of artillery. It is one of the few games that recognises that while it's satisfying to hit an enemy with a shell from a howitzer, it's even more satisfying to target the space next to them and use the force of the blast to give them a sideways shove into a wall.

It's a mechanic that puts Fogpiercer into the same fine company as Into The Breach.

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Valve currently have three Steam Deck models on offer: you've got the standard 256GB LCD variant (basically no longer in production), the 512GB Steam Deck OLED, and a beasty 1TB edition of the latter. All of them are lovely handheld PCs, but whether you've got one of these or you invested earlier in a smaller model, you might still be itching for a little more capacity to make that 32-hour flight to New Zealand a lot more bearable. At this point you have two options: a microSD card, or for storage with more clout, one of the best Steam Deck SSDs.

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The Stop Killing Games campaign's organisers are currently awaiting a chat with European Union politicians about server shutdowns rendering online-only games impossible to play. Said chat's been set up by a petition which racked up just under 1.3 million verified signatures at its final count, with that being one of the alleys the group have gone down in pursuit of action against publishers being able to abandon games without leaving a way for them to be kept running.

Rather than simply adjusting their ties and googling nice places to visit on a trip to Brussels while they wait for their meeting, the group have announced some more action they'll be taking to get their message out in the ling term. Two Stop Killing Games non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are going to be set up to cover Europe and the US.

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Ubisoft are laying off around 40 people at Ubisoft Toronto, the studio behind the forthcoming remake of the original Splinter Cell. That’s approximately eight percent of the studio headcount. It’s all in the service of Ubisoft’s drive to cut costs after restructuring their operations around a big dollop of Tencent funding, which has elsewhere seen Ubisoft propose to lay off up to 200 people in Paris, and chop fixed costs by €200 million over the next two years.

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It’s always a pleasure to write about Frostpunk, but I’m glum that Frostpunk has boarded the Great Videogame Remaking Train. I don’t think the original Frostpunk is beyond improvement, but I do find it very complete. Chilly finitude, obsessive symmetry are its narrative ethos and aesthetic. It’s a three-act story in a genre that tends to be exhaustingly open-ended. Its dramatic stakes are stark and inescapable – who and what will you sacrifice so that everybody else can survive? In place of the hopelessly indulgent, always-extendable gridiron of SimCity it gives you an Omelasian foxhole, with construction rigorously defined by distance from the coal burner at the heart. The Last City's inner configuration may vary, but it must describe a perfect circle, because it has to dissipate heat evenly against the apocalyptic winter. It can’t afford to sprawl.

But sprawl Frostpunk has - firstly in the form of DLC expansions, and then in the shape of Frostpunk 2: a looser, fragmented game of expansionism, bickering council members, tangled ideologies, and petrol politics. And now here’s Frostpunk: 1886, an Unreal Engine “remake plus plus”, as game director Maciej Sułecki puts it, in a sector saturated with boutique revivals, some of them landing a handful of years after the original game - a forcing of embryonic nostalgia, huffing on embers, that suggests an industry running out of fuel, giving itself over to cycles of regeneration.

Still, perhaps I’m being too gloomy. I’m definitely being melodramatic. As you’d expect, Sułecki has a more hopeful analysis.

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