Hello reader who is also a reader! It's finally time for another edition of our thrillingly erratic column on game developers and their bestest books. This week, we're having our ears bent by Marcia Shange, chief operating officer of South Africa, Johannesburg-based developers Nyamakop, creators of puzzle platformer Semblance and the forthcoming postcolonial heist 'em up Relooted. Cheers, Marcia! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

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Sundays are for waking up and remembering you said you’d help your sister-in-law move house. A burning fear flares in your gut, not of the manual labour, but of how she said it was fine because she’d bought a flatbed trolley off a Chinese website for £40. The fear fades into sad resignation that you’ll end the day picking up splinters of shattered plywood out of a carpet.

This week’s readings are a little light on actual videogame stuff. Though let’s be honest, sometimes videogames don’t deserve it.

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Last month, Ubisoft pretty unceremoniously cancelled a bunch of games, the most notable of the bunch being that long gestating Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time remake. This came as part of a major restructuring at the company, putting up to 200 jobs at their Paris HQ at risk, ultimately leading to a call for an international strike, and the firing of one Assassin's Creed designer. It's all a concerning mess, and now the creator of Prince of Persia and lead designer on the original Sands of Time Jordan Mechner has shared his sympathy to devs affected by the remake's cancellation.

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I'll be truthful with you for a moment: I do, from time to time, enjoy a game where I do not have to be supremely strategic, and get to watch different lights and colours light up on my screen. Something that's got the juice, but doesn't ask too much of me. Everyone needs to turn their brain half off once in a while! And I believe I could quite easily find myself switching off that half to STICKER/BALL once in a while, a "pool game roguelike from the future."

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My Menace campaign hasn't been a rousing success. In my first mission, I failed a string of optional objectives and saw one of my squads gunned down by a group of heavily-armed, jetpack-wearing space pirates. I got revenge by running them over with an APC. So, we'll call it a draw. But I need to up my game if I'm to kick these freeloading bandits off the planet Backbone.

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I'm likely going to be spending much of this morning preparing conversation topics for the two-year-old's birthday party I'm going to this afternoon. It's not the toddlers that are the issue - all the old standards go down a treat with them – "Do you like the taste of boogers?", "What's that behind your ear?", "What's your position on jelly?" (To which the answer is always "On a plate!"). No, it's the parents that are the issue.

They get really weird when you as them if they like the taste of boogers.

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Square Enix have announced Paranormasight: The Mermaid’s Curse, a summery sequel to horror mystery visual novel Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo. The original game earned itself a double thumbs-up from former RPS reviews editor Rachel Watts, shortly before she vanished while gathering blood-stained stones one moonlit night. (I am just joshing with you – Rachel is alive and well over at Thinky Games. Remember, there's no such thing as ghosts and there definitely isn't one hovering behind you right now.)

The Mermaid’s Curse should be good, then. It trades the first game’s gloomy streets for the coast of Japan, where young pearl diver Yuza Minakuchi discovers another version of himself at the bottom of the ocean. I routinely discover other versions of myself at the bottom of a bottle of Tuppersmith's Old Peculiar, but nobody's making any dang visual novels about me. Anyway, here’s a trailer.

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Like the Turtle Beach Vulcan II TKL keyboard – except as astute readers will notice, this is a headset – the BlackShark V3 Pro is something I’ve welcomed into my everyday PC kit for months, yet apparently needed the invention of a new review format in order for me to talk about it. Whoops. Still, the length of that happy headwearing should tell you something: I like it, a lot.

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