There are exactly one million metroidy rogueishy action platform games and that is okay>. There's no such thing as too many of an entertaining thing in a world with, god I dunno, at least thousand humans in? Maybe more? Who knows.

They are rarely my thing, though. I try more than I really want to, for you>, and games like Biomorph give me the energy to keep going through the many that leave me indifferent. This isn't one of my grudging admissions that a subgenre isn't all bad; it's a game that I can't even think of a way to complain about.

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Remember when Control came out and your mate Terry appeared out of nowhere to rant endlessly about how they’ve always loved brutalist architecture? Come on, Terry. No you haven’t. You spend weekends eating custard creams and watching Bake Off. You haven’t thought about brutalism since undergrad, be honest. Anyway, my version of that is Starship Troopers. As in, I’ve been waiting for a videogamey excuse to bang on about it in public for ages. Helldivers 2 is obviously as good an excuse as any, but really, I needn’t have waited so long. Official offerings like strategy game Starship Troopers: Terran Command and FPS Robocop: Rogue City aside, I reckon you can find Paul Verhoeven’s fingerprints all over games.

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Graham said he wanted someone to write about Little Kitty, Big City, asked if I liked cats, at which point my soul was possessed by some kind of deep animus. "I really like cats, I just hate the internet UWU nonsense about cats," I said. "God it's awful, I can't stand it, Jesus Christ it's just an empty and terrible way to talk about cats, cats don't deserve to be the internet animal-" at which point Graham managed to interrupt and said I was exactly the person who should write about Little Kitty, Big City.

I promise, I approached Little Kitty, Big City with an open heart, because I do really like cats. But given my aversion to their babification by the internet, it may be surprising that my chief complaint about Little Kitty, Big City is that the hats in it are largely not cute enough. This is a bold claim, because there are more than 40 to collect.

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Nic reckons Homeworld 3, the long-awaited spacefaring RTS, is mostly pretty good. Qualified hoorays for that, as well as for the fact that it doesn’t make especially mad demands of your hardware: besides netting a Steam Deck Playable badge from Valve, its minimum PC specs only list the likes of the Intel Core i5-6600 and Nvidia’s GTX 1060. Easily doable, for most aspiring galactic admirals.

Once a battle gets underway, however, Homeworld 3’s performance can start tanking, turning an initially smooth engagement into a more stutter-prone light show. The good news? You can more than double your framerates with a relatively small handful of graphics setting changes, even if some these (including the DLSS and FSR 2 upscalers) can be a tad inconsistent in their own right.

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Last week, I watched one of my favourite badminton players Kento Momota play his final match. As he stepped off court for the last time, I found myself welling up. He doesn't know me - of course he doesn't - and I don't know him. But for ten years I'd watch him at every opportunity and see him grow into one of the all-time greats. For me, his retirement wasn't only devastating in the sense he was a great ambassador for the sport: a positive soul, a good speaker, a hard worker. No, it also spelled the end of us being able to witness something impossible to replicate, a 'game' of badminton uniquely his. And for a magical two years, he had the best game in the world.

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Tucked away in a corner of 1999's Yosuka, Japan-set open world sim Shenmue there's a convenience store, or "konbini", where you can buy stuff like carrot juice, take part in raffles, and fritter away the hours listening to the shop jingle - an absolute die-cast classic of the genre in that you'll probably be humming the tune before you realise that you've even heard it. Nagai Industries founder Dima Shen has been obsessed with that unassuming Tomato Convenience Store since he was a teenager, partly for the contrast it offers to the rest of the game. "Shenmue was a really depressing game, I would say - your father is killed, it's always raining," he tells me. "But there's one kind of super-healthy place in the whole game: a convenience store!"

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My evolving relationship with Vampire Therapist continues apace - much how protagonist Sam's acumen as an unlicensed therapist for the unsettled undead develops at speed. He's a vampire doing therapy for other vampires, while also undergoing therapy, as a vampire, from another therapist (who is a vampire). Vampire Therapist! I've been able to get to grips with a playable preview - I'd say I got my teeth into it, but I'm not that much of a hack fraud - which means I got to see some of the things that creative director Cyrus Nemati told me about in our interview in action. I remain optimistic that, on it's release on June 18th, Vampire Therapist can walk the tricky line it's drawn for itself.

It's balancing on a knife point of humour, the supernatural, and sincerity about mental health, the latter using real cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT; the comments the first time I wrote about Vampire Therapist revealed a lot about our readership) concepts in consultation with licensed therapists. The preview only covered Sam's first meeting with his mentor, Andromachos, and the first client Sam treats himself - a doctor called Drayne, simultaneously self-loathing and self-aggrandising - but it gave a flavour of how the game plays. Rather than a sort of janky template on how to self-therapise, as I'd feared, when you're playing Vampire Therapist it operates more as a sort of language puzzle against different types of theatre kids.

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I booted up Dread Delusion and fell 30 feet to my death. This throwback first-person RPG is hazardous, and not only due to the dreamlike islands floating in the sky. My leg-snappin' plummet may be down to early access changes, causing the ground to be updated from right under my feet. Far from being a nuisance, meta-jank like this only endears me further to Dread Delusion. It is an RPG from the other side of some attic mirror, an Elder Scrolls from a parallel 2002. It has, somehow, slipped into our reality and is seeing its full release today. There are gods you can thank for this, but we dare not speak their names.

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The last few weeks I’ve been watching quite a few YouTube videos (thanks, Evo Japan), and noticing that adverts during videos a) seem to pop up every 30 seconds or so and b) then last for an unskippable 30 to 60 seconds. My frustration with being bombarded by YouTube ads in videos for which I pay nothing to watch - meaning that I understand the necessity for ads of some kind to support creators and pay server bills - came to mind as I read about EA’s plans to explore inserting advertising into games, which I pay up to £70 a pop to play.

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The story of Manor Lords’ soundtrack begins, as all inspiring tales do, with hunched-over late-night doom scrolling. It was pre-covid, and Pressure Cooker Studios’ composer Daniel Caleb was flicking through reddit posts when a trailer cut through the glare. He’d never heard of Manor Lords before. It looked like a new IP, but already had a huge Reddit following. Caleb loved what he saw. At that point, Pressure Cooker mainly worked on film scores, but both Caleb and fellow composer Elben Schutte had always wanted to eventually move on to bringing their storytelling from cinema to games. Even more so than film, games were the passion. Manor Lords would be perfect for them.

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