There are no wilds in Monster Hunter Wilds. Instead, beautiful dioramas. The fauna are as ferociously believable as ever, but the flora are plastic aquarium plants. You regard each new environment with wonder precisely once, then adopt the suction-hungry gaze of a Kirby-esque loot inhaler. You turn off your Seikret's auto-trundle just to feel the wind in your hair, then realise the freedom it offers is roughly analogous to the the freedom you have to stand up and scratch your bum on a bus.

"You aren't in conversation with the landscape of Wilds in the same way as you are in Breath Of The Wild or Shadow Of The Colossus," wrote Brendy. The scoutflies "reduce lush and curious environments to an all-purpose gumbo of Matrix code and button prompts," wrote Edwin. That thing about bums just now, wrote I. For all their fidelity and art direction, these biomes are laminated. Save the odd mushroom or helpful rock slide, there's no reason to interact with them in ways that reinforce their believability as real places.

Read more

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! I'm starting to regret phrasing it like that, to be honest. The word "selection" evokes either bureaucracy or crap small versions of chocolate bars. I'm now imagining "guy who travels to Europe because he heard the chocolate is better but can only find stale Curly Wurlys". That'd suck so bad.

This week, it's Last Call, Tacoma, Lost Records: Bloom & Rage, and loads more's Nina Freeman! Cheers Nina! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

Read more

Sundays are for playing a bit of Split Fiction and tinkering with that new expensive camera you bought, the latest in a long line of attempts to adopt a new hobby. You're almost 40 so if this one doesn't stick you may as well just give up and start a Band Of Brothers re-watch.

For Eurogamer, Florence Smith Nicholls wrote about their experience at a Disco Elysium-inspired LARP.

Read more

It's been a long week, hasn't it? The balm for me is that I'm spending Saturday feeding squirrels at one of my favourite Glasgow parks, and then visiting a cat cafe. It's a good time to be me. I hope you've all got a healthy dose of animal in your lives to help get you through these chilly March mornings. Games, too. Lots of games. Here's what we're clicking on this weekend!

Read more

I was towards the end of my Atomfall demo when it clicked for me - clicked like the gravelly report of a shell entering the breech of my rusty yet devastating shotgun. Guided by the deteriorated state of my weapons, and by James' Gamescom write-up, I’d been trying to play Rebellion’s alt-Sixties open world FPS like S.T.A.L.K.E.R., hoarding my ammo and avoiding unnecessary bloodshed as I crept around an English woodland full of druids ranting about atomic fungus. I’d made it to the heart of the druid encampment - a National Trust castle of the kind that would typically be 30% wedding venue, 50% giftshop - only to reach a dead end in a banqueting hall. I had a key for a lock I couldn’t find. Perhaps it lay in a tent outside the castle, or in one of the surrounding caves?

Read more

Monster Hunter Wilds is the fastest-selling game in Capcom's history. It continues to lord over the Steam charts, with peaks that might cause Counter-Strike 2 to glance momentarily down from its Olympus of user-created hats, and while people are still booting the dung out of the PC version's performance, verdicts upon the beast-punching as a whole are glowing.

To suggest that now is the time to go back to formula is probably pure contrarianism, but Wilds makes my brain itch. Building on (and hopefully not just recapping) Brendy's excellently ambivalent Monster Hunter Wilds review, I think the series is balancing on the edges of contradictions that extend throughout its design, from the combat through the user interface to the world and narrative themes. I think it's been doing that for years, in fact, but Wilds, for me, is where Monster Hunter's confusion about itself has come to a head.

Read more

$511.78 (was $879.99)

Read more

When you die in Absolum, you are literally reborn from the glowing womb of a giant pregnant lady. This is not how beat 'em ups normally go. The newly announced left-to-right puncher from the developers of Streets Of Rage 4 plans to inject a bunch of roguelike fungus into the bulging musculature of the classic arcade brawler, then dress it in a big fantasy frog suit that's been handcrafted by a traditional animation studio. It's a tight squeeze, but having played an hour of a preview build, it certainly looks the part. Although I order you never to use the term "rogue 'em up" to describe it, an explosively upsetting term publisher Dotemu has cheekily tried to invent.

Read more

A kink is a twist in a rope, an unconventional sexual or non-sexual practice, a spasm, a bend that might interfere with smooth operation, an eccentricity, a source of pleasure and revulsion. A kink can be anything, as long as it's not the done thing. Monster Hunter Wilds, meanwhile, is a game in which you hunt monsters in the wilds. One of the story campaign's odder beats is that you must continually seek permission to slaughter the creatures (and turn them into weapons and gear) from the ostensibly conservation-minded Monster Hunting guild. Specifically, you'll need the blessing of your fresh-faced escort, Alma.

Read more

Another Steam Next Fest is drawing to a close, having had to compete with Monster Hunter Wilds for PC-beholding eyeballs – yet losing none of its knack for highlighting interesting and offbeat games set for future release. A quick dangle of our indie demo astrolabe indicates we’re a few months off the next >Next Fest, though at the time of posting, there are still a couple of precious hours to download and try out the best samplers that this wintery showcase has to offer. Here are our favourites from the past week, and if you’ve played something you think deserves some more attention, why not share it in the comments?

Read more