There are management games and there are micro-management games. Prison Architect 2 is the latter. I don't mean this as an annoying thing, like when Harold from corporate starts commenting all over your document at 4.30pm on a Friday. I mean it as a distinction between those games that let you plop down a house, and others that need you to stack the bricks, install the plumbing, fit the lights, and select the wallpaper. The first Prison Architect allowed you to finesse every detail of a secure correctional facility, down to each cell and dog kennel. Unsurprisingly for a sim about prison, it encouraged obsessive control. The 3D-ified sequel isn't finished yet, but it's taking a similar approach. Maybe a little too similar.

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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’ is actually an ancient Sumerian greeting, short for: ‘can I have that book back I lent you eight months ago you said you’d have finished in like, two? This is going to be another one of those>, isn’t it?.’ Truly, language’s many permutations are a font of limitless wonder. This week, it’s Pony Island, The Hex, and Inscryption maker Daniel Mullins! Cheers Daniel! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

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Sundays are for wheeling my old gamer chair to the curb, before flopping back in my new ergonomic office chair with the same awful posture and whining, "Why doesn't it work?! Who knew that furniture named things like Titan, Pro and Conquer aren't the most conducive to lumbar support?" Before I go, "Aaaaaaahhhhhhh" so loudly I give the local cats tiny heart attacks, let's read this week’s best writing about games (and game related things!)

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This weekend is a big one for me. My brand new fancy shmancy ottoman bed is arriving in my new flat, after two weeks of curling up on the sofa with a weighted blanket. I'll also be topping it with my brand new ultra-thick memory foam mattress topper, raising me off the floor another crucial few inches. Think of the view I'll get from up there! To imagine there'll be any time for games! Pah!

I kid. Plenty of time for games for us all, even while reclining on gloriously beds with ungodly amounts of storage space. We love playing games here at Rock Paper Shotgun. Even Alice, who has routinely told me that actually there are no good games. Here's what we'll be clicking on this weekend.

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I love building games, but it's not that often that put one down and feel particularly tempted to get straight back into it again. Of Life And Land is one of those, but thankfully not so much so that it threatens to consume my every waking moment.

It quietly does several things in a modest little way, that are all the more impressive for its lack of fanfare. The core one though, is that it takes the kind of simulationist foundation normally reserved for the punishing Dwarf Fortress derivatives or gnarly logistics games, and builds on them an approachable, gentle, even philosophical game instead. In a word: it's lovely.

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Ghost of Tsushima: Director’s Cut is now out and about on PC, sadly with the requirement of signing into a PlayStation Network (PSN) account in order to play the samurai action-adventure’s Legends co-op mode. The same requirement, you might recall, that Helldivers 2 players recently lobbied Sony into abandoning. No such luck here, and as previously warned, the need for said PSN sign-in to happen over Windows means that Ghost of Tsushima is essentially missing a chunk of itself on the Steam Deck.

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“In one of Nero’s many manifests,” reads a books in surreal puzzle-box Lorelei And The Laser Eyes, referring to its eccentric (read: tastefully deranged) antag-artist, “there is a satirical proposal claiming that only dictators should be allowed to direct films.” Developers Simogo - of well-deserved Sayonara Wild Hearts and Device 6 acclaim - seem to agree that’s a position worth satirising. Lorelei, despite its single-solution puzzles, is not dictatorial. It’s far too interested in collaborating with you for that. It wants you to observe, consider, and interpret its many mysteries. What’s really hooked me here is how those puzzles are kept coherent and logical, despite you getting delivered a letter by dog and occasionally visiting a floppy disk bizzaro world where you converse with a magician who manifests from his own discarded hat.

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Have you played Homeworld 3 yet? I have. I thought it was *gestures at review*. I bring it up because, as is often your way, the readership commented me into thinking about something I’ve been wanting to cover: the outdated relic that is the easy/normal/hard difficulty trifecta. "Ohoho>," I warbled chuckilishly. "I shall craft a blistering manifesto, sharper than the apex of a Toblerone on the roof of your mouth when you try to eat it as god intended. I will> solve this problem." And then I thought, "Actually, no. That sounds hard." So, instead, here are some wazzock-tier ramblings.

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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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