If you re tuning into the Overwatch League s stage two playoffs this weekend, you might see a video featuring 14-year-old Danik Soudakoff. Soudakoff is an attendee of some of the games in the Burbank arena, a fan of the Los Angeles Valiant, and deaf. When attending games, he gets an American Sign Language (ASL) interpreter to keep him informed, and he s been a part of creating new signs to aid communication among ASL users in the Overwatch community. And he has some advice for Blizzard about how they could make the game better for deaf and hard of hearing players including by following in the steps of Fortnite.

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Forsooth, gentlefolk, look to the skies, for they portend the arrival of a video game. It s Astrologaster, a tale based on the real life of an old-timey doctor, Simon Forman, who blended medicine, astrology, and sort of general advice-giving into a mostly-successful business in Shakespearian London. Oh, and quite a bit of what the game delicately calls strumpy-humpy.

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Australia seems like one of those mythical places everyone agrees exists, but I have seen little to no evidence either supporting or discrediting this claim. My Australian friends are ephemeral beings, constantly on flights which last upwards of fifteen hours. Where are they going? I hope they’re happy there, wherever they are.

Firmly in the pro-Australia camp is The Freeplay Independent Games Festival. “Australia’s longest-running and largest independent games festival,” according to its website. Whether or not Australia is real, the games Australians make are good. Here are the games up for the 2019 Micro-Game award this weekend — all free, and ready to play. Perhaps together we can come to a final agreement on Australia once and for all.

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The weather has fooled me. I’ve been so busy thinking we’re in an endless winter that I didn’t see May coming. Now it’s May, which means it’s almost June. Which means it’s almost E3. Where did that come from. I should race everyone to book time off after E3 to recover from working stupid hours on Los Angeles time from Scotland. Agh. As tiring as it is, that is still one of my favourite working weeks of the year. No time to faff, just WRITE.

What are you playing this weekend? Here’s what we’re clicking on!

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Fantasy merc management RPG Battle Brothers has expanded again, now into pseudo-viking territory with the Warriors Of The North DLC. Unlike the previous Beasts & Exploration expansion, which bulked out the existing world map, this one extends the game up into the frozen north, filled with barbarian tribes and some big hairy monsters. It also opens up the option to play as other factions, including peasants or even cultists. Below, a lengthy developer video, showing off a tough battle between a southern mercenary unit and a barbarian warband. The base game is also half price for one day only.

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Games which kick over the fourth wall and involve the inner workings of your PC have always fascinated me. File://maniac isn’t the first of its kind, but it is an intriguingly dark take on it, and possibly the start of a larger series. Described by developer Born Frustrated as a “pilot episode” about a cyberpunk investigator, delving into the virtual dream-worlds of killers. In this instance, you find yourself at the suspect’s home, its door removable only by deleting the file for it from the game’s directory. Give it a look in the trailer below, or try it for yourself here on Itch.

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Give it another couple years, and Euro Truck Simulator 2 and its American cousin will have mapped most of the roads of the world. Next on SCS Software’s checklist is the Road To The Black Sea expansion, adding the route to Turkey via Romania and Bulgaria to Euro Truck Sim 2. While a night-time trip through the Carpathian mountains and an overnight stop in Transylvania may sound thrilling, those dwindling profit margins prove that the world is the only vampire that counts. The new roads will be open later this year, and you can take a peek at the scenery in the trailer below.

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TwinCop by Finite Reflection has one of those amazing game concepts I’m surprised hasn’t been done before. In a generic ’80s synthwave movie world, two cops have been exploded, and sewn back together into a single super-cop like some kind of bargain-bin RoboCop. Two players (local only) share control of this bisected bobby, twin-stick shooter style. That is, each player controls one arm and leg and must coordinate to defuse bombs, drive around town and survive bullet-time gunfights. It’s gloriously daft and looks like a grand time. See the launch trailer below.

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We all know that the internet was built to send cat pictures, which is exactly what A Hat In Time wants you to be doing in the Nyakuza Metro DLC, out today. While free for original Kickstarter backers, it’s the Mario-like platformer’s first fully paid DLC for the rest of us, but does a lot to justify that price tag. A large new free-roam city packed with cats, an online party mode (Steam only, sadly) for up to fifty players, an overhauled photo mode with stickers and some fan-made mods integrated. Below, forty minutes of online-mode streamed by devs Gears For Breakfast, and my thoughts after bumbling around it for a couple hours.

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Sometimes you don’t know what you need until you have it. Lately it turns out I’ve needed a lot of soothing, which is fortunate because this week’s selection of the best indie games on Steam ranks highly on the alleviometer. We’ve the usual variety you’ve surely come to expect, and a bit less of the drama and thrills than average.

It is time, once more, for some long overdue Unknown Pleasures.

Chilling out, maxing and relaxing all cool this week: plague doctors, Arabian cyberpunks, and… underground goddamn> monsters.

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