Joint winner of IF Comp last year was a text adventure game called The Impossible Bottle. You should try it! It’s free and works in your browser, and you play as Emma, a little girl who has to tidy up her house and help her parents before guests come over for lunch. At least that’s how it starts, because The Impossible Bottle goes places>, and the way it goes to those places is very clever, with several revelations and a central gimmick which I’ll do my best not to spoil here. But one of its cleverest features is evident from the start: hyperlinks.

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I recently picked up an Amazon Kindle e-reader, in the hope that it would help me read more and, I don't know, save me from lugging a tome around when travelling? (Not like we're doing much of that anyway! Ha ha ha kill me).

Having now done some reading on this dark slate of mystery, I am a firm believer that it's home to a feature that is more Dark Souls than any other feature described in article proclaiming that something is like From Software's sublime action-RPG.

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Last year, as the pandemic dragged on through the sweltering summer months, my cat unexpectedly died. I got the call on the way home from a rare visit with a friend, where we had sat six feet apart with masks on as we watched Hamilton. The next thing I knew I was at the vet, saying goodbye to my sweet boy as I held him for the last time. It was only a few months later, when one of the hundreds of photos that I had taken of my cat popped on my phone, that I genuinely broke down. Humans can be very good at repressing the grief that arises from traumatic memories, but photos have a powerful way of taking one back to a particular time and place. I saw myself holding my cat tight, and I cried.

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Kick Keanu to the curb and Mads Mikkelsen too. Sorry lads, we dont need your very real human faces in video games anymore. Epic Games are working on a tool to create very real looking fake humans that they say can reduce the time it takes to make digital characters from weeks to just an hour. The MetaHuman Creator isn't available just yet, but Epic have published two sample humans (a horrifying phrase!) that you can download for use in their Unreal Engine.

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Just one day after its fundraising efforts began, Failbetter Games' upcoming romantic visual novel Mask Of The Rose has been fully funded on Kickstarter. It's a prequel to all of Failbetter's games, set right after London sunk underground in Fallen London. At the time of writing, backers have pledged a total of £99,203 of the £90,000 goal, and now it's time to talk stretch goals - one of which would add an entirely new character option to the game.

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Ubisoft are throwing a big Lunar Sale to celebrate Chinese New Year this week, offering up to 80% off their biggest and best games, plus an extra 15% off selected titles until February 12th. Happily, Assassin's Creed Valhalla is one such game that can benefit from the extra 15% off deal, which means you can now pick up Eivor's excellent Viking adventure for just £35 / $42 instead of the usual £50 / $60. There are loads more games on sale, too, so read on for our selected highlights.

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Ah, earnings calls. They are mostly boring and investors asking about big numbers, but occasionally they reveal some interesting titbits about game developers' and publishers' plans. In Ubisoft's quarterly earnings call yesterday, they talked about how they want to be less reliant on big AAA games, and instead want to put more focus on free-to-play games. They also mentioned Rainbow Six Quarantine and Far Cry 6 will be coming out this year, and even briefly touched on the new Star Wars game they're making with Lucasfilm Games - though the details are still very hush-hush.

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Growing up in the late 80s and early 90s, I was lucky enough to have a dad who happened to be in IT. It meant that from an early age I was banging away at keyboards, playing games like MadMaze on a laptop the size of a briefcase. I eventually fell into to the nascent world of online gaming, which was how I discovered Legend Of The Red Dragon, or LoRD as it’s often known.

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Gaming headsets can be such cumbersome things, can't they? While some are slimmer and svelter than others, they're still one of the bulkier peripherals cluttering up my gaming desk, and I often wish I could just stick in a pair of earbuds and have done with it - especially given how much trouble I often have finding a headset that doesn't give me a splitting headache every half hour. Alas, most earbuds don't come with those all important microphones we need for chatting with our mates online, which means plugging in yet another device to my PC that takes up even more room than before. Happily, EPOS' new GTW 270 Hybrid wireless earbuds have seemingly solved all of my headset woes in one fell swoop, offering great sound across a myriad of different devices as well as a clear, built-in mic. They might just be the best thing I've ever stuck in my ears.

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Blizzard are not done with Hearthstone shakeups. Last month they released its first mini-expansion, and now they are adding a new Core Set of 235 cards. Free for all players, these will replace the Basic and Standard cards in the Standard Format, and are set to launch with the arrival of the next expansion. This should be around April time, going by their usual release schedule.

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