What a ridiculous week. Activision Blizzard came in on Monday dragging a trail of lawsuits and scandal with allegations of widespread discrimination and harassment, on Tuesday were being bought by Microsoft for $69 billion (£50 billion), and now on Friday they've grown a union. 34 quality assurance testers at the Activision Blizzard studio Raven Software, who currently maintain Call Of Duty: Warzone, are forming a union named the Game Workers Alliance. They're seeking better working conditions in the wake of Raven QA layoffs.

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I’ve always entertained the idea of an apocalypse. I mean, zombies are definitely scary, but it’d be a cool fantasy to play out. Over the years, I’ve even formed my own little plan. Loot some local houses and then set up a base in the fire station on my street. They’ve got electric gates and metal fences to guard the perimeter, a renewable power source thanks to a wind turbine on the roof, and a really handy watchtower. I thought 11 years of The Walking Dead would’ve prepared me fairly well and I fancied my chances. So, I made myself in Project Zomboid. It turns out, everything I learned from The Walking Dead was useless.

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Pupperazzi is a game about taking pictures of dogs. They are, as is traditional, very cute dogs. You go around several areas that increase in complexity and dog saturation, completing photo challenges and unlocking more and more complex areas. An extreme sports dog wants a picture of a dog riding a scooter. The old sea-dog at the beach would like a photo of any dog, as long as the lighthouse is in the background. In return for this you get golden bones as a form of currency to buy different kinds of film, or weird lenses, to kick your photography into the next gear.

It's cute. It's a really nice playground that facilitates the player's own creativity. You can pet dogs to make them happy, or find toys to make them do different things: turn on a radio and any furry pals nearby bust out some truly astonishing moves; throw a stick to initiate a huge game of fetch. You post your photos to a kind of dog-centric Instagram for likes and comments (possibly from dogs; possibly from humans). The colourful, chunky art, combined with deliberately stiff animation where nobody can move their joints, really reminds me of Playmobil toys. Despite this carefree, playful tone, I also find it unaccountably sinister.

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If I ever achieve immortality, there might be time to sit down and work out exactly why some building games grab me and some don't. I fear I am too often left with a page of notes that are just variations on the word "vibes".

Perhaps some taxonomy would help. Moons Of Ardan is a space colony building game that's mostly about balancing production rates by placing buildings. Less dryly, you're making a new home for mildly cute little space people on semi-cartoony worlds, where nothing ever really goes wrong and... the vibes. It's the vibes, you see.

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Panic. Panic at the museum reception desk, as the astronaut suit I have belatedly possessed is set upon by a four-strong team of ghost busters. We’re in the opening seconds of the round and only 20 minutes into my Midnight Ghost Hunt hands-on preview, which means I’ve yet to figure out important concepts like ‘where the hunters spawn in’, or nuances like ‘this button lets me hide in props’ as opposed to ‘this button telekinetically waggles props about like ectoplasmic dinner bells’. As ghosts we’re supposed to mostly stay schtum for the five minutes it takes to reach midnight, at which point we get to both metaphorically and literally flip the tables on the living. Instead: panic.

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There was a small recording blip at the start of this week's podcast, but apart from the opening banter we've got a great episode this week. We open an estate agent to appraise the houses in games that would actually be good to live in. It turns out there aren't that many. Not a lot of them would be convenient.

There's an excellent Cavern Of Lies this week, in which Nate hosts a game-themed episode of Through The Keyhole in character as Lloyd Grossman/a robot version of Matt Berry. We also have some great diversions and some opening chat about the time my friend was a real life suspect in a murder for a few days. Plus: Matthew had an unpleasant experience watching House Of Gucci.

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Through the benevolence of Horace and his assorted tech wizards, the RPS Treehouse now has another writing tool at our disposal: liveblogs! Today, we're testing it out with the help of RPS supporters to make sure everything's running nice and smoothly. To ask us a question, post a comment over on the right there and we'll respond in real-time. Give it a try!

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It's a big day for splendid sandbox stealth stabber Hitman 3, now entering its second year of content and support. The developers, Io Interactive are going hard out the gate by adding the new Elusive Target Arcade mode and bringing VR support to PC. It's also ending Epic exclusivity today, hitting not only Steam but Game Pass too, with the full trilogy coming to Microsoft's subscription service. Busy busy.

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Strategy games set in space are almost innately ambitious. The very concept of doing anything meaningful in an infinite void, let alone making it playable and entertaining, is a challenging one, and for every game that reaches for the stars there are countless kinds of... spiraling chaos orbitals.

Between its design flaws and unique ideas with semi-brilliant execution, the 2010 4X/wargame/economic/management simulation Distant Worlds: Universe has straddled those two experiences for a decade. It's needed a sequel for a long time. Distant Worlds 2 is that sequel, and it's almost upon us. Last week I attended a live demo and Q&A session with its producer and co-designer Erik Rutins. With only a hands-off demo to go on I obviously can't say for sure how it plays yet, but it's already looking very promising.

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We’re in a bit of a “love letter” media period right now. Some old things come back with new things to say, like The Matrix Resurrections, and some old things come back simply to enjoy themselves, and remind yesteryear fans what they loved about the original in the first place, like Scream.

Windjammers 2 falls firmly into the latter category. After successfully resurrecting Streets Of Rage for another bout in 2020, developer Dotemu are up to the same old tricks, bringing Windjammers all the way back from 1994 (before I was even born) with a fresh coat of paint and some brand new ultimate frisbee-style action in this sequel.

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