Happy May Day weekend, reader dear! Whether you consider this a celebration of spring, the start of summer, a day for workers, or just a long weekend, may you have a good'un. We've had a busy fortnight, with CJ Wheeler joining us as a news reporter and me becoming associate editor (I am still not sure what that means). So how nice that we'll be away on Monday, returning on Tuesday. What are you playing until then? Here's what we're clicking on.

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Finding your niche can often be the key to success for smaller developers, but Swedish team Image & Form refuse to be pigeonholed. Over the last ten years they've tackled every genre, from tower defence to turn-based tactics, RPGs and action platformers. With their latest game, The Gunk, they've finally entered the realm of 3D adventure games. Released on Xbox Game Pass at the tail end of last year, The Gunk was a big step up for the makers of SteamWorld Dig. Not only was it their first game in 3D, and their first time using a new engine, but it was also their first title that had nothing to do with the series they'd built their name on. As it makes its way to Steam today, I sat down with director Ulf Hartelius to talk more about the creation of the game's titular goop, and how the timing of its environmental themes about cleaning up its gunked up planet was much more than just a Death Stranding-style happy accident.

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Rarely has the threat to bite your thumb at someone resulted in all-out nuclear armageddon, but one group of Fallout 76 players will prove the exception tomorrow when they perform William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet live in the game. The Wasteland Theatre Company has even built a stage they say is modelled after London’s Globe Theatre, renowned for its performances of the Bard’s plays. They’re a week late to celebrate Shakespeare’s birthday, but I won’t judge because I can’t even add up properly in Freddos.

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This is just superb.

I'm not a fan of most fighting games. All too often they have too many elaborate moves, too much memory testing, or they feel like glorified puzzles you have to figure out the one solution to.

Hats Are Not Allowed takes an approach I find far more interesting. Combat is pared down to a few basic principles, and the challenge comes from learning how to combine them, and timing is less about animations than about second guessing your opponent. I can't say it's one of the best dueling games ever, but it's the best one I've played for ages.

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Battle royale spinoff and subtitle collector Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodhunt launched this week , following a delay to address feedback from its early access phase. That included ample reports of performance issues, but fortunately, what I’ve played over the past couple of days points towards a much more stable brand of last-vamp-standing shootery. Let’s take a look, then, at Bloodhunt’s PC performance, system requirements and the best settings to tweak.

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QA contractors working directly on the next Dragon Age with BioWare Edmonton have filed to unionise, just the latest in a string of such decisions affecting high-profile companies throughout the industry. The workers are employed by the internationally-operating contract services company Keywords Studios but contracted out to BioWare. They’ve now formed the KWS Edmonton United group and have named low pay and concern at being instructed back into the office while Covid-19 remains a danger as their reasons to seek collective bargaining.

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A rooster calls, and the sun rises as I stock the shelves for another day in Winkeltje: The Little Shop, a business management game about running a little store in a fantasy town. I recently inherited Hefford’s Hovel and, after a manic start, have managed to become well-known for my loaves of bread. Each day customers charge into the store and raid the various displays, tussling over freshly-baked rolls before scrambling home to slap them on a plate. It’s mass hysteria, but what can I say? I make damn good bread.

Fresh meals are just one of six item categories you can sell in Winkeltje, but I don’t need to worry about the rest. Over a few in-game days, your store starts to specialise in the goods you stock, so customers will visit expecting to find those same items. When you enter the Hovel, you’re greeted with the toasty warmth of the oven as the scent of baking dough drifts through the air. You won’t see us preparing potions or crafting clothes, no sir. For that, you’ll have to go elsewhere.

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Looking for a GPU? The RTX 3080 Ti offers comparable performance to the RTX 3090 while costing far less, and today there's an OC model available at the card's UK RRP. It's an Ventus 3X OC model from MSI, with a hefty triple-slot thermal solution that ought to keep the card cool and quiet even running at its factory overclocked 1695MHz.

To get the discounted price, use code SAVE75 to knock a healthy £75 off the list price. That brings it down to £1054, just £5 more than the UK RRP and a great deal for an OC model. You also get free delivery, with the card slated to arrive just after the upcoming bank holiday.

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The WD Black SN850 is a fast PCIe 4.0 solid state drive, and the 1TB model with an integrated heatsink is going for $150 at Best Buy today - some $120 off the MSRP and a historic low price.

This is one of the very fastest SSDs you can buy, with great sequential and random speeds, so it's a great choice for running your OS and loading games faster than ever before. It's also fully compatible with the PS5 thanks to its high speeds and integrated heatsink, making it a great plug-and-play solution for exanding your game storage on the Sony console. Either way, you should expect bleeding-edge performance thanks to high-end components and that extra cooling potential.

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Melos Han-Tani and Marina Kittaka, the dev duo that make up Analgesic Productions , seem to make games about scientists. Young, the hero of their Link’s Awakening-influenced debut Anodyne, may not technically be one, but he bears the coke-bottle glasses and white coat that may make you think he is. Aliph, the put-upon protagonist of the haunting, grief-stricken 2D side-scroller Even The Ocean, works as power plant technician. Nova, hero of Analgesic’s tour de force Anodyne 2: Return To Dust, labours as a Nano Cleaner, one with the ability to shrink inside the psyches of those plagued by Nano Dust, corrupting their thoughts. Even the word analgesic itself has a scientific background; the term means a pain-relieving drug.

When the player begins Analgesic’s newest game Sephonie - part 3D platformer, part deep emotional story - three Taiwanese biologists make their way onto the titular island to explore. As the Steam page puts it: “Amy Lim, Taiwanese-American and bold leader, hails from the midwestern USA town of Bloomington. Riyou Hayashi, an analytically-minded Japanese-Taiwanese researcher, calls the bustling Tokyo his home. And Ing-wen Lin, a kind and considerate Taiwanese scientist, lives in Taipei.”

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