Readers may remember my delight over the demo for Little Witch In The Woods, and I'm happy to report that game is now out in early access. It's already much more polished than the demo, with more yet to come. It's a life sim with a bit of a Stardew Valley or Animal Crossing vibe, except instead of farming you are a witch called Ellie (size: small) living in a biome (type: forest).

In the story you start to free the nearby village from cursed vines, and this requires that you catalogue and collect ingredients for spells, and thence expand your repertoire of witchy recipes. At the same time you can trade spells and magical candy with locals for currency, which you can use to improve your little machines - a roaster, a caldron, a press for ingredients - to make even better things, more efficiently. It's a satisfying process of mastery and exploration. But that is not the important bit. The important bit is that Little Witch In The Woods is disgustingly adorable.

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To be honest, I found Computex 2022 kind of underwhelming; this is usually the biggest event in the PC gaming hardware calendar, and had returned to Taipei after an all-remote 2021 show, but ended with only a smattering of major announcements in the bag. We got nothing on Intel’s Arc graphics cards, and Nvidia’s keynote revealed some new DLSS games but otherwise went light on GeForce deets.

That said, this year’s show wasn’t a bust either: there was fresh AMD Ryzen 7000 info, Corsair’s first crack at a gaming laptop and, at long last, some PCIe 5.0 SSDs you can actually buy. One day. In the future. That’s in addition to the wackier, moon-shooting tech on display, without which it just wouldn’t be Computex. So, in descending order - from the interesting and sensible to the blinking ludicrous – here are the PC gaming highlights from Computex 2022.

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Megacorp Embracer Group has announced that they are building a games archive, to preserve games culture and save it for the future. The project is in the early stages, but they've already got 50,000 games and consoles stored up waiting to be catalogued.

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Sundays are for watching a delivery van reverse into a bollard. Before you hear the crunch, let's read this week's best writing about games (and game related things).

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Fast Four Word is a clever idea. It's a Wordle-like in which you begin with a four-letter starting word and must enter a new word which changes just a single letter. So if the starting word is AHEM, as it was yesterday, you could change the first letter and enter THEM.

From there, you have 44 seconds to chain together as many new words as you can, with plenty of other twists to make it more challenging.

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I'm always interested in card games that stretch beyond pure combat and are used to convey narrative. That's what Foretales does. It's a card game filled with anthropomorphic animals in medieval garb in which you can sneak and barter before or instead of scrapping. Find the trailer below.

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We've less than one week left until the Queen's Platinum Jubilee long weekend, so please do remember to book your pets in to be dyed red, white, and blue before it's too late. All the grooming parlours will be heaving with patriotic pups and pusses. Don't forget to brew a giant pot of coronation chicken (or, like me, coronation tofu) to keep you going during the coming week of endless festivity and forced celebration. If you grow tired and that flag-waving arm starts to sag, you'll be in for it. But first, what are you playing this weekend? Here's what we're clicking on!

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Amazon Games’ fantasy MMORPG New World has received its latest update, ‘Arenas’, which means you can now smack other players upside the head in teams of three. The update brings PvP arena combat in best-of-five contests that Amazon say are for “glory and riches”, but then quickly qualifies that they're actually for unique stuff to decorate your in-game house with. The trailer makes the whole thing seem pretty wacky, see for yourself below.

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The word that comes to mind is "slick". In a genre defined by busy screens and showy light spectacles, Drainus does well to distinguish itself with such excellent animation. The enemies, and particularly the way they spill from levels like the battleship one, demonstrate some of the best sprite work I've seen for ages.

It's more than just stylish, too. As I've mentioned before, I'm bad enough at scrolling shooters, and outright averse to bullet hell, to make me less than an authority on which are the best. But Drainus held my attention for long enough that you should definitely give it a chance.

I'm not going to do a pun about the name. I'm not. I'm definitely not.

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A while back I finished Yakuza: Like A Dragon and felt a little bit lost. You know the feeling, right? When you snap shut a piece of fiction you’ve been reading for days, or months even, it can be difficult severing those relationships you’ve built with its characters. Unless there’s a direct sequel, you must pull your pants up and shelve those emotions and move on.

Not that I struggle with letting go of characters and stories particularly, but my brain makes an exception for the Yakuza games. More specifically, Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio's games. I’ve reached a point where I’m ordering Lost Judgment with no intention of playing it for months - maybe even a year? It’s all a ploy to hang onto RGG’s characters and worlds for as long as I can; a sort of buffer to keep the unease at bay. Having nowhere to turn to next isn’t an option.

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