If you own Half-Life 2 but never bothered with its freebie tech demo, Half-Life 2: Lost Coast, do give it a whirl. Its showcase of HDR lighting might have lost the "Huh, nice" factor it had in 2005, but it’s still a satisfying slice of punchy HL2 combat, with a nod to the original Half-Life that Valve regretted not making in the main game. I know this because Valve told me, via Lost Coast's other innovation: its developer commentary.

I love these things, these spinning speech bubbles inflated with knowledge straight from the FPS coalface. So do Valve, judging by how dev commentary has appeared (in identical, node-activatable form) in most of their games since. They’re interesting and illuminating, don’t interfere with the game unless the player wants them to, and help build design literacy. Why, then, don’t more games offer commentary as well?

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When I was a kid growing up in rural New Mexico, I dreaded the first day of school. I had to give up whole days of biking in the desert with my brother and playing video games, sure, but the real problem was school supplies. My poor mom had to track down a huge list of supplies the school said we needed, from pencils and paper to expensive binders and calculators. Sure, back to school sales took the sting out of these mandatory purchases, but it was often a real stretch to get everything I needed, and I'd need to make friends quickly to borrow anything I didn't manage to come to school with.

That's why I was particularly amused, a decade and a bit later, to find out that Ebay is offering 20% off back to school purchases in the US, and that category of products includes a $999 LG OLED gaming monitor. Even for a university student, that's one heck of an upgrade for the new school year - but a darn good deal if you're considering this kind of ultra-premium gaming monitor.

• Get the LG 27GR95QE 27-inch 240Hz 1440p OLED gaming monitor for $718 w/ code SAVE4SCHOOL (was $999)

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Ugreen is a Chinese brand that has made a name for itself by providing surprisingly good design and build quality with the same aggressive pricing as its domestic competitors. I've used one of their USB-C chargers before, but I wish I'd bought this 4-port Gallium Nitride (GaN) charger that offers three USB-C ports, one USB-A port and a maximum output of 100W - sufficient for many lighter laptops, but more importantly the Steam Deck, mobile phones, tablets, headphones and controllers. This normally costs £50, but today it's down to £42 to Scan in the UK.

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Want a sit/stand height adjustable desk for $119? Monoprice are currently selling their WFH single motor model for exactly this price when you use the code BIG30 at the checkout, saving you a ton of money on a desk with an MSRP of $279.99.

This is available only on the white model, which I happen to think looks great - and this is really an outstanding price for a sit/stand price of this size (47.2 x 23.6 inches, for the record).

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The WD SN740 is a 2230 NVMe SSD, one of the few small enough to fit into the Steam Deck and ROG Ally gaming handhelds. It's also the cheapest of these options, and is now available for £80 at Scan - compared to £85 for the recently discounted Corsair MP600 Mini and £105 for the not-so-discounted Sabrent Rocket 2230.

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Citizen Sleeper is a game with lots of brilliant individual stories in it, even the ones that end so catastrophically badly that redemption seems nigh on impossible. But when I look back on this tabletop-infused RPG and think of my favourites, there is one that stands head and shoulders above the rest. It isn't one of Citizen Sleeper's more emotional story beats (I miss ya, Lem and Mina), nor is it its most thrilling (big love to my man Feng). Rather, it's one of the game's quietest and arguably least significant plot points, but the fact it's there at all is probably what cemented Citizen Sleeper as one of my favourite games of last year. It is, of course, befriending The Stray who takes up residence in your Lowend apartment.

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I can almost remember the moment in the original Dishonored when I realised, "Crap. Chaos is coming, and there's nothing I can do to stop it." It was around the halfway point of the game that the world of Dunwall was visibly starting to sour before me, and it was all because I hadn't quite taken the time to truly understand how its chaos system worked. I'd let too many of my mistakes get away from me, killed one too many people in the process, and now its Low Chaos ending seemed permanently out of reach. I thought in vain that if I behaved really nicely for the rest of the game, it might balance out my former transgressions. But alas, it was not to be. I ended the game in High Chaos, and I was furious. For whatever reason, getting a game's 'good' ending really mattered to me back then.

It was this personal failing that drove me to some extreme lengths when Dishonored 2 came out a couple of years later. Not only did I resolve to do a Clean Hands run this time, guaranteeing a Low Chaos ending by refusing to kill anyone, but as I cast my eye down its list of Steam achievements, I also got it into my head that, 'You know what? If we're going no-kill, let's Shadow run it as well and do it completely unseen at the same time.' A great idea at the time, I thought, if a little unusual for me. Cut to my fifth hour trying to clean out Kirin Jindosh's Clockwork Mansion on a review deadline, however, and you might think that decision would have worn a little thin. But you'd also be totally and utterly wrong.

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Dishonored 2 is an immersive sim stealth 'em up by Arkane and it's been in my brain a lot more than usual. Partly due to this year's RPS 100, but also because of the mess that was Redfall. Arkane swung at the live service hero shooter and missed, with some comments writing off my sadness in the review as an inevitability. Sure, there's definitely truth to Arkane having changed over the years, of course it has. But I don't think there's anything wrong with being hopeful.

I think of Dishonored 2's A Crack In The Slab mission as both a beacon of Arkane's past pedigree and a symbol of their situation in the present. While I can't look into the future, I still think there's worth in turning to an all-time classic of a stealth level.

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The Expanse is one of those TV shows that I've started to watch about three times now. Matthew (RPS in peace) and I keep hearing great things about it, but every attempt we make has always ended the same way. We get a couple of episodes in, determined to make it a little bit further than we did before, but there's just something about it that can't quite hold our interest long enough to properly stick with it. One day, though, I do hope to finish the first season of The Expanse, and my ideal scenario is for the episodic prequel game from Telltale and current Life Is Stange custodians Deck Nine to be just the kick up the bum I need to get through it.

The Expanse: A Telltale Series started the fortnightly release of its five episodes on the Epic Games Store last week, and I played through the first, Archer's Paradox, over the weekend. As you'd perhaps expect from a first episode, the plot scales lean heavily toward setup here as opposed to actionable 'so and so will remember that' choices. Still, its centrepiece of exploring a big exploded battleship to find some sort of money-printing macguffin is also like such a sedate, threat-free version of Dead Space that it can't help but feel a little lightweight at the same time - and that's not just because you're floating around in zero gravity for half of it. It does a reasonable job of laying down what I hope is some good groundwork for the origin story for TV favourite Camina Drummer, and her fellow crewmates are a fun, bubbling pressure cooker of personalities just waiting to spill over into conflict, but I do also worry that the game will have the same truncated fate as my attempts to watch the show.

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Every weekend, indie devs show off current work on Twitter's #screenshotsaturday tag. And every Monday, I bring you a selection of these snaps and clips. This week, my eye has been caught by a whole lot of water, which I swear is a coincidence. Ships! Ponds! Otherworldly pools! Ponds! Sharkgirls! Come admire these attractive and interesting indie games.

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