Towards the end of The Bookwalker: Thief Of Tales, I just wanted it to end. The adventure game's strong premise of a writer magically entering books to steal treasures wore thin across uninteresting puzzles, repetitive crafting, bland combat, and—worst of all for a game about the wonder of words—iffy writing. But once the credits rolled, I realised I had been fooled by its polished looks, and its core development was team was tiny (with a squad of external contributors), leaving me feeling a lot more forgiving. So, it's a good game to check out on Game Pass, or at least flick through the opening chapters.

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“It’s incredibly weird for anybody who knows me that I’ve become the romance guy,” David Gaider tells me. “I’m the least romantic guy. Especially when I get to the characters saying ‘I love you’ to each other…” Gaider mimes the sickliness of the scene and his own horrified response. “Apparently I did it so well on Baldur’s Gate II that James Ohlen kept handing me this stuff. And, god, I hated it so much.”

It’s weird, in fact, that Gaider wound up working on Baldur’s Gate II at all - let alone that he became synonymous with Dragon Age and romanceable companions afterwards. At 27 years old, he ran a hotel in Edmonton, Alberta - the same city where, unbeknownst to him, Bioware was busy making its name. Once it came time to make a sequel to Baldur’s Gate, Bioware cast around for local writers, and a friend recommended Gaider, who had played D&D in the ‘80s before it fell out of fashion.

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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 car combat, some pretty walks, a physics-defying cat, a squishy mech, and so much more. Come admire these attractive and interesting indie games!

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Samsung's 870 Qvo SATA SSD is one of our favourite drives for gaming, offering a huge amount of storage for a very reasonable price. Today that goes double, as the 4TB 870 Qvo has dropped to £161 on Amazon UK, considerably less than the £300 it cost back in February. This is a great way to add more game or media storage to your system on the cheap, especially if you've already filled up your available NVMe M.2 slots.

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Is a 24-inch 1080p 75Hz monitor count as a gaming> monitor? If so, this is the cheapest gaming monitor I've seen for some time, with a 15% discount on Ebay producing an extremely affordable monitor with a higher-than-average 75Hz refresh rate and FreeSync compatibility. The Iiyama G-Master G2450HS is available for just £68 with code TAKE15 until 6th September.

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Sundays are for being in awe of backpacks that pack into themselves. Before you scrunch it into a ball, let's read this week's best writing about games (and game related things).

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And while the RPGang are still finishing Baldur's Gate 3, here's Starfield coming to claim another hundred hours of your roleplaying time. That's a whole lot of lives to live on top of an actual life. Starfield is out now for folks who bought the fancy special expensive editions, by the way, then hits Game Pass and all that next week. Anyway! What are you playing this weekend? Here's what we're clicking on!

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This week's news that the amazing Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew will be Mimimi Games' last hurrah has left me absolutely devastated. As the kids might say, I am shook. Besides being a bestest best in class tactics game with great characters, a witty script and deviously designed stealth puzzles to blast and backstab through, Shadow Gambit did that very rare thing that's seemingly eluded both other types of strategy game I've played recently (*cough*The Lamplighters League*cough*), and even Mimimi's own work in the past - and that's teaching you how to actually have fun with its large cast of murder pirates through its brilliantly-conceived bespoke tutorial missions.

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Crusader Kings 3 is somehow three years old, and Paradox’s grand strategy game is celebrating in style - and with a lot of stats - by dropping the news that it’s sold over three million copies in that time.

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Normally we see a straight doubling in RAM module sizes. Around the turn of the millenium, 1GB sticks were commonplace, and by doubling that amount over time we've gradually worked our way up to 8GB, 16GB and 32GB sticks of DDR4 and DDR5 being common sizes. Now though, DDR5 manufacturers are also producing an intermediate 24GB size, allowing for 48GB kits of two sticks each.

This new capacity requires a BIOS update for most motherboards, but pricing on it can be quite good - and that's what we're seeing today, with extremely rapid DDR5-6400 CL36 RAM available in a 48GB capacity for $130 after a $18 price drop.

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