Avast, me hearty bowls of soup! Welcome back to Plundertales, a chronicling of my journey to best strategy game Total War: Warhammer 3 as vampire pirate Count Noctilus without ever touching grass. When we last saw Noctilus, he’d just received a challenge from his ancient rival Gentlemen Jenkins, crudely scrawled on the rear of a carrier pigeon (I had to google ‘do birds have buttocks?’ to write that.) I say ancient rival, it’s been about 15 turns, but Horace said the column needed more drama and that Noctilus’ ongoing battle with the weevils to reclaim his biscuit tin ‘wasn’t testing well’ with the Treehouse’ preview audience. Avast, Jenkins! (I really should find out what avast actually means.)

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Friends, there is trouble a-brewing down the radioactive watering hole. While Amazon's Fallout TV adaptation has launched to pretty positive verdicts, a contingent of Fallout players are up in arms over its portrayal of the Fallout timeline. In particular, it's being claimed that the show has written the events of Obsidian's Fallout: New Vegas out of the canon, despite reassurances from Bethesda Game Studios design director Emil Pagliarulo. Dare you read on? Let me just load up my Junk Jet with piping, hot Fallout Season 1 spoilers...

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Need anything from the shop? Mushroom milk? Fresh tarts? Mystical bejewelled skull? I'm just popping out to Dépanneur Nocturne, a lovely little game which came out in 2020 and I kept forgetting to post about. It's a small first-person explore-o-chatter set within a corner shop in a magical, mystical Montreal, full of things to admire, find, poke at, and chat about with the owner. And it'll only cost you about as much as a pint of semi-skimmed and loaf of Kingsmill from your own local shop.

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My most recent experiences with performance-testing strategy games have been defined by miserable sluggishness and dental drama, so it’s been a relief to find that citybuilding/RTS hybrid Manor Lords is set to launch in a relatively fine state. As an early access game, no less.

Having dug into the latest build’s GPU performance and graphics settings, I have found a few loose strands of technical flax that Manor Lords could do with snipping away. Yet it’s generally in good shape, both for early access and a solo developer project, successfully balancing strong visuals with relatively light hardware demands that should help it run on older PCs (or handhelds like the Steam Deck). Several hours in, the ugliest things I’ve seen are my road layouts.

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Nationalism is obviously weepingly dull, even when it’s not being genuinely harmful, but the UK does have a few special things you can’t get anywhere else. Nik Naks, for example - the only crisp without at least one inferior flavor in the multipack. If I’m even vaguely patriotic about anything, though, it’s the sort of colloquial variety for such a comparatively tiny landmass that means you can drive an hour in any direction and get in a guaranteed fistfight with a stranger over what one of these is called*:

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I tried to look up the plot of Bore Blasters, because my focus when playing the game is entirely on exploding dirt, but it turns out the Steam store page doesn't bother to explain any kind of plot either. Thus, the purity of Bore Blasters. Some facts can be divined from the earth, though: you play a dwarf, piloting a small ship akin to Robotnik's flying hedghog killer, and are dropped off on a small, discrete, gem-bearing chunk of dirt. This you pulverise, in a downward direction, with the aim of finding a huge chest of gems at the bottom somewhere. Your drill is the machine gun on your ship, your efforts governed by about two minutes worth of depleting fuel and a hull that can take three hits total. It's cyberpunk by Gimli.

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With the Fallout live-action show now out and honestly far better than I was expecting, are Bethesda also brewing an adaptation of their other big RPG series, The Elder Scrolls? Not at present, according to Bethesda executive producer Todd Howard, and he says he'd "probably say no" if approached. Mind you, that was the stance he had until Fallout finally fell into place.

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Some new videogame releases pounce on us like excitable Golden Retrievers, while others become apparent to us more insidiously, like undead Golden Retrievers creeping back from the grave to do their master's bidding unto eternity. Withering Rooms is one of the latter: released out of early access last week, and noticed by me just yesterday, it's a haunted mansion metroidvania in which you are a small girl in a nightie who must use meat cleavers, pentagrams and spells of self-enlargement or possession or incineration to overcome various monsters of the Silently Hilly and/or Residentially Evil persuasion. No, none of the monsters are Golden Retrievers.

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When I was a wee lad, my grandfather, an avid gardener, walked with me down to the end of his immaculately tended botanical kingdom, and bid I look upon his favourite flowers, bright blooms of Geraniums. He was a humble man, but even he could not disguise his pride at how wonderfully full and rich their colours and forms had come in this year. “Does the fragile beauty of these blooms not fill you with tender hope for the future?” he asked. “No, Grandad,” I replied, “these flowers are mid.”

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I like co-op shooter Remnant 2, because it doesn't pretend to be much more than what it is: a dodgerollathon where, in between dodge rolls, you fill demons with bullets. I've been meaning to go back to it, so it's convenient that there's more DLC arriving soon. Dubbed The Forgotten Kingdom, it adds a new Invoker archetype, fleshes out an existing jungle biome, and introduces more gear, more monsters, and the like. Yes, count me in.

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