A bunch of us at RPS have been blattering our way through the underworld of Hades 2, which came out in early access yesterday. Naturally, our favourite gods and goddesses are emerging from our evenings of hacking and/or slashing. For me, Nemesis provides a lot of chuckles. Not because she's bright and jokey (she is frownier than a wet bulldog). But because she's determined to put the player in their place and to beat you at your own roguelike. Narratively, she fulfills a role similar to Meg in the first Hades, that of closest frenemy. But in gameplay terms, Nemesis won't stoop to something as trite as a boss battle. Oh no. She's out to mess with your build.

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I’ve been sampling Hades 2’s early access build on the Steam Deck, and my only complaint – besides the smooching frog having eluded me for hours – is that it’s giving me very little to write about, performance analysis-wise. Honestly, it fits the dinky PC so well you’d have thought Supergiant had decided to make this roguelike sequel a Steam Deck game that just happened to run on desktops by accident.

Hades the first was much the same, taking to the Deck like Hercules to Augean shit, but Hades 2 barely even gives away that fact that it’s unfinished. It doesn’t crash, stutter, or hang, and there’s no point in talking about settings when it runs at a practically perfect 60fps on max quality. Make that 90fps on the Steam Deck OLED, too. It’s just a fabulous game for handhelds, even in its earliest of early access days.

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Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome to Booked For The Week - our new Sunday feature where we ask a selection of cool industry folks questions about books! The very first book was famously written in the 1200's by notable scholar and six-time wrestling world champion Booker T, a fact you'd know if you simply read more books. This week, it's voice of Horizon Zero Dawn's Aloy and many others, writer, singer, and endless other cool stuff, Ashly Burch! Cheers Ashly! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

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Sundays are for sorting the tangle of busted pipes under my sink out so I don’t have to change my socks twice a day after forgetting to wear my designated Kitchen Crocs. Before I remember this time and instantly become a style icon, let’s read this week’s best writing about games (and game-related things!)

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How like Ollie to volunteer to take over Playing This Weekend and then go on holiday, or whatever it is he's done that means he isn't here today - I don't know, he's a law unto himself. What am I, his mother? Thus it falls to me to ask the other staff what they're playing, and thence communicate that to you. Jeeze, why can't you just text each other or something, why all this middleman-ing. What am I, your mothers? But we're playing a bunch of different stuff, so have at it.

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Well, swaggle me horns and fasten me timbers so they stop shivering like that, because the noise is quite irritating. Welcome back to another edition of Plundertales - my quest to conquer strategy game Total War: Warhammer 3 without ever stepping foot on dry land. If you don’t know the other rules by now, I can only assume you’ve been living under an extremely specific type of rock that changes nothing about your life except preventing you from reading the previous two editions of this column. Who would carve such a rock? How would it even work? These are lubber-tier queries and shall remain unanswered, because it’s plundering time. Avast!

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Despite my desire for a real life herb garden, I don't really like farming or gardening games. Distant Bloom could be an exception, except I'm not sure it even qualifies as either, really. It is a little bit about exploration, a little about very light puzzles, and mostly in its heart, about cleaning up and making everything pretty.

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Indika is a good game about a good nun, and I’ll talk about why in a sec, but first - a complaint. ‘Low’, ‘Medium’, or ‘Ultra’ graphics settings? Really, Indika? Where is 'High'? Where’s it gone, eh? This isn’t cute when Papa John's do it, and it’s not cute now. You’re lucky you’re an extremely interesting game, Indika. Let’s talk about that instead.

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I gave that Pools game a go recently - you know, the first-person traipse through some liminal spaces that happen to be pool themed. At one point it was trending on Steam and since then it's garnered loads of positive reviews, with people saying it's unsettling and drips with atmosphere. Reader, I do think it's quite atmospheric, but I do not think it's all that unsettling. If anything, I find it a bit dull, in a way that's semi-frustrating. Am I missing the liminal space-liker bit of the brain a lot of people have? Am I an anomaly here?

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Leonardo Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man is a legendary drawing of a nude with his arms and legs reaching towards the rim and corners of a circle and square. It's often invoked as an archetype for the humanist worldview of Man the Measure and Centre of all Things, holding a perfectly proportioned universe in shape. Rin D'Lorah, the heroine of new narrative RPG Sky Of Tides, is a bit like the Vitruvian Man, and the result is a game I find at once bewitching and powerfully offputting in its refusal to satisfy the conventions of the genre.

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