If you're a strategy game aficionado who has yet to cast a monocled eye over Hooded Horse's catalogue, 1) which map hexagon have you been skulking under? And 2) you're in for a treat. Founded in 2019 with the signing of Terra Invicta, and led by Dallas, Texas-based chief executive officer Tim Bender and chief financial officer Snow Rui, Hooded Horse have spent the past five years grabbing up original strategy games and strategy RPGs like a smaller civ quietly steamrolling bandit fiefdoms, while larger empires like Creative Assembly and Paradox Interactive bleed each other white in the centre.

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I too desire to eat the moon. In Skate Story, you are made of glass and you will burst into a thousand miniscule shards if you bail. You have signed a four-page contract with the Devil, cursing you with this fragile body yet blessing you with a fearsome skateboard with which to fulfill your quest to digest Earth's only natural satellite. I've only now got hands on a demo shared earlier this year at Tribeca games festival, and I'm reverberating with pleased energy at the dreamlike atmosphere of this demonic kickflip simulator.

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Read enough of our hardware articles and you’ll eventually come across someone, probably me or Katharine (RPS in peace), banging on about the Logitech G915 Lightspeed Wireless. After half a decade on shelves, it’s still the best low-profile mechanical gaming keyboard going, and quite possibly the best wireless keyboard to boot – while the tenkeyless version, the G915 TKL Lightspeed, is just as lovely to use.

Between their nimble performance, crisp mech switches, and impeccable build quality, the only way in which the G915 duo underwhelms is their high pricing – very much the kind you’d want to wait for a Prime Day or Black Friday to dull the pain of. Now, though, there’s an alternative: the new Logitech G515 Lightspeed TKL. I’ve been using it. It’s good!

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Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to Booked For The Week - our regular Sunday chat with a selection of cool industry folks about books! “What’s with the politics? Stick to games!” is a common refrain you might hear from the sort of winning individual who thinks books are a communist plot to lower their sperm count. Luckily, those people are elsewhere, so I hope you’ll allow me a brief moment of relief that the Tories are no longer in power. This is a great thing, providing you have absolutely no follow-up questions! This week, it’s QWOP, Getting Over It, and Ape Out's Bennet Foddy! Cheers Bennet! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

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Sunday’s are for being mildly optimistic about the future for a few short hours. Before something bad happens, let’s read this week’s best writing about games (and game related things!)

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I played badminton yesterday. I am now incredibly sore all over. It made me realise that, perhaps more than anything else you could say about them, weekends are for being sore. Sleeping in, waking up covered in aches, making a noise like someone three times your age when you get out of bed, and then pretending you're a third of your current age by doing nothing except play games for the next 48 hours. Here's how we'll be spending them!

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It's Sokoban! A game whose name I recognise as shorthand for this type of puzzle, and yet have never seen. It's also a genre I'm not overly fond of, preferring puzzles I can sometimes get through by intuition (Spring Falls), brute force (every switch-the-lights puzzle ever), or entering chaos mode (real life).

But I like Isles of Sea and Sky. From starting it almost on a whim, I was playing and figuring things out with zero fuss and no overt tutorialising pretty much immediately, and from there suddenly found that several hours had breezed by without frustration or boredom.

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"Dune is unadaptable! It could never work as a film," I cry, placing defiant fists upon my hips. "But what," says Denis Villeneuve, "about two?", shattering my physical form into one trillion shards. I have a difficult life.

But wait! What about as a strategy game? Denis glances nervously at the inexplicable open pools of molten steel all around us. I've got him now. He hasn't even played Spice Wars. Except... I think Spice Wars is about as good as an adaptation could be. Imperium too. Damn it. Alright Denis, let's have a truce and sort this one out.

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Can you believe we didn't have a best JRPG list until now? Baffling. To be fair we did once tackle this topic with a preliminary blast of recommendations for those completely new to the genre. We also have a few familiar fantasys in our list of the 50 best RPGs on PC. But until now we haven't addressed the genre in its own right. In an act of contrition, we offer you this: our list of the best JRPGs you can play on PC this year, according to our own tastes.

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There's no genre like the open world for inducing choice paralysis, so it's fitting that I've been agonising over how to begin this irregular article series on open world games for months. I have a lot of material, oodles of interviews with developers of all shapes and sizes - big shops like Remedy and CD Projekt, smaller studios like Ace Team and Awaceb, all holding forth on such topics as whether Elden Ring or Zelda did bandit camps better, and how you make a forest feel endless. There is so much you could talk about, so many trails heading off in all directions, but perhaps it's best to begin with the more personal and superficial question that inspired this investigation: how did the open world game get so boring>?

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