I’ll stand by my review when I say that S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl is worth playing, in spite of it the many and varied ways in which it’s utterly broken. To be clear, though, it is> utterly broken, in many and varied ways.

That makes my usual new-game performance analysis/settings guide song and dance harder to pull off, with or without the appropriate soundtrack. Is S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 in such dire technical straits that we should wait for a few patches before giving it a shake? And how can its best settings be anointed if some, particularly FSR 3 frame generation, simply don’t work as they should?

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I have significant reservations about Avowed, Obsidian's first-person Pillars Of Eternity spin-off RPG, but those reservations are significantly offset by the fact that I can be an undersea mushroom woman called Mystic Meg. In Avowed, you are the god-touched envoy of a distant emperor, sent to an island realm known as the Living Lands to investigate a mysterious blight. "God-touched", in this case, means "fungal and a bit mermaidy". It means that you can make rainbow toadstools sprout from your eyesocket in the character creator. It means that you can accessorise your cheekbones with what look like bracket polypores, or deck your ears with staghorn coral.

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Gang Beasts is one of the games I think of when I recall the golden days of video game expos, before Covid rolled up and nuked the business model. It casts you as one of several jellybaby pugilists, fighting for dominance over such locations as Ferris wheels and the tops of speeding vans. All of the characters are 1) seemingly drunk, and 2) subject to real-time physics. Your abilities consist of 1) punching, headbutting or kicking people, perhaps knocking them out for a few seconds, and 2) grabbing people and things and either hoisting them skyward like a wrestler, or hoisting yourself skyward like a toddler climbing onto Mummy's head. The only way of defeating people is to hurl them off-map.

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In 2015 a flight by Germanwings carrying 144 passengers and six crew crashed into a mountain in the French Alps. Later, the authorities who investigated the crash judged it was intentional - somebody in the cockpit had purposefully crashed the plane in an act of suicide, killing themselves and everyone on board. Mouthwashing begins with the same premise, albeit in a sci-fi setting. You're piloting a spaceship with a crew of five, clicking on its various controls to override the safety and turn the ship towards a nearby heap of space rock. You mean to crash. The words that appear moments before this sequence are chilling in their simplicity: "I hope this hurts."

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I've been trying to work out if I'm keen on Soulframe only because I feel guilty about missing the boat with Warframe. I reviewed Digital Extremes' hit free-to-play shooter in 2013, back when people were still calling it a spiritual successor to the developer's boomerang-throwing action game Dark Sector. I didn't like Warframe much at the time. Think I gave it a 6/10. Warp forward a decade, and that 6/10 game has become a thriving live service phenomenon - fifteenth on the Steam Most Played charts at the time of writing, and profitable enough to spawn its own annual TennoCon expo. It's also become an intoxicating, confusing morass of dynastic sci-fantasy politicking and genre-shifting expansions, ranging from capital ship mechanics to questions of time travel, wrapped in layers of cosmetics that make Destiny look about as colourful as Gears Of War.

I definitely didn't see all that coming. I doubt Digital Extremes saw it coming either. Warframe today feels like a lab experiment run amok. I love its appetite for novelty, but there's a lot for a returning player to catch up on and, frankly, it feels like homework. As such, I had a couple of broad motivations for playing Soulframe's pre-alpha "prelude": I'm keen to see what Digital Extremes can do when they aren't encumbered by 10 years of world-building, and I want to get in on the ground floor before they absolutely swamp this thing in updates.

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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! This week, it’s Game Maker’s Toolkit and Mind Over Magnet mechanics knower, explainer, and designer, Mark Brown! Cheers Mark! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

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I will spend this Sunday nursing a chest infection, probably by wrapping blankets around myself and watching YouTube videos until sleep comes. Let's first round up some good links with writing and videos about videogames.

This is surely the best link this week: an hour-long video on how to beat "every possible game of Pokemon Platinum at the same time". That is, coming up with a set of game inputs that can win billions of possible permutations of the game, as determined by its RNG, when played simultaneously. It's an impressive feat, but the video itself is great too, patiently breaking down the process with motion graphics and video editing flair. Delightful.

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It's a strange new world we find ourselves in. Previously, we'd only feared for those of you playing games with names like "The Addresses Of All Notable Public Figures in Terra Gaia VI" and "Xtreme Bomb Maker: Easily Obtainable Household Objects Edition". Alas, the automod decided that what a healthy comment system really needs is a blanket ban on the entirety of language. Typical robot. Anyway, that should be sorted now, so please welcome this most hallowed of RPS traditions back with aplomb. No. Aplomb>. Christ. It's coming for us now. Here's what we're clicking on:

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Four thousand words of notes. Hoboy. Field of Glory Colon Kingdoms is definitely thought-provoking.

It was also complaint-provoking in the fairly long period where I didn't understand what it's trying to do. Reaching that point, luckily for you, means we can cut out a lot of the "confused whingeing" subsection of those notes. Though it still has its shortcomings, I've come to appreciate that I was reading Kingdoms all wrong. Although it talks big about characters, politics, and religion, they're not what it's about. It's about building>.

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In Rue Valley you role play a guy with poor mental health. He wanders around a crappy motel, stuck in the same old patterns of life, seemingly unable to escape his inner demons. When confronted with the premise for this upcoming RPG you may have one of two reactions. The first: you will say "lol, it me" with enough humour to wishlist it on Steam and earmark it for the future. The second: you will mutter "ugh, it me" and be immediately put off by the idea of having to tolerate an entire second layer of psychological hangups.

There is a third secret reaction though... you might think: oh, this looks a lot like Disco Elysium, but in the real world.

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