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! Everyone knows about ‘hardback’ and ‘softback’ books, but have you heard of the quickly discontinued ‘rice puddingback’? While hiring so many rice grain artists to transpose the blurbs in beautiful calligraphy made for an impressive spectacle, they were eventually banned after several fatal train slippage and/or smellage incidents. Ah well! This week, it’s Charlene Putney, who’s been writing for games for over ten years, including bits for Divinity: Original Sin 2, Baldur's Gate 3, NUTS, and Saltsea Chronicles! Cheers Charlene! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

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Today's door is shimmering and promises dark magics within. It's an unlikely marriage of big budget publisher and a genre beloved most by smaller development teams. What mastery will unlock the door and expose the vast arenas within? Why, clicking to read more, of course.

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Sundays are for, I hope, upgrading my PC swiftly and successfully and then getting down to business. Think of all the games I can now play! But I'll probably just play Dune Imperium.

Gail Mackenzie-Smith in Electric Lit wrote a Dear John letter breaking up with Wordle.

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You could open today's door, sure. You could also blow it up with an explosive, though. Or shoulder-barge your way through the wall beside it. Or plant some C4 on the ceiling and go up and over. Or I think that's a load-bearing pillar over there - may as well just bring down the entire advent calendar to find out what's behind today's door.

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Morning, all. Hope you're keeping those game-playing hands nice and toasty this winter. You can do it however you like. Wear gloves, huff on them, sit on them, give a fluffy cat a good squeeze. I personally like to clasp a mug of almost-too-hot coffee while I gaze at my Steam library wondering where the hours have gone. To each their own. Here's what we're all clicking on this weekend!

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If you’d told me last year that face of all-out, GPU venerating, fully ray-traced PC game visual excess would be that of a de-aged Harrison Ford, I’d have asked which exact colour of paint you’d been eating. And yet here we are, with Indiana Jones and the Great Circle loving its ray tracing so much that the effects can’t ever be fully switched off.

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Open a door, then back here again, open a door, then back here again. It's as if we're caught in some infernal loop. Thankfully we get to talk to you, our attractive friends, in the moments between.

OK, ready to go again. Let's open the door.

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When last we left myself, on a mission to survive S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 by weaponising its monsters instead of shooting its guns, my one-with-nature experiment was yielding mixed results. At best. I’d successfully lured some bandits into the deadly lair of a bucket-tossing Poltergeist, but several attempts at more actively siccing mutated pigs on the Zone’s human baddies had all failed, even when I’d seemed to actually tame one.

Now, my only friend lay dead at my feet, and I’m in dire need of some new beasts to master. And some cash. It turns out that a fighting style that involves letting shopping trolley-sized swine creatures chew on my heels is bad for the ol’ HP, and having recently blown my savings on half a sausage, I’m forced to shift focus from my current debt collection mission towards a means to fill my own coffers.

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Hang on, before you enter today's door, take off your shoes at do– Ach, it's everywhere. Take off your socks as well. Damn, it's in all my trouser pockets and– How did it get in my ears? I hate this stuff. Let's just hose ourselves down on the frontstep before we go in.

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If you’re the naughty sort, legend has it that on Christmas Eve a portly bearded chap will descend down your chimney and leave behind a lump of coal. The dwarven heroes of today’s game are much the same, except instead of using the chimney they will deploy pickaxes and power tools to burrow straight through your living room wall, and will make off with any minerals in the house rather than leaving them behind in a sock.

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