During my first two hours serving Strange Antiquities' customers, I tugged the bronze pendulum of an ornate clock at least a dozen times, wondering what the resulting spin and settle of its hands meant. I checked my occult encyclopaedia's index for mentions of time and compared the clock face to shapes in a book of hermetic symbols. Each time I drew a blank I yanked the pendulum a few more times, just in case.

This follow-up to the joyous 2022 puzzler Strange Horticulture is packed with these promises of future puzzles: a locked cabinet with no key, a sliding-door cupboard with no clear purpose, three empty plinths beneath your shop counter, an engraved desk with four missing chunks. I knew >they were all clues, I just couldn't tell what for.

Until, in a series of glorious moments, I could.

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By the great transport gods, trolleymageddon is upon us! It's the end of the line as we know it, and I feel fine. All of that is to say that two wacky trolley-related games are releasing within days of each other, no doubt driving fans of the budding genre off the rails or road.

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I'm not sure the just-released Troublemaker 2: Beyond Dream is one of those "good games" you're all so bloody obsessed with. My working summary, based on 30 minutes with the demo, is that it's an unofficial Like A Dragon/Yakuza game developed with a fraction of the budget, and set in "fictionalised" Indonesia. That's to say, it's an open world comedy beat 'em up with a bunch of other genres haphazardly stirred in.

I compared it to Rockstar's work and Saints Row in this week's Maw, which was Mostly Wrong. This is a predominantly on-foot experience, for one thing, and you can't grievously assault people at random. There are designated gangs of hoodlums you're permitted to punch out, and as far as I can tell, you have to wait for them to Make Trouble first. It seems very polite and passive for a brawler. Also, you get to transform briefly into a dying cow.

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Oh, Netflix's The Witcher TV series is back with its fourth series next month, following a lengthy hiatus that's seen Geralt regenerate from Henry Cavill into Liam Hemsworth. The new series premieres in late October, and first official looks at both the HemsGerry and Laurence Fishburne as Blood and Wine vampire Regis have been offered.

Hang on a minute, I thought, when I scrolled past this news on one of the screens in my Adrian Veidt-esque world-watching setup - Laurence Fishburne's in it? Yep, it seems that after not getting around to watching the third series, I've managed to completely blot out all knowledge that the actor behind The Matrix's pill distributor is being cast in The Witcher.

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Sundays are for working out what to do with about 200 apples and 50 pears. The parks round here are full of semi-forgotten fruit trees, so we went out last weekend and gathered a few buckets. It has now dawned on me that if I don't eat apples with every meal and also possibly light fires with them, bathe in their juices and pound them up to serve as a low-grade polyfiller, my flat will soon be overtaken by rats, weevils and feral brewers.

I'll probably take a load to a food bank. I hear apples keep pretty well when they're fresh-picked, at least, but pears are treacherous, adamantium-hard one day and a sopping disaster the next. Anyway, here is some internet writing that doesn't significantly mention fruit at all.

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You might not think of it as one, but Wikipedia is a game. It has untold numbers of characters and stories, each page an interactive slate with your mouse and hand acting as the choice maker for what you learn next, thus impacting your following choices. This is, admittedly, a bit of a wanky, thinkpiecey way of talking about Wikipedia, so instead of that let's talk about Neurocracy, a game that could quite easily fool you into thinking it is another version of Wikipedia.

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Getting your game a publishing deal has never been an easy thing to do. Right now, it's especially hard given that for many publishers, if it doesn't seem like a guaranteed hit, it likely isn't something they'll take on. This is something that Vampire Survivors developer Poncle, or rather the actual person, Luca Galante, takes great issue with, and in a recent interview he spoke more broadly of his issues with publishers, and his thoughts on now being one.

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In general these days it's never a good time to release a video game unless you're Rockstar, but in recent months it's been made even harder due to numerous payment processors cracking down on digital storefronts like Valve and Itch.io. There's a host of reasons this is problematic, but one less spoken about how this is also an issue of preservation. GOG, another digital storefront, this one owned by The Witcher developer CD Projekt, is known for their preservation efforts, and in a recent interview they shared a bit of their thoughts in relation to these recent issues regarding payment processors.

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I don't play online games particularly often, mostly the only ones that I do enjoy are the kind of games I can play with just my friends. People are mean, you see, and I have a sensitive soul, and also I often find them deeply boring conceptually and in practice. Take of that what you will in relation to this story about Dota 2! Moving on swiftly to a topic that I promise connects to this intro, Gabe Newell! He is a co-founder of Valve, and a noted Dota 2 lover. He also, apparently, is someone who is often subjected to ridicule while playing the very same game his company makes.

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Whenever there is word of a video game's release date being changed, it's hardly ever surprising because nine times out of ten, it's because it has been delayed. That's just the way things are these days, no one can have the luxury of Team Cherry, who took so long making Silksong just because they were having fun. However, in this case, the release date shifting news is actually a positive one, as Dying Light: The Beast will be launching just that little bit earlier.

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