Sundays are for landing on a mysterious planet. At first, the surface seems barren, a dusty sheet of paper stretching towards the grey horizon. Does anything live here? Could anything live here? Is there anything here which can inform how I'm supposed to feel about it all? The emptiness is a feeling, but one can only deploy the world bleak so many times before starting to read it as ble-ack just to try and avoid dying of boredom. Then, the ground around you opens up. A great dark space into which you slide. Everything goes cold, dark, and wet. Suddenly, you're back among the stars in a flurry of movement. Adrian Edmondson's planet-sized head stares at you, licking its lips to get rid of leftover spittle. Well, there's two of you in the bleakness now.

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It's a busy week for union organisers at Activision Blizzard. Yesterday, in conjunction with the Communications Workers of America (CWA), a group of over 100 developers that work on Hearthstone and the mobile only strategy game Warcraft Rumble voted "strongly in favor of wall-to-wall union representation." This comes after around 400 Blizzard platform and technology workers voted to unionise, also with the CWA.

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Like whatever genres you like, but for me personally, I find platformers to be the quintessential video game genre. Even with the most challenging entries, there are very few other genres that (when done well) are as easy and quick to pick up, play, and have fun with. I think that's why so many of them have such longevity, one such game being N++, a tough but fair platformer that's celebrating its 10th anniversary with a new update.

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See ya, suckers – I’m off to India for a week, and am only writing this introductory paragraph because Ollie stole my 'taking holiday' idea while I was distracted by a bird. Specifically, I’ll be in Dharamshala, the mountain town where the Dalai Lama lives. Maybe I’ll get to ask him what he thinks of my Steam Deck.

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You've played through countless immersive sims as a cyborg, a thief, and a cyborg thief. Now, try doing it as a scuttling demon dominatrix. Brush Burial: Gutter World is the sneaky and frenetic new dollop of squalor from Knife Demon Software. It casts you once again as Fennel, a swamp devil with a pronged tail you can use as a whip and a grapple, knocking props around and swiping crossbow bolts out of midair.

Fennel seems as agile here as in the previous, excellent Brush Burial, pouncing from head to head like a tic, but they've bolstered their moveset with an injection of overclocked koppōjutsu. You can snare foes to perform sinuous, bone-crunching takedowns, the catch being that you're vulnerable during the execution. It's deeply, moreishly unpleasant. Those little fatal jerks at the end of the animation are more visceral than anything in Doom Eternal. I'm not sure I can bear to watch the trailer again. Here it is.

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Sweary peripheral experts Dbrand sent me the Asus ROG Xbox Ally/Xbox Ally X version of their Project Killswitch case yesterday. I squeezed my Xbox Ally X into it. It was great. Sturdy. Form-fitting. Protective and grip-enhancing in one. Everything that makes the original Killswitch one of the best Steam Deck accessories, wrapped snugly around 800 quid of Windows handheld.

It also annoys me, a little bit. Not the skin and cover themselves. More the fact that it’s so important that they exist, as neither ROG Xbox Ally models – costly as they can be – bother to include a carrying case in the box. Nor does the original Ally and Ally X, or the Zotac Zone, or the MSI Claw 8 AI+, or the Lenovo Legion Go and Legion Go S. Give me a case, you plastic jerks. Give it!

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