Minor spoilers for the first few hours of Veilguard and heavy spoilers for Baldur’s Gate 3>

For all the things I ended up enjoying about Dragon Age: The Veilguard, it isn’t much of an RPG. What little roleplaying it does offer revolves around what flavour of supportive hero you prefer, and you can count the number of impactful dialogue decisions on a three-fingered hand. This might sound utterly damning in the wake of Baldur's Gate 3’s incredible reactivity, and if I approached games as some sort of tedious comparative intellectual exercise rather than just, y’know, seeing how I felt about them, then I suppose it would be. Weirdly, though, the recent memory of Baldur’s Gate 3 didn’t diminish my time with Veilguard at all. It was actually the opposite: it freed Dragon Age from having to carry the torch for a certain period in Bioware’s history, and let me enjoy Veilguard for what it was.

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The mystery surrounding Deadlock, Valve’s work-in-progress MOBA shooter, has largely evaporated. Its freely extendable invite system is about as effective at controlling player headcount as a disinterested football steward, meaning pretty much anyone with a clued-in Steam friend can get in and start poking around its secrets. And yet, being a lane-pushing wizard fighter in the Dota 2 vein, it’s already a vast tangle of interplaying abilities, items, strats, and often unspoken rules, of the kind that even experienced gankists will take hundreds of hours to learn. It’s been too much for poor Brendy, at any rate.

Still, Brendy is but one man. What if we had but four> men, working in tandem to crush lanes and flatten Patrons just as Gabe intended? To find out if Deadlock is indeed more comprehensible as a team sport, Graham, Ed, Ollie, and James joined forces, promptly getting fucked up yet emerging from the warlock hospital with a deeper understanding of its workings. Or, at least, if anyone would keep playing.

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Sunday is cancelled. Book for now!

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It's official: I am once again the Sunday correspondent around here. That means it falls to me to round up (mostly) good (mostly) writing about (mostly) video games. I will otherwise be spending my Sunday continuing the fight against my dog's fleas, which rebound every three weeks no matter how much I spray, scrub or throw things away.

On, the independent video game magazine which I linked to last week, has run a series of brief interviews with each of the contributors to its launch issue. I recommend Christian Donlan's for the puzzle game recommendations and Margaret Robertson's which expands on her fascination with Japanese paper games.

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Okay, look folks, I'm terribly sorry you've been trapped in the bubble of silence for this weekend while comments are still un-fucking themselves. I'm expecting some really juicy catch-up comments next weekend! In the meantime, this post will stay up as usual so you can at least hear what we're getting up to in the treehouse.>

Congratulations on making it to another checkpoint, fellow traveller. Please spend your hard-earned coin on one of the following bonuses: either a weekend of games but no sleep; a weekend of sleep but no games; or a weekend of health and activity but nothing to post in the comments below? Your choice! Here's what we're all clicking on this weekend.

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There’s plenty that you could justifiably expect from a Bioware RPG: chats with mates, opportunities to get those mates horribly killed, surviving mates turning to the side then walking offscreen. But I don’t think anyone expected Dragon Age: The Veilguard to be, at least on a purely technical level, one of the smoothest-performing, settings-rich AAA PC releases of the year so far.

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Some extremely fresh vintage workwear that I bought for entirely practical reasons> aside, I’m not exactly a fashion person. I have nobody to impress most days but my cat, and the only item of clothing she appears to have an opinion on is my Oodie, which is very comfortable for both of us and also smells like a chicken shop, which I imagine is more pleasant for her than me.

This aside, I found myself taking a whole bunch of Dragon Age: The Veilguard screenshots as I played just to capture the RPG’s various outfits. They are ridiculous>. Incredibly intricate and detailed, as well as being obscenely impractical for the most part. I do not like any of them in the sense I would wear them, but I like all of them in the sense that they display artists allowed to run free like caffeinated weasels and indulge their every whim.

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I never completed the original Red Dead Redemption, but not for the usual reasons of being terrible at the game, or thinking that open worlds are too big and boring these days and I just want to lie down forever and watch anime. I never finished it because my Xbox 360 version was not, in practice, an open world game, but a lonely farm at the bottom of a vortex of butchered spacetime. In the prologue, reformed outlaw John Marston confronts an old bandit acquaintance and gets himself roundly shot to bits. He’s rescued by local rancher Bonnie MacFarlane, who nurses him back to health and gives him a few odd jobs to warm him up for the next plot point.

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If I am ever murdered, please do not ask Max Caulfield to investigate. I've already written our review for Life Is Strange: Double Exposure, in which I celebrated the touching moments of Max's return to the series, and lamented the clunky plot that she finds herself in. In this adventure game, you're looking into the killing of a close friend, shot by an unknown assailant. You hop between two dimensions to solve the case - one world in which your pal still lives and the other in which she's dead. Unfortunately for the murder victim, you play a bona fide hot mess who could not perform a cross examination if she were standing in front of a crucifix with a magnifying glass.

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Going by three hours with a preview build last month, the Indiana Jones of Indiana Jones And The Great Circle has the hungriest hands this side of Thief 2014. They're always surging into view, reaching restlessly toward objects as you explore, for there is ever so much to touch: photos and letters; pipes, frying pans, and other blunt implements; relics that translate into "Adventure Points", used to "unlock" books of skills; camouflaged levers and other chunks of fusty comicbook exotica that harbour clockwork secrets. Sometimes, Indy's magic fingers help you glean an object you need from the game's religiously-sourced piles of Lucasfilm memorabilia. Sometimes, they exhaust you: please, Dr Jones, for the love of George. Stop trying to pick things up. Let me look at "ancient history" for a while.

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