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! No cool industry person this week. Instead, you are stuck with me. In an elevator. And I have eaten nothing but cabbage-wrapped beans for a week. You'll doubtless want something to keep your mind off that, so let's talk about books instead.

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The weather is supposed to be pretty nice by Sunday afternoon, according to the forecast as I write this, which means that Sundays are for going to the park to read. I'm making my way through Tokyo These Days, a short manga series by Tekkonkinkreet and Ping Pong author Taiyō Matsumoto, about a manga editor who quits his job at a publisher after his magazine folds, but decides to enlist the creators he admires to launch something of his own. Hm.

If you don't understand the Switch 2, you won't understand the modern world, argues Stephen Bush in the Financial Times. The FT paywall their content and there's nothing I can do about that, but I'm sure you can figure it out.

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What's that? Sorry, mate. Can't hear you over all the sighs of relief now that Summer Game Fest is over and done with. You'd better write it down instead. Here's what we're all playing this weekend!

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My personal pick of this week’s Steam Next Fest demos is Jump Ship, which you might already know as that co-operative, 'Left 4 Dead meets FTL meets Sea of Thieves' space crew shooter previously known as Hyperspace. Godspeed, Captain Farts.

All our previous looks at Jump Ship, including Edwin’s GDC 2024 preview, have seen it in varying states of unreadiness, with more missing parts than the game’s own spaceship after one of its many 1 vs. Loads dogfights. This public demo, however, looks and feels fairly polished, allowing it to serve as a rather moreish showcase of its mission loops. Which, at least for me and a couple of crewmates, seem to involve a lot of swishing around on grappling hooks while our vessel melts from within.

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Many years ago, my brother and I climbed the moor above our town and, for reasons that elude me, decided to roll to the bottom of it. We hugged each other and threw ourselves off the path into an ocean of heather and bracken. This was, to be clear, a bloody stupid thing to do. That moor is full of potholes, sheep bones, barbed wire and animal turds of all flavours. If there were any justice in the cosmos, I'd have banged my bonce on a boulder and be pushing up daisies. But somehow, we reached the outskirts of the town basically unscathed, and it was glorious.

We went tumbling over ledges and into ditches, sucking in careless lungfuls of spores and laughing like seals. I felt a sense of para-Wordsworthian abandon and intimacy with rocks and stones and trees, that I haven't ever felt since. I caught a trace of that feeling in Baby Steps, the new open world fail 'em up from a team led by Bennett Foddy, in which you move each leg of a body subject to believable physics, and the challenge is therefore to walk more than two paces without keeling over.

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I’ve been tracking deals closely this week, and there are some solid ones across gaming hardware that deserve a proper look. A few brands are running deeper discounts than usual, and some of the better-value picks are getting buried under the usual noise.

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I’ve always found Dune: Awakening an oddball concept – it’s been repeatedly made clear, by Zendaya no less, that Arrakis will immediately kill, flay, and digest anyone who pokes a toe into its sands without an impossible sci-fi techsuit and a lifetime of edged weapons training. Not, you'd suspect, an obvious setting for a survival crafting game where genre conventions demand you begin life as some naked loser picking up sticks.

And yet, Awakening has turned out alright, hoisting desert exploration and ominous sci-fi atmospherics above the tedious 24/7 resource gathering that has choked out certain peers. PC performance is workable too, with enough concessions towards low-end rigs, though it’s not crysknife-sharp either: some technical mishaps need a prompt patching, while Unreal Engine 5 is up to its usual stuttering nonsense.

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Resident Evil: Requiem's first trailer tied it unambiguously to the wider Resiverse, with sweeping footage of a nuked and abandoned Raccoon City, but the slice of zombie survival I saw at this year’s Summer Game Fest felt like a pocket horror experiment in the vein of P.T. and Amnesia: The Bunker. I hope it’s not a one-off. I hope the whole game is like this.

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Towards the end of my hands-off demo for Onimusha: Way Of The Sword, Capcom introduced me to a bunch of ragamuffin ninjas who moult their injured selves when struck. It looks like they're springing out of their own dying heads, like Athena bursting from the skull of Zeus. That's the kind of freak factor I want from an action-horror series whose last major instalment released in 2006. A bit of gentle madness to blow the dust off. A generous pinch of vicious little weasels who won't fight fair, to lift this Edo-era yokai hunt above the ranks of action games that just want you to combo and parry ad nauseum.

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