Initially, Lorn’s Lure feels like an escape. A first-person spelunking sim, it takes place in a colossal, mournful extent of pipes and silos, ancient turbines and concrete cliffs, where emergency lighting and broken gantries form scrappy platforming routes into darkness.

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Not technically an Indiescovery-type deal, this, as Edwin already called attention to breathless FPS Echo Point Nova back when the demo came out. The full game has just released, though, and as someone with such chronic Titanfall withdrawal that I’ll ingest anything with a decent wallrun, I’ve bought it, played it, and am here to tell you why it rocks.

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There is an absolute carkfest of a headline to be written here involving the words "head" "not" "enough" and "giving", but I am a journalist of grace and discretion, and will resist. Treyarch, Raven Software and Activision have popped up a note-to-players covering a range of improvements they're making to Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6 in the aftermath of August's beta. Specifically, they're tweaking the damage from bullets to the cranium, while trying to ensure that bullets to the cranium don't "significantly affect the consistency of time to kill".

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If you're a nerd of a certain age, I apologise - that headline has probably caused you to rupture something in the wizened meat of your lower back, or the swampy catacombs of your cerebellum. If you aren't, let me explain: Zachtronics are or were a US-based video game developer founded in 2000 by Zach Barth, who put the studio on ice in 2022 and now works at Coincidence Games, a "flexible business framework" involving many former Zachtronics devs. Zachtronics have thrown together all kinds of things - Infiniminer, a block-builder from 2009, is probably the single greatest individual influence on Minecraft, while Eliza is a tremendous visual novel about AI chatbots and labour politics. But if there's a type of game they're known for, it's engineering puzzles and factory games.

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I don’t like to brag, but it turns out that running a museum is actually well easy. Within an hour of sitting down to play Two Point Museum at Gamescom last month, I was running a modest monthly profit, educating the masses about one-fifth of a dinosaur skeleton, and most importantly, had not ordered a single staff member to their death.

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I'm not someone who's ever been on board with the "Can You Pet The Dog?" craze that swept and/or still sweeps video games. As a heartless individual, I am more concerned with whatever the dog's capable of: general savagery, a howl that replenishes my HP bar, letting me climb atop its glorious mane as it strides across the barren wastes. If it's none of these things, I would much rather have a shiny turret on spindly steel legs skitter besides me.

Nomada Studios have, incredibly, thrust their hands into my chest cavity and given me a blood-pumping mechanism. Having spent some time with upcoming action-platformer Neva (the game) and Neva (the dog from the game), I have to admit: I did enjoy petting Neva (the dog).

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This one’s a very simple build at the moment, but neat enough that I wanted to shout it out. Near Mint is a roguelike deckbuilder where you advance through a tower fighting slightly stronger iterations of the exact same skeleton. Ok, nothing too captivating so far. The twist comes from the cards: someone’s left them in their Oodie pouch, spilt BBQ sauce down it, then stuck it in the wash before taking the deck out. Now, all the cards have split apart into three pieces. It’s name-your-own-price on Itch here, and it’ll only take you a couple minutes to get acquainted, but I’ll explain the gist below. Gist is a good word. Satisfying to say. Gist.

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Ever since Crimson Desert dropped that audacious trailer at Gamescom 2023, I’ve yearned to soak in its medieval Just Cause 2 vibes. It’s hard not to be moved by the exaggerated kineticism of it all – the magic-enhanced swordfights, the jumping off cliffs and turning into a flying shadow monster, the ability to drift horses>. Yes. Yes!

I’m therefore somewhat unnerved to report that my enthusiasm has been tempered significantly by actually playing it. I’ve since used all the straws I’ve clutched at to spell out "It’s just a demo" on my floor, but the fear remains that Crimson Desert’s fantastical open-world exploration is going to be interrupted by regular bouts of twangy, unwieldy, unsatisfying combat.

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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! Once again, the dastardly autumn breezes have blown my schedule all out of whack, so no cool industry person this week. Instead, here is a short excerpt from another weird story I starting writing, also containing poultry for some reason.

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Sundays are for eating Biscoff spread and rewatching Better Call Saul, again. Crunchy, ofc. Before that, let’s read some writing that I, Nic Reuben, personally found interesting about games (and game related things!)

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