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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In Capcom’s sci-fi third-person shooter Pragmata, you are a gruff and gun-toting astronaut called Hugh Williams who is exploring an AI-operated moon base with the help of a juvenile android, Diana. She rides on your back like a sinister blue-eyed goblin, her enormous mop of blonde hair flapping in the wind as Hugh jets around on his suit thrusters.

The notes of God Of Warlike deuteragonism here betray Pragmata’s dragged-out development – it was announced in 2020, when Dad & Sprog action games were all the rage, but was delayed "indefinitely" in 2023. Still, the game I played at this year’s Summer Game Fest didn’t seem greatly the worse for its long spell in cryostasis. It’s a slick thinking girl’s shooter and a gratifyingly bright and clicky piece of lunar set dressing, with shattering robot enemies that put me wistfully in mind of Binary Domain.

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We've already reported on the hidden radio stations you can listen to as you traipse about cutting up rocks in survival MMO Dune: Awakening. They play chiptuney classics from the original, 1992 Dune games that will drive you slightly mad even without huffing spice. But they also include full-blown radios drama based on various backstory events which unfolded before you arrived on-planet. It is like listening to a really intense episode of The Archers on BBC Radio Arrakis.

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Esports pros aren’t the only gamers who need higher frame rates these days, with advancements in GPUs squeezing more and more frames out of games.

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Some game demos, you write up after the expo because they need a bit of reflection; some game demos, you write up immediately because they are easy to digest, even through a droning fugue of jetlag; and some game demos, you write up immediately because they synchronise perfectly with your swivel-eyed, hyper-caffeinated delirium.

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