Tales Of The Shire unfolds in a world without shadow. There are shadows, technically, but they’re so mellow and fuzzy they might as well be stray pools of sunlight that have forgotten to glow. In this latest chunk of Lord Of The Rings memorabilia from developers Wētā Workshop and publisher Private Division, you are a custom-created hobbit who has just taken up residence in the charming Tellytubby town of Bywater, there to spend your days foraging, fishing, feasting and fraternizing with your fellow halfings, all of whom wear expressions of rosy-cheeked humour so intense in their winsome affability that your own face soon forms a merry rictus in response - like that terrible smile from Disco Elysium, but cosy>. Oh god, no. Oh god, get it off me.

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Battle Aces is billed as “a vision of the future for real-time strategy” but if you glance at a screen, you might think you’re staring into the past: another toonified science fiction world of scuffed, shiny nodules, lanes and arenas, an overly functional colour scheme, and hotkeyed hordes of little and large units that appear devoid of personality, even by top-down generalissimo standards. Let’s start by addressing that last complaint: the units of Battle Aces have immense personality. It just doesn’t come across well in screens.

Each is a mix of bug and robot, with a clutch of finely observed, quirky-but-never-gratuitous animations that immediately had me choosing favourites when I played the game at Summer Game Fest. "Our main unit design concept artist, his father was also an illustrator and nature illustrator at that, so he's already accomplished with animal designs, but he also loves mechs and robots too," notes Uncapped Games art director Ted Park. "So he's kind of melded both worlds as much as he can."

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Minecraft is, very often, just a nice place to potter about in. But its call to adventure rings loudly in my square ears, and now that the Tricky Trials update has dotted the underground with action-heavy, loot-filled Trial Chambers, I’m simply powerless to resist.

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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! Books obviously come in many different sizes, but did you know that there’s an obscure law that dictates the legal limit for how long a novel can be? It’s measured in ‘George Martins’. If your story is more than three ‘Georges’ wide, you’re swiftly escorted to a cell and made to eat any bits of book that reference more than three characters in a scene with the same surname. This week, it's developer and writer of the legendarily good Radiator Blog, Robert Yang! Cheers Robert! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

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You may notice there's a stowaway this week. He crept in during all the recent kerfuffle, and secreted himself in a cosy little nook of the treehouse. He was quickly discovered, but despite patient attempts to explain that it's been several years since he was last here, and as per tradition he's now dead to us, we've so far been unable to dislodge him. Like the smiley face hidden in the above image, he's just... there. So I decided, hell, let's hear what he's playing this weekend as well.

Here's what we're all clicking on this weekend!

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What little rejuvenation reaches my ancient, haggard soul comes most often from pleasant little surprises like a game creeping up on me.

Our Adventurer Guild is cheerfully simple in appearance, and its turn-based fights and griddy missions establish its parts at once as familiar, potentially even by-the-numbers. But those parts are arranged into an original and deceptively detailed mercenary management game that got harder to put down the longer I played.

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The RPS inbox is a wondrous treasure-trove of distraction doubloons, some delightful, some shite-ful, and not even Outlook’s lichen-like interface can dull the luster of its offerings. In amongst the press releases, indie nuggets, and the occasional pitch for sponsored AI content (no, never), something truly exquisite occasionally peeks through the chest lid. This week, it was a completely context-free message containing several photos of what appear to be artificial houseplants from a man named ‘Harold’. We take criticism seriously here, so I can only assume the sender intended the contents of these imposter pots to be judged as such. Well, I’m nothing if not obliging. Apologies for the quality of the images. I screen-grabbed then resized them up because I was too scared to download them in case they contained explosives or something.

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Every so often in the ignoble craft of james gournalism you stumble on a game that reminds you why you got into this weird and silly trade, a game that slices through the phantasmagorical mulch of a million Summer Game Fest announcements and clears the portals of the brain. It seems mad to think of Kanitsu-Gami: Path Of The Goddess this way, given that on some level, it is a tower defence game. Tower defence! The archetypal browser-based strategy experience and darling of emerging smartphones. The great-uncle once-removed of today's idle clickers. Without meaning any disrespect to those currently working in the genre, which I've had a tonne of fun with, when's the last time you were seriously> excited by tower defence? As of this week, I am seriously excited by tower defence, because Path Of The Goddess has captured my imagination. It's a stately, beautiful thing. I had a go at this year's Keighleycon, and it's one of two games at the show I wanted to carry on playing once my time was up. Thank goodness it's out (on Steam and the Xbox store) in just a month or so's time.

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In the past I've described Phantom Blade Zero, the foetid and frantic new action-RPG from Chinese studio S-Game, as a Soulslike, and more specifically a Sekirolike. I must now hang my head and await the executioner's ludicrously oversized hammer, for while Phantom Blade Zero's ambience and layouts owe something to From's work, the moment-to-moment has just as much in common with older hack-and-slash games such as Ninja Gaiden. I played a bit of it at Summer Game Fest this week, and while I’m not rushing out to preorder (I never am, in fairness), I think it could be a good ‘un.

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This piece is written in memory of the Alpha Doshaguma, a huge furry quadruped with the belly, gait and mournful disposition of an orphaned St Bernard, which - no, who> was sleeping blamelessly in a canyon when Capcom's demo presenter strolled up and bopped it with a bayonet howitzer. The demo in question was for Monster Hunter Wilds, which they probably should rename Monster Hadron Collider in that a major selling point appears to be making the megafauna converge and murder each other. It's possible to do this in previous games, especially 2018's Monster Hunter: World, but not like this. Not like this. Alas for the Alpha Doshaguma. Getting rocket-speared in the bum was only the start of its worst day ever.

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