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! Words are amazing, aren’t they? I once put in a cover letter to a creative writing university course that I’d “even invented several of my own words” before my mate talked me down from it. Spoilsport. This week, it’s the creative director of Dread Delusion, maker of The Night is Darkening, and Lovely Hellplace director, James Wragg! Cheers James! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

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Sundays are for... oh, god, there’s more of it, isn’t there? I thought it was just a regular cave, not a cave to literally a million new things. Before I go left and spend the next three hours stressed about the stuff I missed by not going right, let’s read this week’s best writing about games (and game related things!)

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Finally, some decent weather round these parts. And I don't mean good> weather, you perverse sun-lovers. I mean some real wind and rain to clear the air. Sitting at my desk next to the window, my eye keeps being caught by the hypnotic swaying of the treetops. It's quite magical, really. I might go for a walk later.

Just kidding. I'm superglued to my desk chair (thankfully it's a very comfy chair), and I'm ready for a weekend that's distinguishable from the weekdays only in name. Here's what we're all clicking on this weekend!

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It’s that time of the year again. You know the one. Numbers you’d previously shunned for being too high have suddenly gotten smaller, and purchases have shifted categories from impractical to impulsively justifiable. It’s the Steam Summer Sale 2024! There’s no rush, of course. It runs until the 11th of July. Still, to help you navigate the meatily chummed waters of Sales Lagoon, Horace has decided to reward our combined years of service with a crisp ten bob note each to spend on games. We’ve been bringing up the whole “getting paid” thing for ages, so this is a real win for us. Here’s how we’re all spending that tenner in the sale.

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Besides giving The First Descendant the ol’ benchy marks on desktop, I was curious to see how this gleaming looter shooter would run on the less flexing hardware of the Steam Deck. The answer: it didn’t, at first. Luckily, a semi-quick fix was enough to get me in, where I found a game that for all its ray tracing inclinations, is comfortable with life on the Deck. Reasonably. Most of the time.

With any luck, my issue could be purged completely by the time The First Descendant releases on July 2nd. Partly because I was using a technically non-final preview build, and partly because the problem itself was a silly one: launching was blocked by a case of missing Visual C++, something that the Steam Deck’s Proton compatibility witchcraft usually takes care of. Come on, Proton lad, you’re kinda dropping the ball here.

If this ever happens to you, in The First Descendant or any other game, I heartily recommend YouTuber JD Ros’ video tutorial on fixing it. The method boils down to installing the latest C++ versions via the Steam Deck’s Desktop Mode, then adding their executables to the game’s launch options. This worked a treat for me, and I didn’t suffer any further compatibility headaches from there on out.

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To start a modern Atlus game is to dive headfirst into an ice-cold bath of unbearably swish UI design, a brimming tub of Cool Fonts and Flash Segues. Metaphor: ReFantazio, the first (going by the colon usage) in a new series of RPGs helmed by Persona series director Katsura Hashino, is no exception. It might be set in a medieval fantasy realm, a relatively straight-laced world of square masonry and parchment maps, but it portrays bread-and-butter RPG fixtures with much the same flair as its strutting high school cousin.

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I mentioned it briefly in my Shadow Of The Erdtree review, but there's one area of the DLC where your steed Torrent is so scared they refuse to be summoned. That's because said area is a woodland that's been steeped in shadow and chaos for so long, large goats don't dare clop their hooves. What I hadn't expected was that relying on my own two trotters would be so... revelatory. It's made me reconsider exploration in Elden Ring's open world, and conclude that using Torrent as a taxi service contributes to a feeling of disconnection.

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I don’t dislike> The First Descendant. It has a good grasp of the numbers-go-up-yay appeal behind looter shooters. Sometimes you get to grapple onto a vast robot crab. The first evil alien overlord you fight is named Greg. Not bad, not bad. It’s also, wholeheartedly and unapologetically, a big graphical show-off, complete with multiple ray tracing modes and shinier power armour than if you fed the entire cast of Warframe through an industrial car wash.

Happily, this doesn’t necessarily translate into chugging performance on low-end PCs, or even handhelds like the Steam Deck. But judging from its final preview version, which has just closed prior to the July 2nd release date, feasting on The First Descendant’s finest visuals will definitely tax your rig – and it has its share of technical quirks on the side.

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The internet doesn't exist in the world depicted by the film Aliens, though variations of it crop up in the expanded universe. Nor does the idea of a digital society. There's networked communications tech, but it consists of signals between bodies in deepest space, light years apart, of lonely video terminals in cramped dockloader apartments, and of maniacally collaged CCTV feeds of Marines getting their asses kicked, man. There's no ocean of online interactions, corroding the everyday from all directions, just 1-to-1s through boxy, retro-futurist screens that are so dingy and inadequate it feels like Ripley and Burke are peering at each other through a letterbox. Small wonder, given that Aliens was released in 1986, when what would become the internet was still mostly the province of universities and the military.

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Fallen Aces is a stylish FPS lead pipe ‘em up with immersive sim elements, published by good gun-knowers New Blood Interactive. Your gumshoe ‘tagonist wakes up, hungover of brain, skint of wallet, and unshaven of face, to discover your apartment - undoubtedly reeking of smokerettes and dehydration wee - is being broken into by foes goonly and mookish. They take a while to boot the door down, which gives you a moment to observe the place and consider which of Fallen Aces' expansive makeshift weapon selection you'd like to batter them with. Decisions, decisions...

After eating some fridge fruit, I prepare an ambush by flicking off the lightswitch, then hide behind a desk. When they break in, I bravely sneak up behind them and put the frying pan I picked up to work. The sound effects tell me this a quality bit of cookware. Probably cast iron. Barely a dent. In the pan.

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