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! Except, as reader’s of last week’s edition will know, this is a lie. There are no industry folks, cool or otherwise, in this week’s column. It is simply a placeholder - as voted for by you ravenous spine-fiends - while I take a break for the rest of July.

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Sundays are for…god help me, I’m going to start catching up on all the Destiny 2 I missed since Witch Queen. Pray for mojo. Before I shoot infinite dudes and am rewarded with another infinite dudes to shoot, let’s read this week’s best writing about games (and game related things!)

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Wrong answers only please: how did I slice open my finger earlier this week? Bystander in a climactic shinobi duel? Fell afoul of the local mantis shrimp? Got out of bed too quickly? Whatever the case, typing is painful for me at the moment, so let's get straight to it. Here's what we're all clicking on this lovely weekend!

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The immersive sim has seen a revival in recent years. Not only from larger studios like Arkane, keeping the faith alive with their time loops and space stations, but also from a bunch of smaller developers bravely exploring a typically ambitious genre. RPS has always had an affinity for these systemically luxuriant simulations, historically lauding the likes of the original Deus Ex as the best game ever made. But given everything that has come since, is that still the case? Only one way to find out: make a big list.

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Between Against The Storms’ critters, Manor Lords’s perfect oxen, and now Cataclismo, Hooded Horse’s roster of strategy games share a common thread that many guard-the-village-em-ups can fatally overlook: they present a civilisation that’s worth protecting. Even if the fallen culture you’ll defend against waves of gribblies offers fascinatingly few concrete details on its origins, there’s a lithe and impressionistic otherworldliness and use of colour in Cataclismo’s art that evokes unearthed layers of history. Also, everyone is just so gosh darn likeable, with their foppish hats plopped atop stretched bodies, and dialogue that remains resolute, chirpy, and eager, even when you’re click-marching these poor folk straight to their deaths.

Still, none of this will stop me will sacrificing every last man, woman, and child of these beleaguered warriors if it means preserving a single one of my immaculately crafted staircases.

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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! Something extra magical has happened! And by magical, I mean that I’ve bollocksed it up, yet again! I foresaw this coming, honestly, and should have addressed it last week. Alas, I dared to dream that I’d have sorted things out by now. Well, this is what I get for mild optimism!

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Sundays are for getting dangerously into No Man’s Sky again. Before I go floating in a tin can, let’s read this week’s best writing about games (and game related things!)

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