Each week Marsh Davies orbits the supermassive blackhole that is Early Access and comes back with any stories he can find or gets shredded to subatomic spaghetti as he tumbles towards a point of infinite mass. This week he has become death, destroyer of worlds, and really quite a lot of moons as well, in Universe Sandbox 2. Otherwise known as Universe Sandbox , if you re the kind of terrible prick who insists on using Character Map to enforce your brand. Anyway, the game s great.>

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The developers at Eat Create Sleep managed to tame that wild horse crowdfunding a little over a year ago. In 2014, using Indiegogo they raised just over $21,000 to create an interactive god game called Crest [official site] – where players take on the role of an unseen force who can express commandments to its island denizens, which can be interpreted and misinterpreted by followers to dire consequence. The game is in Early Access until sometime this December, say its makers, and they’ve already have some ideas on how to fund some regular content before and after release.

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O and the clouds parted and so decended the great Master Spy [official site] – a little stealth-based precision platformer that’s drifting toward its Steam launch on September 8th.

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Have You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.>

I don’t know when I’ll ever get another first-person experience like SWAT 4, but Door Kickers [official site] is pretty close. It’s played from above, but you command a squad of well-trained soldiers to breach and clear rooms full of criminals, and it’s every bit as smart, tactical and exciting as its inspirations.

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Skipping Stones to Lonely Homes is a new game from indie designer Alan Hazelden. It’s a puzzlescript puzzler, developed by Hazelden in the open-source engine, and it tells the story of a sailor – that’s you – whose ship is damaged and must be repaired using items found on nearby islands. It also ranks in the top five games that use lilypads as a comprehensive game mechanic.

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The seemingly endless expanse of alpha updates that make up our coverage of Prison Architect [official site] – we’re up to Update 36 now, friends! – is coming to an end. It’s true, these collective hands of rock and paper will no longer know the gentle touch of Introversion Software’s regular patches. As we draw closer to its eventual October launch, the final Alpha update reads as follows:

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“From the day she was born, Patricia Wagon has dreamed of becoming a police officer,” reads the premise for Mighty Switch Force! Academy, a jaunty rags to riches story that follows poor Ms. Wagon in her pursuit for a job in justice.

Sound faintly familiar? Ah, good call! Mighty Switch Force! Academy is in fact a spin-off of a game named simply Mighty Switch Force! – a shooter/puzzle hybrid from the same developer which saw a Steam release just last month following its initial 2011 release on 3DS.

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Sundays are for laying face down on the ground, thanking the carpet fibres that the following day is a bank holiday and you don’t have to move anytime soon. Good thing you gathered the week’s best games writing at some earlier, unspecified point of the week, eh?

• Over at Gamasutra, Alex Wawro writes about the ways in which working on “gross, violent games” can affect developers. We featured this article in its own post earlier this week, but it’s worth flagging again.

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Guild Wars 2 is going free. That’s free, not free-to-play. “We re not using the words free-to-play with Guild Wars 2,” says ArenaNet president and co-founder Mike O’Brien when I talk to him about the changes via email. “We believe in buy to play, and we know that when people describe something as free-to-play that comes with expectations.” Those expectations are that free-to-play games require heavy microtransactions, but O’Brien say that Guild Wars 2 will remain the same as it always was – and the expansion, Heart of Thorns, will still have an entry fee when it releases later this year.

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Seeping out from the D&D fantasy maw from whence all RPGs come is Sword Coast Legends [official site], a new action role-playing slashy-slashy project which expands on D&D’s famed Forgotten Realms setting. You may remember me mentioning it earlier in the month when news arrived that its PC release would be delayed until September 28th. Here I am again, this time a harbinger of happier news – and there’s 40 minutes of game footage below.

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