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Fish! Tea! Time! Space! An ‘immersive horror sim’! Stopping the sun from not burning anymore but also not getting burnt in the process! Locally Sourced Anthology I: A Space Atlas does not, somewhat disappointingly, offer the infinite possible game concepts that space allows for. It’s got eight though, which I must say is a good start. Eight experimental indies from different developers, each equally taking part in space as the last.

Late last week, 241 staffers from Fallout, Starfield, and The Elder Scrolls developers Bethesda Game Studios announced a "wall-to-wall" union under the Communication Workers of America (CWA). Alongside Bethesda Montreal’s unionisation last month, and the union of Zenimax QA workers last year, this marks a historic moment in the US game industry labour movement.

Steve Sinclair, CEO of Warframe studio Digital Extremes, reckons publishers should give live service games more time to find their footing, and not see dodgy release periods as a "make or break" indicator of a game’s success. "It comes out, doesn’t work and they throw it away," Sinclair told VGC.

The below list of new PC games was communicated to me using smoke signals by two brave Advance News Scouts, shortly before the Maw's event horizon expanded by 100 metres. I have not heard from them since. I fear their souls are even now pigmenting the tides of Destiny 2 gifs that fill the Maw's lower intestines. Sergeant Shagbert, Corporal Pieface, I will avenge you in the only way I know how: by posting some words on a website.

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!

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!)

Microsoft have responded to the US Federal Trade Commission's assertion that the tech giant are now offering a "degraded" Game Pass experience, posing "exactly the sort of consumer harm" the FTC warned was possible in advance of the Activision Blizzard acquisition.

Nuh-uh, say Microsoft, who call the FTC's letter "a misleading, extra-record account of the facts".

I like my car combat to be focused on collisions not guns, and for the vehicular argy-bargy to be an additional layer of excitement and strategy upon a racing core. FlatOut, then. A series of bumper car racing which managed to impress with its crumple zones long before the era of Wreckfest or BeamNG.

Now FlatOut, FlatOut 2 and FlatOut: Ultimate Carnage have all received an update on Steam to add Workshop support, Steam Deck verified status, improved performance, and in the case of FlatOut 2, re-enabled online multiplayer.

Station wagon survival 'em up Pacific Drive has received a summer update which adds a photomode, new upgrades for garage machinery, a new sideways dodge manouver for the car, and a piece of paid cosmetic DLC. This is the first of a new roadmap of post-release updates still to come.

The skies roil. The forests burn. The oceans drink themselves, then throw themselves back up, then drink themselves again. That’s gross, oceans. Don’t do that. Wait. Wait. Sorry. I misread the memo. It’s not the end times, it is simply the end of the week. That’s much nicer. Weekends bring with them solid videogame hours, and perhaps even video game hours? We shall have to see. Here’s what we’re clicking on.

Ho, wayfarer! Beware slight spoilers for Alan Wake 2 in the passages ahead.

Deep in the Dark Place of Alan Wake 2 there is a forest that is not a forest - a zig-zag tunnel adorned with murals of a grisly woodland scene. Entering that tunnel, you find yourself sealed in at either end. But the mural suggests a way out: it changes when you turn around, following an unspoken narrative. It's a device as delicate as the graffiti elsewhere in the Dark Place is obnoxious. In hindsight, it feels like an example of "metsänpeitto", a concept from Finnish folklore about forests which, as writer Sinikka Annala explains, saturates the design of Alan Wake 2. It's a fascinating idea I'd love certain much larger, less intriguing video game worlds to learn from.

Our former editor Katharine "Thorsbane" Castle has long since quit these turgid shores for the sunny uplands of Eurogamer, where the consoles multiply like rabbits, but her legacy endures. For instance, it's thanks to her that I know and am excited about Roots of Yggdrasil, a roguelike deck-and-city-builder which casts you as a posse of vikings in a flying longship, touching down on floating islands to found a quick settlement and harvest some magic before the apocalypse - here known as the Ginnungagap, a swirling purple void - catches up with them.

Katharine called it "a real grower" before the early access release in January, likening it to both Dorfromantik and The Banished Vault - a chalk and cheese comparison if ever I heard one. Well rejoice, perverted chalk-and-cheese mixers, because Roots of Yggdrasil now has a 1.0 release date - 6th September 2024.

Right from the ungainly 3D face taunting me on startup like the Guardian, I had a feeling I was going to enjoy Dungeons of Blood and Dream despite myself. It is a baffling, bizarre thing that lives on the border of janky, retro, and punk (insofar as games can be punk, but that's another article).

You're trapped in a Mind Prison, your "hateful magics" neutered, your memory and understanding gone. Now what?

What’s that? You’re deeply interested in learning the esoteric factors that play into my weekly choice of supporter post topics? Glad you asked, Simon T. Rawman. While I cannot compare my inspirations to the no-doubt spontaneous communion with the cosmos that inspired Debussy to tinkle out Suite bergamasque’s esteemed third movement, I did experience a moment of joyous serendipity yesterday. By which I mean that Edwin wrote a silly strapline riff on a piece of music I was already thinking about because it features in Conscript, which I just got done playing for review.

Edwin’s been appreciating the acrobatic twist that Flintlock: The Siege of Dawn puts on the Soulslite formula, but not everybody’s magical zip-zooping has been going as smoothly. Following the Steam and PC Game Pass releases yesterday, there are widespread reports of heavy stuttering spoiling the fun; I’ve given both versions a test, and indeed, Flintlock does have a serious case of the framerate stammers. Especially the Game Pass build, which is significantly worse for it.

I am burning the Bishop while he sleeps. I'd say it's nothing personal, but quite a lot in medieval management sim Norland is personal. He shouldn't have slept with the Queen's sister, for example. He shouldn't have insisted his lover subsequently pay him for a confession to absolve herself of the guilt accrued from sleeping with him. He shouldn't have felt safe in a room next to the Queen, a woman described as "reckless" in her character traits, and who is perilously close to having a nervous breakdown. This, my holy friend, is how your bed chamber becomes a raging inferno.

By the end of my first game of Norland, the village of Nandos (you can name your own settlements) is covered in more blood than the back end of the bard's best work. In storytelling terms, it is a tragedy. In terms of fantasy management games? It is great fun. The failure cascade as waterslide.

Like many an addled follower of the games industry, I have recently fallen under the spell of Balatro, and especially, its jokers. The mechanics and overall presentation may be exquisite, but it’s the thrill of discovering another mutant jester modifier that has me lunging for the Steam Deck in my sleep. Well, now those jokers have competition: ducks. Step or rather waddle forward Placid Plastic Deck - A Quiet Quest, a quacked-up card battler which somehow takes inspiration from both the Pokémon series and Inscryption.

Devolver have just announced Forestrike, a 2D kung-fu game where you're not smashing buttons in a beat 'em up format. Instead, you use your supernatural time-bending abilities to tactically dispatch goons in a roguelike bash through increasingly difficult levels. It looks like a mixture of things: Sifu, Katana Zero, Aesthetically Cool Stuff In General.

The US Federal Trade Commission have slammed Microsoft's recently announced Game Pass price hikes as "exactly the sort of consumer harm" they claimed would result from the Xbox publisher's now-completed acquisition of Activision-Blizzard.

Over the past few weeks, my review schedule has involved kicking dudes, shooting dudes, war, eldritch busses, and diseased rats. I did not know how utterly burnt out I was on violence and misery until I held one of pet simulation Bobo Bay’s sentient blob critters in my arms and lavished snacks upon it. When I close my eyes, I can still hear Conscript’s shells falling in the distance. But here and now, there are only Bobos, the races they take part in, and the idyllic bay in which they reside.

Many moons ago, I remember having a chat with Brendy about FPS Metro Exodus’s choice to have characters frequently speak over each other in conversation. It’s something I always appreciate in films (Brendy mentioned Fleabag, I brought up Shane Meadows), and although the flow of many of Exodus’ scenes were quite awkward, it was still refreshing to see a game break away from the common, unnatural back-and-forth line delivery. Bioshock and Judas’s Ken Levine has a name for this - “turn-based dialogue.” According to Levine, it’s “one of the biggest problems” in the way games portray conversations.

Everybody knows that Counter-Strike's asymmetric levels are its best. If only someone had told its millions of players. Counter-Strike creator Minh Le seems to agree with me at least, naming cs_siege as one of his favourites in a recent interview.

It was just last month that we reported on Streets Of Rogue 2's early access release date, then planned for the middle of August. Alas, the streets of video game development are meaner than first thought, and its release date has now slipped until October 22nd.

I confess that 2018's Warhammer 40,000: Speed Freeks is a corner of the grim dark far future with which I'm unfamiliar, but it turns out it's an Orky death rally. Its video game adaptation, meanwhile, is a free-to-play, multiplayer, with several team-based modes. It now has an Early Access release date: August 6th.

Crow Country, Conscript, and now Vultures - Scavengers Of Death. We really do seem to be living through a craze for PS1-style horror games. Vultures is different to the others, though, in that it's turn-based zombie crunching combined with roguelike scavenging to survive and get more powerful. It's arriving on Steam sometime soon and it's probably worth a looksy if you're after biohazard disposal with a tactical twist.

We've had a glut of articles about gloomier video games on here today, Rachel's bright and breezy Dungeons Of Hinterberg review notwithstanding. Tomorrow, I promise, it'll be wall-to-wall wholesome life sims, pastel petals and hug emojis as far as the eye can see. But before then, a quick piece on well-received DreadXP-published horror sim The Mortuary Assistant, which will shortly be updated with an "endless embalming-only mode" that strips out the game's supernatural scares and turns it into a very downbeat job sim.

A good immersive sim, by its very nature, offers myriad varied approaches to solving problems. And yet, I find myself wanting to get hyper-specific when writing about the action of Corpus Edax, because it has an incredibly gratifying metal pipe sound, whether you’re stealthy wrapping it around the back of a blissfully unaware fool’s noggin, or lobbing it directly at their knee caps. In fact - although the game does have a delightful array of classic verbs, along with a few surprises - many of them are simply conducive to a stirring round of fisticuffs, to write my most British sentence of the week.

1047 Games have announced Splitgate 2, sequel to the gambolling free-to-play FPS from 2021 in which you could blast people through wormholes. The new game brings back said wormhole-based carnage together with newly "faction-forward" teamplay, and if you want to know what "faction-forward" means when it's at home, I encourage you to stick your whole head into the below crackling cinematic trailer-vortex. I promise nothing bad will happen to it on the other side.

Take me back to the soft blue light, Conscript. It’s safe there, in the save room. No body-armoured heavies with trench raiding clubs. No tunnels choked with sickly, mushy-pea green gas. No rats feasting on my ankles, occasionally inflicting a disease that halves my health bar. “Christ, they’re sending runners now?” the rifleman asks as I hoof south from Fort Souville after a gruelling trench defence whittles down my resources to a busted fightin’ spade and a handful of pistol bullets.

I've been fumbling for a grasp on Bokeh's skull-splitting horror game Slitterhead since I first heard the words "brought to you by Keiichiro Toyama, former designer of Silent Hill, Siren and Gravity Rush". Thanks to a new interview, I now have a proper description of the relationship between protagonist and antagonist. Friends, Romans and countrymen: this is a game about a war between two sets of body-stealing monsters, waged in the neon shadows of a fictional East Asian city. It all puts me strongly in mind of a certain John Carpenter movie about squelchy goings-on in Antarctica.