Sundays are for getting up early and testing the legs are still in working order after potentially overdoing it with a crosscountry ride. All week, climbing stairs has been a struggle, like the muscles contain only vapours of energy. Just a little test cycle out to the woods to see if everything’s tickety boo.
Then, inevitably, when I collapse into bed afterward, it will be time to settle into some heavy reading. Exercise for the old noggin, you know?
Over on Aftermath, Brenda Romero has published a beautiful piece of playable literature, a memoir. A life story told through the overlappings of history within a house. I don’t want to spoil too much, so I’ll share a bit from earlier in the story, but I sat down to glance at Chasing Lilacs and found myself gripped until its end.
3) Front door. The space inside the front door can be called an entryway or foyer, but these words seem bigger than the space, so it is called ‘the front door’.
a) If you are two, your father greets your older sister’s date at the door. He hands him a lead pipe and says, ‘Bend this, and you can take my daughter out’. The young man struggles with the pipe, fails to bend it, and hands it back to your father saying, ‘I don’t think it can be done, sir.’ Your father takes the pipe, bends it in a U with his powerful arms, muscles worked hard by a lifetime of labour, and hands it back to the young man. Closing the door, he walks back to the living room and sits down in front of the TV. Your sister, mortified, races out the front door trying to explain her father’s odd sense of humour.
The Guardian has begun their annual series of Summer Game Previews. These short, 500-word dives into upcoming games were a delicious challenge to write as a freelancer. Developers can be so generous with their time that it’s easy to overload a piece with their words and lose sight of detailing the game. James Nouch’s write up of Mouthwashing developer Wrong Organ’s upcoming game Carcass Clad shows how to do it well.
When you’re planning a follow-up to something so pitilessly nasty, how do you raise the stakes? Well, you could set the entire game in the stifling crew compartment of a heavily armoured tank, a coffin-like interior you share with two other players as you co-operatively attempt to pilot your beleaguered war machine to safety through the crumbling remains of a city in enemy territory.
While there’s undoubtedly tonal overlap, the roaring engine powering Carcass Clad is gameplay rather than scriptwriting. “In Mouthwashing, every single thing we were doing was about trying to make that script come to life in any way possible,” says Tomec, the gameplay lead. “Every gameplay sequence, everything you do at every point is just there to make that story hit. And Carcass Clad is fundamentally not that kind of game. This is a gameplay-driven experience.”
While our sweet Callum fell out of love with Beast of Reincarnation during his review, over at Remap, Patrick Klepek and Rob Zacny explore why its “mid world” can provide pleasure. Not that this conflicts with Callum’s feelings, more that it explores how not reviewing a game can open it up to be enjoyed.
I bring this up because of the time I’m spending with a new video game this week, Beast of Reincarnation. It’s a deeply unambitious action game from Game Freak, the developers of Pokémon, that rarely transcends its influences. A special girl in a corrupted world destined to save it. A fun, if repetitive, combat system that owes a great debt to Devil May Cry and From Software. A world that’s somehow too big and too small, largely devoid of stuff to do.
It is, by every definition, mid. 7/10. Whatever you want to call it. But Rob, I’m enjoying my time with it. It’s not great. It’s mostly good. That enjoyment might come with an expiration date, a joy that empties long before the credits roll. (These games tend to be 10 hours too long, and I have a tendency to pre-emptively exhaust myself by spending too much plucking around the world.)
To mark ten years since the release of No Man’s Sky, Sean Murray has spoken to Eurogamer about the game’s journey from its tumultuous release to its present day ascendant. Though, as you can read below, Murray disagrees with that framing.
No Man’s Sky’s August 2016 launch was, of course, a controversial one, but the first signs of a renaissance arrived just a few months later when Hello Games released the Foundation Update, adding base building and more. From the inside, was there ever such an obvious turning point? “The nice story is that there’s this redemption arc, this comeback,” Murray replies, “and that there would be some sort of inflection point for the team; like, ‘Oh, we were doing things one way, and then we learned this important lesson, and now we do things a different way.'”
But that isn’t really accurate, he goes on. “That isn’t really the story of No Man’s Sky and the story of the team … This team is incredible and has always been incredible; I feel super proud of what they released. I feel super proud of what they’re doing now, and they have always been this team that has just cared so much about this game and so much about the community. And I think that shines through.”
Moving to a heavier subject, Game Developers’ Bryant Francis has investigated the sexual harassment allegations made against three indie horror game publishers – including Mouthwashing publisher Critical Reflex – and what changes have been made within the companies.
On December 14, 2025, former Critical Reflex community manager Evelina Zemljic uploaded a video to YouTube accusing two individuals of mistreating her during her time at the company: CEO Rita Lebedeva and her former co-worker Ted Hentschke, now a CEO and co-founder of Polish horror publisher Black Lantern Collective.
Her video sent shockwaves through the fast-growing world of indie horror as other developers and game industry professionals came forward with similar allegations. These claims went beyond Critical Reflex (known for publishing horror hits like Mouthwashing), with some accusing Hentschke of sexually harassing them during his time as head of production at Dread X Collection publisher Dread XP.
It’s been eight months. None of these companies ever released public statements. It’s left developers and accusers wondering—did Hentschke or Lebedeva face any accountability for their alleged behavior?
And to round things out on a low note, I’ve been at times obsessed with and deliberately disengaged from the news of wildfires in Europe. This year seems to mark a knot in the fabric that can’t be smoothed out. The years of warnings have passed and now we will feel the growing heat year after year. Writing for the LRB, Jeremy Harding dives into the many warnings and cancelled fire safety programs in France which exacerbated the recent blazes.
So far this year four firefighters have lost their lives across France. They and their comrades who battle on are rightly praised by politicians and media for their endurance. But there is smouldering anger in the ranks about the bureaucratic reluctance to update their equipment. In 2024 Macron’s fly-by prime minister Gabriel Attal (nine months in office) cancelled a central government loan that would have allowed the fire department to benefit from new amphibious firefighting aircraft. There are currently twelve planes, but when the fires began this summer only seven or eight were in service. By late July eleven were mission worthy.
These workhorse Canadairs – known in France as pelicans – are put to the test with every sortie and require intensive maintenance. Ground staff and pilots insist that the engines need replacing regularly. In July the interior minister assured the public that a dozen spare engines were fully serviced and ready to go. In fact nine engines were still in the workshops. As matters stand, France’s Canadair fleet has two spare engines at its disposal. It is backed up by nine DHC Dash aircraft – mostly spraying fire retardant – and this year by Black Hawk helicopters, courtesy of the Czech Republic.
So, how to end, how to end? What music to share? Last weekend I was travelling north, passing through train stations I’ve not visited for years. With that in mind, how about a little Vashti Bunyan? No? What about some Elbow? Still not your speed, I have just the thing: Steve Reich.