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After the backlash and subsequent U-turn on Helldivers 2 requiring players to link their Steam account to a PlayStation Network account, the next PlayStation flagship headed to PC has sought to reassure players that you won’t need a PSN account to play its single-player campaign. Multiplayer’s a different case, though.

Scylla and the Sirens are a rock band of mythical boat wreckers who insist they have tons of fans. (They do not.) As a boss battle in Hades 2 they are a deadly trio that has bested me more times in the last few hours than I care to admit. But as a sign of things to come for this early access roguelike sequel, they are an encouraging bunch of characterful malcontents. The harbingers of a confident, slash-happy action game, and another poppy adaptation of classic Greek japes.

After a bit of a bumpy landing on PC, it looks like No Rest for the Wicked is finally finding its feet. The early access action-RPG launched with notable performance problems that developers Moon Studios promised they’d address, starting with several hotfixes over the last few weeks that managed to claw back some frames. The game’s first big patch goes a step further, seemingly boosting the game’s performance to a degree that its minimum and recommended hardware specs have been lowered as a result.

Gears of Warhammer sequel Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 will feature some kind of PvP multiplayer mode, similar to the first Warhammer 40k game, going by an early look at an art book for the upcoming third-person shooter.

It’s been a tumultuous few days for Helldivers 2, as one of this year’s most beloved runaway hits managed to seemingly undo all of its goodwill and earn the ire of thousands of players in the blink of an eye.

Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome to Booked For The Week - our new Sunday feature where we ask a selection of cool industry folks questions about books! The very first book was famously written in the 1200's by notable scholar and six-time wrestling world champion Booker T, a fact you'd know if you simply read more books. This week, it's voice of Horizon Zero Dawn's Aloy and many others, writer, singer, and endless other cool stuff, Ashly Burch! Cheers Ashly! Mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?

I need to take all the opportunities to write about Fall Guys that I can get, given how much time I spend playing it with my son. This is a pretty good opportunity, too: a set of Star Wars skins are coming to the bean battle royale, as announced yesterday on May 4th, and they coincide with some major changes to Fall Guys' platforming physics.

Sundays are for sorting the tangle of busted pipes under my sink out so I don’t have to change my socks twice a day after forgetting to wear my designated Kitchen Crocs. Before I remember this time and instantly become a style icon, let’s read this week’s best writing about games (and game-related things!)

The UK government has responded to a petition asking for "government intervention" to force the industry to keep video games "in a reasonably working state when support ends", rather than allowing them to become unplayable such as when online servers are shut down. The petition was prompted by the closure in March of ten-year-old Ubisoft racing game The Crew.

Earlier this week, Helldivers 2 players on PC were told that they'd soon need to link their Steam account to a PlayStation Network (PSN) account. Two days later and the game has received 100,000 new negative reviews on Steam.

What's more, developers at Arrowhead have made several statements to say that they're on the players' side.

How like Ollie to volunteer to take over Playing This Weekend and then go on holiday, or whatever it is he's done that means he isn't here today - I don't know, he's a law unto himself. What am I, his mother? Thus it falls to me to ask the other staff what they're playing, and thence communicate that to you. Jeeze, why can't you just text each other or something, why all this middleman-ing. What am I, your mothers? But we're playing a bunch of different stuff, so have at it.

Almost a decade after it set crowdfunding records on Kickstarter, and five years after its release, Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night’s developers have announced the final free update for the Castlevania: Symphony of the Night successor.

The original SteamWorld Heist was an absolute treat, slamming the charming robotic world of the SteamWorld series together with a 2D take on the turn-based strategy of your XCOMs and Valkyria Chronicles and such. With SteamWorld Heist 2 recently revealed for an August release on PC, developers Thunderful have teased some more details on the sequel’s shiny new job system.

"Nosophobia" is the fear of disease, "bathophobia" is the fear of depths, and "devlogphobia" is a mixture of nosophobia and bathophobia produced by reading Steam posts about Norland, a systems-rich and plague-ridden medieval colony sim from developers Long Jaunt and Hooded Horse, publisher of Manor Lords. Norland is sort of The Sims meets Dwarf Fortress meets RimWorld. It gives you charge of several new kingdoms that have sprouted from the corpse of a fallen Empire and are now feuding for supremacy.

The already controversial decision to add the anti-cheat tool used in shooter Valorant to League of Legends has seemingly caused developers Riot Games even more of a headache. The studio have issued a lengthy assurance that - at least as far as they know - the new anti-cheat software isn’t causing players’ hardware to end up bricked, despite various reports of major issues after its introduction.

Well, swaggle me horns and fasten me timbers so they stop shivering like that, because the noise is quite irritating. Welcome back to another edition of Plundertales - my quest to conquer strategy game Total War: Warhammer 3 without ever stepping foot on dry land. If you don’t know the other rules by now, I can only assume you’ve been living under an extremely specific type of rock that changes nothing about your life except preventing you from reading the previous two editions of this column. Who would carve such a rock? How would it even work? These are lubber-tier queries and shall remain unanswered, because it’s plundering time. Avast!

In its continuing quest to become Everything to Everyone, Fortnite has shapeshifted, The Thing-like, into a new Lego Star Wars game. The Lego Fortnite survival mode has been expanded with a new, permanent Star Wars world, with this weekend - which includes May the Fourth, don’tcha know - also kicking off a new battle pass and bringing additions to every other part of Fortnite: whether you’re playing it as a battle royale shooter (remember that?), racing game or music-rhythm successor to Guitar Hero.

Despite my desire for a real life herb garden, I don't really like farming or gardening games. Distant Bloom could be an exception, except I'm not sure it even qualifies as either, really. It is a little bit about exploration, a little about very light puzzles, and mostly in its heart, about cleaning up and making everything pretty.

Indika is a good game about a good nun, and I’ll talk about why in a sec, but first - a complaint. ‘Low’, ‘Medium’, or ‘Ultra’ graphics settings? Really, Indika? Where is 'High'? Where’s it gone, eh? This isn’t cute when Papa John's do it, and it’s not cute now. You’re lucky you’re an extremely interesting game, Indika. Let’s talk about that instead.

I didn't have a Game Boy Camera as a lad, partly because I couldn't afford one, and partly because my "friends" used to troll me ("bullying", I think we called it back then) about my Game Boy. Amongst other things, they'd reach over and flick the power off while I was playing The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening. I didn't finish that game for 15 years. I'd flown the family nest before I braved the Eagle's Tower. Can you imagine what my friends would have done if I'd owned a Game Boy Camera? Probably, they'd have taken photos of... bottoms with it, and such.

I'm aware I'm not making a great case for being a graduate of the School of Hard Knocks. The point is: I didn't have a Game Boy Camera then, so I'm delighted that the Game Boy Camera has caught on among a later generation of indie PC developers - prominent among them artist and educator Catharine Graffam, whose GB Camera Gallery: Mystery Show you can play for free in a browser.

Carceri is a fizzy and kaleidoscopic, first-person "chaotic Art-toy" in which you explore/hallucinate an island resort that's also a concentration camp ("carceri" is Italian for prison) for sentient computer programs. Out sometime in May, it's the work of James Beech, who describes himself as "an on-again, off-again AAA veteran" with credits on Metroid Prime 4, Remnant: From the Ashes, and Crysis 3. The environments take hefty influence from Carceri d'invenzione, a series of prints created in the 18th century by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, whose name has become a byword for impossible spaces.

The kids today might be all about their Helldivers 2 premium warbonds and tactical strikes, but back when me and the boys were defending earth against giant insects, all we had were massive riot shields and miniguns, and by jove, we made do. Never speak to me about Terminids. If you can’t finish your truck-sized ants here on earth, don’t even think about asking for bizarre interstellar insectoids to kill. Anyway, good news for me and the proverbial boys, because multiplayer sci-fi anti-ant shooter Earth Defense Force 6 is dropping on July 25th, 2024.

If there's one thing that'll rile people up more than a robot blasting them with a laser cannon, it's having to create a new account. That's something Helldivers 2 players will have to do pretty sharpish, as Arrowhead announce mandatory account linking between Steam and Playstation Network. Why? Safety and security apparently.

Crossover fighting game Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite first sauntered onto various videogaming mechanisms back in 2017. We forgot to review it. Oops. But others did, sometimes complaining about the art style, which was a chunky and plastic-looking departure from previous games in the series. It's now almost seven years later but at least one person has not forgotten this missed opportunity. A fighting game modder has been tinkering with shaders to bring the comic book style of previous games to Infinite. Looks cool.

I gave that Pools game a go recently - you know, the first-person traipse through some liminal spaces that happen to be pool themed. At one point it was trending on Steam and since then it's garnered loads of positive reviews, with people saying it's unsettling and drips with atmosphere. Reader, I do think it's quite atmospheric, but I do not think it's all that unsettling. If anything, I find it a bit dull, in a way that's semi-frustrating. Am I missing the liminal space-liker bit of the brain a lot of people have? Am I an anomaly here?

Good news, people whose day-to-day lives are woefully short on blingy Clancified squad-murdering. Ubisoft's elusive free-to-play shooter XDefiant finally has a release date, 21st May 2024. Or at least, that's when the preseason launches, providing six weeks of access to the modes, maps and factions from last month's server test.

Happy May 3rd, Battlestar Galactica fans! Remember what John Dune said about living long and prospering? He said: Oh, look, objectively excellent dogfighter Star Wars: Squadrons is under two quid on Steam. As Edwin pointed out to me, that’s about the price of a third of latte, although he does pay London prices. Also, Edwin, are you going around trying to buy the dregs of people’s lattes? I cannot judge. Were it in short supply, I too would debase myself for caffeine in an instant.

Fabledom somehow passed me by, but darn if it isn't leaving early access in about a week and a half. May 13th (unlucky for some) will see this fairytale kingdom city builder launch into 1.0, after a comparatively short but successful early access run on Steam. It looks very sweet, and reminds me of a kind of Foundation meets Lakeburg Legacies - at least based on the trailer, which puts an emphasis on it laid back and idyllic citybuilding, and love.

Co-op horror game Content Warning - aka "Lethal Company but you're role-playing as an abandoned places streamer and all your party members are squealing like hogs and putting on daft accents and Brian, will you please stop trying to feed me to that giant whisk so you can go viral" - has received a big update.

If I was writing What's Better, it would be a short series. The first entry would declare that the best thing in video games, obviously, was watching NPCs fight among themselves.

It's this which most interests me about The Forever Winter, which takes place in a "PvEvE conflict" in which enemy factions - including enormous, stomping robots - are constantly fighting one another while you and your squad try to scavenge and survive in their shadow. Its first trailer showing in-game footage is below.