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Might And Delight's "tiny Multiplayer Online RPG" Book Of Travels has scheduled itself a new early access launch date after its most recent delay. As M&D previously reassured fans, it is indeed a shorter wait than I'd feared. Their cozy online RPG is now setting out into early access on October 11th, with plans to work towards a full launch in two years.

Listen up, escape room fans. There's a new Korean drama you need to watch. It's called Squid Game, it's on Netflix, and it's real good. It's a show about 456 down and outers - folks with no life, family or who are in huge piles of debt - who enter a deadly competition to win a truck ton of money to help them turn their life around. All they need to do is compete in six games. Easy peasy, everyone thinks. How hard can that be? Only the first of those games, a riff on the classic children's game Statues / Grandma's Footsteps / Red Light Green Light - involves running toward a giant automaton with motion sensors in her eyes, as well as a team of snipers waiting in the rafters to take down anyone who does stay perfectly at the right time.

It's grim, but it's also the perfect blend of some of my favourite things ever: Zero Escape, Danganronpa and Battle Royale (the Japanese thriller, not the game genre) - and I implore you to give it a go.

I love doing this column because it means a) it is the end of a working week (working hard or hardly working, amiright?) and b) I get to play something nice and (often) small, and usually a bit weird. I am also, as it turns out, really smug about the theme I discovered for this week. Last night I had a bath, so am ideally positioned to extoll the benefits of dunking things in water. May I present to you three brand new indie games: a frog's tea party, a potion workshop and a rainy walk.

After rebooting Lara Croft with 2013's Tomb Raider, Square Enix's Crystal Dynamics studio are now helping reboot another vintage hero: Joanna Dark. They'll be chipping in on Microsoft's mysterious new Perfect Dark, helping out the mysterious Santa Monica studio named The Initiative. Secrecy might be thematically appropriate for a game about a futuristic superspy but we don't know much of anything about it so all you can really say is "Yup, I guess they're doing that."

It's all very silly. Having survived the grey, po-faced gruntman domination of the 2000s, I love that games can still be very silly.

Metal Dogs is a twin stick (sort of) shooter about sending heavy weapons platforms into irradiated future deserts to fight giant insects, ghost tanks, and robot hippos. Naturally, those heavy weapons platforms are strapped onto dogs.

Humans are boring. All fleshy and feelings and Netflix. Like this quiz, robots don't have hidden agendas. Robots want to wish Paulie a happy birthday, and we want to entertain you for quarter of an hour. It's the perfect match.

Following a short delay caused by Tennent's Lager (actual true story), Margaret Thatcher has returned from Hell to menace us once more. Thankfully, one doomed space marine will stand up and venture into the tenth circle of Hell (aka the UK) to put the reviled British prime minister down for good. Thatcher's Techbase is its name, and Doom 2 is the game you'll need to play this free mod now it's out. It is quite the thing, and even has a custom soundtrack from Paradise Killer's composer.

During Geoff's Gamescom MegaMix earlier this week, we got another extended peek at Death Stranding's upcoming Director's Cut, which adds loads of new features, modes, story missions and ways to transport your cargo to Kojima's esoteric postal hiking sim. Personally, I couldn't care less about the bum-warming jet pack or the mountain-scaling catapult. Instead, I'm ALL about Sam's Buddy Bot, and I 100% plan to use its strong, muscly robot calves to carry me all the way across America when I inevitably end up playing it all over again. Watch out, BB Boys. I think we might have a BBBB Boys road trip on our hands, too.

What's up 90s kids, how would you like to jump back into a SNES platforming city-builder that was first released 30 years ago? Last night's Nintendo Direct had a surprising amount of PC news on offer, including the announcement that a remake of ActRaiser is available to play on PC right now. Named ActRaiser Renaissance, Square Enix say they've given the game a "complete graphical overhaul", as well as added some new features for players to try.

Though Monster Hunter Rise isn't even out on PC for months yet, Capcom have announced an expansion is coming our way. During last night's Nintendo Direct stream they revealed Monter Hunter Rise: Sunbreak, which will launch simultaneously on Switch and PC in summer 2022. Hey, at least that means while consoleers had to wait over a year for the expansion, we'll have it after only a few months. Have a peek in the announcement trailer.

Nier director Yoko Taro is making a new role-playing game in which everything is depicted through cards, and somehow it's not called Yoko Tarot. Story? There are cards for that. Combat? Turn-based card battles, of course. Travelling through the world? Flip over some cards, see what you find! It's called Voice Of Cards: The Isle Dragon Roars, and it's set to release this October. On top of that, a demo will be available later today if you fancy trying it out.

Rise, brothers, to venerate Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine as it celebrates its tenth birthday this month. Relic Entertainment and Sega have a surprise for us all too, turning the third-person ork-smasher into an 'Anniversary Edition' which includes all the DLC as well as bonuses like the soundtrack. That's all for free, which is nice.

The Steam Deck has just broken through a major compatibility barrier: one that would have made it difficult for some of Steam’s most-played multiplayer games to properly function on the Valve handheld. Gabe and co. have Epic to thank for this one, though, as the latter’s Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC) tech is now extending support to Linux and it Wine and Proton compatibility layers. The same layers, you may recall, that the Steam Deck relies on to run games without native Linux ports. In other words, games with multiplayer components that wouldn’t have worked on the Steam Deck - because their use of EAC precluded Linux/Wine/Proton compatibility - should, in theory, be able to run in full.

Fuga: Melodies Of Steel is set during an anthropomorphic animal anime World War 2 in which your parents have been taken by the dog Nazis. Still with me? You and your fellow cat children find Howl's Moving Tank in a cave and set about getting your families back, with turn-based, RPG battles.

You also discover at the end of the tutorial that your giant angry house has a "Soul Cannon", which is a gun that only fires if you feed it the soul - and permanently kill - one of the children.

Still with me?

Breaking news: everything is normal and fine. Yesterday Halo Infinite developers 343 Industries mentioned during a livestream that they might need to delay this weekend's beta. Today they confirmed that's not the case, and posted an overview of what to expect.

The riot shield was probably the most divisive item ever added to Counter-Strike - and now it's back. New update Operation Riptide, out now, introduces the defensive item to Counter-Strike: Global Offensive's casual mode, alongside major tweaks to Dust2, new missions, shorter matches, and private matchmaking queues.

Diablo 2: Resurrected launched earlier today, offering players the chance to relive the classic hack-and-slasher. But why recreate the experience of one Diablo game when you could recreate the experience of two? Resurrected is also experiencing a bunch of launch issues related to its online mode, just like Diablo 3 before it.

Those issues include players being unable to see their existing characters, create new characters, or launch the game. Some might say essential features.

Terrible news continues to pour out of Blizzard like pus from of a festering wound around a splinter you forgot about and left for way too long. You should really get that looked at. Still, they must be drawing some comfort from the fact that Diablo II: Resurrected is out today, one of Blizz's most beloved games of all time.

Naturally, a lot of people will be excited for the remastered version. But if my tone is more immediately aggro than the last time I wrote about Diablerrected, that's because I was previously playing the beta through the rose-tinted haze of this game being very important to me and a big part of my childhood, and bonding with my older brother, and so on. This time, I have been playing the final version for several hours, and am cross.

When you've played a lot of games, or seen a lot of films, or probably eaten at a lot of restaurants or generally oversaturated your life with one subject, it's easy to start making rules and codes for How It Should Be. I given a lot of games a hard time for being opaque and failing to explain themselves. And yet here I am, finally writing about Mech Engineer after watching and playing it for nine months, waiting for it to hit the point where I can almost, sort of, not exactly recommend it... but share my fascination with it.

The primary function of ragdoll physics in video games, everyone knows, is to freak out and make people laugh. Everyone knows this. The technology was created explicitly to bring a subversive touch of merry mayhem to po-faced murdergames. Everyone knows this. But developers are wary of overdoing it or openly acknowledging this fact which everyone knows. This is why, sadly, Call Of Duty: Vanguard will indeed 'fix' the 'bug' which could make attack dogs turn into a giant maelstrom of limbs, teeth, and mashing meat noises, a phenomenom known as the 'dognado'. Tragic.

This week on The Electronic Wireless Show podcast I was inspired by the extremely cute little monsters the Rot, who are you besties in Kena: Bridge Of Spirits, to ask Matthew and Nate about their favourite animal companions in video games. You will probably be able to predict some of their answers. Others, not so much.

A big digression about trains and commuter rage this week, as well as a shocking update from Matthew re. the farewell fizzy drink tour. But most exciting is that the Cavern Of Lies is replaced this week by a Cavern Of Announcements! Yes, we have very special news indeed, and you have to listen to at least two thirds of the podcast to find out what it is. But it is genuinely incredible.

A new Sea Of Thieves content update heralds the start of a new season today, encouraging pirates to plunge overboard and explore the beautiful halls and mysteries of the Sunken Kingdom. All sorts of coral-y PvE surprises await, with Shrines to quietly explore and Treasures to plunder by force. As beautiful as the game's water is from above, I'm very keen to see more from below.

Ever since Chorus first broke out of hyperspace during Microsoft's Xbox Series X showcase last year, Fishlabs' enigmatic space shooter has been a tricky thing to pin down. The first trailer gave us a taste of its high speed combat and third-person battles, but its deep, ominous narration, hints of a mysterious cosmic power, and that final image of a planet being sucked into a black hole almost looked like it was verging into horror territory rather than plain sci-fi. Having now played around an hour of Chorus, I can safely say it's very much a pure breed of space combat shooter, following in the same, adrenalin-fuelled vein as EVE: Valkyrie and Star Wars Squadrons.

Forsaken, the sentient ship you control in Chorus that's piloted by the rebel cultist Nara, is probably a similarly slippery thing to nail down in the eyes of your enemies, too. Thanks to one of Nara's special Rite powers, bestowed on her by that aforementioned cosmic power you'll be hunting down over the course of the game, Forsaken is able to shift and teleport right behind enemy ships for brutal, bullet-ridden takedowns. It's immensely satisfying, and can also make for daring, last-minute escapes from incoming crosshairs. But you'll need much more than Nara's crafty Rite powers to survive Chorus' unforgiving dogfights. Forsaken went up in flames more times than I care to admit in my hour of hands on time, but I'm very much looking forward to going back for more when it finally launches on Steam and the Epic Games Store on December 3rd later this year.

Discord has started testing official YouTube integration, rolling out a new feature named Watch Together which, well, allows users watch YouTube vids together. It comes just a few weeks after Google's lawyers shut down several third-party Discord bots with a similar function. Watch Together has reportedly been enabled in a limited number of Discord servers for now, with plans to roll it out to everyone by the end of October.

Bandai Namco's first Tales Of game, Tales Of Phantasia, weighed in at a previously unheard of 48MB when it released in 1995. That's a mere wisp of data nowadays, but a veritable beast for a Super Famicom game cartridge. The cost of these high capacity carts, combined with westerners' ho-hum attitude towards RPGs at the time, likely axed any chance it had of being translated. Later Tales games have had better success in the west - 2003's Tales Of Symphonia was arguably its first breakout hit outside Japan - but the series as a whole has always seemed to exist on the fringes of the JRPG dynasty. While the Tales games certainly have a following outside Japan, western JRPG fans still tend to gravitate toward Square Enix's Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest games, or Atlus' Persona series.

But the Tales series' low-key existence is seemingly coming to an end thanks to the recently released Tales Of Arise. With its bright, eye-catching visuals and its uniquely frantic battle system, it turns monster slaying from a chore into an addiction, and has won the hearts of many curious newcomers in the process (including yours truly). With this influx of new blood, Tales might stand a chance of grabbing a throne at the heart of the JRPG genre. I recently talked to Arise producer Yusuke Tomizawa, who worked hard to tailor the adventure for a new Tales audience as much as its established fans. He explains how Arise's development went down a long, risky road, but it paid off in excellent review scores, happy fans, and a refreshing new direction for Tales.

Splendid snowy survival sandbox The Long Dark will launch the much-anticipated fourth episode of its story campaign on the 6th of October, developers Hinterland Studio have announced. Named 'Fury, Then Silence', episode 4 of the 'Wintermute' campaign sees one of our protagonists captured by murderers sheltering from the strange superfreeze in a prison complex. Have a peek at that in the new trailer below.

If you've tried to play Apex Legends over the last week or so and noticed that things have been pretty slow, you're not alone. Since the game's Evolution Collection event launched last week, the battle royale and its servers have been struggling, and Respawn Entertainment have been tinkering away to try and sort it all out. Yesterday, they issued a patch to resolve a number of bugs and improve stability, but having played a few matches myself last night, it seems we're not out of the woods just yet.

While Valve haven't been overly secretive with the Steam Deck, there are still plenty of burning questions to ask about the upcoming handheld PC. For me, these are usually along the lines of “Will it slip into my big coat pockets as easily as the Switch does?” or “Will it survive my cat pushing it off literally any flat surface?” but the newly-launched Steam Deck FAQ covers enquiries of a generally more techy nature.

The dastardly multiplayer invasions of Deathloop are some murderous hijinks. But not everybody wants to see a player-controlled assassin with vicious human instincts pop up as they sneak through their time loop adventure. That's fine, say developers Arkane, you can simply switch to single player mode, which will replace player incursions with periodic visits from an NPC Julianna who is (let's be diplomatic) a less feisty opponent. I am here to ask, nay, beg: do not do this. Leave it in Online mode. Welcome malice, embrace pain, receive with warmth that sudden mortal stab in the back. You are strong and capable of overcoming such things. I'm not just giving you an ego boost here. As the tenacious Colt, the fight is fixed in your favour.

Fantasy sports management sim Blood Bowl 3 is delayed again, with the early access launch now pushed out of September and into the nebulous future. The official word is that after beta feedback, they realised yeah it wasn't ready. They say, "our teams are more committed than ever to make Blood Bowl 3 the most comprehensive and polished instalment in the series yet." Yeah go on, please do that.