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The idea of another person controlling every action my body takes is one that keeps me awake at night more often than I like to acknowledge to myself. So how about a game all about that! It's called Remote Control, and in it you most titularly remote control human proxies to explore a derelict spaceship and figure out what went wrong on it.

I've never been a football person, so this whole Global Mug thing that's going on at the moment is as important to me as eyelids for a fish. What I have always been is someone who likes platformers, however, even when they're all about that thing they call the beautiful game. And in the case of Kick, it seems that sidescrolling ball dribbling is actually quite delightful.

Marathon's already announced mid-season 2 update is set to arrive next week, bringing with it the shooter's first proper, albeit experimental, PvE mode, Vault Breaker. A new blog post has gone into a bit more detail as to what you can expect with the new update, with a teaser trailer showing off some extra bits, but the biggest bummer is the fact that Vault Breaker will only be around for a short while.

Outside of the entirety of the ocean, the thing that probably scares me most about the things the world produces are natural disasters. You're telling me that sometimes the wind gets so fast it can pick up a dang cow? I'm smaller than a cow! I'd have no chance. And it's this fear that I, and I assume many of you, have that sits at the core of Funnel Runners, an online co-op game where you have to fix up a fan to escape a massive tornado.

As strange as it might sound, there truly might be no better piece of writing to turn into an anime girl roguelike than Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy. It's the original self-insert fic after all (arguably, anyway), so why shouldn't Hell Maiden put its own little spin on it? That's the nature of these sorts of works. And today, you'll be able to get a bigger taste of the game and see if it's able to pull all of this off, as it's now out in early access.

"Play is humanity's oldest technology for connection and learning," Roblox's CEO yells at me through my monitor. "Before agriculture, before commerce, before civilization, we played together." Right, so, where's this going? Oh. They're rolling out a tool on their mobile app which allows people to generate basic games by sticking a text prompt into an AI model, then do some light rearranging of said game so they can pretend it's in any way unique or artful before they publish it for others to give a go. The tool's called Build.

Now where's my editor's pen, I know I left it here last time I wrote one of these. Ah, here it is, under all the dust and cobwebs…

GOG, famed revampers of classic PC games, have done just that to the Gold edition of beloved purse-snatching stealth romp Thief: The Dark Project. Through the storefront's preservation program, the GOG version of Thief Gold boasts a number of handy tweaks to help it run seamlessly on modern hardware.

Last week's Microsoft layoffs, a seemingly never-ending source of terrible and sobering news, included several members of the Elder Scrolls Online's leadership team. According to a WARN notice, studio head Jo Burba is among those departing, despite having only stepped into that role around the time of last year's mass layoffs at Microsoft. With him and several other key figures on the outs, a "transition" to a new leadership team for the MMO is reportedly underway.

We've all been there. You're a pirate captain whose pockets are overflowing with freshly nicked doubloons and you fancy blowing it all on some shiny new cannons or a figurehead carved to resemble a bag of money. So, you sail on down to a port with a harbourmaster and start perusing ship upgrades. Then, when you get back to the docks, your ship's disappeared into thin air. Ah. Yarr've got to be kidding me. Completing the rest of Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced might be rather difficult now. Thankfully, these impromptu mutinies are a bug Ubisoft have fixed in the title update set to arrive in the game today.

A fresh report has shed light on what played out behind the scenes last week as Microsoft laid off around 1600 people and parted ways with a number of studios. While news of the various affects the cuts have had on specific studios still under the Xbox banner since that pint, the report also paints a damning picture of the effect these layoffs and the ones which still loom have had on the mindset of remaining workers, with unclear goals having contributed to a situation whereby staff feel they're disposable regardless of what they make.

Last week, to mark its 30th anniversary, EA rebranded Criterion as Criterion: A Battlefield Studio. The storied studio that created Burnout and in recent years has shepherded the Need For Speed series, as well as working on the rebooted Star Wars: Battlefront, will become just one of the four studios supporting EA's fresh Battlefield push.

This isn't the first time Criterion have contributed to Battlefield, the Guildford studio have been involved since 2015's Battlefield 1, but the rebranding marks an end to working on other projects.

Or is it?

I fear I’ve authored some kind of Boy Who Cried Wolf situation, vis à vis Denshattack. It’s shown signs of greatness ever since its reveal last year, but in hindsight, I wonder if my enthusiasm for its silly side – it is undeniably a game about trains doing skateboard-style flips and grinds, sometimes while chased by giant baseballs – ever contributed to an impression of it as a mere novelty. A joke game, disinterested in anything beyond breakneck wackiness.

I hope not. Because Denshattack is utterly and genuinely brilliant, and not just because it lets you blow up an AI data centre by ploughing a locomotive through it.

The wait for GTA 6 on PC lasting past this November's been a foregone conclusion for a while now, but if you're interested in a bit of developer perspective as to why Rockstar opt to do things that way, a former producer at the company's offered some. Essentially, it's a matter of it being less of a headache to scale up after initially getting a game working on hardware with stricter limitations than it would be to strip back an all-singing, all-dancing PC port for consoles.

"For the longest time, we went one by one," Ata Sergey Nowak, co-founder of Torpor Games, the studio behind strategy game Suzerain, tells me, explaining the four year gap between the game's release and its first DLC. "Our games take a long time, our staff was very limited, and our financing was very project-to-project." So it was a little surprising he was also telling me Torpor are today announcing not one but three new projects - two DLCs and a spin-off. All of which are due to be released before their next flagship title, The Conformist.

Each of the three newly announced projects will take you deeper into the world of Suzerain, and let you see its states and people from new perspectives. But, Torpor aren't only making these games to expand Suzerain, they're also using it as a defence against a punishing industry.

Dead Space creator Glen Schofield has decided it's time to walk away from game development, or at least "the day-to-day work of making them. Thus concludes a career which kicked off all the way back in the early 90s, and saw Schofield work on games ranging from Disney World racing to Call of Duty and The Callisto Protocol. The latter will now go down as the developer's last game, provided he hasn't got any surprise un-retirements up his sleeves.

Today, July 15th, unionised Microsoft workers are set to hold a series of co-ordinated rallies outside the offices of Xbox-owned studios, in protest of the mass layoffs the company set in motion last week. According to the Communications Workers of America union (CWA), over 400 union-represented jobs across Bethesda Game Studios, ZeniMax, and id Software are being cut. In solidarity with the union marches, modders continue to fill Bethesda games with union logos. Skyrim was the first and Fallout 4's the latest.

There is an anxiety to deckbuilders that I don't find with many other games, in that I get incredibly stressed about which cards I should play. I feel this way about card games in real life too, for reasons I truly cannot understand. It's just a game! And yet I can't help but scold my tiny, silly brain in moments where I pull the wrong move. So I am quite keen on how Grail sounds, the latest little game from little game aficionados Sokpop, where after you build your deck, the deck does the fighting for you.

RuneScape is having a bit of a home improvement moment, quite literally. An update went live yesterday that focused completely on player-owned housing, revamping how you both use and construct it, bringing it honestly quite close to The Sims in how it handles house building, amongst other tweaks and additions.

Dragon's Dogma 2's fast travel system is a pain in the ass, and depending on who you ask and even when you ask it, this is a good, bad, fine, annoying, interesting, frustrating, clever thing. But as part of a recent free update that has arrived in the leadup to the game's Dark Arisen expansion, it is now less of a pain in the ass. And for the expansion's producer Naoto Oyama and director Kenta Kinoshita, it's about giving people more choices.

Another step forward has been made by IWGB Game Workers in their efforts towards calling for Grand Theft Auto 6 developer Rockstar Games to formally recognise the studio's union. A new letter addressed to Rockstar studio director Jennifer Kolbe and head of HR Rob Spampinato has been signed by 22 trade union leaders joining in the call for the developer to start bargaining with the IWGB.

Those of you that have been playing Slay the Spire 2 in its current early access form will have seen that some of the placeholder art looks, well, arguably bad. I am not necessarily making this argument! But it could be made. As it turns out, according to Mega Crit co-founder Casey Yano, this is very much the point, and has more purpose behind it than just being easier to do.

Following the release of Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced, an undertaking by a bunch of Ubisoft studios based all over the world, union protests at one of said studios have kicked off over plans to lay off staff now the remake's out of the door. Ubisoft Barcelona, the studio in question, were reported last month to be set for a restructure that'd see them focus solely on Rainbow Six games going forwards.

A frustrating result of early access becoming entrenched as a concept: players condemning such a game for being unfinished, or awkward, or very wobbly. Some completely unrelated game by entirely different people was fine straight away, was it? Well we should definitely punish these people for not having those resources. That'll definitely encourage others.

Spacefleet Colon Heat Death is perhaps not the best candidate to start that argument over, mind. Its awkward and opaque parts make it more potential than game at this stage, and it's cursed to appear in the shadow of Nebulous, despite their very different designs and aims. It's not good, and it's not a janky but loveable underdog. But I want it to get there.

While there's never been any shortage of characters who'll pay you to splatter some brains across the desert with your trusty anti-mat rifle in Fallout: New Vegas, a new mod adds a whole extra faction based around being a post-apocalyptic assassin. They're dubbed the Dark Family, and you get no prizes for guessing which robed gang of Elder Scrolls dagger-enthusiasts they're based on.

2026 has already had a modern take on James Bond in game form thanks to IO Interactive's 007 First Light, and now it's getting some retro bondage thanks to a throwback spy FPS that's been in the works for a while. Agent 64: Spies Never Die, a GoldenEye-inspired romp from solo developer Replicant D6, releases next month.

Having recently parted ways with former owners Xbox as part of the console maker's mass cuts, South of Midnight and We Happy Few developers Compulsion Games have announced they're seeking opportunities to collaborate with other studios. Likely to help them keep the lights on until they've got a new game of their own well on its way, Compulsion look to have turned their focus towards landing a co-development or support gig on someone else's project.

The IWGB union have held a protest with former Build a Rocket Boy (BARB) staff outside of the MindsEye studio's offices. The union accused the company of hosting an expenses-paid fan playtest event following layoffs, with IWGB chair Spring McParlin-Jones dubbing it "a kick in the teeth for the fired workers who are seeing fans brought in to do jobs that would otherwise have been theirs".

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Good news! Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls' Steam backend no longer lists it as not being available for purchase in 132 countries. It's now only listed it as not being available for purchase in 117 countries. That's 15 whole countries removed from the list of excluded nations, which looks like it could be linked in some way to the need to have PSN account to access certain bits of the game.