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Falls asleep in the armchair fairly regularly at this point. Sarah has started leaving a blanket by the sofa. The controller ends up face-down on the carpet every time and I have no memory of how it got there. Ellie finds the whole thing very entertaining.

I still buy physical for anything I consider a proper game — mostly out of habit and, frankly, a mild distrust of platform licences. Steam is fine in practice but the principle of owning a disc sits right with me. That said, I haven't bought anything worth having in a box in a few years. The...

Morrowind. The combat operates on invisible dice rolls that the game never bothers to explain properly, so for the first few hours you're swinging at enemies repeatedly and nothing seems to connect. There's no feedback telling you whether you're playing badly or whether the system is just...

Frankly I've given up trying to clear mine. I've had Divinity: Original Sin 2 sitting untouched since 2019. At this point I think I'm keeping it as a monument to optimism. I will play it eventually. Possibly when Ellie goes to university.

Keyboard and mouse for everything. I've used a wired mechanical keyboard for about a decade and I genuinely cannot tell when the switches need replacing because I refuse to think about it. The short version is that modern games are increasingly designed around a controller first, and you can...

The original Doom soundtrack is genuinely impressive for what it is — industrial, relentless, perfectly matched to the pacing. I'd argue it's one of the few cases where the music is actually functional rather than decorative. That said, personally I hold the Morrowind theme in higher regard, and...

I still buy physical for Switch games because they actually work offline from the cartridge. For everything else it's Steam and Game Pass.

Running through Baldur's Gate 2 again. Do it roughly every couple of years. Ellie wandered in last night whilst I was partway through the Planar Sphere and decided it looked like someone had drawn a dungeon with their eyes closed. Which isn't entirely wrong, to be fair.

The honest answer is yes for the majority of what's available. The model for most mobile titles is explicitly designed to extract money rather than deliver something worth paying for. That said, there are genuine exceptions -- a few ports of PC titles that hold up reasonably well. But the...

Gothic II, which I first attempted around 2003 and found completely impenetrable. The skill system wasn't explained, the enemies near the starting town would kill you in two hits if you wandered the wrong direction, and there was nothing whatsoever holding your hand. I put it down for the better...

Not for years, and I can't pretend that's changed. There was a decent independent shop near Piccadilly in Manchester that I'd visit on a Saturday -- proper staff who actually knew what they were talking about. That closed around 2015 and I haven't found a reason to go anywhere physical since...

Digital Foundry for anything technical — frame rate analysis, console comparisons, that sort of thing. It's one of the few outlets that are actually rigorous about it. RPS for the more opinionated long-form stuff, though it's drifted a bit from what it was. I've mostly stopped reading review...

Mostly single-player so I rarely encounter this directly. The few times I've ventured into multiplayer over the years the experience has generally confirmed why I tend to avoid it. It's not that the games are bad — it's that a certain kind of person seems specifically attracted to anonymity and...

For me it was the moment Arthur starts writing in his journal — sketching things he's seen, jotting down observations about the people around him. It reframed him entirely. You realise the game is actually about a man trying to make sense of his own life, not just an outlaw doing outlaw things...

Sixty pounds is roughly where my tolerance ends, and frankly that's already a significant ask. What I won't do is pay full price for something that ships with known issues, day-one patches, or content that should have been in the base game. The value calculation has shifted entirely. I'd rather...

Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 would be the obvious pick if it hasn't been covered already. Beyond that, anything with an active modding scene and a predictable update schedule seems more tractable than chasing AAA releases that shift memory layouts every fortnight. The ones that hurt most to...

Nothing particularly impressive. Dell 27" 1440p IPS, mid-range Ryzen build I put together in 2021 and haven't touched since, a mechanical keyboard I got for the office that migrated home, and a G502 that's been going for years now. The chair is an old office model Sarah was throwing out. Does...

Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is the right answer if you're talking about something that actually runs at the same time as it looks impressive. Bohemia managed something most big studios haven't — a visually dense open world without the slideshow. STALKER 2 post-patches has atmosphere that most...

Need a fourth for Warzone too. On most evenings after 9.

The fundamentals Tyler described work across the whole FromSouls catalogue, not just Elden Ring. What I'd add is that Elden Ring specifically tends to reward patience more than aggression — a lot of the legacy dungeons are designed around reading attack windows rather than forcing them. If...