The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for crossing off Saturday on your calendar. Before you slash, let's read this week's best writing about games (and game related things).

Over on The Guardian, Rick Lane wrote about the video games lampooning Britain's cursed politics. Interesting chats with game devs about preserving and interpreting the catastrophic politics of our nation.

Fast-forward a year, and Douglas’s daft Twitter joke has evolved into a rolling chronicle of Britain’s rapidly decaying social and political structures. Within its recreations of the British high street and countryside are dozens of references to the weirder extremes of the news cycle, some of which were added to the game within hours of the stories breaking. “It’s interesting that the mod has evolved into a topical social media project, when that wasn’t my initial intention at all,” Douglas explains. “I’m trying to imbue the project with as much affection as malice, and feel like I’m straddling a line between documentation and parody.”

For Polygon, Nicole Carpenter wrote about how Pentiment's defining detail is its fonts. A cool chat with Obsidian and Lettermatic about how they the game's fonts are just so much more than than, well, fonts.

After studying the documents and other resources, Lettermatic built out a big ol’ family tree of Latin writing, one that spans time and geography, to be able to place Pentiment’s world within a timeline, ensuring its writing styles were ones that people of the time were likely to use or see. (Obsidian Entertainment and Lettermatic read so many books in researching this game that Pentiment has a bibliography in the credits, Frey said.) From there, Lettermatic and Obsidian developers pulled pieces of those fonts together to build Pentiment’s new fonts, which were designed specifically for the video game. When they figured that out, they started drawing the fonts mostly by hand, using writing tools accurate to the time period, Cran said. He estimated there are around 2,700 individual glyphs within Pentiment’s six fonts.

On Eurogamer, Robert Purchese and Thomas Morgan wrote about the cost of powering your consoles in the UK. A quick read on how much your consoles can chip at your bank balance, with a chart and everything. I'm going to turn my Switch off entirely, no more rest mode for you lil guy.

To find out, we collaborated with hardware experts Digital Foundry to run a series of tests to determine how much energy each console uses, per hour, doing a range of different things: in standby mode, idling on the menu, playing a game, and so on. Digital Foundry's Tom Morgan then recorded the numbers in a table for this article.

If you've watched Park Chan-Wook's latest film Decision To Leave recently, you might have found its subtleties a bit puzzling in places. I know I did! Tasha Robinson chats to Park who sheds some light on a few key details viewers may have missed. No preview para with this one, for obvious spoilerific reasons.

I did watch the Banshees Of Inisherin the other day, and found it to be a more enjoyable - and at times, really funny - watch than Decision To Leave. Banshees is still fairly open-ended but felt clearer and more concrete than Decision To Leave's choppiness. Or at least, I couldn't tell whether some of Decision's many subtleties were actually symbolic of anything, or just like, weird quirks.

People Makes Games are back with a two-part investigation into Valve and it's ties with dodgy gambling sites. The vid I've linked below is part one, with the second arriving sometime in the near future. As ever, a fantastic watch.

Music this week is Die For You by Joji. Here's the YouTube link and Spotify link. A beautiful tune.

That's it for now, catch you next week folks!