Enshrouded is a beautiful combination of Minecraft, Skyrim and resource gathering that makes it at least three games in one. My daughter told me I would love it and I ignored her for too long. I've tackled Elden Ring, but much prefer the often gentler combat of Enshrouded. It sometimes makes me feel like an elite fighter, then other times kicks my arse in precisely the right measures. Its real joy is the flexibility to spend your time doing whatever tickles your fancy. I'll spend a few hours growing crops to make a cake or smelting metals for better armour, then knock off a few quests to unlock new materials and weapons.

As the video games industry continues to face massive layoffs, narrative jobs are taking the biggest hit. The industry's job cuts over the past couple of years--more than 30,000 roles were eliminated in 2023 and 2024--disproportionately affected narrative designers, the creative professionals who craft the story elements of the game and give a title its emotional punch. Even the director of the game Avowed, Carrie Patel--a successful author and narrative developer with over a decade of experience at the game studio Obsidian Entertainment--feels lucky she was able to start her career years ago. She can't imagine trying to break into the industry under today's conditions. "It just seems to be harder and harder to find a path in," Patel says. "I've heard colleagues hired within the last three or five years say essentially the same thing."

There was a long-running joke that Bethesda's Skyrim had become so ubiquitous that it would run on anything. Starting life on the humble Xbox 360, it found its way on to Nintendo Switch, virtual reality headsets, PS5 and even Amazon's Alexa. After more than 13 years, its sequel is still nowhere to be seen, so role playing game veterans Obsidian are offering fans an alternative in the form of Avowed. I'm taken aback by just how fun and breezy it is, given that it has been spun off the somewhat stuffier computer RPG Pillars of Eternity. Entering the game's colour-saturated world, Eora, I explore a luscious overgrown cavern with my alarmingly athletic mage, and find myself leaping across chasms and climbing rock faces without breaking a sweat. Where Skyrim's dull colour palette and clunky combat betray its 2011 origins, Avowed's kineticism and vibrance make first-person spellcasting feel fun.

The production pipeline for mainstream video games has always been hectic. The AAA factory is powered by rigid marketing plans and periods of soul-sucking crunch, and while this process has resulted in incredible games over the years, it's also been detrimental to developers' mental health and long-term job stability. Layoffs have long been baked into the video game industry, but in recent months, this trend has been running in overdrive, and it's happening at studios of all sizes. Hideo Kojima is partnering with Sony to build a new game that's actually more like a movie. Of course, you could say this about any of Kojima's games since Snatcher, but this time around, he's doing the Hollywood thing on purpose.

"As Dusk Falls" is a narrative adventure by INTERIOR/NIGHT, an Xbox studio headed by Caroline Marchal, a former lead game designer at Quantic Dream. Quantic Dream is known for "Heavy Rain" and "Detroit: Become Human," narrative-heavy games where the story changes depending on the player's decisions. "As Dusk Falls" claims to be a story about intergenerational pain and a sprawling epic about "how people grow and change over the decades," all told against the backdrop of a hostage situation.