Games | The Guardian

My family is coming apart – so it’s time for one last video game session | Dominik Diamond

Dominik Diamond — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 09:00:10 GMT

I wanted our last family games night to be the best fun we’ve ever had. Maybe we should have stuck with Mario Kart …

It is the end of an era for the Diamond family. For 20 years, there have been five of us living together. It has not been easy. Militant vegan daughters, sons who have inherited Scottish tempers, and a youngest child who attracts trouble like an industrial magnet, have meant our house has been conflict-laden at times. Throw in the fact that we are beset with all manner of mental health bobbins and chronic illnesses that resulted in two of our three kids almost dying in hospitals and you get a family that is combustible – but extremely close.

Through it all, we had games. They always brought us back together. Not just us all hunkering over Super Mario Kart like some kind of UN-mandated family therapy, but the conversations that happen when any of us spy another playing something new. Games are a cultural touchstone that helped us crack through the veneer of disagreements and distrust and remind us that we have more things in common than we sometimes feel.

SingStar Take That anyone? The strange joy of charity shop video games

Keith Stuart — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 08:00:08 GMT

Hidden gems can be unearthed, but you have to dig deep into the bargain bins of countless outdated Fifas, Wii Fits without the controllers and partially finished quizshow games

As an eternally optimistic charity shop fan, I hold on to the fantasy that one day I’ll walk into my local Oxfam and find a pristine copy of the Sega Saturn shooter Burning Rangers for £1.50. Or perhaps a box full of old Neo Geo carts for a quid each. Sadly, this is now unlikely. Charity shops have caught on to the fact that old video games – like old vinyl albums – are highly collectible, and so they’re putting the good stuff on eBay. That’s fine, it’s their job to raise money, not to provide opportunist swine like me with bargains. But what games can you find tucked away in your local branch of Barnardo’s? To find out I visited about 40 charity stores across the country. Here is what I discovered on the shelves … And please do share your own charity shop gaming finds in the comments!

‘A universal human story’: Clean Start’s thought-provoking tidying sim tells immigrant’s tale

Keith Stuart — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 11:00:13 GMT

Playing as recent arrival Lena, your challenges include learning a new language and uncovering family secrets – its developer hopes it will spread ‘a little more compassion’

The cosy house-sorting sim has become a much-loved staple of the PC indie scene. Titles such as Unpacking, A Little to the Left and Momento charm players with their detailed interiors and quiet narratives of lives lived and shared within the same four walls. For Clean Start, Polish developer Serious Sim has taken a different approach – here you play as domestic cleaner, Lena, an immigrant who has arrived in an unspecified western country with little knowledge of the local language, and a family to support back home.

From here, you’re tasked with cleaning a series of houses and apartments, polishing tables, tidying shelves and scrubbing muddy pawprints from kitchen floors. It seems you’re able to rearrange the rooms, giving them a personal feel, which is after all one of the most pleasing elements of the genre. You can also, we are reassured, pet the dog.

Halo: Campaign Evolved review – they don’t make ‘em like this any more

Keza MacDonald — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 07:00:56 GMT

PC, Xbox, PlayStation 5; Halo Studios/Xbox Game Studios
Halo’s modernised introduction to all that was great about the 00s’ first-person shooter is also a welcome return trip for those of us who were there at the time

This 25th-anniversary remake of Xbox’s most iconic shooter comes loaded with symbolism. It arrives at a time when Xbox’s whole gaming division (and indeed the games business as a whole) is in turmoil. It’s been made by Halo Studios, an outfit that has arguably never quite recaptured the magic conjured by Halo: Combat Evolved’s original developer Bungie, a studio now owned by rival Sony. It has been polished and prettified using Unreal Engine 5, making it look and feel more modern at the expense of visual uniqueness: Halo now looks similar to hundreds of other games made with those same tools, where Bungie’s 2001 original, made with a bespoke engine, still looks austerely distinctive. I never wanted to become this person, but: perhaps things were better in the old days?

I had my misgivings after the opening level, in which freshly defrosted supersoldier Master Chief fends off an alien attack on a disintegrating spaceship. Originally this was a masterclass in explosive action: you wake up, you look around (once a clever way to determine whether you needed to invert the controls), and you get right into it, firing gaming’s best pistol at chittering alien grunts who scatter from your bullets. Now it’s wrapped in needlessly expanded cutscenes and explanations. Where Halo Studios has made changes to Combat Evolved’s pacing, it really feels noticeable.

Halo: Campaign Evolved is out now

A Line Held Tight – miners, mechs and mismanagement on a distant planet

Keith Stuart — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 11:00:12 GMT

Deep underground the player joins a colony of ruthlessly exploited pit workers who could be taking on the bosses. How things play out will depend on you

It is rare for video games to feature industrial action as a key theme, but it does happen. There’s the shady Dockworker’s Union in Disco Elysium and the Orbital Workers Union in space adventure Tacoma; then there is Lynx, the evil union-bashing corp in Hardspace: Shipbreaker. Soon we can add A Line Held Tight, a visual novel that puts workers’ rights – and workers’ lives – at the very centre of the narrative.

In the distant future, a colony of miners digs far beneath the surface of an isolated planet, searching for veins of some exotic ore, protected from the poisonous atmosphere within giant mech suits. But the working conditions are woeful and as a strike looms, an unpopular employee named the Canary must decide whether or not to stand with colleagues and fight against suppression. The player, of course, takes on the role of the Canary, navigating personal as well as political struggles in a world rendered in stark monochrome.

After 40 years, Aliens is still shaping the way video games are made

Keith Stuart — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 14:00:35 GMT

James Cameron’s high-octane film sequel is a blueprint for modern action space slashers

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It is difficult to believe that James Cameron’s Aliens was released into cinemas 40 years ago. The seminal space shooter took the original Alien – a tense slasher film with a tiny cast and one monster – and transformed it into an intergalactic war movie crammed with wry one-liners, massive guns and an actual boss battle finale. As a 14-year-old, I stood in line at the Tatton Gatley cinema, unsure if I’d be allowed in – I came out three hours later a changed person, my head filled with esoteric military slang and a deep fear of beeping motion detectors. For days afterwards, I slept with my duvet covering my mouth so that no facehuggers could get me. (I was a highly impressionable teenager.)

It’s little wonder that the film has had such a profound effect on video game design. Take the colonial marines, for example. Although the concept of the space soldier had been around in sci-fi novels since the 1930s, most notably in the works of EE “Doc” Smith and Robert Heinlein (the Starship Troopers), Hicks, Hudson, Vasquez and co, were the perfect 80s rendition, combining the witty banter of contemporary buddy cop flicks with awesome weaponry and hi-tech gadgets. Their influence is easy to spot in Doom, where the nameless marine fights ceaseless waves of hellish monsters using a mix of futuristic rifles and good old shotguns. It’s there too in the Halo series, the Spartan soldiers sporting the same armour and mega weapons, cruising about in very similar highly militarised starships and fighting recognisable hive-mind space beasts. Gears of War, Killzone and Marathon all borrow from the same set of costumes and deadly accessories.

Silent Hill Townfall: the series is coming to Scotland, but what fresh horrors will it bring?

Keith Stuart — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 07:00:26 GMT

An amnesiac loner arrives in a remote town for who knows what reason … this may sound familiar but this time we’re on a remote Scottish island and surprises lie in wait

A man washes up at the harbour of a small coastal village, his memories vague, an eerie sea fog rolling in all around him. As beginnings go, this couldn’t be more Silent Hill – an amnesiac loner drawn to a remote town for who knows what reason. But this time, we’re not in the Pacific Northwest of the original games or the Japan of last year’s excellent Silent Hill f. We’re on an island off the northern coast of Scotland, and it’s 1996. Lead character Simon Ordell knows this place, but isn’t sure how – and why does he have an IV cannula stuck in his hand?

Announced back in 2022, Townfall is the work of Glasgow-based studio Screen Burn, previously responsible for tense horror adventure titles Stories Untold and Observation. Like Silent Hill f, it moves the setting far out of Silent Hill itself: St Amelia is a fishing town, inspired by St Monans and dozens of other seafront towns the team visited and extensively photographed.