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Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy review – picture-postcard retelling of haunting Minoan myth

27 August 2026 at 15:00

PlayStation 5, Xbox Series S/X, PC; Asobo Studio
The medieval franchise is transplanted to Crete, conjuring action-adventure magic from familiar ingredients

The path in Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy is a familiar one. Amid ancient ruins and sun-dappled gorges, a young woman, Sophia, dutifully treads the same footsteps as a Minoan warrior from millennia ago, one with whom she seems to share a visionary connection. The “resonance” between these two characters is made clear by their echoing actions – a crank pushed in the bronze age that still works in the medieval present, for example. Through these spliced timelines, it becomes clear that Sophia, compelled by her supernatural gift, possesses little agency. Destiny beckons her forwards.

This is a smart meta concept for a game that, at its most basic level, boils down to keeping your left thumb planted firmly on the analogue stick, always pushing Sophia onwards in linear fashion. You jostle her through ornate corridors rendered as higgledy-piggledy pirate camps and cobbled Venetian streets. For the greater part of the game, you propel her through the Minoan remains of Crete, which harbour a dark and terrible secret. It is classic third-person action-adventure fare, building on the template laid down by the likes of Tomb Raider and then refined and complicated by titles such as The Last of Us. Little, from an interactive perspective, surprises: you dash, vault and swing between teetering podiums, squeeze through tiny gaps in rock and crouch behind conveniently placed walls to avoid enemies.

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© Illustration: Asobo Studio

© Illustration: Asobo Studio

© Illustration: Asobo Studio

Trainwatch – alone with your thoughts on a railway line to nowhere

27 August 2026 at 12:00

The flat routines of a dead end railway job screen out an approaching menace in a quietly intriguing game from the indie developer of Cat Lady and Lorelai

Lonely jobs have provided excellent material for independent video games over the years. From Papers, Please to Firewatch to The Stanley Parable, players have been happy to spend hours dwelling in depressing cubicles or rural hideaways, usually because there is an intriguingly hidden point to it all.

In Trainwatch, a character named Troy has taken a seemingly godforsaken job as a railway worker in an unnamed desolate backwater. His main task over the course of a single month is to manage a level crossing, closing the gate whenever a train comes, while also carrying out daily chores such as cooking and washing. It sounds serene, but Troy is also running away from something. The other stipulations are that he stays sober and calls his wife every night. And there is something lurking in the fog at the edges of the fields – one day he must face it.

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© Photograph: Harvester Games

© Photograph: Harvester Games

© Photograph: Harvester Games

Thursday news quiz: a PM’s nose, a pop star’s clothes, and a kitten with too many toes

27 August 2026 at 08:00

Test yourself on topical news trivia, pop culture and general knowledge every Thursday. How will you fare?

Every now and then the Thursday quiz gets involved in a flap, as it did last week with “birb”-gate. After a sustained campaign lasting at least two weeks, subeditors finally relented and allowed the quiz to call our feathered friends “birbs” – only for half the comment section to revolt against the indignity of modern internet parlance. Still, that is nothing compared with the time a reader complained that the quiz using the phrase “baby cows” was unbecoming of a broadsheet newspaper. Anyway, 15 questions on news, general knowledge and obscure trivia await, and no “birbs” were harmed in the process. Allons-y!

The Thursday news quiz, No 262

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© Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images

© Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images

© Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images

My Arms Are Longer Now – comedy stealth game sends lawlessness into new territory

24 August 2026 at 11:00

Developers who met through Australia’s improv scene and publishers of comedic party games have united for this slithering challenge in which you play as one extended limb

Most stealth games cast you as a spy, an assassin or a master thief. My Arms Are Longer Now dispenses with most of the criminal person, to send in just one spectacularly badly behaved limb. It slithers across floors, winds around furniture, steals things and slaps anyone within reach – finally answering the question nobody asked: what if your own arm turned to crime?

As Toot Games co-founder Matthew Jackson puts it: “You are the bad thing that happens to the people.”

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© Photograph: Toot Games

© Photograph: Toot Games

© Photograph: Toot Games

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