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What links Corinne Bailey Rae and Keir Starmer? The Saturday quiz

29 August 2026 at 09:00

From ‘rocks, but gently’ to Ainu in Asia and Zuni in the US, test your knowledge with the Saturday quiz

1 Which design illustrates the tragic love story of Koong-Se and Chang?
2 Which British woman was nominated for all four Egot awards, but didn’t win any?
3 The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art is in which country?
4 Which Shakespeare play opens in Africa?
5 Which football stadium is officially the Estádio Jornalista Mário Filho?
6 The sun’s nuclear fusion is primarily fuelled by which element?
7 Which naval dockyard closed in 1984 after more than 400 years?
8 Who “rocks, but gently” in a 1967 album title?
What links:
9
Jari Hill, Tanggula mountains; Chongqing; Wuhan; Nanjing; Shanghai?
10 F&F; George; Nutmeg; Tu?
11 Eva Boyd, Victoria Hesketh; Richard Penniman; Steven Van Zandt?
12 New York; Pennsylvania; Hawaii; Connecticut; Arkansas?
13 Alveolar process; mental protuberance; mental spines; oblique line?
14 Brownlee brothers; Mark Knopfler; Corinne Bailey Rae; Keir Starmer; Jack Straw?
15 Ainu in Asia; Basque in Europe; Sandawe in Africa; Zuni in the US?

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© Photograph: Joseph Okpako/WireImage

© Photograph: Joseph Okpako/WireImage

© Photograph: Joseph Okpako/WireImage

Why is the grass green and which was the deadliest dinosaur? The kids’ quiz

29 August 2026 at 09:00

Five multiple-choice questions – set by children – to test your knowledge, and a chance to submit your own junior brainteasers for future quizzes

Molly Oldfield hosts Everything Under the Sun, a podcast answering children’s questions. Do check out her books, Everything Under the Sun and Everything Under the Sun: Quiz Book, as well as her new title, Everything Under the Sun: All Around the World.

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© Illustration: Hennie Haworth/The Guardian

© Illustration: Hennie Haworth/The Guardian

© Illustration: Hennie Haworth/The Guardian

The Witcher 3: Songs of the Past – Geralt of Rivia returns after a decade in the sun

28 August 2026 at 16:00

Before The Witcher 4 arrives in 2028, CD Projekt Red is returning us to the world of The Witcher 3 for one last foray. Looks like wind’s still howlin’

The game that graced us with Bathtub Geralt, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, arrived more than a decade ago. So it was a touch surprising this summer when developers CD Projekt Red announced a new expansion to the venerable adventure, titled Songs of the Past, for next year. It will release alongside a full remaster of the original game, which will be free for anyone who bought it back in 2015. (The studio is also working on a sequel, The Witcher 4, but that’s not due until 2028.)

As it turns out, this is all possible thanks to a partnership with Fool’s Theory, a studio founded by CD Projekt Red veterans, which took on the brunt of the development work. “We’ve had this story in a drawer for many years,” explains Marcin Blacha, VP story director at CD Projekt Red. “Of course, we moved on to Cyberpunk 2077 and now The Witcher 4, as well as our other projects. But because we knew The Witcher 4 would take time, we saw a gap in our release calendar where Songs of the Past could go. Thankfully, we were able to find the right partner to help execute it.”

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© Photograph: CD Projekt Red

© Photograph: CD Projekt Red

© Photograph: CD Projekt Red

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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