The Sunday Papers

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The Sunday Papers is our weekly roundup of great writing about (mostly) videogames from across the web.

Sundays are for resting, so I hear, though by the time you read this I’ll have got up at 5:30am to drive my parents-in-law to Gatwick Airport. As such, I’m probably not the best authority on resting, or, indeed, Sundays. Nonetheless, I have gathered some quality game-related articles to help you fill yours.

Gamescom 2026 was this week, yay and boo, and it was – apparently not for the first time – the scene of multiple dev-targeting laptop thefts. Nicole Carpenter investigates for Aftermath.

Laley is not only losing out on the cost of a brand new laptop, but the booth space that will go unused for the rest of the event, which runs through Sunday. It costs nearly €3,000 (roughly $3,500) for the smallest size booth in Gamescom's business area, according to its price calculator. Pricing only goes up from there. That's not to mention the cost of travel, hotels, and food for the week in which Laley expected to showcase Mimic. He posted an emotional video to social media to share the news that his Gamescom was over. "As an indie, solo dev, this shit's expensive and hard to do all by yourself," Laley said in the clip. "And to have this happen is beyond frustrating. It's heartbreaking."

The writing is the reward, argues Steven Santana. I don’t necessarily have the same beef with stats that this does – often they’re just numerical expressions of actions and interactions that more tangibly tickle the senses. But then, I’ve spent too much time reading lore-snippet item descriptions to disagree further.

In opposition to text, numbers are hard, precise, stoic monoliths that impose their mathematical certainties on you. Text is fluid, provocative, potent, elegant, blunt, sensual, noxious, vivid, visceral, tangible, abstract, hyperbolic, humorous, and much more.

The award for Most Interesting GTA 6 Take of the post-Netflix showcase era goes, nepotastically, to friend of RPS Jeremy Peel, whose GamesRadar piece considers the dynamics of its central relationship.

But what follows is subtler and more powerful than that. Rockstar appears to understand that some of the most important conversations between couples happen in liminal spaces: the car on the way to the party; the elevator up to the rooftop bar. These are moments for team tactics - in which potential issues are raised, fears are voiced, and a shared approach is agreed upfront. Forget couple goals – these two have couple objectives, and they're being reassessed and renegotiated on the fly.

I remain more interested in reading about Disco Elysium than playing it, a personal flaw exacerbated by articles like this: Steven Stoermer revisiting the games soundtrack for Deleted Saves.

The surrender in the song title is also Harry’s, for when it first plays he is at his lowest point. The Instrument handed Revachol over to a centrist invader whose moralist equivocating has left it in stasis, while Harry is similarly paralyzed. Yet it plays when he steps onto Martinaise’s streets for the first time, dazed but roused nevertheless, with potential opening up before him. The rendition in the game itself is quite different from the official soundtrack — longer and more ambient, with the positivity of the OST version’s back half woven in more ethereally. It is a music cue that I have found to be personally stupefying: it stopped me in my tracks during multiple failed attempts to play through Disco Elysium, overwhelming me with emotion and halting my progress.

This is an old one, which I’ll hope you’re forgive on the grounds that’s it’s also a good one: Duncan Fyfe’s oral history, for Vice, on an infamous piece of C&C: Red Alert 3 scenery-chewing by the dearly departed Tim Curry.

"SPACE!" he snarls: throat thrown back, eyes rolling up to face God. Then he looks down the camera - he looks at you - with delirious, high-wire glee. It’s almost gloating, that look: he did it, he finished the line, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Music this week is oh shit, there’s a new Clutch track? A nice one, too. Thick, chunky rock 'n' roll that requires a trip to Wikipedia to understand what the lyrics are on about, just as a Clutch song should.