It’s a strange time to be selling a new VR headset, and maybe an even stranger time to be buying one. The supply of original virtual reality games has slowed to a dribble, and just as with Valve’s last hardware launch, the Steam Frame arrives covered in bumps and scrapes from a fight with the worst components shortage in memory. A fight which, judging by how it’ll cost ya £889 / $1,059 at minimum, it lost.

However, something else the Frame has in common with the revamped Steam Machine is that as a piece of hardware per se, it’s really quite likeable. Charismatic, even. It’s a happy marriage of core VR capability and genuinely new engineering ideas: some simple practicality boons, some with the potential to change PC games as we know them. And not just the ones you’d play with sweaty goggles on your face.

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For a series about light and dark, it's appropriate that Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy is a spinoff that's trying to escape the main entries' shadow. Developer Asobo Studio have dropped much that is familiar to explore exactly what a Plague Tale story can be.

Resonance doesn't feature series protagonists Amicia and Hugo. It is set 16 years before the events of the last game, long before the siblings flee across wartorn medieval France, hunted by the soldiers of the Inquisition. In Resonance, you play Sophia and see how she became the woman who saves Amicia in A Plague Tale: Requiem. You learn how, as a child, she was kidnapped by the Inquisition and injected with a poison that gave her visions of a strange island. How her father, the leader of a group of smugglers, found the island and died there searching for treasure and a cure to Sophia's dreams. And how Faro, her father's successor, continues visiting the island, seeking to unearth its secrets.

Resonance's early chapters see a now teenage Sophia growing frustrated with Faro. The smuggler leader never takes her with him to the island, despite – and because of – the mounting casualties in the expeditions. Guiltridden, Sophia stops sharing her visions. Those chapters also teach you Resonance's focus: combat.

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Like the technical fix-uppery of the 2.0 update it’s launching alongside, STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl’s Cost of Hope expansion arrives with a determinedly furrowed brow; that kind of enthusiastic, if just slightly contrite, look of someone hellbent on righting their own past wrongs.

Of course, most of the open-world shooter’s past crimes are long absolved, if not forgiven immediately on the grounds that they were committed amid an actual war. But Cost of Hope does serve as a second chance for this bleak, beautiful, tense, thrilling, imperfectly brilliant game to address certain omissions it made back in 2024 – even if some of these restorations gleam brighter than others.

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Beast Of Reincarnation opened pretty promisingly. Its first stretch dropped me into a sprawling fantasy forestscape full of deadly spore-sprouting woodland creatures, gave me a sick hat and a fireball-shooting dog, then strapped a katana in my hand and introduced a real solid parry clang that would fire dopamine into my brain every time I landed it.

Considering the generous parry window let me effortlessly deflect the boulder-sized suckerpunches of a 9ft grizzly bear, I figured this was shaping up to be a very pretty and particularly accessible Sekiro-like. And what’s more, it was from the minds behind Pokemon, Game Freak, who were trying something very different after being trapped making games under the beady, all-seeing eye of a kawaii yellow rat for so many decades. Unfortunately, it didn’t take long to realise the cool hat, the fireball-shooting dog and a satisfying parry clang were a cunning facade.

Beast Of Reincarnation is, in fact, a big old wad of chewing gum for the brain. I got the sweet taste up front, before it quickly squished down to the slimy, flavourless nothingness I continued chewing on autopilot.

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