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It's a strange thing to think about now, but there was a time when Myst was the best-selling computer game of all time. Shifting more copies than even the almighty Doom, Cyan's enigmatic puzzle game about a series of peculiarly crafted islands stirred up feelings of awe, reverence and curiosity. Much of this was due to Myst's extremely abstruse premise. It contained no immediate backstory about you being a hero on a quest to save such and such. It didn't offer an exposition dump grounding you in its pristine world. And it didn't offer much in the way of character interaction. It simply dropped players on a surreal island of monuments - a rocket, a Greek palace, a contemporary lodge - and asked them to have at it until a more recognisable story came into focus.

Absolver isn't a Dark Souls game. It seems wise to state that up front, because for its first few hours Absolver manages a very good impression of a Dark Souls game, albeit one that has traded its Covenants for martial art schools, its "jolly cooperation" for Jeet Kune Do. There's the world, to begin with - the crumpled remains of a splendid civilisation, flickering eerily between timeframes and dimensions, where masked Prospects do pilgrimage in the hope of attaining the mantle of an Absolver. There are the altars that, like Dark Souls' legendary bonfires, peg down exploration of that world - geysers of glowing stone where you can meditate to access equipment and ability inventories together with arena PvP.

Sony will give PlayStation VR title Rigs to all PlayStation Plus members as a bonus game.

UPDATE 31st August 2017: Sega has said the offline play bug that affected the PC version of Sonic Mania has been patched.

Nintendo unveiled its "Nindies" (a terrible word that means independent games coming to Nintendo platforms) showcase in a livestream earlier today and the reveals came quick and fast.

UPDATE: It turns out it's not exclusive to Switch after all, but also coming to PC, PS4, Xbox One, iOS and Android.

Developer Fatshark has teased a sequel to its first person Skaven slaying game Warhammer: End Times - Vermintide.

With the penultimate season of Game of Thrones finished on TV and a colossal amount of people talking about it, it's hard to imagine any video game maker ever passing up the opportunity to get a piece of that franchise pie. But as I found out recently, Obsidian Entertainment did - it turned down Game of Thrones.

Blizzard is toughening its stance on toxic behaviour in Overwatch.

Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 3 will soon get modding tools.

After four days of players battling it out for a share of a $350,000 prize pool, the Gamescom PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds Invitational is over.

UPDATE 30/8/17 10:10am: We've updated one of the comparison images below with fresh PS4 Pro and PC shots that replicate an additional texture layer found in Square-Enix's Xbox One X press shot, representing an injured Lara. We couldn't replicate this look within the cutscene, but thankfully Digital Foundry readers came forward to help get better matching shots. The key takeaway remains the same though - Xbox One X is clearly running with higher quality art than PS4 Pro, but there are some curious differences with the maxed-out PC version.

UK shop CEX recently suffered an online security breach that may affect up to two million of its customers.

UPDATE 29/08/2017 11.30pm: GTA Online has added a new mode that sounds a lot like a team-based take on PlayerUnkown's Battlegrounds (or Battle Royale before it).

AMC and Finnish developer Next Games have announced they are releasing a new location-based augmented reality mobile game, The Walking Dead: Our World, based on the hit AMC TV show.

The first two seasons of Telltale's The Walking Dead series, along with its spin-off The Walking Dead Michonne, have been added to the Xbox One's backwards compatibility library.

Five years ago the creators of popular webcomic Homestuck raised nearly $2.5m on Kickstarter to make a video game spin-off. Now, half a decade later, that game is coming out.

Earlier this month Bertie and I visited Obsidian Entertainment, the excellent, proudly independent role-playing game developer based in Irvine, California. There's plenty of history there, from the team's work on games like Pillars of Eternity, Alpha Protocol and Fallout: New Vegas to its genesis at Black Isle Studios.

Nintendo will reveal its upcoming seasonal lineup of independent games in its "Nindies Summer Showcase" livestream Wednesday, 30th August, at 6pm UK time.

A couple of weeks ago I got to try Sea Hero Quest VR - a virtual reality game which will, somewhat astonishingly, help in the fight against dementia.

Brendan Greene has confirmed that the upcoming desert map for PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds will be 8x8 km in size - equal to that of the original Erangel map.

Way, way back in early February 2016, Digital Foundry ventured to the Japanese PlayStation Store and picked up a digital copy of Yakuza Kiwami. We hoped that Sega would consider bringing this excellent PS4 remake to the West and just over 18 months later, it's finally happened. To mark the occasion, we've decided to republish our original analysis. If you've enjoyed the Yakuza titles, or want to check out the series for the first time, we reckon it's well worth a look.

Microsoft discontinued the original Xbox One after it released the Xbox One S, it has confirmed.

Rabbid Peach is the game character of the century. One of Ubisoft's madcap, bug-eyed mascots dressed in Princess Peach cosplay, she fuses the anarchic irreverence of the former with the queenly preening of the latter in a squat, sassy bundle of diva delight. Beat a boss and she frantically fires off selfies, attempting to catch its demise in the background. Watch her animations closely: the defiant tweaks of her wig, or the way she doesn't crouch against cover but lounges, checking her phone or skewering her foes with nonchalant side-eye. She doesn't speak a word of dialogue, but reminds me strongly of that other heroically fatuous It Girl of our time, Adventure Time's Lumpy Space Princess. She's a creature of satire, a meta-commentary on the self-referential fandom of the ridiculous game she stars in - but also an authentically hilarious badass.

It is, as ever, a busy time for Telltale Games. This year the studio finished Batman's first season and Walking Dead's third, released Guardians of the Galaxy's first season and then Minecraft's and Batman's second. Oh, and it announced Batman season one on Switch. Phew!

Last week Ark: Survival Evolved developer Wildcard said PlayStation 4-Xbox One cross-play worked internally but Sony "won't allow" it publicly.

Towards the end of 2014, Jeremy Stieglitz and Jesse Rapczak knew they wanted to make a game together. "It was just Jesse and me in the beginning. You don't set out as 'let's build a team and make a game but we don't have an idea for a game'. It was quite the opposite," Stieglitz says. The team they built would soon be known as Studio Wildcard, and even though they didn't know it yet, they were about to run one of the most successful Early Access campaigns ever for a game called Ark: Survival Evolved.

The highly recommended Uncharted: The Lost Legacy - a shorter but much leaner instalment, and cheaper too - is top of the UK physical-sales game chart. This marks the sixth time in 2017 a PlayStation exclusive has debuted top of the list.

Tom Watson's done it. Hillary Clinton's done it. Now, Luigi's dabbed too.

The Miiverse's days have finally been numbered. Nintendo's social messaging service will close on 8th November in Japan, with other regions set to follow suit. Perhaps more importantly, its closure takes with it a number of key features for Wii U games.