Lowry, Salford
Reprise of Graham Duff’s cult comedy delights the series’ fans but there’s not much here for anyone else

If you are a fan of the cult BBC Three sitcom Ideal, you should immediately book a ticket for this show. Judging by tonight’s audience, you will have a hilarious night. If you are not a fan of the TV series, which ran from 2005 to 2011, there are very few reasons to see this stage version.

Writing for the Guardian in 2008, Ben Myers claimed “Ideal is the best British comedy show on TV”. People who love cult shows, really love them. That is palpable in Salford, where creator Graham Duff set the series, and the Lowry is the perfect location to premiere the show ahead of a national tour. You feel the love when the audience applaud and laugh at the lights coming up on the set of Psycho Paul’s “business” headquarters, the entrance of Cartoon Head, the entrance of Psycho Paul, the entrance of Johnny Vegas as Moz, the lights coming up on Moz’s flat … you get the picture. At times it’s like being at a live studio recording.

At Lowry, Salford, until 13 September. Then touring until 11 October.

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In this week’s newsletter: an archaeologist and gamer on why we love to walk around finding objects in-game and in real life

The game I’m most looking forward to right now is Big Walk, the latest title from House House, creators of the brilliant Untitled Goose Game. A cooperative multiplayer adventure where players are let loose to explore an open world, I’m interested to see what emergent gameplay comes out of it. Could Big Walk allow for a kind of community archaeology with friends? I certainly hope so.

When games use environmental storytelling in their design – from the positioning of objects to audio recordings or graffiti – they invite players to role play as archaeologists. Game designer Ben Esposito infamously joked back in 2016 that environmental storytelling is the “art of placing skulls near a toilet” – which might have been a jab at the tropes of games like the Fallout series, but his quip demonstrates how archaeological gaming narratives can be. After all, the incongruity of skulls and toilets is likely to lead to many questions and interpretations about the past in that game world, however ridiculous.

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PC, PS5, Xbox, Switch 2; Bloober Team
An intriguing setup sees an unnamed protagonist time-travel to discover the origins of a devastating outbreak, but a stingy inventory and one-sided battles lead to frustration

Bloober Team, the Polish developer behind 2021’s hugely underrated psycho-thriller The Medium and last year’s excellent Silent Hill 2 remake, clearly understands that there is an established, almost comforting rhythm to survival horror games. It’s baffling, then, to see this latest game excel in so many areas while failing spectacularly on several of the genre’s most basic tenets.

You play an unnamed traveller, the latest of many, sent to gather information about a devastating outbreak that transformed the citizens of a town called New Dawn into the sort of misshapen monsters that have become the staple of sci-fi-adjacent survival horror: contorted of limb, long of fang, and ample of slobber. As you explore the stark, often beautifully devastated aftermath of the outbreak, you search for places where you can travel back through time to when all hell was breaking loose, extracting persons of interest who may shed light on the disaster. A slow-burn story is revealed through the usual assortment of voice notes, missives and grim environmental clues (often, as is de rigueur, daubed in blood on walls).

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In this week’s newsletter: the long-awaited release from the three-person Team Cherry studio has crashed gaming storefronts and put indie developers back in the spotlight

Just one game has been dominating the gaming conversation over the past week: Hollow Knight Silksong, an eerie, atmospheric action game from a small developer in Australia called Team Cherry. It was finally released last Thursday after many years in development, and everybody is loving it. Hollow Knight was so popular that it crashed multiple gaming storefronts. With continual game cancellations, expensive failures and layoffs at bigger studios, this is the kind of indie triumph the industry loves to celebrate at the moment. But Silksong hasn’t come out of nowhere, and its success would not be easily reproducible for any other game, indie or not.

If you’re wondering what this game actually is, then imagine a dark, mostly underground labyrinth of bug nests and abandoned caverns that gradually yields its secrets to a determined player. The art style and sound are minimalist and creepy (though not scary) in a Tim Burton kind of way, the enemy bugs are fierce and hard to defeat, your player character is another bug with a small, sharp needle-like blade. It blends elements of Metroid, Dark Souls and older challenging platform games, and the unique aesthetic and perfect precision of the controls are what make it stand out from a swarm of similar games. I rinsed the first Hollow Knight and I’m captivated by Silksong. I’ve spent 15 hours on it in three days, and it has made my thumbs hurt.

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After a lacklustre response to the 2025 edition, the game has gone all out to engage players and respond to user feedback

In an open office space somewhere inside the vast Electronic Arts campus in Vancouver, dozens of people are gathered around multiple monitors playing EA Sports FC 26. Around them, as well as rows of football shirts from leagues all over the world, are PCs and monitors with staff watching feeds of the matches. The people playing are from EA’s Design Council, a group of pro players, influencers and fans who regularly come in to play new builds, ask questions and make suggestions. These councils have been running for years, but for this third addition to the EA Sports FC series, the successor to EA’s Fifa games, their input is apparently being treated more seriously than ever.

The message to journalists, invited here to get a sneak look at the game, is that a lacklustre response to EA Sports FC 25 has meant that addressing user feedback is the main focus. EA has set up a new Player Feedback Portal, as well as a dedicated Discord channel, for fans to put forward their concerns. The developer has also introduced AI-powered social listening tools to monitor EA Sports FC chatter across various platforms including X, Instagram and YouTube.

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Instead of recognising that social media harms mental health and democracy, the former deputy PM and Meta executive repeats company talking points

Nick Clegg chooses difficult jobs. He was the UK’s deputy prime minister from 2010 to 2015, a position from which he was surely pulled in multiple directions as he attempted to bridge the divide between David Cameron’s Conservatives and his own Liberal Democrats. A few years later he chose another challenging role, serving as Meta’s vice-president and then president of global affairs from 2018 until January 2025, where he was responsible for bridging the very different worlds of Silicon Valley and Washington DC (as well as other governments). How to Save the Internet is Clegg’s report on how he handled that Herculean task, along with his ideas for how to make the relationships between tech companies and regulators more cooperative and effective in the future.

The main threat that Clegg addresses in the book is not one caused by the internet; it is the threat to the internet from those who would regulate it. As he puts it: “The real purpose of this book is not to defend myself or Meta or big tech. It is to raise the alarm about what I believe are the truly profound stakes for the future of the internet and for who gets to benefit from these revolutionary new technologies.”

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Medea tells her side of the story in a reimagining of the ancient Greek stories that puts women centre stage

The women of myth have been talking – and they’re pointing the finger at us. Myths are “mirrors of us”, writes Natalie Haynes in Pandora’s Jar, her book of essays on the women of Greek mythology. “Which version of a story we choose to tell, which characters we place in the foreground, which ones we allow to fade into the shadows: these reflect both the teller and the reader, as much as they show the characters of the myth.”

Considerations of culture and bias have been central to the recent wave of mythic retellings focused on women, from Madeline Miller’s Circe and Pat Barker’s Iliad trilogy to Haynes’s own triad of novels set within the classical Greek world (The Children of Jocasta, A Thousand Ships and Stone Blind). This latest is a reimagining of the myth of Jason and the Golden Fleece and, true to form, it centres the women.

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After the death of co-frontman Rick Davies, we survey the best of the songwriting partnership with Roger Hodgson that propelled them to mass success in the 70s

• Rick Davies, Supertramp frontman and co-founder, dies aged 81

Supertramp spent their early years exploring, developing a flair for soft-focus introspection and muscular adventure without quite finding melodic hooks for their stylistic acumen. Crime of the Century, their third album, is where things started to change for the group and School provides the bridge between their art-rock beginnings and the clever pop polish that brought them fame. One of the rare full collaborations between Rick Davies and his singer/songwriter partner Roger Hodgson, School takes flight once Davies’ jazz-inflected piano pushes Hodgson’s sarcastic swipes at educational bureaucracy toward an open-ended space, the sweeping solos suggesting worlds far away from dreary institutions.

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