Rudderless

Aftersun 5/5 Gorgeous and heartbreaking, with two outstanding central performances (Frankie Corio is a hell of a find and Paul Mescal has never been better) and a final 15 minutes in which the film's gentle undercurrent of melancholy builds to an almighty wave. There's a surprising but devastatingly effective needle drop towards the end, and the very last shot is something else. Wonderful stuff – one of the best debut films in years.

It didn't even offer a satisfying sense of closure, really - a couple of solid moments aside, it mostly felt like an extended trailer for three separate spin-offs.

They are. I thought 5 and 6 were easily the weakest and 7 and 8 two of the strongest.

That was 377. We've addressed it in the flannel panel in 378.

He does, but I still think he was too old for that role and I found his accent quite distracting.

Having thoroughly enjoyed the first four, I was quite disappointed with today's offerings. I thought 5 in particular was a dud - it's not always easy to expand short stories, and this felt both rushed in places and oddly sluggish in others. It's such a strong premise, but sloppy writing and direction undermined it.

Yeah, there's a bit towards the end where there's several waves of them, but the only real challenge is staving off boredom as you run around waiting for specific resources to respawn so you can take the armoured ones down.

Here's a snippet of a very early go before I'd done any of the tutorials. It is *marginally* easier to parse while you're playing. https://hyprd.mn/clip/3212010489 Looking forward to diving back in once we're off deadline and I'm slightly less frazzled.

Ghostwire: Tokyo. One of my favourite 7/10s in ages, a delightfully awkward collision of east and west in its design, with a really distinctive (if limited) approach to firstperson combat and a memorable setting filled with too much open-world cruft. It never fully hangs together, but I enjoyed pretty much every minute of it.

Yeah, it's really good, this.

The length of the rllmuk thread being, of course, the most accurate barometer for determining a videogame's quality.

The layoffs are terrible news, obviously, but I don't want anybody to be misled by that story's appearance here - no print publications have been affected.

tbh the "mostly" makes it seem more likely

I imagine if you're coming back to Splatoon after a long time away it feels more difficult because there are fewer genuine newcomers. After the initial settling-in period for Splatoon 2, which brought *a lot* of new players to the series, Turf War gradually got tougher, albeit never so much as the ranked modes which obviously a lot of the more skilful players gravitated towards. As a lot of Splatoon veterans start qualifying for Anarchy Battles (it takes a little while to reach Lv 10, after all) you'll see the challenge level off a little.

What self-congratulatory, supercilious claptrap.