Xbox, PC; Obsidian Entertainment/Microsoft
Obsidian’s huge, heavily detailed fantasy world has a lot of variety and texture, and interesting people to meet - but the combat and exploration wear thin

Every time I have to switch between fantasy realms I feel a little like the workers in Severance. Who am I again? What am I here to do? Who are all these people? It’s been a golden time for fantasy lately and having inhaled Dragon’s Dogma 2 , Metaphor: ReFantazio , both seasons of House of the Dragon and all of Rebecca Yarros’s Fourth Wing novels in less than a year, I’m starting to blur the finer details of one kingdom with another.

Avowed’s fantasy universe comes ready-made, from developer Obsidian’s other Pillars of Eternity games. The lore is dense, the in-game text plentiful and characters verbose, but thankfully The Lands Between is fascinating to look at and the realm of Eora full of political tension and cool monsters. I remember precious few names or historical details, but I will remember several of my experiences in this game – the view from the rickety path hugging the walls of an underground cavern big enough for a mad priest to have built as gigantic automaton inside, and the skin-crawling secret I discovered in the basement of a companion’s family home. The look is Annihilation-meets-Oblivion, with fungal and floral detail embroidering the structures and peoples you encounter, and and ever-present tension between the organic and the corruptive.

Avowed is released on 18 February; £59.99

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The actor on being star-struck by Harrison Ford, colour-blind casting and the question he is asked the most

Cyndi Lauper , Michael Jackson and Clint Eastwood were among the celebrities who dropped by during the filming of The Goonies . Who were you most star -struck by? McScootikins
Harrison Ford! I was star-struck when Harrison Ford came to visit because I’d made Indy [Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom]. Spielberg played a big joke on him. There was a biography out of him that he really hated, so Steven went out and bought about 300 copies, so that when Harrison came to visit and walked on to set, the security guard, the gaffers, the camera equipment people, everybody was reading that biography.

I remember when we were told that Michael Jackson was going to visit. The cast and crew were so excited. We didn’t know what time he was arriving, so we were constantly looking over our shoulder. Sure enough, when he walked on to the set, everybody just stopped what they were doing – even the guy making the coffee. He was very shy. I think we made him nervous because there were so many people. Then we took those photos that you see on the internet. We were so giddy that he was there. He gave us tickets to watch him perform in Los Angeles, and gave us all a jacket, which some of us still have. Somehow I lost mine, which I’m very mad at myself for.

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Royal Exchange theatre, Manchester
Hiding behind the fluttering dialogue and domestic chatter lies a dark poetry in a pair of plays that address terrifying futures head on

Last month, wildfires ravaged southern California, President Trump issued executive orders on gender diversity and Storm Éowyn brought 100mph winds to the UK. Could any play be more timely than Caryl Churchill’s Escaped Alone, with its apocalyptic visions of raging fires, a God who punishes gender dysphoria and a wind that “turned heads inside out”?

First seen in 2016 , this startling chamber piece juxtaposes the inconsequential chitchat of four retired women with alarming descriptions of planetary destruction. Structured like a string quartet in which fluttering exchanges alternate with soulful solos, it is sometimes a leisurely free association, ranging from antiques to cats, soap opera to superpowers, and sometimes a terrifying catalogue of rising waters, miscarriages and societal collapse.

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The novelist uses perfume to conjure scenes from a working-class upbringing in this funny, bleak memoir

When Adelle Stripe was 23, she got a job working on a sex chat line. She had answered an ad looking for women with no qualifications save for a clear voice and a self-assured manner. Callers would pay 50p a minute to speak to girls working in the small hours in the attic of a tatty office building. On arrival, Stripe observed staff at partitioned desks in jeans, jumpers and no makeup “fake laughing [on the phone] as though they are hosting the world’s greatest party”, along with the “sickly and overpowering” scent of Exclamation. That was the perfume worn by the manager, Viv – so strong it made everyone’s eyes water.

Stripe’s foray into the world of phone sex features in Base Notes, a literary voyage through her formative moments and the perfumes – some pleasant, some less so – she encountered along the way. Stripe is the author of Black Teeth and a Brilliant Smile , a novel based on the life of playwright and screenwriter Andrea Dunbar; Ten Thousand Apologies, a tale of rock’n’roll excess co-written with Lias Saoudi of Fat White Family; as well as several volumes of poetry.

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Postal Museum says research featured in new exhibition shows how global postal service was ‘tool of empire’

A British shipping company that became the largest in the world at the height of empire continued to use enslaved labour after the abolition of slavery, research has found.

The Royal Mail Steam Packet Company (RMSPC), which received a royal charter from Queen Victoria in 1839, used enslaved workers on the tiny island of St Thomas, which was a Danish colony at the time and is now part of the British Virgin Islands.

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A tale of radioactive mutation and bloodlust takes flight in the Argentinian author’s wild anti-capitalist satire

Argentina, 2272. The Argentine Pampas, the grassland prairies that make up much of the country’s interior, have been flooded by a rising sea. The landscape of lakes and glaciers is now an archipelago of tropical islands. Rechristened the Pampas Caribbean, it’s one of the planet’s few remaining inhabitable regions and, as a result, prime tourism real estate.

Dengue Boy attends summer camp on the public beaches of the Victoria Interoceanic Canal, a toxic dumping ground that incubates epidemics and aberrations. One day, the boys form a circle and pull their dicks out in one of those exploratory preteen rituals. Dengue Boy hesitates, because Dengue Boy is a giant, humanoid mosquito, inexplicably born to a human mother in a post-apocalyptic slum. And mosquitoes don’t have dicks. “Is it true your mom was raped by a mosquito?” the kids taunt.

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(Young)
She frames herself as an alien visitor, and sure enough, this ideas-packed album at the edges of rap doesn’t sound like anyone else right now – you’ll be repeating it again and again

You could easily read Steady as I Am, from John Glacier’s debut album, as a mission statement. “I’m sticking to the plan, not the game,” the rapper offers. “Think I’m crazy, ’cause you’re all the same.” In a genre characterised by flash, Glacier cuts a unique figure, her USP a kind of wilful obfuscation. She doesn’t reveal her real name – the space where it should be on her Instagram bio is instead filled by the word “NO” – nor her age: she once told the Guardian she was “20,000” years old. She first attracted attention with a SoundCloud page, filled with snippets of music she had given shrugging, prosaic titles: A Child Was Sad So I Made This in Front of Her to Make Her Laugh; Sounds From Friday Evening. Said snippets have long been deleted, but a fragmentary, demo-like quality has clung to her releases ever since: the 12 short tracks on her 2022 mixtape Shiloh: Lost for Words played out in a mass of muffled synth tones and distorted samples.

More than one critic has compared the effect of her vocal style – occasional bursts of brisk lyricism separated by sections in which she incants the same phrases over and over, as if in a stoned daze – to overhearing someone’s scattered voice memos. On Like a Ribbon, even her most pugilistic lines – “I’m the hottest in the game”; “I don’t give a fuck, let the people talk”; “now they’re calling me a bitch – best believe it” – are delivered in an oddly blank tone, as if she’s muttering them to herself, unaware that anyone’s listening. Elsewhere, her lyrics have a stream-of consciousness effect, a splurge of words written to try to work out how she feels – or perhaps just because she likes the way they sound together: “Like a satellite in the dark / In the night / Whereabouts in the clouds like a kite / Floating in the winds let the birds float by,” runs a characteristic line on opener Satellites.

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Does the death penalty – ‘a life for a life’ – really help victims’ families achieve closure? A new documentary finds out

For almost 20 years, Aaron Castro was certain about what had to happen. John Ramirez had to die.

Ramirez’s execution was the only way to ensure he got the justice he deserved. And it was the only way that Castro, the son of Ramirez’s victim, could staunch his bleeding heart, soothe the constant anger boiling inside him, and achieve what had been eluding him for two decades: closure.

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This big-hearted tale sees a 99-year-old woman reckoning with the inheritance of the past

Before I introduce you to our narrator, a few weeks shy of her 100th birthday, you’d better take a moment to prepare yourself. Tuck that shirt in. Stand up straight. Fix your hair. And for goodness sake, don’t patronise her. Our heroine – mother, grandmother; friend, lover, widow; a successful ganja farmer; a survivor, who sleeps with a cutlass under her pillow – is a force to be reckoned with. “Me is not you fuckin Granny,” she snaps, early in the book. “Me haunt you for fuckin ever if you mek me die inna hospital,” she threatens, later on. Pauline Evadne Sinclair is her full name – Miss Pauline, to you and me.

We are in Jamaica. Not the touristy coastal towns, but inland: a quiet village in St Mary parish, Mason Hall. Miss Pauline’s life is rooted in this soil: she was born here; she and her partner, Clive, built a house and raised their family. She lives alone now, but she still tends her kitchen garden and climbs the steep slope down to the river to fetch water. But recently, her worries have been on the increase. Her stomach gripes. A walking stick might soon be needed. And even worse, the stone walls of her house have begun to shake. She tells no one in the village about this last development, lest she be labelled a “mad ooman”. In any case, she’s already convinced that she knows the cause: “the stones know what she did all those years ago … The past [is] seeking its reckoning.”

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