Project Hail Mary

The sun is dying, being feasted on by tiny lifeforms based on Venus. The phenomenon, the "astrophage," is not unique: every star within dozens of light-years of Sol is suffering the same malaise...except one: Tau Ceti. With Earth's habitability in danger in a matter of decades, the countries of the world unite to send a near-lightspeed ship, powered by the same tiny lifeforms, to Tau Ceti to investigate. Only one crewmember, Ryland Grace, survives the trip, finding himself alone almost a dozen light years from home with the awesome responsibility of saving the entire human race...and no idea how.

Project Hail Mary is a film based on the 2021 novel of the same name by Andy Weir, best-known for The Martian (also made into a successful movie). Both stories have a similar premise, stranding a handsome Hollywood leading man (first Matt Damon and now Ryan Gosling) an ungodly distance from home with limited or non-existent chances of rescue. Project Hail Mary is far less concerned with actual science though, with the threat to Earth, the interstellar propulsion system and the resolution to the crisis all being way more speculative than anything in The Martian. This gives the story more leeway to focus on the characters and having a little bit more fun.

This makes sense as the directors are the duo of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, remarkably here directing their first movie together in a dozen years. In the meantime they had started work on Solo: A Star Wars Story, only to be removed from the project mid-film and replaced by Ron Howard. Project Hail Mary serves as a calling card to show that yes, they can handle a more serious tone and also an effects-heavy SF movie, and do it well.

It's probably not a massive spoiler to say that Gosling's character is not alone for long, as it turns out other extraterrestrial civilisations are also under threat from the "astrophage" and the guys at 40 Eridani have also figured out that Tau Ceti may have hold the secret to defeating them so send a team of their own. Grace has to join forces with an alien named "Rocky" and learn his language as a prelude to finding a solution to the problem.

In order to overcome the limitation of 90% of the film being made up of Gosling talking to an ambulatory rock, the film also features elaborate flashbacks to the discovery of the astrophage, Grace training the scientists to fix the problem and then being asked to replace them when they are killed in an accident. This non-linear approach to the storytelling works quite well, even if it does add to the feeling this movie is "Interstellar with a few more laughs," (not a bad thing at all). Key to the flashbacks is Grace's relationship with his boss Eva Stratt (a phenomenal Sandra Hüller) which goes in directions the viewer wasn't quite expecting.

But it is the relationship between Grace and Rocky (voiced with skill by James Ortiz, who also "plays" the puppet version of the character) that is core to the movie, and that relationship is very well-written and excellently played, with the duo rapidly becoming one of SF's more impressive bromances, maybe not quite Han and Chewie, but more on the lines of Bruce Dern and his robots in Silent Running. In fact, the film feels like the perfect melding of a 1970s classic slice of sci-fi with a more modern twist.

The film falters a little with its running time, which feels a little overwrought, and with the film under-explaining a few concepts, like how the 40 Eridanians have no concept of relativity, explaining why Rocky's ship is so over-fuelled (a concept better acknowledged in the novel) for the voyage, which becomes a key plot point in explaining how they can move around the Tau Ceti system without worrying too much about fuel.

These complaints are next to negligible though. Project Hail Mary (****½) is an all-around, well-made, well-conceived film which mixes a serious plot with some lighter moments and is driven by superb performances as well as exemplary visual effects. The movie is available to watch worldwide now.

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Cloudpunk: City of Ghosts

Several months have passed since the rather memorable first night on the job for Cloudpunk delivery driver Rania. She is still ticking along, doing her thing, when another crazy night starts. Before sunrise, Rania will become an illicit street racer, renewed her contacts with the movers and shakers of the city, and become the target for a relentless assassin.

City of Ghosts is the expansion to the 2020 indie hit Cloudpunk. "Expansion" may do the title an injustice, as it is about as long as the original Cloudpunk storyline and expands on some of the ideas presented in the original game. However, the title does not bring enough new to the table in terms of locations or gameplay features to warrant being a full sequel. Instead, it's an impressively large slice of new content, even if it does nail that expansion pack feel of "if you liked the original, you'll like this, if you didn't, there's nothing here to change your mind."

Once again you're controlling Rania, the protagonist of the first game, as you navigate the airways and streets of the futuristic, ocean-straddling city of Nivalis. Nivalis is divided into airways where you can fly your HOVA (hovercar) and neighbourhoods where you can land, get out of the car and walk around on foot. Only a relatively small part of the city is explorable on foot, divided into a couple dozen areas on the map, but this gives the illusion of the city being open-world even when it's not. As with the first game, a lot of your time is spent picking up packages and occasionally people and driving them to a destination. The on-foot areas do have some collectibles to find (some play a role in the story, but most are there to sell to make money), and very rarely important NPCs and quest-givers you can stumble across, but these are few and far between.

More than the first game, City of Ghosts also likes to shake things up, at least a little. The very start will confuse the hell out of veterans as the first game as you get to know a new protagonist called Hayse, before he abruptly vanishes and you go almost the full length of the game before he shows up again. At another key point in the game you get to take control of Rania's pet AI-dog Camus, recently installed in a new body, and this is fun as Camus can run around at much greater speed than the human characters. A rather creepy section set deep in the bowels of the city benefits from turning into a Resident Evil game, complete with fixed cameras and tank controls, as you try to find keys and ways of moving deeper into a deserted (or is it...?) neighbourhood in search of answers. The game also gives you a few new options, such as being able to buy new HOVAs with different characteristics and swap between them as needed (including fast-but-fragile models for racing).

These improvements are muted by being limited. You only control Hayse and Camus for relatively brief periods, and can't swap between them at will. The Resident Evil section is cool but maybe lasts half an hour, max. Buying new HOVAs is fun but ultimately the game is still completable no matter which vehicles you have. As with the first game, the narrative is the key draw and you can make choices at various moments in the game which have an outcome on the finale, although sometimes the consequences of the choices you make are so vaguely defined it's hard to make a well-informed choice in the moment, not helped by the game's stingy save system.

Still, Cloudpunk was a serious vibe back in 2020 and it remains so now. Driving around the rainy city streets listening to the superb, chilled-out synth-driven soundtrack is quite fun, even if the driving controls remain a bit janky. Walking around the neon vistas may wear out your screenshot button. The Minecraft-ish voxel aesthetic is starting to wear a little thin here, but when the game looks as good as it does, complaining about it would be churlish.

The story is pretty good, and the side-vignettes are often quite compelling. Being contacted by a cryogenic "time-skipper" in deep space who gives you the first clue on just how far in the future the game is set is a hairs-on-the-neck moment. Rania trying to work how to respond to a client with a crush on her is funny. The voice work, the weakest link of the original game (Rania thankfully excepted), is improved here, even if it's not as consistently strong as most players would like. The tonal shift from dystopian semi-comedy to tragedy is repeated here, maybe more successfully than in the original game.

Cloudpunk: City of Ghosts (***½) adds another eight to nine hours of fun adventuring to the original game. The core gameplay loop - pick up something, fly across the city, drop it off whilst the characters engage in exposition voice-overs - remains fun but also remains limited. There are attempts here to freshen up the formula and these are successful, but also not as extensive as you might wish. If you want a varied and action-packed game, this is not it. But for a more chilled-out narrative adventure game, City of Ghosts fits the bill nicely. The expansion is - somewhat incomprehensibly - only available for the PC version of the game, despite the original also launching on Switch, Xbox One and PlayStation 4.

A semi-sequel called Nivalis Nights, allowing you to run multiple businesses in Nivalis, will be released on 29 November this year.

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Masters of the Universe (2026)

The planet Eternia is invaded and conquered by the armies of the evil warlord Skeletor. Young Prince Adam is sent into a portal by the Sorceress of Eternia to safeguard him and the Sword of Power, but he loses the Sword mid-transit. Arriving on Earth, he spends fifteen years searching for the Sword. He finally locates it, but finds the war has followed him to his adopted homeworld. Returning to Eternia, he has to rally the Eternian loyalists to fight Skeletor, but finds his long absence has alienated his people.

Masters of the Universe is the second attempt to tackle a live-action movie based on the He-Man and the Masters of the Universe franchise from the early 1980s. Alongside GI Joe, He-Man kicked off the whole toy/cartoon/movie phenomenon later followed by the likes of Transformers and Thundercats, but unlike those franchises it burned relatively briefly, dominating toy sales for only a few years before dropping off. The first live-action movie in 1987, launched as the franchise was waning, was critically rinsed on release, although it has since been revised as a more entertaining pulp film, mostly for Frank Langella's much-better-than-needed performance as Skeletor and the appearance of a young Courtney Cox.

This attempt sees Adam - played with winning likeability by Nicholas Galitzine - exiled to Earth, but the film gets him back to Eternia with commendable speed, where he teams up with Teela (Camila Mendes) and fighting mentor Man-at-Arms (Idris Elba). Skeletor (a pre-yikes-revelations Jared Leto) and Evil-Lyn (Alison Brie) lead the forces of evil. James Purefoy puts in a winning turn as Adam's father, but somewhat oddly he is saddled with an American accent that doesn't allow his impressive voice to shine through (casting Purefoy and not letting him use his distinctive voice is a bit weird).

Everything seems set for a solidly enjoyable popcorn flick and to some extent the film succeeds at that. The script is a bit MCU-adjacent-ha-ha funny, but for this franchise that's pretty appropriate, so isn't a major problem. The performances are all pretty good, and some of the actors make interesting choices. Idris Elba seems to realise this is the sort of role he can do sleepwalking, so makes more comedic choices and plays slightly against type in some scenes, which freshens up his role.

One problem is that the action is a bit over-stylised, with a few too many clever-arse, CG-enhanced camera moves that never feel convincing. This is a shame as some of the fight choreography is pretty solid. The film also arguably flounders with its central message. Adam has not looked after himself too much, repeatedly shows hesitancy and weakness in the face of a threat that should have defeated him multiple times over (the running gags of both Adam's preference for diplomacy and Skeletor's apparent refusal to kill his enemies if they have names and/or toys on sale do address this, somewhat) and yet wins anyway because he has a magic sword that gets him ripped in five seconds flat. The film is also easily half an hour too long, with that whole "this is the final battle, whoops, no it isn't, now this is ha ha," plot device modern action films would do well to drop. Camila Mendes is also one of the strongest performers in the film but doesn't have much to do in the second half.

Masters of the Universe (***½) is a perfectly serviceable piece of entertainment that the brain will watch, absorb and completely forget about within 48 hours. If you want a popcorn movie actually resonates a bit more and is more fun, than something like the Dungeons & Dragons movie or the better third of the MCU is probably a stronger recommendation. The film is available on streaming and media worldwide about now.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

A GAME OF THRONES at 30

In May 1996, eager fantasy fans in the UK hit their local bookstore to pick up the seventh and latest Wheel of Time novel in hardcover. Robert Jordan's giga-series ruled the roost in fantasy sales, only beaten in the UK by homegrown legend Terry Pratchett and his Discworld saga (which had two entries in 1996, Pratchett not being one to hang around). But fans picking up the brick-thick tome could also pick up something else: a preview booklet for a new novel arriving later that year. The preview booklet even had a Robert Jordan back cover quote: "A Game of Thrones grabs hold and won't let go!" proclaimed Jordan. "It's brilliant!" he added, possibly redundantly.

Arriving in the first week of August 1996 (release dates being a window rather than a specific date at that point, especially for the first book in a new series by an author who was not a household name), A Game of Thrones was George R.R. Martin's first solo novel for thirteen years. That novel, the supernatural rock and roll story The Armageddon Rag, had sold poorly and had dented Martin's publishing reputation to the point that he couldn't sell his his next planned books and instead took up a career in Hollywood, working on The Twilight Zone and Beauty and the Beast. He did repair his reputation in publishing circles with his short story collection/fixup novel Tuf Voyaging (1986) and then as the editor-in-chief of the Wild Cards shared world anthology series, which started in 1987, but there was a perception that a promising genre novelist had been lost to the silver screen.

They may have been right, for a while, but Martin had grown frustrated with everything he wrote being "too long and too expensive" for the screen and started planning a return to fiction, where length and budget were not (or at least less) of a concern. With Beauty and the Beast finishing in 1990, Martin started work on Avalon, a new novel in the Thousand Worlds science fiction setting of his early work. By summer 1991, work on that novel was coming along well when he was almost forcibly struck by the vision of a young boy watching a man being beheaded in the snow. Martin didn't know what that meant, whether it was a short story or a novella or more, but started writing. More chapters came, and he left Avalon cooling off in a corner of his hard drive (where it presumably remains, the victim of maybe the biggest writing tangent in human history).

What the first chapter of A Game of Thrones looks like on George's WordStar 4.0 word processor. He's written the entire series like this. Writing white-on-black is something that would drive me crazy, making me want to murder every single character I was writing...wait a sec.

Martin's early career can be defined by promising series he started writing only to dry up after a promising first instalment, and he generally needed to get a story down whilst it was white-hot in his mind before it could cool off. As a result, A Song of Ice and Fire was almost strangled at birth when Hollywood called Martin up and offered him the thing he'd been dreaming about for ten years: his own TV show. Martin agreed with alacrity and began working on Doorways, a TV series about a character who can slip between parallel universes. Sets were built, casting was undertaken in Europe and a pilot episode filmed, featuring among its supporting players an unknown actress called Carrie-Ann Moss. By late 1992 or early 1993 ABC had passed on the project and Martin returned to working on what he was now calling A Game of Thrones. Rather than losing the thread of the novel whilst working on the TV pilot, Martin had used the time to solidify some of his ideas.

Martin had by now drawn a map of the vast continent called Westeros where the bulk of the action would take place. Additional action was happening to one character on an even bigger continent to the east, but Martin decided not to map or name that landmass to preserve a sense of mystery. He had also made a key decision on the tone of the story. His initial chapters had not featured any magic at all, and he had toyed with the idea of having no fantastical or supernatural elements of any kind, just a "fake history" in a different world. Martin's friend Phyllis Eisenstein, knowing of Martin's lifelong love of writers like Robert E. Howard, Jack Vance, Michael Moorcock and Tolkien, thought this was limiting and suggested that he "put the dragons in." He took this advice to heart and, not one to do things by thirds, he put three dragons and a multitude of zombies and ice creatures in for good measure. A new prologue incorporating some of these elements followed.

Robert Jordan's copy of A Game of Thrones, signed by George R.R. Martin.

In October 1993, Martin sent the novel's opening thirteen chapters (totalling around 170 pages) out to publishers, alongside a rough outline of what he now considered to be a trilogy called A Song of Ice and Fire. Martin was not a fan of outlines, feeling they inhibited the improvisational urge that gave rise to the best fiction (in this he was similar to Robert Jordan, Terry Pratchett, Stephen King and J.R.R. Tolkien, so was in reasonable company), so cheerfully admitted that the outline would probably bear no resemblance to the actual series as it unfolded, as would very much prove to be the case.

The outline did its job, with publishers in both the USA and UK eager to snap up the series. Epic fantasy was huge business at the time but an epic fantasy from a credible, multi-award-winning genre figure was much rarer. More to the point, the editors who read the early chapters saw immense commercial potential mixed with excellent dialogue, potentially a critical and sales success. If anything, the UK was even more thrilled than the US publishing houses, with Legend Books and HarperCollins getting into a brutal bidding war that ended with Legend's John Jarrold admitting defeat to HarperCollins's Malcolm Edwards after the tactical deployment of a cheque for £450,000 (about £978,000 in today's money) in February 1994.

Martin discovered he may have bitten off more than he'd initially planned to chew (potentially not for the first time). His original estimate of three 700 manuscript page books started to look naive when he soared past 1,000 manuscript pages for the first book and kept going...and going. He took a hard look at the pages he had and chainsawed the book at a dramatically appropriate moment, calling this first coherent chunk A Game of Thrones and sending it off to his publishers, along with his apologetic note that A Song of Ice and Fire would now be four volumes in length.

Someone who was very happy was Robert Jordan, who sent George's editor a letter celebrating the fact that A Song of Ice and Fire would now take as long as it would take, across as many novels as it would take, rather than being artificially restricted to just three books. Jordan's unrepentant enjoyment of A Song of Ice and Fire may be explained by the fact that his original outline for The Wheel of Time was far more heavy metal, balls-out crazy than what the series ended up being, with half-demons invading our world through portals and the main character having sex with almost every female character of note in his quest to save the world, presumably by exercising his prostate. Jordan's editor (also his wife) and publisher asked him to tone it down a bit and write something with a bit wider of an age range, which ended up being commercially the better decision, but Jordan may have felt a little disappointed at not having unleashed his inner keg rager of a writer, whilst George had.

Finally complete (sort of), A Game of Thrones hit shelves in the first week of August 1996, preceded by the aforementioned sampler in May in the UK and, in the USA, by Blood of the Dragon, a novella consisting of all the Daenerys Targaryen chapters arranged into a single story. This novella was published in Asimov's, one of the leading SF magazines of the day, to try to tempt Martin's already-existing SF fanbase into trying his fantasy novel.

These intriguing tactics proved...not really successful. A Game of Thrones launched to a muted reception. Sales were okay, but not stunning. Reviews were decidedly all over the place. As well as Robert Jordan, authors Raymond E. Feist, Katherine Kerr and Anne McCaffrey gave the book glowing reviews and cover quotes, but critical reviews were somewhat less unanimous. SFX Magazine, Britain's biggest-selling SF magazine, was cool at best. The reaction was, after five years of build-up, underwhelming. However, Martin did get some consolation when Blood of the Dragon won the Hugo Award for Best Novella in 1997, the only literary Hugo the series has won to date (A Storm of Swords made a strong swing for the Best Novel prize in 2001, but was defeated by Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire).

But, things slowly got better. The Wheel of Time fanbase, responding to Jordan's exultations about the novel and, with that series entering its longest hiatus (though, at two-and-a-half years until the next novel, perhaps not that bad in retrospect) many decided to check out A Game of Thrones. Arguably the earliest stirrings of the online Song of Ice and Fire discourse came about on Wheel of Time fansites. Some eager fans quickly created their own websites, with early discussion on the Dragonstone site before moving to Westeros.org.

A Game of Thrones came out in paperback and saw a jump in sales, with additional cover quotes joining the party. Thanks to the novel being split off from the larger manuscript, Martin already had a significant head start on the second book, which he now called A Clash of Kings. Martin's original plan had been to release a book a year in the series, but when he turned in A Clash of Kings in early 1998, he was deeply apologetic and some very early grumblings online can be discerned about the lateness of the book (proving that historical irony is definitely a thing). More traditionally, the same thing that had happened to Thrones had happened to this book. Once again, the book had gotten too big to be published in one volume and Martin's trusty literary chainsaw had been deployed, with a third volume called A Storm of Swords introduced to the mix.

At this point Martin decided to at least have a go at writing a new outline, one that has never been made public, and from this he deduced that the series would now consist of six books: A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords, A Dance with Dragons, The Winds of Winter and A Time for Wolves (a title he was never happy with, many years later replacing it with A Dream of Spring). He also mounted his first reconnaissance expedition into the lands of Westeros outside of the main series. His colleague Robert Silverberg had called to ask for a short story in the same world for an anthology he was editing called Legends. Martin eagerly agreed, and his story The Hedge Knight, about a young knight and his unusual squire adventuring in the Seven Kingdoms some ninety years before the events of A Game of Thrones, duly appeared in the book alongside new stories in their signature universes from the likes of Pratchett, King, Feist...and inevitably Robert Jordan. It was arguably Jordan's short story New Spring that drove sales of the anthology more than anything else, which led to people reading The Hedge Knight, which led to people buying A Game of Thrones and its newly-minted sequel.

A US first-edition hardcover of A Game of Thrones, retailing for £540 at the 2014 London WorldCon. I can only assume the value has gone up.

The rest is history, both past and present. The series did expand, though thankfully only from six to seven planned novels (touching wood). A tiny TV operation called HBO picked up the screen rights to the books and turned them into the biggest drama show of the entire decade in the 2010s, driving sales of the books to over 100 million (HarperCollins, you'll be happy or, more likely, totally indifferent to know, turned a profit on that advance). The novels would get turned into video games, board games, tabletop roleplaying games, action figures, miniatures, calendars and, most vitally cookery books. An entire ecosystem of websites and YouTube channels dissecting every scrap of the lore and background material would spring up. The TV show would spawn two spin-off shows, both successful, not to mention a stage play and even a book of witticisms (okay, maybe that one was pushing it a bit). The only thing missing is a Game of Thrones-branded flamethrower shaped like a dragon.

The books would get everything but, so far, an ending. Yes, and I know the novelty of this information this will shock readers to the very core of their being, A Song of Ice and Fire is, thirty years on from the release of A Game of Thrones (and fifteen from A Dance with Dragons), incomplete, with five of the planned seven books out and the sixth reportedly sitting on over 1,200 manuscript pages as of last reporting. We'll have to wait and see if the series will be finished. It will have etched its mark into the fabric of fantasy history even if it isn't, but everyone, and George R.R. Martin most of all, will be much happier if the words the series ends on are "THE END" and not "TO BE CONTINUED." 

But it's hard to overstate the positive impact that A Game of Thrones had on the history of fantasy fiction, an impact maybe exceeded only by The Lord of the Rings, Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian stories, the Harry Potter phenomenon, and Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax's invention of Dungeons & Dragons in the 1970s, and rivalled only by Terry Pratchett's series about a flat planet and Robert Jordan's series about a battle of the sexes played out as a magical metaphor. Authors like Joe Abercrombie, Scott Lynch and Mark Lawrence would gain traction from playing in a similar sandbox to Martin. Martin would champion younger authors like Daniel Abraham, who (as half of author-unit James S.A. Corey, alongside Martin's former assistant Ty Franck) would go on to write their own successful multi-volume series that would become a popular TV show (The Expanse, in that case). Fantasy would gain a more traction as a serious genre for adults after A Game of Thrones was published.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

Blogging Roundup: 31 March to 31 July 2026

 

The Wertzone

News

• S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Cost of Hope launches on 20 August

• Amazon's Warhammer 40,000 project recruits Mike Flanagan

• Bethesda confirm Fallout remasters and new games from themselves and Obsidian Entertainment

• First trailer for Dune: Part Three released

• VERY STRONG RUMOUR: Obsidian Entertainment to develop a new Fallout game

• Avatar: The Last Airbender sequel movie gets a trailer

• Nivalis gets new trailer, name and release date

• Russell T. Davies leaves Doctor Who (again), 2026 Christmas Special cancelled

• Subterranean Press to shut down

• Creative Assembly unveils Alien: Isolation 2

• Square confirm Final Fantasy VII: Revelation for early 2027 release, completing the Remake Trilogy

• The Witcher III to get a new expansion, eleven years after the last one

• The world's most expensive video game, Star Citizen, crosses the billion dollar mark

• Peter Jackson hints that films based on Tolkien's Silmarillion may be possible

• Warhorse Studios confirm they are making an open-world Middle-earth game

• New China Mieville novel gets cover art and blurb

Features

• RIP Anthony Stewart Head

• RIP John Blanche

• Brandon Sanderson & Joe Abercrombie talk fantasy in London

• RIP Michael Keating

Reviews

• Pillars of Eternity

• I Shall Wear Midnight by Terry Pratchett

• Star City: Season 1

• Murderbot: Season 1

• Unseen Academics by Terry Pratchett

• Widow's Bay: Season 1

• Daredevil: Born Again - Season 1

• Person of Interest: Season 5

• Death Stranding 2: On the Beach

• Making Money by Terry Pratchett

• Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu

• Tempest Rising

• Person of Interest: Season 4

• Wintersmith by Terry Pratchett

• Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files - Volume 04

• Person of Interest: Season 3

• Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files - Volume 03

• Person of Interest: Season 2

• Citizen Sleeper

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: COST OF HOPE launches on 20 August

They've left it a bit late, but GSC Game World has revealed the release date for their Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl expansion, Cost of Hope. The expansion launches on 20 August, or in just over three weeks' time.

STALKER 2 launched in late 2024 and was a very good time, despite janky launch bugs and some questionable AI, not to mention a somewhat-sluggish implementation of Unreal Engine 5. A stream of patches and updates fixed a number of these problems. Cost of Hope adds a lengthy new questline and a whole new area, including the Iron Forest and the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant itself, which was visible but not visitable in the initial release.

STALKER 2 has sold over six million copies since release, though sales seemed to tail off as fan frustration with some of the missing features and bugs became more notable. Cost of Hope launches alongside the 2.0 revision of the game, which completely updates the game's underlying technology, moves to more stable version of Unreal Engine 5 and features revamped textures and lighting. GSC also recently oversaw the release of technically-updated versions of original games STALKER: Shadow of Chornobyl (2007), STALKER: Clear Sky (2008) and STALKER: Call of Pripyat (2009).

Amazon's WARHAMMER 40,000 project recruits Mike Flanagan

Amazon has brought modern horror-meister Mike Flanagan on board with its long-gestating Warhammer 40,000 screen universe project. Flanagan will be working with producer-star-geek ambassador Henry Cavill in getting the project onto the screen.

As related previously, Amazon and Games Workshop entered talks in late 2022 to bring the Warhammer 40,000 IP to the screen across multiple projects, potentially for both TV and film, with Cavill advising, producing and potentially starring. In December 2023, the two companies signed a more comprehensive agreement on the project. In December 2024, the two companies agreed to move forward with the project, although that seems to have been more of an amber light than a green light.

Flanagan and United Artists (UA) have now joined the team. Flanagan is a writer-director with considerable recent cred from his adaptations of Stephen King works, particularly Gerald's Game (2017) and Doctor Sleep (2019). He is also the writer-director of Oculus (2013), Hush (2016) and The Life of Chuck (2024). He is also the writer-producer-showrunner of The Haunting of Hill House (2018), The Haunting of Bly Manor (2020), Midnight Mass (2021), The Midnight Club (2022) and The Fall of the House of Usher (2023). He is also in charge of the upcoming Stephen King mini-series Carrie, also for Amazon, and is attached to an Exorcist reboot project. Most notably, he has been planning an ambitious, true-to-the-books adaptation of Stephen King's The Dark Tower sequence for many years.

Whilst Warhammer 40,000 is predominantly an action franchise, it has strong horror and body horror elements, as well as a satirical tone. Flanagan's sensibilities seem in tune with the franchise, so it will be interesting to see if he can help this project get over the production line after four years of discussions.

Created in 1987, Warhammer 40,000 is a science fantasy franchise set 39,000 years in the future and incorporates elements of space opera, horror, military fiction and dark, satirical comedy. The ruthless Imperium of Man controls a vast swathe of the galaxy, but is beset on every side by external alien threats: the brutish Orks, the scheming Tau, the ancient Necrons, the hive-minded Tyranids and the arrogant Eldar, amongst others. The Imperium is also weakened from within by Chaos cults, worshippers of the dark Chaos Gods who dream of turning the Imperium into a charnel house of worship of the Ruinous Powers. Originating as a tabletop wargame, the franchise has expanded across well over 600 novels, short story collections and audio plays, alongside dozens of video games, numerous spin-off board games and hundreds of wargame sourcebooks and tabletop roleplaying rulebooks.

The lengthy discussion process has probably been down to Games Workshop's exacting standards of quality control. Previous proposed film and TV projects foundered on Games Workshop requiring to maintain creative control over all visual elements of the setting, since their bread and butter is the massive range of miniature models and accompanying artwork based on them. Most TV adaptations seem to want to change elements (sometimes for practical reasons, sometimes just changing things for the sake of change), which Games Workshop likely would like to avoid to prevent any disputes over the ownership of visual elements of the franchise. There have also been concerns over lore and fidelity to the source material, with some recent TV projects (including Amazon's own Wheel of Time and Rings of Power series) being fiercely criticised for large deviations from the source material. Warhammer 40,000 author Dan Abnett has also indicated that Games Workshop is lining up its future runs of novels and big lore expansions with the TV show, so GW is undertaking a careful curating of the property across multiple incarnations to make sure everything lines up.

Back in 2019 Games Workshop partnered with veteran US screenwriter Frank Spotnitz (The X-Files, The Man in the High Castle) on a potential adaptation of the classic 40K novel trilogy Eisenhorn. No broadcaster was attached, but Spotnitz had previously worked with Amazon The Man in the High Castle. 

Both companies have clarified that the current deal is for Warhammer 40,000 alone, but the deal could incorporate fantasy franchises Warhammer and Warhammer: Age of Sigmar further down the line.

Games Workshop is currently working on a CGI TV series about the Deathwatch Space Marines. The franchise is also set for a boom in popularity with the long-awaited video game Dawn of War IV set for release on 17 September, and Total War: Warhammer 40,000 is expected to follow in 2027.

Pilllars of Eternity

The Eastern Reach is beset by a terrible curse: children are being born without souls, becoming known as the Hollowborn. The arrival of a Watcher, an individual able to reach out and touch souls and discover their former lives, may hold the key to resolving the crisis. The Watcher must travel the length and breadth of the Eastern Reach, from the great city of Defiance Bay to the mountains of the White March, to discover why this is happening, and if it is possible to stop it.

Pillars of Eternity is a CRPG created by Obsidian Entertainment after a successful Kickstarter campaign and released in 2015. The game was a bit of a Hail Mary for the company which faced financial difficulties after games they were developing for Microsoft and Sega fell through, but critical acclaim saw the game sell well, allowing the company to recover and eventually be bought out and prosper (by the same Microsoft that got them into trouble in the first place, but that's a whole other discussion). Pillars of Eternity also became the first game in a franchise, with direct sequel Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire following in 2018 and then a first-person spin-off, Avowed, in 2025.

Mildly embarrassingly, I started playing Pillars of Eternity in the week it came out and got about 15 hours into the game before I was distracted by something else, and additional sidetracking took place for, er, eleven years. But in the last few weeks I managed to circle back and finally complete the game and its expansion, The White March, with all the benefits of eleven years of patching and extra additions to the game (including a much-requested turn-based combat mode).

Pillars of Eternity is a spiritual successor to the old Infinity Engine games, and Obsidian are well-placed to handle that. Before they were Obsidian, some of the same team were at Black Isle Studios (the internal development studio at Interplay before Interplay went bust in 2003) where they created Planescape: Torment, Icewind Dale and Icewind Dale II, as well as providing additional dev support on Baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate II. This team is well-versed in the structure of these kind of games and what made them tick and so successful.

As with the Infinity Engine games, you view the game from a top-down perspective, controlling a team of six (from an eventual pool of eleven). You create your main character, the Watcher, and can then recuit additional named NPCs as the game continues. Intriguingly, if you find none of the NPCs are what you're looking for, you can also recruit random hirelings at inns, or create a whole party from scratch yourself. The named companion NPCs do have a lot of unique dialogue and banter, and each one has their own chain of side-quests, so there is value in bringing those characters along and interacting with them. There are numerous classes available, including the bog-standard fighters, mages and paladins, but there are some interesting classes like the chanter, a spin on the traditional bard. Being able to replay the game with a different class adds a lot of replayability. Not being based on a tabletop rule set, the game does have the advantage of not having to shoehorn awkward or barely-applicable tabletop rules into a video game, which can give a more focused experience.

The game has two modes, realtime-with-pause to replicate the classic Infinity Engine experience or turn-based, which was added to the game only this year, presumably to cash in on the success of the turn-based experience in Baldur's Gate III. Realtime with pause (RTWP) allows you to hit spacebar at any moment to pause the game and given fresh orders, very useful when you want your cleric to start healing frontline fighters or mages to use specific spells. I think the turn-based implementation in Pillars of Eternity is awkward at best, and doesn't mesh well with the absolute masses of combat encounters in the game. In BG3 it worked because each combat experience was tailor-designed to be interesting, with environmental factors and special skills to make each battle memorable. Pillars of Eternity has far too many random fights with easily-defeatable mooks and making each fight ten times longer does nothing other than make combat more tedious. RTWP makes fights more dynamic and fun, and much faster. RTWP can be horrible when badly-implemented, with Pillars of Eternity is one of the best implementations of the concept, so it works quite well. There's a solid variety of enemy types to fight, and some of the bigger creatures are genuinely imposing to face down.

Pacing-wise, the game starts with you investigating the Hollowborn crisis and discovering your Watcher powers through a linear, quasi-tutorial section before the game opens up into a wilderness area where you can travel to various small towns, caves and ruins. You acquire your first companions (I recommend getting six ASAP as the game's early difficulty spikes can be brutal) and pick up initial quests. These will eventually take you to the abandoned fortress of Caed Nua, which you inevitably end up taking ownership of. Repairing Caed Nua becomes the major subplot of the game, as you have to rebuild the crumbling defences, hire staff and manage the surrounding area, as well as clearing out the massive, 15-level dungeon below it, the Endless Paths, with huge rewards if you succeed. The Endless Paths are a significant challenge and are best tackled intermittently, with you periodically returning to them after levelling up a few times through quests elsewhere.

After pacifying Caed Nua, at least a bit, the game takes you to the great city of Defiance Bay, where there are an absolute ton of side-quests, factions to align with and enemies to find and defeat, as well as a legal challenge to your ownership of the castle (which can lead to a massive field battle). As with most RPGs, the big challenge is mixing this side material with following the main questline. Once you're ready to move on, the game takes you into additional wilderness areas to the east and eventually an elven city where you pick up the trail of those responsible for the Hollowborn. However, you can be sidetracked by visions of an encroaching threat, which takes you to the northern area of the White March and a series of lengthy quests involving the rediscovery of a magical forge. This is the game's main expansion which is now integrated into the base game, and both provides a lot of extra content and also adds additional weapons, gear and plot revelations relevant to the main quest. All-told, you can finish the game in around 50 hours, but completionists can probably push that past 65 hours by doing unnecessary-but-fun side-quests and exploring different endings and builds. This makes for a game longer than Baldur's Gate but still nowhere near the length of Baldur's Gate II or III.

Pillars of Eternity is a very solid and sometimes exceptional game. The writing is strong, and the game is dealing with philosophical concepts around life, death, souls and faith that is more interesting than many video game plots. The game tries to give you lots of ways to solve quests other than just through violence, and some of your companion characters are fascinating in their worldviews (whilst others are...there). As it's an Obsidian game, there is not a lot of outright goods vs evil choices, with you having to consider arguments where both sides have merits before coming down on one side or the other. Even by Obsidian's standards this can get a little out of control with moral murkiness absolutely everywhere, and sometimes you do wish for a few more quests where one side is obviously in the wrong. Even their New Vegas wasn't afraid to say that no, one side is a bunch of fascist slave-owning rapists, and it's fine to shoot up those guys, even if their opponents are stuck-in-the-past has-beens with questionable expansionist motives. Still, some of these morally grey areas are well-constructed and well-written.

The game's biggest problem is the tonal dissonance from these morality labyrinths where dialogue and diplomacy is key to the absolute shedloads of combat the game throws at you every five seconds. Every bit of wildlife in the game has a psychopathic need to kill you, spectres attack without warning, and the hostile native tribes of xaurips kill-on-sight (apart from one quest that hints that you can mollify them peacefully, and then immediately forgets about it). For a developer who has sometimes made it possible to do total pacification runs through games and who has included so many quests with a non-violent outcome, the focus on mass slaughter as you just walk around can be jarring, not to mention making turn-based mode almost non-viable unless you want to triple or more the length of the game.

There are also some UI weaknesses such as the lack of a customisable hotbar, which was pretty standard at the time, and some questionable gameplay decisions. Rationing the number of camping slots, forcing you to periodically abandon your adventuring to find somewhere to buy rations, is deeply stupid. Since overcoming this issue is fairly straightforward, since you can leave any dungeon or quest mid-flow and come back to resume it immediately even if three weeks pass, there was nothing gained by forcing this limitation on you.

Pillars of Eternity (****) is a fine-but-not-flawless roleplaying game with weaknesses that are not negligible, but they do not detract overall from the beautiful, hand-painted environments, great music, very strong writing, thought-provoking storyline and well-characterised companions. Managing your home base is fun, the Endless Paths is an enjoyable challenge, and the White March expansion is excellent, working as a good story in its own right as well as a homage to Icewind Dale (and arguably White March has a better story than Pillars itself). The worldbuilding for Eora is excellent, taking what appears initially to be a standard sub-Tolkien setup of elves, dwarves and trolls and quickly complicating it through the stuff about souls and faith. Combat can be superb, though there is too much of it, and the game may be a little bit overstuffed. But it's better to have too much to do than too little. The game is a fine spiritual success to the Baldur's Gate series even if it can't quite match that trilogy's overall very high standards.

Pillars of Eternity is available now on PC, Linux, PlayStation, Xbox and Switch.

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I Shall Wear Midnight by Terry Pratchett

Tiffany Aching is almost sixteen and is now a respected witch across the Chalk. She is taken aback when the death of a local dignitary seems to spark off a burst of hatred and fear towards witches. Her investigation reveals the return of an ancient force of evil, which unleashes bigotry and invective even from mild-mannered people, even from Tiffany's oldest friends and allies. Fortunately the Nac Mac Feegle are unaffected, and with their help Tiffany sets about restoring her reputation.

I Shall Wear Midnight is the thirty-eighth Discworld novel and the fourth to focus on the character of Tiffany Aching, ostensibly the protagonist of a series of books "for younger readers." It's also one of the darker Discworld novels, tapping into the idea that there is a coil of communal hatred in people that can be periodically unleashed for no real reason, and a canny operator can direct that bile towards their own ends.

The book is something of a Greatest Hits of the Ramtops, bringing in Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg, though with tremendous restraint Pratchett does not allow them to overwhelm proceedings. We also get a flying visit to Ankh-Morpork (complete with cameos from several Ankh-Morpork regulars), a blink-and-you'll-miss-it appearance by Magrat, and even the return of one of the major protagonists of one of the very first Discworld books and has been puzzlingly MIA for the thirty-five books since. It's the largest-scaled Tiffany book and the one that seems to make the most effort to make her books feel connected to the larger Discworld setting, which it is successful at. 

But for all that, the story is focused a lot on Tiffany's personal story. She has found acceptance and respect, but that is suddenly endangered by people deciding they hate her for almost no reason whatsoever. Anyone who has been the victim of bigotry, for whatever reason, especially from people they've known for a long time, can identify with this idea. Pratchett explores the metaphor by making the source of this inexplicable hatred an actual entity, the Cunning Man, but also reinforces it by having it that the Cunning Man can only be defeated, not destroyed totally.

The book alternates between obvious in-your-face humour - the Mac Feegles would be getting tiresome if Pratchett wasn't so good at giving them development, as individuals and a species - and more subtle gags and vigorous poking of the human condition. Like Unseen Academicals before it, this book was written shortly after Pratchett learned of his early-onset Alzheimer's diagnosis. Whilst Unseen Academicals ended up feeling unfocused and distracted, I Shall Wear Midnight feels focused and angry, like Pratchett had decided if he was on his way out, he was going to go out kicking and screaming at the injustices of the world. And as we know from Small Gods, Night Watch and Monstrous Regiment (among others), nothing is more glorious than an angry, articulate Pratchett.

I Shall Wear Midnight (****) is not perfect, it's mildly overlong and the final confrontation with the Cunning Man is vague at best, but this is otherwise a roaring return form for Pratchett after arguably the weakest book in the series. It's also the strongest outing for Tiffany Aching.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.