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Grade: A In the beginning, there was Doom. The videogame landscape was formless and void. But id Software created a square-headed space marine and several billion two-dimensional demons for him to kill with a shotgun, a chainsaw and a BFG (Big Fracking Gun); and several billion teenage boys saw that it was good, and they called it the First-Person Shooter, and lo, they gave up leaving their bedrooms altogether. The original Doom (1993) really was the genesis of a genre: dark, intense, relentless, addictive. The latest iteration of the game – which plunks our space marine and his demon hordes in a medieval world rather than a space station – stays true to its vibe, while using all the processing grunt available in next-gen consoles to tune that vibe up.

Grade: B+ This is unexpected. A bright young cellist – one of the brightest, in fact – makes his recorded debut with a collection of opera fantasies. In the 19th century, touring virtuosos routinely ransacked hit operas for melodies, then decked them out with every conceivable bit of flummery, dazzlement and top-end-tinsel, the better to excite their fans. They were wildly popular. The young Wagner spent a miserable few months in Paris compiling opera fantasies for cash in hand. The process basically radicalised him. Nowadays, there’s no less fashionable genre, and for the excellent 26-year-old American cellist Zlatomir Fung to record a whole disc of the silly things – well, it’s as if Dua Lipa had suddenly released an album of Victorian parlour ballads.

Grade: A– For this winning little narrative adventure we are in the South – all gris-gris gumbo yaya, decaying mansions and ghosts of the underground railway – and it is a bit midnighty, what with the sinister otherworldly beings you fight.  Our protagonist is sassy, cornrowed Hazel, a mixed-race Lara Croft, who sets out to rescue her social-worker mother after her mobile home is swept downriver in a hurricane. Her snooty grandma Bunny, rotting in her vast plantation house, is no help whatever. But Hazel does manage to half-inch some magic hooks from granny’s ottoman, which allow her to manipulate glowing magic strands in the air and use them to unravel ‘haints’, the ropey-looking demon-things that pop up from time to time to attack her.

Grade: A Sometimes you want to admire the pluck and inventiveness of an indie developer. At other times, you just want to sink into some thumping AAA franchise that’s thrown all the time, design talent and VC megabucks in the world at the screen. The new Assassin’s Creed has you covered there. Irresistibly, it’s set in a richly detailed and (kinda) historically accurate 16th-century Japan – which means, as all teenage boys will know, ninjas and samurais. Be warned, though: I downloaded the PC version, but the screen appeared to announce that I don’t have an STD so my new game wouldn’t run. Talk about a mixed blessing. Turns out it meant an SSD, or solid-state drive – me neither – and they’re harder to catch than theother thing. The PS5 version worked just fine.

Grade: A- It has been nearly ten years since addicts of the empire-building simulator Civilization – or Civ, as players call it – have had a fresh fix. Was it the original Civ that cost you a first in your finals? It’s back, and this time round it aims to cost you a promotion at work. You’ve both grown up. Prepare to lose very many hours to its attractive blend of diplomacy, resource management, city-building and strategic ultraviolence.  Your path through history comes in three linked chunks: you’ll play through the ancient world, then carry forward some of your progress into the age of exploration, and then do the same again in modernity. What’s more, your leaders no longer have to be historically or geographically appropriate.

Olga in Three Sisters, the opening speech: ‘Father died just a year ago, on this very day – the fifth of May, your name-day, Irina.’ Jeeves says somewhere in P.G. Wodehouse that people with monogrammed slippers are afraid of forgetting their names. Irina, the absent-minded sister, probably needed reminding it was her birthday. A useful side-effect is that the audience also knows exactly when and where we are. Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County begins with a frank information offload: Beverly Weston, the patriarch, conveniently explains to the new native-American hire, Johnna, the basic set-up: ‘My wife takes pills and I drink.’ This bald set-up is ‘concealed’ by digressions about Berryman, T.S.

Grade: A The original Monument Valley was a handheld puzzle game of beautiful design and high originality. Why it was called that I have no idea: the title suggests a desert landscape of red dust and sand-scoured buttes, but the playspace was a series of architectural arabesques hanging in space, around which the player navigated a mournful little stick princess. It made wonderfully clever use of isometric perspective: knobs and handles allowed you to rotate the playspace and slide structures together or apart. As you fiddled with the architecture, Escher-like perspectival tricks would open fresh paths or surfaces for Ida to walk on. The atmosphere was absorbing and the puzzles were great.

Liszt’s compositions tend to have descriptive titles – ‘Wild Chase’; ‘Dreams of Love’ – whereas Chopin avoided titles. Thomas Wentworth Higginson wished titles on Emily Dickinson’s poems, opposed by his fellow editor Mabel Loomis Todd. They didn’t stick. Maybe this is why Dickinson is acclaimed but unread. ‘I heard a Fly buzz’ is easier to remember than 465. We can express this truth by quoting Dickens on the Bible in Little Dorrit: ‘such hiccupping reference as 2 Ep. Thess. C. iii, v. 6 & 7.’ Or by remembering how often we forget our several PINs. For poets, titles can be a resource, a useful press release before the actual poem Titles are important. Titles are useful.

Like all other forms of culture, video games offer a way to escape from, or reflect on, reality through fiction. Unlike almost any other form of culture, they are interactive – you, the player, control the experience. Nowhere is this more true than with immersive role-playing games (RPGs), in which the player embodies a character forced to make moral (or wildly immoral) choices in a fictionalised world, which change the narrative of the game for good or ill. That might sound nerdy (it is), but it’s big business. Baldur’s Gate 3 has comfortably topped $1 billion in global sales, and won numerous industry awards. Baldur’s Gate 3 gives you lots of choices.

Among the many destructive after-effects of the pandemic, the impact of two years of lockdowns has had serious consequences for public museums and galleries, particularly so for our national museums and galleries. More than two-and-a-half years since the last restrictions were lifted, visitor numbers to many of the big London institutions have yet to return to the levels seen pre-pandemic, according to the latest figures released by the DCMS. Although the British Museum and Natural History Museum have come roaring back, surpassing their 2019/20 figures (the NHM attracting some half a million more visitors alone), the picture varies wildly, mostly between the more ‘scientific’ museums and those whose remit is visual art.

Grade: A- I usually try to write about new games, but indulge me in addressing Blizzard’s open-world dungeon crawler Diablo IV this week even though it came out last year. Why? Because along with simultaneously trying to save American democracy and make humanity an interplanetary species, Elon Musk’s third preoccupation is Diablo IV. When he’s not tweeting about the first two things, he’s tweeting clips of himself roaring through Diablo’s endgame content, slaying hordes of very high-level demons in timed dungeon runs. He’s good at this, and since it takes getting on for a solid week without eating or sleeping even to reach the endgame, he’s sinking a lot of time into it. ‘Finished faster after masterworking my rod three times,’ he tweets, proudly.

Grade: A Remember the mad 1970s TV series Monkey? Here, excitingly, is the closest you’ll get to it in videogame form. In a pre-credit sequence, you are the Monkey King, Sun Wukong, and you not only fly about on a little cloud but suffer from that headache-inducing circlet on your bonce. The main game is set much later. Sun Wukong is locked in a stone egg and you take command of a monkey warrior – the Destined One – in search of the magic objects which will revive him.   Black Myth: Wukong is the first AAA blockbuster game to come out of China, and it’s what I believe the young people call a stone-cold banger.

Grade: B Readers of a certain age (mine, roughly) may have fond memories of 1993’s Sam & Max Hit the Road – a joyously silly and absorbing two-dimensional point-and-click adventure starring the ‘Freelance Police’: a tubby cartoon Irish wolfhound called Sam and his partner Max, a ‘hyperkinetic rabbity thing’ with a propensity for random violence. It was Itchy & Scratchy meets Raymond Chandler, with puzzles to solve and wisecracks to enjoy. Point-and-click has gone the way of the abacus, but much of the feel of the original franchise is to be found in this remastered version of the final game in the series. As it opens, our heroes are locked in the brig of a spaceship commanded by General Skun-ka’pe, a megalomaniac space-gorilla in quest of the Toys of Power.

Salzburg Festival doesn’t mess about. The offerings this year include an adaptation of Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain in Lithuanian, a Soviet-era operatic treatment of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, and Igor Levit tackling one of the Himalayan peaks of the piano rep. Kiddies, meanwhile, could enjoy the children’s opera Die Kluge (brilliantly done), a Nazi-era allegory on the rise of Hitler by Carl Orff, a composer they love here but whose politics are shall we say, um, complicated. (Pleasingly, I’m not sure the festival understands the concept of cancellation.) People always think Salzburg is pretty and fun. It’s not. It’s dark and primal, with a festival that is far more uncompromising and exhilarating than a global-elite bun-fight in provincial Austria has any right to be.

Grade: B+ Looter-shooters, match-three games, dragons and spaceships... Sometimes you despair of video games doing the same thing again and again – and then a lone developer gets a severe bump on the head and produces something completely batty.  Vampire Therapist is a comedic adventure-story therapy-simulation starring a vampire, except he’s also a cowboy, and he’s training to be a cognitive behavioural therapist in the backroom of a German nightclub under the tutelage of a 3,000-year-old bisexual vampire who was romantic with Marcus Aurelius back in the day.  Our hero was a bad vamp in the Wild West for many years, you see, but he fell in with the Transcendentalists and learned to ‘walk a better path’. Now he hopes to persuade others to do the same.

Most of us, once we pass the age when we wash our own underpants, don’t play games on a PC or a console. We think ‘Twitch’ is what you get when your spouse stacks the dishwasher and ‘Discord’ is what comes next. But you bet we play Candy Crush on the commute. Mobile gaming is still gaming, and it’s a big deal. Problem is, most of it’s crap. This is true even when the games are OK. Take the new Strange Horticulture, which ports a well received PC/console original to mobile. It’s a cartoon-gothic puzzle game (you identify plants apothecary-style; there’s a murder plot; vibes abound) which is dragged from a solid B+ to a glum C by the fiddly interface on an iPhone. Peer angrily at the tiny script; stab clumsily at the screen with your Homer Simpson thumbs; give up.