GEOFF BOTTOMS appreciates the local touch brought to a production of Dickens’s perennial classic
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Voyages to tyrannical island and deep philosophical ground
BEN COWLES Game on: Reports from a virtual frontier
MARY CONWAY is disappointed by a production whose design and cartoonish acting overwhelms the close scrutiny of characters
SUSAN DARLINGTON enjoys the raucous familiarity of a traditional topsy-turvy pantomime
RON JACOBS introduces the latest novel by the best writer of US working-class fiction writing today
HENRY BELL is fascinated by the underlying curiosities and contradictions of one of the great poets of the Mediterranean
DAVID RENTON recommends a books that explores the ways in which disabled people are made to feel both of and not part of this world
PLAYING Kitbox Games’s cult management sim The Shrouded Isle, I got a taste of what it must have been like running Heaven’s Gate, the People’s Temple or Scientology.
In this wonderfully monochromatic roguelike game — if you fail, you can’t load a previous save and have to start all over again — players are cast as the high priest of a sacrificial cult in a secluded 16th-century town, whose founders saw that humanity was doomed.
Luckily for the folk on the shrouded isle, lord and saviour Chernobog is prophesied to save us in three years — quite how or why our bloodthirsty deity would do such a thing isn’t clear. But best not go there — questions are blasphemous.
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