I went to Paris for the very first time to attend Ubisoft’s Digital Days, and while there I got awfully ill, so apologies for the lack of updates. This is, as many of you on Twitter pointed out, how 28 Days Later starts, I think.

While in Paris, though, I did manage to do an interview with the Child of Light leads, a trio I found incredibly candid and impressive.

It’s an unexpected story: The creative director of Far Cry 3 felt uncomfortable both with the game’s dark subject matter and with questions about how much creative input one really can have on a team of some 600 people. We discuss the team’s trying to find themselves in a JRPG-inspired, stylishly-illustrated game about a young girl who can fly. The bros at Ubi call it “the fairy game”, internally.

Child of Light uses Ubisoft’s 2D art-focused Ubi-Art framework, which the company’s made to enable its teams to do more small-team, creative multiplatform games (the touchscreen mobile explosion brought good 2D art back into fashion). So does Valiant Hearts, the new character-driven WW2 adventure game, which I thought looked awfully sweet.

It was a funny feeling, to be able to go to Paris from London on a train, to feel only a short ride away from another nation’s border. I’m in the New Statesman today writing a little more about Papers, Please, and how it’s helped me explore my attitude to national security as an American abroad.

Continuing with my plots to place extraordinary games in mainstream publications, I also did a feature on Gone Home in the Atlantic, celebrating the way restraint on the design side and a more minimalistic approach to storytelling seems to offer games more opportunity for narrative impact than piling on a kitchen sink’s worth of tech.

Related: I ought to buy GTA V this week, I guess. I imagine that like all GTAs, it will be bigger than the last one, will require the phrases “mayhem” and “satire” to describe, and I am liable to end up wondering whether gamers are horrible people, or whether the game is making fun of gamers and/or horrible people. I mean, it’s a GTA. 10/10.

Papers, Please and Gone Home are among my favorite games of this year so far, as is Michael Brough’s 868-HACK, a roguelike of sorts set in the guts of a neon machine. Read all about it in this interview I did last week.

Still getting over being ill, so if I owe you an email/a reply to an email, please be patient.