Keyword – Global development
Trefwoorden – Access to water, Colombia, Coca-Cola, Americas, Global development, World news, Food & drink industry, Business, Water, Environment, Conservation and indigenous people, El Niño southern oscillation, Conservation, Drought, Food
Title – ‘This is what I was born for’: the drought-ridden Colombian town that took on Coca-Cola Femsa – and won | Access to water | The Guardian
Author – Alfie Pannell in La Calera, Colombia
Link – ‘This is what I was born for’: the drought-ridden Colombian town that took on Coca-Cola Femsa – and won | Access to water | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-12T11:30:43.000Z
Category – News
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/jun/12/colombian-town-coca-cola-la-calera-water-rationing-springs-drinks-giant-subsidiary

W hen a severe drought struck La Calera near Bogotá, many of its residents lost their water for drinking, cooking and farming and faced up to 15 days of strict water rationing each month. Yet the area is home to Chingaza reservoir, which supplies about 70% of the drinking water for Colombia ’s capital.

As the drought stretched from April 2024 to April last year, people began to look more closely at how their water was being managed.

“With rationing, people started to reflect a bit about where the water was coming from: ‘Why is there no water in my house, if we always had it on tap?’” says Javier Cifuentes, a local councillor and campaigner for water rights in La Calera.

Attention soon turned to Indega, a subsidiary of Coca-Cola Femsa – the world’s largest Coca-Cola bottler – which was still filling thousands of water bottles a day to sell under the popular Agua Manantial spring water brand, which is sold across Colombia.

News that the plant was continuing to extract water during the drought sparked uproar in La Calera. “They asked us – the people – to ration water but not the companies,” says Alexander Hernández, a local resident.

After a bruising campaign, in which he and his fellow activists faced intimidation and abuse, including death threats, Cifuentes says, they secured a rare victory for the environmental cause in Latin America: in April this year, the local authorities slashed Indega’s water concession to the lowest level since it began in the 1980s.

La Calera’s battle began more than a year and a half ago. The town is one of 11 municipalities in the Chingaza national park . Despite being a historically water-abundant area, the Chingaza reservoir system was depleted from 2023 to 2024 by a particularly extreme El Niño weather pattern, leaving it only 15% full – the lowest level ever recorded. That year was one of the five strongest El Niño events on record, and research suggests global heating has intensified such patterns.

In investigating Indega, the community discovered that the company not only had privileged access to water, but also paid just 120 pesos for a cubic metre to pump and sell water, while households in La Calera are charged between 697 and 3,720 pesos (15p-78p), depending on their income.

“This is a multinational company that has been extracting resources for 40 years practically without paying for them,” says Hernández.

Outrage over Indega’s water usage turned to action, as members of the community united to oppose the company’s request to renew its concession ahead of a December 2024 expiry date. In October 2024, with the help of Cajar , a legal non-profit organisation, local leaders became parties to the concession’s renewal process.

Among them was Herminia Cristancho, who heads the female-led Association of Hamlets in La Calera. Over the past 40 years, she says she has witnessed dozens of corporations extracting precious water from Chingaza.

“They stay until they wipe out everything, then they leave and find a new victim in another country,” she says. “They don’t care about the state in which they leave us.”

Under Colombian law, she was able to access hundreds of documents related to the Coca-Cola Femsa subsidiary’s water use and petition the regional autonomous corporation (CAR) – the local government body that manages water concessions – to hold a public meeting.

Cristancho and other leaders spent many hours poring over the complex papers and with Cajar’s help drafted a letter of opposition to the renewal, arguing that Indega’s use of seven springs depleted the San Lorenzo basin, whose levels had dropped significantly during the drought.

In response, Indega commissioned a study that concluded the springs it used were replenished by rainwater and existed independently of the San Lorenzo basin. The report was dismissed by CAR authorities and campaigners as technically flawed.

Community leaders spearheaded social media and political pressure campaigns to bring the problem in La Calera to a national audience. Cifuentes, who is also a leader of the local Muisca Indigenous people, says: “The Muisca people have always protected the water in this territory, and it is thanks to the Muisca people that there is still water left.”

Not everyone in La Calera opposes the concession, however. Some people living in rural areas around the Indega plant say it brings employment and investment in local infrastructure.

Cristancho and Cifuentes argue that the Coca-Cola Femsa subsidiary embarked on a charm offensive shortly after locals challenged the concession, with efforts such as painting the local school, installing water filters and pledging to re-pave the roads.

Discord over the concession has sparked a bitter feud in the town, with Cifuentes and Cristancho facing personal attacks for their activism, including death threats.

Cifuentes says that on 27 March last year, a hooded man dressed all in black came up to him with a pistol in his hand. “He told me, ‘You don’t know who you’re messing with,’” Cifuentes recalls. “‘Keep fucking around and we’ll come for you and your family,’” Cifuentes recalls. “‘We know where you live.’”

The activist has no evidence that the threats were sanctioned by or related to Coca-Cola Femsa or its subsidiaries, which did not respond to a request for comment. Yet violence targeting environmental activists is a real concern in Colombia, which recorded the world’s highest number of murdered land defenders between 2012 and 2024.

After reporting the threat to the police, Cifuentes was issued a government protection unit, but that did not deter his enemies. On two occasions last November, his vehicle was followed by masked men on motorbikes, forcing his bodyguards to perform evasive manoeuvres to escape.

Posts on social media have also accused the water defenders of corruption and false activism, while pamphlets distributed at a town hall meeting in May 2025 called Cifuentes a “fake Indigenous drug addict”.

Cristancho has also faced intimidation, including silent phone calls and abusive text messages. She says she felt a “brutal fear” at the meeting as members of the crowd yelled obscenities at her and attempted to drown out her speech with vuvuzelas, a deafeningly loud plastic horn.

The land defenders fought on, keeping their pressure campaign alive through mural paintings, marches and public workshops.

Finally, in April this year, the CAR decided to renew the concession but slash Indega’s water extraction rate from 3.23 to 1.9 litres a second. It also reduced the number of springs the company could exploit from seven to four, halved the concession length from 10 to five years and can now temporarily suspend the concession in case of severe drought.

The decision was a milestone for Colombia, where victories for land defenders are few and far between. “For the first time, we succeeded in getting the country to open a debate on water use,” says Cristancho, hailing the widespread media attention brought to the issue and unprecedented community participation.

Yet Cristancho notes that concerns remain, specifically about how authorities will monitor Indega’s water use. For Cifuentes, who continues to live under state protection, the case is simply the “first step” in an existential battle to protect water resources.

“We will keep fighting until not a single millilitre of water in the Chingaza is exploited by a multinational corporation,” Cifuentes says. “This is what I was born for.”

Keyword – Books
Trefwoorden – Ruth Ozeki, Books, Culture
Title – Ruth Ozeki: ‘All my books are an attempt to recreate Charlotte’s Web’ | Ruth Ozeki | The Guardian
Author – Ruth Ozeki
Link – Ruth Ozeki: ‘All my books are an attempt to recreate Charlotte’s Web’ | Ruth Ozeki | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-12T09:00:43.000Z
Category – Culture
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/jun/12/ruth-ozeki-all-my-books-are-an-attempt-to-recreate-charlottes-web

My earliest reading memory I was reading – or pretending to read – before my brain could encode memories, so probably around three or four? I “read” Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd, but that was mostly pictures.

My favourite book growing up Charlotte’s Web by EB White. For years, I remembered it as a story about a little girl named Fern who saved her pet pig, Wilbur, but it’s not. It’s a story about a writer named Charlotte, who happens to be a spider, who spins words into her web that save Wilbur from slaughter. It’s about the power of language to save lives. Looking back at the books I’ve written, I can see now that all of them are an attempt to recreate Charlotte’s Web. It’s the perfect book.

The book that changed me as a teenager Teenagers change constantly, hour by hour, book by book. I read voraciously as a teenager because we didn’t have smartphones, and every book I read left its mark. The Catcher in the Rye certainly was one of them . I must have read it when I was 12 or 13 and learned two skills critical for my adolescent survival: a disaffected attitude and how to spot a phoney.

The writer who changed my mind Every writer I read changes my mind. Isn’t that the point of reading? But OK. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. I read it in 1975 in Nepal, when I was 20, during a month-long trek in the Himalayas from Pokhara to the Tibetan border. That was 50 years ago, and there were very few trekkers back then. We had no GPS. I was trekking with my friend, following winding trails across the mountains, through forests of bright pink rhododendron. Sometimes we’d pass sherpa heading down to town. Their donkeys wore bells on their harnesses, and we could hear them echoing long after they’d passed. I didn’t know the term “magic realism” yet. I just knew that magic was real.

The book that made me want to be a writer Most of the books I read as a child were about smart little girls (or spiders) who were writers: Harriet in Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh; Jo in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women; Emily of New Moon; Anne Frank; Meg in A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle – she wanted to be a scientist, but still. And then there were books about obstinate, contrary, misbehaving little girls, like Eloise, Madeline, and Pippi Longstocking, who were obviously destined to be writers even if they didn’t know it yet. I’d also argue that any story told in the first person by a misfit female narrator, like Jane Eyre, is about being a writer, since their subtext is always “Dear reader, I survived to tell the tale.”

The book or author I came back to I don’t really have a simple answer to this question, so I’d rather talk about Kurt Vonnegut, whose novels I read and loved when I was younger, but who I haven’t revisited. Why? I learned something important about humour from Vonnegut. About the difference between irony and cynicism. About earnest irreverence. That it’s OK to be funny about serious things. I hope I would still find this quality in his books, but what if I didn’t? I’d rather just keep his tone alive in my mind.

The authors I reread Poems and poets: Emily Dickinson, Adrienne Rich, Elizabeth Bishop. I tend to give their books away and then buy new ones. I bought Geography III after reading Bishop’s poem One Art in the New Yorker in 1976. That poem is all about loss. Every time I survive another loss, I reread it, and every time I reread it, I am reminded of how to survive.

The book I could never read again Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M Pirsig. I love Zen. I love motorcycles. I loved this book when I was a teenager, and I’m still inspired by Pirsig’s ideas about quality and craft. But when I tried to read the book again as an adult, I found the narrator’s pomposity irritating. Naturally I didn’t notice it earlier, when it was eclipsed by my own teenage pomposity.

The book I discovered later in life A 13-volume set of Tales of Chekhov, translated by Constance Garnett, first published in 1929 and reissued in 2006. I was never much interested in short stories until I started teaching the form in a fiction-writing class and realised I had a lot to learn. There are 201 stories in the 13-volume set. I’m still reading and learning.

The book I am currently reading Sublimation by Isabel J Kim. It’s a debut set in contemporary alter-worlds of Seoul and New York. It’s a take on the classic immigrant story, wherein the characters, at the moment of border crossing, split into two selves. As a mixed race person, I can relate. I’m also reading The Typewriter Revolution: A Typist’s Companion for the 21st Century, which is excellent.

My comfort read Lydia Davis’s Collected Stories . I am comforted by the brevity of her stories and the precision of her sentences.

The Typing Lady by Ruth Ozeki is published by Canongate. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com

Keyword – Television & radio
Trefwoorden – Television, Television & radio, Culture
Title – Proud review – the gorgeous tale of a hard-partying model who ends up a dad | Television | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/jack-seale
Link – Proud review – the gorgeous tale of a hard-partying model who ends up a dad | Television | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-12T07:01:37.000Z
Category – Culture
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2026/jun/12/proud-review-the-gorgeous-tale-of-a-hard-partying-model-who-ends-up-a-dad

F ilip Raczyński (Ignacy Liss) is really enjoying his late 20s. We meet him on a modelling assignment, this vocation having been handed to him by his sparkling eyes and soft jawline, good looks he accentuates with a biker jacket and bleached hair. He has vodka and Diet Coke for breakfast and a bump of powder in an Uber on the way to his next job. At night we follow him through the backrooms of a club, until he finds one where the naked men are almost as beautiful as he is. He loses himself in them and worries about nothing.

It’s less fun to be in Filip’s immediate social orbit. His agent’s nervy assistant, Olek (Kamil Studnicki), has to cover for Filip’s perpetual lateness and, on the night after the club odyssey, is obliged to look after his badly behaved dog, because Filip has only just rescued it from a drug dealer who resorted to dognapping to force him to pay moneys owed. Filip’s decision to bring four of the guys from the club home with him, meanwhile, goes down poorly with his sister Anka (Sylwia Boroń), the single mum of a one-year-old girl, Tosia. Filip is crashing at their flat, and he’s not keeping to his promise to help with the bins and laundry.

The topline premise of Proud is that Anka dies and Filip ends up caring for and then looks to adopt little Tosia, but it takes all of the first episode to get there. By the time calamity descends, we know Filip well and are in the same position as his friends and family – not nearly as angry or disappointed as we feel we should be, because he’s just too energetically roguish. Make him straight and spin him back 20 years to London, and he could be the protagonist of a racy romcom starring Hugh, or possibly Richard E, Grant. The child is to be the manchild’s salvation.

Proud – conceived and directed by Karol Klementewicz and co-written by him and Monika Pęcikiewicz – is a fair bit grittier than its potentially cheesy setup. That said, it loses something upon being shown outside its native Poland. In Britain – even the backsliding, eve-of-fascism Britain of 2026 – viewers will mostly shrug their shoulders at the concept of a gay man adopting a child, although they might raise their eyebrows at this particular one doing it. In Poland, the whole idea is culturally controversial and legally difficult, as we see when a solicitor advises Filip that if he wants to avoid Tosia being taken away from him – which Filip fears deeply, since he and Anka grew up unhappy in foster care after their mother died and their father drifted away – he needs “to stop being gay for some time”.

The show likes to throw in sly black humour like that, along with some fully hilarious slapstick. Filip turns up to a modelling audition and is asked to strip to his underwear, but isn’t wearing any so he stands there nude, leading to a terrific visual gag when the funniest possible thing happens; an appearance modelling swimwear on Poland’s answer to This Morning ends messily when Filip’s drugs kick in.

Mainly, though, Proud deals in pain, shame and a yearning for connection. The chosen family Filip is left with when all his biological family have gone are tenderly sketched, from poor faithful Olek, who tries to be a sassy man-eater but is really, as revealed when he belts out a piano-cabaret cover of Creep by Radiohead, a sweet soul broken by unrequited love; to makeup artist Kiki (Maria Sobocińska), who evidently had her teenage daughter far too young and has never quite got the hang of any life skill that isn’t parenting. They are not perfect but they love Filip, and their love language is putting up with him.

It’s a convincing ensemble, and the scenes with Tosia are so gorgeous and believable, you almost start crediting tiny Alicja Lewczuk with being an accomplished actor, despite her not yet having acquired the power of speech. As well as knowing how to marshal his cast, Klementewicz elevates Proud’s audiovisual palette to the cinematic with his use of closeups, moments of ringing silence, and the odd unforgettable image: Filip, who was on the dancefloor when the hospital rang with bad news, leaves a smear of glitter on his sister when he kisses her cold cheek in the morgue and gets ready to leave his flashy lifestyle behind.

By the end of episode three – which closes with a montage of Filip and Tosia, soundtracked to stunning effect by Kae Tempest’s Hold Your Own – we are on board, prepared to fight for Filip as he makes a ton more mistakes we will happily forgive.

Proud is on HBO Max now

Keyword – Sport
Trefwoorden – Formula One 2026, Silverstone, British Grand Prix, Formula One, Motor sport, Sport
Title – The Glastonbury of motorsport: how Silverstone became the biggest GP in F1 history | Formula One 2026 | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/gilesrichards
Link – The Glastonbury of motorsport: how Silverstone became the biggest GP in F1 history | Formula One 2026 | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-12T09:04:41.000Z
Category – Sport
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2026/jun/12/the-glastonbury-of-motorsport-how-silverstone-became-the-biggest-gp-in-f1-history

The scale of change at the British Grand Prix in recent years will be writ large come July when the meeting is poised to become the biggest in Formula One history.

The race this year is expected to sell out its new capacity of 570,000 over four days, which will be a record-breaking 50,000 increase on the previous highest attendance of 520,000 at the Australian GP in 1995. Only Wimbledon, across two weeks, will boast more numbers in the UK summer with Silverstone the largest event on F1’s calendar.

This is a turnaround of demographics as well as size that was almost impossible to imagine a little under a decade ago when the race was in danger of disappearing from the calendar all together.

The resurgence of F1 and indeed the fortunes of the old airfield have gone to an extent hand in hand. In Silverstone’s case, adaptation and innovation has put the track at the vanguard of dragging what had been a creaking part of the sport into catering to a demanding, sophisticated and younger audience.

Female attendance now makes up 43% of sales at the British GP. In the area at Silverstone dedicated to the British defending world champion, Lando Norris – the “Landostand”, which has been expanded to accommodate 20,000 this year – women make up more than half of the audience.

Stuart Pringle, Silverstone’s chief executive, is proud of how they have embraced and encouraged F1’s new followers. “Ten years ago people would have scoffed at the concept of nearly a 50-50 male‑female split. Unimaginable,” he says. “This concept of value for the weekend and a blend of different types of fans is working for us.

“This diversification has been powered so successfully by the unexpected growth in popularity in Formula One . That’s raising awareness, bringing the new crowd and once they find Silverstone they love the vibe of the grand prix and we’re loving these new friends.”

Hard as it is to imagine now amid the huge, smiling crowds at Silverstone, in 2017 the circuit activated the break clause on its contract with F1, allowing it to pull out in 2019 – with a very real danger that the British GP, which has been on the F1 calendar since the inaugural season in 1950, would cease to exist.

In 2015 and 2016 it was attracting race‑day audiences of 139,000 but losing money to the tune of £2.8m in 2015 and £4.8m in 2016. The key issue was the escalator clause in the contract done with the then F1 chief executive Bernie Ecclestone, under which the fee rose from £11.5m in 2010 to £16.2m in 2017. It would have been due to reach £25m by 2026.

Silverstone felt it was unsustainable and two years of negotiations with F1’s new rights owners, Liberty Media, followed. A new deal was signed at the very last minute, on the Wednesday before the British GP of 2019. It gave the circuit a new lease of life since when it has thrived.

“Pulling the break clause wasn’t scary because what would have been scary was to stay on that contract,” Pringle says. “Yes, there was uncertainty but it didn’t feel like it was going to be any worse where we were. I inked the signature [on the new contract] on the Wednesday afternoon before the event started on Friday morning. It went right to the wire and that was nerve-racking.”

Pringle was given an OBE this year for his work, an award he insists belongs to the whole organisation and since 2019, freed form the shackles of a financially crippling deal, they were able to take the event to the next level. As Liberty pursued its new agenda of making F1 meetings destination entertainment events, Silverstone was on board. It saw out Covid, just, and as F1 rode the wave of popularity of Drive to Survive, adapted to this new, growing audience.

The days of three blokes stood on a grassy knoll and a burger van were long gone. The British GP is now almost a motorsport Glastonbury, with a host of music, entertainment (Ally Pally-style darts on Sunday with Luke Littler included), food and facilities to ensure an overall experience that goes beyond the 90‑minute race itself. All of which may be derided by traditionalists, but the numbers demonstrate unequivocally that it is popular and has worked.

The range of entertainment is broad indeed. Music highlights from a wide-ranging bill this year include David Guetta, Richard Ashcroft, Chase and Status, and James Arthur; with late-night DJ sets from John Newman, Rudimental, Pendulum and MK. The night at the darts has Luke Humphries, Michael van Gerwen and Fallon Sherrock alongside Littler; there is a dedicated comedy tent featuring Lou Sanders and Paul Chowdhry, and a big-top stage aimed at a family audience.

They have also attempted to address every area. The traffic, once arguably the most torturously bad on the entire calendar, has been extensively reorganised. The track hires 600 double-decker buses as part of its park-and-ride and rail-and-ride scheme to shift an expected 167,000 people, while camping facilities now extend to accommodate 60,000 around the circuit.

These are the unglamorous logistics, like how to address the queues for the loos when everyone wants to go pre- and post-race, that don’t garner headlines but which are very much part of making the experience worthwhile and worth the price.

The latter has of course caused controversy. Popularity has led to soaring demand and there has been pushback over the cost to attend, notably because prices are far from where they were a decade ago.

Pringle, however, robustly defends their position. Having been part of the government’s dynamic pricing inquiry, he notes that 60% of customers who buy early tickets pay less than the average and less than if it was legislated to have a flat ticket price. His point is illustrated in that when first on sale a three‑day general admission ticket was £269 and is now £419.

That prices have been rising over time is undeniable, but that is the case at every popular GP on the calendar and very few are putting on quite the show Silverstone is now managing and expects to present once more come July.

“We’re committed to putting value into the ticket for the fans,” Pringle says. “We’re doing pretty well at getting the right sort of thing so that there’s something in it for everybody.”

Keyword – Games
Trefwoorden – Games, Culture, Xbox One, PC, PlayStation, Nintendo, Steam
Title – Summer Game Fest highlights: 34 new video games to look out for, from Alien Isolation to Crazy Taxi | Games | The Guardian
Author – https://www.theguardian.com/profile/keza-macdonald
Link – Summer Game Fest highlights: 34 new video games to look out for, from Alien Isolation to Crazy Taxi | Games | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-08T16:46:48.000Z
Category – Culture
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/games/2026/jun/08/summer-game-fest-highlights-new-video-games-resident-evil-silent-hill

Alien: Isolation 2 (Nintendo, PC, PlayStation, Xbox)

The sequel to a revered 2014 horror game from British developer Creative Assembly: this time you must evade the xenomorph on the surface of a storm-ravaged colony world.

Bad Magpie (2027) (PC, Xbox)

A little magpie with a broken wing and a lost flock makes its way alone, enthralled by a fallen piece of star.

Resident Evil Veronica (2027) (PC, PlayStation, Xbox)

The latest of Capcom’s zombie games to be raised from the dead is 2000’s Code: Veronica, presented here in first-person rather than the original’s third-person view. Every RE remake so far has been a banger, so expectations are high.

Mighty Cuphead Adventure (Nintendo, PC, PlayStation, Xbox)

An extremely 1980s platform shooter that looks straight off the NES/Mega Drive, from the makers of the notoriously difficult 1920s-animation tribute Cuphead. (Fans of that game will also be delighted to know that development has finally begun on another new Cuphead game, and that the announcement was made by a Cuphead puppet in a business suit.)

Apple Crumble (PC)

It’s your grandma’s birthday and your family is here – to murder her. This Knives Out inspired British locked-room mystery comes from the makers of Duck Detective.

God of War: Laufey (PlayStation)

The first blockbuster action game in which we play an extremely angry mother: Kratos’ wife, Laufey, trapped in the afterlife with a whole pantheon of other gods and demigods. Co-starring a talking sword and a gelatinous cube.

Magicians: The Devil’s Deal (PC, PlayStation, Xbox)

A sort of extended violent vaudeville production in which a magician has to escape hell, mocked at every turn by a very dapper Satan and his minions. Notes of Bioshock and Dishonored.

Gen Atlas (PC, PlayStation, Xbox)

The first game in a decade from Fumito Ueda, designer of landmark PlayStation games Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, and The Last Guardian. It has those games’ trademark sense of scale, as you pilot gigantic robots from within their detachable heads. I’m expecting Pacific Rim but with delicate emotional nuance.

Crossfire (PC, PlayStation, Xbox)

A military sci-fi narrative action game in the Last of Us mode, from developer That’s No Moon, in which two opposing operators must form an alliance to survive.

Control Resonant (PC, PlayStation, Xbox)

In this paranormal action game, you are an operative from the Federal Bureau of Control, a shady US government agency tasked with keeping supernatural threats imprisoned in a brutalist building in Manhattan. Except everything from the parallel realms that they were trying to contain is now loose, and you’ve got to deal with it.

Guild Wars 3 (2027) (PC, PlayStation)

It’s high time someone tried to evolve the massively multiplayer online role-playing game in which World of Warcraft still has a near monopoly. The glimmering high-fantasy setting of Guild Wars makes a pleasing contrast to the ravaged worlds of many online games.

Virtua Fighter Crossroads (PC, Xbox)

From Yakuza/Like a Dragon developers RGG Studio, this resuscitated Sega series sees you running from the Chinese mafia – half fighting game, half story adventure, with shades of Shenmue (which itself started out as a Virtua Fighter game).

1666 Amsterdam (PC)

French designer/director Patrice Désilets presents this impossible-to-describe game about witches set in early modern Europe, but these robed women are battling demons rather than consorting with them.

Final Fantasy VII Revelation (2027) (Nintendo, PC, PlayStation, Xbox)

The long-awaited final part of Final Fantasy VII Remake, in which Cloud and his painstakingly assembled crew of allies finally face off against Sephiroth. The conclusion of a six-year project to breathe new life into a seminal role-playing game.

Into the Wind (PC)

Seemingly inspired by both Kiki’s Delivery Service and Pixar’s Luca, in this game you inherit a family delivery service and must fly/zoom around an island community on a scooter or in a plane to get the goods to their destination.

Fable (2027) (PC, PlayStation, Xbox)

Man, this fantasy game has had quite the glow-up. It appears to have ditched the fairytale vibe and fart humour of the classic games for a more ambitious (but no less irreverent) tone.

Gears of War: E-Day (PC, Xbox)

Now back to being an Xbox exclusive, this long-awaited prequel covers the day when subterranean aliens arise to wipe out humanity.

Clutch (PC, PlayStation)

It’s been so long since we had a driving game with a story! This is a new cinematic open world driving game, set in Monaco and the French Riviera, a story about a young driver in a seemingly extremely dangerous racing competition run for the entertainment of the super-rich. The opulence of the surroundings matches the cars. Featuring Peter Serafinowicz and Little Simz.

Until Dawn 2 (PlayStation)

A bunch of young idiots are on a very haunted tropical island making a documentary about horrible things that happened there. Unsurprisingly this does not end well: your choices determine who lives and who dies.

The Lost Wild (PC, PlayStation)

The dinosaur survival game of every young kid’s nightmares – it looks like you’ll spend a lot of time avoiding extraordinary beasts while cowering underneath things that provide very little protection from their jaws.

Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis (2027) (PC, PlayStation, Xbox)

A remake of the very first Lara Croft adventure, starring Alix Wilton Regan as the next iteration of the storied action-hero. A classic globe-trotting adventure film of a game.

Threads of Time (PC, PlayStation, Xbox)

I was very charmed by this stunning-looking indie tribute to Chrono Trigger and the other Japanese RPGs of the 90s, which its developers obviously revere. Its band of heroes ravel through the eras of human history, from prehistory to the far future.

Red Kiss (PC)

Vampires are running amok in 1989 Berlin – and you are one of them, running a house of sexy undead misfits. A counterculture-inspired underground/underworld game with a soundtrack to match.

Exodus (PC, PlayStation, Xbox)

From some of the key people behind the sci-fi opera Mass Effect comes a new space-game that looks… well, a lot like Mass Effect. You’re a traveller venturing across worlds abandoned by an ancient race of aliens, looking for tech that can save your homeworld. It’s difficult to tell at this stage whether it will be as colourfully written as its inspiration, but one of the characters was a sentient octopus and another was an elephant, so there’s hope on that front.

Silent Hill: Townfall (PC, PlayStation)

Possibly the most promising of all the many, many horror games shown at the summer showcases, this psychological horror game is set on a Scottish island and looks profoundly (and interestingly) horrible.

The Wolf Among Us (PC, PlayStation, Xbox)

After many, many years of development hell, this comic-book adaptation returns from a re-formed Telltale Games .

Crazy Taxi: World Tour (2027) (Nintendo, PC, PlayStation, Xbox)

Sega’s colourfully insane driving game returns after a long, long hiatus – complete with its original theme track from the Offspring. It’s truly 1999 again.

Wardogs (PC)

A 100-player battlefield game for those who appreciate online shooters the old way – ie, not an extraction shooter or a battle royale, but a tactical war game. Old school Battlefield vibes.

The Lift: Supernatural Handyman Simulator (2027) (PC, PlayStation, Xbox)

Turn screws, assemble modules, rebuild furniture, clean things and find out what on earth went on in a vaguely post-communist-looking facility that it’s your job to renovate.

Clockwork Revolution (2027) (PC, Xbox)

InXile’s new game looks really fun, like Peaky Blinders except steampunk – another game in the Dishonored tradition. Time-travelling rogues flit back and forth in time to mess with the balance of power in their corrupt city.

Persona 6 (PC, PlayStation, Xbox)

There was just the merest glimpse of this upcoming entry in Atlus’s impeccably stylish series of role-playing games, in which teenagers harness manifestations of their psyches to battle (usually adult-controlled) evil. But the previous games’ pedigree is enough to inspire excitement.

There Are No Ghosts at the Grand (PC, Xbox)

Restore a crumbling old grand hotel in a dilapidated British town, befriending the local hapless policeman and meeting all the local residents. Also: there are giant shadow-spiders to shoot, and everything gets very weird after dark.

Vivarium (2027) (PC, Xbox)

A game about summertime memories that looks like a 1970s children’s manga, set in a rural community where humans intermingle with fantastical creatures. The Ghibli comparisons are inevitable, but appreciators of niche Japanese PlayStation games will also notice notes of Boku no Natsuyasumi.

Penguin Colony (PC, Nintendo)

Horror from a new perspective. This adaptation of HP Lovecraft’s novellas At the Mountains of Madness and A Shadow Out of Time has you observing through the eyes of a penguin, as humans come to the Antarctic in search of a cosmically powerful entity.

Keyword – Games
Trefwoorden – Games, Culture, James Bond, Action games, Adventure games
Title – ‘The enormity of the idea helped me’: how Patrick Gibson became gaming’s new James Bond | Games | The Guardian
Author – Matthew Castle
Link – ‘The enormity of the idea helped me’: how Patrick Gibson became gaming’s new James Bond | Games | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-10T11:00:19.000Z
Category – Culture
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/games/2026/jun/10/patrick-gibson-gamings-new-james-bond-007-first-light

I s any acting gig more contested than James Bond? Each week seems to bring a din of audition speculation so loud that it must be exhausting for the Elordis, Cavills and Dickinsons who are at the centre of it all. But when one of them does finally bag the role, perhaps they should seek the counsel of the actor who has quietly played the part for the last five years: Patrick Gibson. He’s the star of 007 First Light, the video game that has sold 2.7m copies since it was released two weeks ago.

As a computerised Bond, Gibson is the first video game actor to lend both his voice and likeness to the role. With endorsement from both Amazon MGM and previous brand guardians Eon there’s a case to be made that he is the seventh official Bond (and the second Irish one). Not that he knew this when submitting a self-tape to Danish developers IO Interactive. “There was talk of martinis in the audition sides that gave me an inkling,” says Gibson. “Although at that point I didn’t believe there was any way it could be that.”

And when the penny dropped? “It definitely tested my anxiety threshold.”

The key to pushing through that – listen up all you would-be 007s – was to lean into the pressure. “I think the enormity of the idea helped me. It felt so impossible as a dream that I was like, sure, may as well throw my hat in here,” he explains. Once he saw how IOI’s team had shaped the character, it only solidified his resolve. “It felt so quintessentially Bond, that it was almost carrying me along. I went from wanting to portray a character I’d known, to suddenly feeling like I was actually becoming it a little more.”

First Light adds the extra wrinkle of being an origin story. This isn’t new territory for Gibson, who’s best known for playing young Dexter Morgan in serial killer prequel Dexter: Original Sin. But there he had the north star of Michael C Hall’s older killer: glazed stare, sly intonation and terrible haircut. Although Daniel Craig was “his” Bond growing up, Gibson resisted aping any one turn, instead looking for common ground between portrayals. “The most exciting part was stripping away the experiences of the Bonds we’ve met in books and films and being left with the DNA of ‘who is this person?’ What ingredients existed before, that were perhaps nature rather than nurture?”

The game’s narrative director Martin Emborg definitely seems more invested in pinning down character qualities over a tick-box exercise in nudge-nudge fan-service. “The trappings – the martinis, the one-liners, the tuxedo – very easily get a jokey, tropey quality to them,” he says. “You need to double down on who the character is, and why he’s in situations where those things exist. Taking it seriously is what gives it the gravity that it absolutely needs to land.”

Still, it must have been pretty cool to say “Bond, James Bond”, right? Gibson’s cagey about which signature moments appear in the game – it doesn’t open with the gun barrel stroll, for starters – but agrees with our assessment that outside “To be or not to be” there are few line deliveries more scrutinised. What’s it like waking up, knowing you have to say it that day? “You have to imagine you’ve never heard it before. You remove yourself from the pop culture element and find truth in those moments. These things are organic happenings, rather than winking ‘a-ha’ moments.”

If the legacy wasn’t already challenging enough, there’s the extra layer of technical abstraction that comes with any video game performance. No jet-setting location shoots here. Filming First Light’s several hours of cutscenes required head-mounted cameras, tracking dots all over the face, blinding lights and an unflattering morph suit. “You’re almost literally naked,” says Gibson. “Which acting can feel like, but this takes it to a new degree. And then Martin says”: ‘Look cool and elegant. Action!’”

When we speak Gibson hasn’t yet played the game, nervously trusting that it has come along since early glimpses where “James Bond would walk in made up of boxes and spheres” and he had to keep it to himself that “I wasn’t totally impressed by the graphics”. There’s also the oddness of seeing strangers steer his digital likeness around. “It didn’t really dawn on me until my mate said: ‘I can’t wait to play as you in this game’, and that is the weirdest thing I’ve ever thought about.”

Above all this hangs the question of where Gibson’s performance will eventually sit in the grand scheme of 007. It’s been easy up until this point to treat Bond’s video game adaptations as a geeky offshoot; the buzzier conversation is always around who’ll play the role on film (although Gibson’s First Light co-star Lennie James said film-makers “would be mad” to not consider him for the part). Emborg sees the game as its own, meaningful alternative. “We’ve had the literary Bond. We’ve had the cinematic Bond for 62 years. What we have here is an interactive Bond that exists in its own right.”

Gibson certainly seems to be enjoying the full Bond experience. Seeing his character model for the first time (dapper, no tux). Learning what car he’ll tear around in (an Aston Martin Valhalla). Hearing his theme song (a stonking Lana Del Rey/David Arnold collaboration). For Gibson, these firsts are impossible to rank. “I had to constantly remind myself that I was doing it. It feels both ingrained, but also a world I couldn’t possibly be a part of,” he says. “I think the only way for me to approach it was with ownership, ignoring the canon and taking this reimagined character into this next stage.”

007 First Light is out now on PC, PS5 and Xbox on 27 May; and releases on Nintendo Switch 2 later in summer

Keyword – Global
Trefwoorden – Society, Carers, UK news, London, Schools, Education, School attendance and absence, Social care, Documentary films, Documentary, Film
Title – Aiden’s story of life as a young carer | Is Mum OK? Documentary | Society | The Guardian
Author –
Link – Aiden’s story of life as a young carer | Is Mum OK? Documentary | Society | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-06-09T09:31:31.000Z
Category – News
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/global/ng-interactive/2026/jun/09/how-do-you-give-britains-hidden-army-a-break-is-mum-ok-documentary