INKY SQUIGGLES

I came into this gaming experience without really knowing what to expect. Despite never having heard of the horror adventure title from indie games studio The Astronauts before, I bought it during a Steam sale without viewing much more than the description and a brief trailer. As someone who likes to research games in depth before committing to a purchase (and as a notorious 'fraidy cat), this was an unusual move for me. Certain key phrases really sold it to me on the store page: 'immersive storytelling'; 'inspired by the weird fiction from the early twentieth century'; 'atmosphere, mood, and the essential humanity of our characters'. Sometimes, when it's right, you just know. I wasn't disappointed.

The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe , £8.99 (Oxford University Press, 9780199537419) Publication date: 1 November 2008 (first published 1794) My rating:   ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆ The Mysteries of Udolpho is the story of orphan Emily St. Aubert, who finds herself separated from the man she loves and confined within the medieval castle of her aunt's new husband, Montoni. Inside the castle, she must cope with an unwanted suitor, Montoni's threats, and the wild imaginings and terrors that threaten to overwhelm her. (Penguin Classics description) I don't believe in judging classic literature according to contemporary sensibilities, which makes a review of an 18th-century novel challenging. Certainly, as other reviewers have noted, Radcliffe is due credit for her pioneering Gothic novels. Her prose is strong, her landscapes and settings are imagined on a grandiose scale and, excepting a tiresome every-other-page occasion of a fainting fit, in Radcliffe's work is a prevailing

Photo credit: Hiroto Hata (Mili) I learned early on that I wasn't seen in the same way as everyone else. My friends and I had been playing a careless game of Block 123 with a street lamp as our target post when a passing neighbourhood kid pointed at me. 'Eurgh,' she sneered. 'Why are your arms brown? You look dirty.' It wasn't said with malice, exactly; we lived in a small, racially homogeneous village and she was genuinely oblivious  –  both to why my skin looked that way and how her words might make me feel. And, having never been confronted with the brownness of my skin before, I didn't know how to respond. Although it had nettled me, I simply pretended not to care.

Sometimes, the thing that got to me the most  about the job-hunting process  wasn't the existential dread of drifting purposelessly through life. Nor was it the employers who never called when they said they would, like fickle dates. It wasn't even the  rigorous hoop jumping I was subjected to each week to secure my paltry Jobseeker's handout . Nope. Sometimes, after a hard week's jobseeker grinding, the thing that really irked me was the desperately bad writing that pervades so many job adverts.