We join Lara Croft in St Francis’ Folly – inspired by the Unesco-listed monasteries of Meteora in Greece – as the light shines through the cracked ceiling and a flock of bats glide across the vast ruins below. When Lara leaps down to the monastery’s crumbling pillared courtyard, it becomes clear that these screeching, leathery creatures aren’t just set dressing. As they lurch towards her with unpredictable movements, she dispatches the swarm with a flurry of gun fire and panicked punches.

It’s a suitably cinematic reintroduction to our heroine and her very first adventure. Co-developed by longtime Lara custodians Crystal Dynamics and Polish studio Flying Wild Hog, Legacy of Atlantis is a reimagining of the classic 1996 game Tomb Raider, and this familiar cliffside location is now brimming with new life and believable detail. Yet while our reunion gets off to an auspicious start, I have my concerns. It feels like reconnecting with an old friend at the pub, only for them to begin spouting conspiracy theories two pints in.

Where the ’96 original forced players to rely on their wits – or a pricey strategy guide – to figure out what to do, Lara can now straight-up cheat. She’s equipped with an environmental scanner, so a button tap reveals extra environmental lore or simply the solution to a puzzle. It’s a change that feels somewhat sacrilegious, and may detract from the eerily isolating atmosphere that made the original so beloved.

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“If the devs from 1996 had the technology that we have today, what choices would they make?” asks Raul Siqueira, game director at Crystal Dynamics. “The sense of isolation in the original game was largely due to the technological limitations of that time,” says Arek Tomaszewski, art director at Flying Wild Hog, likening it to the fog in Silent Hill which was both an artistic decision and a way to cover up empty environments on the PlayStation 1. “The darkness and the feeling of being alone created an emotion that you remember. When I replayed Tomb Raider, my initial memory was the exact same. What we are trying to do now is build environments – like the spaces in Greece – where you feel as if you are the first person discovering them in centuries, entering places that have been left untouched.”

Lara now crafts balms from a menu rather than finding anachronous first aid kits in centuries-old untouched tombs. Somewhat less believably, she can also pause her adventure to whip up stat-boosting stews, Breath of the Wild-style. These additions are among a slew of modern flourishes that I feel unsure about. Is the original really improved by giving Lara a grappling hook, RPG-esque stats, skill trees and quick time events?

One area that Flying Wild Hog – the maker of Hard Reset and Shadow Warrior – knows well is combat. As Lara delves deeper into the dingy ruins of the Damocles chamber, she is ambushed by a familiar foe: a leopard. But this roaring beast now moves with convincing agility. As well as swiping at Lara, leopards now hide from her, retreating through holes in the walls before returning with an emboldened counterattack. Luckily Lara is fiercer too. As the beast lunges toward her, she draws her shotgun and blasts, causing the creature to crumple to the floor in Max Payne-esque slo-mo. The newly dynamic combat is the gameplay overhaul that looks most promising – a world away from the stationary shooting and “dog scooting across the carpet” backsteps of yesteryear.

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Narratively, the remake promises a deeper story and some fan-pleasing easter eggs. For this iteration, Lara is played by Dragon Age: Inquisition and Cyberpunk 2077 actor Alix Wilton Regan. “Hearing her voice in the game now, she is Lara Croft,” says Tomaszewski. “The sheer amount of character and depth she brought to Lara is unbelievable.” The game’s publisher, Amazon, is also the custodian of a forthcoming Phoebe Waller-Bridge-produced Tomb Raider TV show, and the developers suggest there will be some connective tissue between the two projects. After hopping across falling swords and solving Damocles’s puzzles, Lara emerges from the darkened tomb into a burst of sunshine, and my demo culminates with the tease of a vast, ancient civilisation.

“I think this game changed our DNA as a studio,” says Tomaszewski. “In our previous games, like Shadow Warrior, every second was filled with nonstop action. Here we wanted to master pacing, and we learned a lot from Crystal Dynamics.”

Gaming as a whole has undoubtedly transformed since Lara’s first adventure. Tomb Raider’s dodgy camera controls and questionable Playboy collaborations are thankfully now dusty historical relics themselves. Yet as visually impressive as Legacy of Atlantis looks, I can’t help but wonder if a touch of Lara’s brilliance lay in her original simplicity. By encumbering her with modern game mechanics, a bit of her soul may be lost. If Legacy of Atlantis offers the option to disable all of that for a purer Tomb-raiding experience, it could still be a winner.

Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis is scheduled for release in February

• This interview took place at Gamescom in Cologne, Germany. The writer’s travel and accommodation expenses were met by Gamescom.

A US prosecutor described China’s Huawei as a criminal enterprise that stole from US companies to build its telecommunications empire, as ⁠the trial against the tech company kicked off in Brooklyn federal court on Wednesday.

“Theft, lies, cover-up,” Taylor Stout, a trial attorney from the US Department of Justice, said in the government’s opening statement. “For 20 years, that’s how Huawei, a massive Chinese telecommunications company, victimized American companies ⁠and abused the American financial system, all ⁠in an effort to dominate the telecommunications ​industry around the world.”

Huawei conspired to steal trade secrets from five US companies, including operating system source code for internet routers from Cisco Systems and a robotic arm to test phones from T-Mobile, to gain an unfair competitive advantage and grow its business, ⁠the prosecutor told jurors.

“We’ll hear from people who caught Huawei red-handed trying to steal American tech,” Stout said, adding there was video of an employee stealing the robotic arm.

The defense painted a very different picture of the company and its success in court.

“It’s about competition, not conspiracy. Innovation, ⁠not theft. Ordinary business dealings, not criminal conduct,” Brian Heberlig, one of a team of lawyers representing Huawei, said in his opening. “Huawei earned its success … There was no blueprint for crime.”

Huawei is known ​for its telecommunications equipment, mobile phones and, in recent years, AI chips. It does ‌business globally but its networking gear is restricted in ‌the US and suppliers are banned from exporting US goods and technology to the company without approval from the Department of Commerce.

On Thursday, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson said “the Chinese ‌government firmly opposes the US side’s suppression and containment of Chinese enterprises,” when asked about the case and the US prosecutor’s “criminal enterprise” description.

China “firmly supports Chinese enterprises in safeguarding their legitimate rights and interests”, the spokesperson said at a regular press conference.

The case against Huawei began in 2018 with an indictment charging the company and its chief financial officer with bank fraud and sanctions violations for allegedly misrepresenting its business in Iran to get around US sanctions and move millions of dollars through the US financial system.

In the ensuing years, it grew into a sprawling indictment that includes racketeering, a pattern of illegal activity conducted by an enterprise to generate profit.

Heberlig, defending Huawei, told jurors that prosecutors will describe routine activities ‌by global tech companies “but will twist those ordinary activities to try to make them look criminal”.

He said the incidents involving Cisco and T-mobile were “actions by individual employees” and that ​management worked to make things right after learning of them.

The prosecutor also accused the company of keeping the nature of its work in Iran secret so it could launder US dollars through the financial system and could help the Iranian government spy on its own citizens. The defense said there was no evidence Huawei knew the dollar-clearing would violate US sanctions law.

In 2018, Huawei’s chief financial officer, ​Meng Wanzhou, was detained in Vancouver after being picked up on ​a US warrant as a part of the original indictment. She fought extradition for nearly three years before being freed to return to China ​in a diplomatic agreement between the US, China ‌and Canada.

The charges against her ​were dismissed in 2022 as part ​of a deferred prosecution agreement but admissions she made are set to be introduced as evidence at the trial, which is expected to last three months.

I have a confession. I love my social media algorithm. It is a perfectly curated window into my insane and inquiring mind. It knows precisely which videos will tickle me and which memes will gently distract me from the slow collapse of humankind.

On Tuesday the Australian government announced “world-leading” reforms that would force social media platforms to allow users to opt-out of algorithms, dubbed “my feed, my way”. On the same day, I was delighted to be confronted with a video on Instagram of a woman accidentally spilling a bucket of eels on a Chinese train. Dozens of eels slithered among the passengers, who appeared not as surprised as I would have expected.

In bed that night, after sending the video to several friends and watching it multiple times, I lamented to my partner how I would find content like this if my accounts weren’t at the whim of the algorithm gods. “You can still search for eels,” he said. But would it be the same?

So, for 24 hours, I decided to manually turn off my algorithm via little-known settings on Instagram to get a sense of how the reforms might change my feed. This feature – accessed simply by tapping on the Instagram logo at the top of the home screen – allows you to limit your feed to posts from accounts you are following, in chronological order. This is basically what social media feeds, including Facebook, looked like when they started.

Would I be thrust back into the old days of social media, to how things were before artificial intelligence and Elon Musk bought Twitter and everything became an ad?

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As a reminder of how things used to be, I scroll back to my first posts on Instagram and find sepia-heavy pictures of trees, gigs and friends. “The SKY,” says one, simply showing a sunset.

I am gripped with nostalgia for 2012, when all my posts got eight likes and no comments and I only followed two dozen close friends from school.

For a truly “authentic” social media experience, I trawl through my contacts and unfollow any account that isn’t a person I have met in real life. It is refreshing to unfollow news accounts, and politicians, but sad to let go of funny influencers and meme accounts and chefs.

“Goodbye, Ottolenghi,” I think wistfully. “Farewell, woman from Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders.” In total, about 100 accounts get the axe. I refresh my feed, and it only takes about 10 minutes of scrolling to run out of content to look at.

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For the first time in years, Instagram informs me I have reached the “End of following”. “There are no more posts from accounts that you follow from the past 30 days,” it says.

I am floored and unmoored. Each time I refresh my feed for the next few hours, there is nothing new for me to mindlessly scroll. Instinctively, I keep clicking on the app but it’s futile. Is this how social media used to be? A tool to communicate with people rather than a way to remain constantly distracted?

What disturbs me, though, scrolling through a feed that should theoretically be made up of friends and family updating me about nice moments in their lives, is that it still feels hollow and impersonal.

Mostly, people are using it for self-promotion, whether it be posting about something they’ve published, projects they’ve done, brand partnerships or attempts to “go viral”. The only ones who seem to be using social media as it used to be are my mum and her friends, who still upload happy snaps with abandon. This is soothing but also very boring. And do I really need to know or care that someone I met backpacking in 2015 is appearing at an art festival in Amsterdam?

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During my lunch break, instead of hitting the apps, I read my book and look at my surroundings. It’s nice. Maybe the solution is not to opt out of algorithms but to opt out of social media altogether.

The justification for turning off algorithm-driven content makes sense. The federal government and many experts have raised concerns about how dangerous and divisive content can be pushed into people’s feeds, drawing them further and further into rabbit holes.

I have watched on with concern as figures from the “manosphere” gain traction across the world alongside the rise of far-right parties, and how thinness appears to be the new norm in Hollywood, with eating disorder content proliferating on X, TikTok and Instagram.

Thankfully, this has not been my social media experience. According to Instagram’s AI summary of my algorithm, a little-known feature of the app, I enjoy “community events” and “saving furry friends”, with a particular penchant for content related to the “Sydney food scene” and, somewhat vaguely, “Australia” (click on the reels icon and then the double-heart symbol in the top-right corner to see yours).

My “For You” page is a haphazard collection of animals, food and gossip about reality TV. The top posts are an old man who summarises the latest episodes of Below Deck Mediterranean, a dachshund being pet with a spatula and someone making a cake with the face of Edward Cullen. It knows me so well!

But is this healthy? Do I really need to spend my time watching AI-generated dogs dancing in the shower, or marvelling at a man attempting to eat an extremely gigantic cone of soft-serve ice-cream? After 24 hours switching off, my conclusion? It’s numbing my brain and turning my own thoughts into slop.

It was always going to be difficult to follow Spider-Man. Insomniac’s three games based around the web-slinger are masterpieces of superhero wish fulfilment, allowing you to swoop above a depiction of Manhattan alive with graffiti artists, roving journalists and gun-toting gangsters. If anyone should be up to the task, it’s Wolverine. A beloved Marvel stalwart, his life much darker and bloodier than Peter Parker’s, he seems the ideal protagonist for a moody action adventure. Yet somehow this well-made game falls short of its potential.

Set years before the founding of the X-Men, Marvel’s Wolverine sees a disenfranchised Logan falling back in with Sabretooth and Mystique when their mentor Nathaniel Essex is kidnapped by mutant-hating billionaire Bolivar Trask. This archetypal tech bro has a disturbing plan for world domination and the X Team are out to stop him – but there is a secret buried in Wolverine’s past that’s about to cause an eruption. It’s a decent setup, filled with the sort of intrigue, violence and Freudian tension we expect from the X-Men.

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At its heart, though, Marvel’s Wolverine is, like its hero, an unreconstructed brawler. From the start, you can dodge, parry, shred attack and leap attack with speed and savagery, but as you earn XP, you unlock new techniques and combos as well as powerful special moves such as the tornado spin, which damages enemies all around you in a flurry of blades, or the spiral strike, which lets you drill through an enemy to escape a crowd. Your main combo attack is the barrage, accessed by hitting shred repeatedly, but this can be closed with a leap attack or other unlocked techniques for extra damage, and to stagger opponents. On top of this you can also unlock new DNA strands, which provide buffs to your health and cooldown speeds. The highlight, though, is the three-stage rage meter, which builds as you damage and parry enemies. At each stage you get more powerful attack and defensive stats, and at the final stage you become an almost indestructible machine of carnage, which is immensely liberating.

But while fights feel smooth and empowering, there is rarely any need to be creative or experimental. In the Spider-Man games, the character’s grace, his web-throwing, the three-dimensional nature of his movement, all encourage you to fight beautifully; here I was reminded of 80s beat-’em-ups, or PS3 brawlers – a bludgeoning production line of identical fights against increasingly over-familiar enemy types. Sure, this fits with Wolverine’s character, but similar melee-based brawling adventures such as Devil May Cry and Bayonetta provide deeply layered combat systems and diverse enemy types which reward (and often demand) varied techniques from players. I survived a huge majority of skirmishes in the default difficulty setting by pummelling parry and switching between linked shred attacks and leaps, opening and closing barrage combos in the process, while letting rip with specials whenever they came online. The boss battles, which felt extremely familiar and at times cliched, demanded a similar approach, just with better timing and more patience.

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Similarly, the Insomniac team warned us to expect a more tightly structured environment than in the Spider-Man titles, and they were not kidding. Wolverine is mostly linear, thrusting us from set-piece to set-piece in a globe-trotting race against time and plausibility. When we do get to big, inviting cities such as Madripoor or Tokyo, we find roads closed off and invisible walls directing us back to the action. The whole world feels like a theatrical backdrop, untouchable and aloof, and many miles from the bustling metropolis we got to live in and explore as Spidey. Yes, we all know this makes sense – Wolverine is by nature a rootless character, an inveterate drifter, but presenting us with a Tokyo so richly detailed and visually seductive, only to lock most of it off, feels almost cruel.

In contrast, the game’s interpretation of Logan is a triumph. Through exquisite character art and animation, and a brilliant performance from Liam McIntyre, he comes alive as a flawed, often unwilling hero, capable of extreme brutality and touching vulnerability. His rivalry with Sabretooth and his blossoming relationship with Jean Grey are intricate and involving, resulting in some truly moving scenes. But you play no interactive part in the linear story or its relationships, and the few attempts at offering puzzles tied in with the narrative are hurriedly designed and quickly abandoned. We’re told that Wolverine’s past trauma will be explored, but for much of the game this comes via snippets of lore that you unlock by competing in mini-challenges such as timed parkour runs and horde battles against waves of baddies. It feels like a rather insensitive way to portray and process PTSD. The climax of the game, when it comes, is an absolute technical marvel, a Homerian clash of super powers, but sadly its impact is lessened by far too many exposition flashbacks and airy metaphysical deviations.

Marvel’s Wolverine remains a lovingly crafted, beautifully polished hack-’em-up that will no doubt thrill Wolverine fans who want to eviscerate as many enemies as possible while looking out for X-Men easter eggs, and pausing once in a while to have story and subtext thrown at them. But despite the full-bloodied use of Wolverine’s claws and a generous array of moves and combos, combat lacks both the bone-crunching impact of the Batman Arkham games and the balletic joy of Spider-Man. As the game goes on and the enemies line up, it feels increasingly like a chore. Logan becomes what he always dreaded: hired muscle.

There is so much seductive and emancipating rage in this game, in its story, its combat mechanics, its gloriously conflicted protagonist. But the crescendo always feels like it’s just out of reach, like an argument in another room, or a war on the news.

In August 2009, at the very first Gamescom expo, I sat in a small meeting room in Germany and played Mario Kart and World of Warcraft on a laptop, via technology that was then completely new: cloud gaming. It was a demonstration for a yet-to-be-launched service called Gaikai that promised to let you play any game in a browser window, without a console. (Here is an ancient video of that demonstration, featuring a very young Keza.) With a single click I could launch into any game, hosted on servers hundreds of miles away. It really did look like the future.

Since then, plenty of companies have tried to be the first to truly crack game streaming, vying to be the Netflix of games. Sony ended up buying Gaikai for $380m (£242m) in 2012; its technology now powers the streamable classic games library on PlayStation, and the PS5’s advanced game streaming. OnLive, Gaikai’s first competitor, launched in 2011 but shut down after less than a year, leaving Sony to acquire all its patents. Google’s Stadia cloud gaming service also imploded, launching in 2019 and shutting down three years later.

Despite the fact that people simply don’t seem to want game streaming services – or at least not enough to pay a stand-alone monthly subscription for them – Sony and Microsoft have remained steadfastly committed to the idea, bundling game streaming into their PlayStation Plus and Xbox Game Pass services. I use both quite regularly when I want to check out a game quickly, mostly because modern download sizes are ridiculous (Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, say, takes up nearly 150GB of my PS5 space, almost a quarter of its usable storage). Who wants to do 30 minutes of hard drive management every time they want to play something new?

Last week, however, Microsoft announced that it was introducing time limits for game streaming: you’re now allowed 5-15 hours a month, depending on your subscription tier. And yes, you’re right: that is not enough time to play through even one single average-sized game. This brings Microsoft’s previously unwavering commitment to cloud gaming into question – and when even Microsoft with its infinite resources can’t seem to make it work, is the writing on the wall for game streaming as a whole?

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In the early days, the biggest problem with streaming was input lag: the time it took for the game to respond to your button-pressing. Normally, when you’re playing a game this lag is imperceptible. Via streaming, it would often be horribly obvious, your character taking maybe a full second to jump after you’d pressed the A button. Not all games rely heavily on timing and finesse, but a lot of them do, and playing games on a minor time-delay felt nauseating.

This is much less of an issue now, but another problem has only gotten worse: game streaming requires the instantaneous transmission of a lot of data, making it taxing on your internet connection and expensive for the service provider. Here’s a comparison: watching an hour of Netflix uses about 1GB of data. An hour of game streaming via Xbox requires about 4GB. Microsoft’s servers have to stream you the video of your live gameplay, and continually receive and interpret your controller inputs. No wonder Microsoft suddenly wants to limit your hours.

The cloud gaming model has always been based on the idea that data infrastructure would become faster and cheaper in the future. Its selling point is outsourcing computing power so that you can play whatever you want without upgrading your console or PC, or even without having one at all. Unfortunately, thanks to AI companies and their chatbots’ bottomless demand for computing power and energy, the opposite has happened. Data and computing power are now more expensive. Ironically, this change has been driven by Microsoft itself as much as anything else: a huge chunk of the company’s spending went on data centres and AI infrastructure in the last fiscal year. This suggests that Microsoft is choosing to prioritise data provision for users of Azure and Copilot over its gaming customers.

Will this affect you? Probably not. Only 4% of all Game Pass subscribers use it for more than 15 hours a month, Microsoft said in a blog post announcing the changes. Which brings us right back to the question: if cloud gaming really is the future, why is nobody using it? It’s been a long time since that 2009 demo, and this technology has still yet to meaningfully break through. Is it time to give up on it?

Alongside Sony and Microsoft, there is one other player left in this death match: the US-based tech firm Nvidia, whose GeForce Now game-streaming service (launched in 2013 and revamped many times since) might just be the world’s most successful. Nvidia has been riding high on the AI boom, becoming the most valuable company in the world. Its computing hardware powers all the datacentres that the rest of the tech industry has been building, to satisfy imagined future AI demand. Perhaps, when all of this shakes out, it will be the only company left that can afford to provide game streaming services at all.

What to play

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I have been variably unwell for most of the summer, and in need of something absorbing, so I dived into Kingdom Come Deliverance II – think Skyrim, but 15th-century historical fiction.

I was impressed immediately by the outstanding script, story and performances, all of which are much more humorous and entertaining than I was expecting from a hardcore medieval RPG. And I also love how unashamedly laborious this game is: you must control each swipe of a drawn-out sword fight; you have to manually grind and mix herbs for health-restoring concoctions; and if you want anyone to speak to you, you must regularly wash your face (and grubby tunic) so you don’t stink. Last night, I spent 20 minutes hammering out horseshoes in the forge. The opening hours have you hauling sacks of flour around while a tavern landlady swears at you.

I can’t help but respect this naturalist commitment to grime and busywork; knight-life isn’t all horseplay, you know. I have spent many, many hours with this game and I am still basically a stinking peasant. I may well never finish it, but I am resolved to at least get to the point where I have my own steed and a pair of decent boots.

Available on: Xbox, PlayStation 5, PC
Estimated playtime: 55+ hours

What to read

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• A Nintendo broadcast on Tuesday spilled a bunch of new details about the upcoming Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake, which I’m relieved to say is looking beautiful. Link looks doll-like in the updated style, and Hyrule Castle Town looks a bit like a living Playmobil village overlaid with a watercolour-ish filter that makes the whole game look like something half remembered. (I am somewhat less enthused by the addition of voice acting to the cutscenes; Navi was already annoying enough.) Check out the demo here.

• For the Ringer, frequent Guardian games contributor Lewis Gordon has written this excellent long-read on Japanese publisher Capcom’s current streak of brilliance, talking to a host of executives and developers about exactly how the company has bucked the trend while the rest of the games industry is on fire.

• Patrick Miller – better known as pattheflip – has published a thought-provoking reflection on how and why some players become overinvested – even dependent – on video games. “I say this as someone who has loved video games his whole life; if games serve a load-bearing function in someone’s life, it’s the life that needs fixing, not the games.”

• At the end of last week, the White House released this horrible little propaganda arcade, featuring nasty riffs on popular games, such as a version of Tetris where you have to build a wall on the Mexican border to stave off “the coming horde”. That particular game was later removed after The Tetris Company expressed its opposition.

What to click

• Grand Theft Auto VI: can playing a video game count as cheating on your partner?

• Thieves target mail order sales as Pokémon card prices soar

• ‘Ruin and decay bring a chance of rebirth’: Hidetaka Miyazaki on uniting players in a damaged world

Question Block

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Reader Piero sent in this question (along with some super-nice feedback on the newsletter – thank you, Piero!):

“I enjoy the occasional foray into story-driven RPGs, such as Kingdom Come Deliverance, Skyrim and the Baldur’s Gate series, but as I get older I’m finding the continual combat sections overwhelming and dull. Could you recommend me some good RPGs that don’t rely on combat as the main game mechanic?”

You’re not alone, Piero – for a surprising proportion of players, combat is just something you have to do in order to get to the bits of a game that you find more interesting. Most RPGs these days have a “story mode” option that at least makes all the fighting trivially easy, if you’re not interested in engaging with it. There is of course Disco Elysium, a complex role-playing game with no combat at all; like Citizen Sleeper, it is mostly text-based. I have heard good things about Eastshade, an open-world game where you’re a painter rather than a fighter. I’d also suggest Pentiment, though it’s a very different style from Skyrim. And Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles is worth a look if you don’t mind cutesy.

If you have a question for Question Block – or anything else to say about the newsletter – hit reply or email us at pushingbuttons@theguardian.com.