I have had a Cookie Clicker save for many years. It has moved with me between laptops, and, since I unlocked the ability for it to continue to earn cookies even when closed, I feel less attached to it, dipping in and out every few months. I have found the ways in which the game has expanded to be well thought out, if overly complicated. Nowhere is this more true than the stock market.

You unlock the stock market by upgrading your banks, and suddenly there’s a whole new currency to be learning, which varies with your cookies-per-second measure. While it means that the game is relatively stable compared to the main cookie attainment, the added layer of abstraction means it’s tricky to understand how it’s going to affect your cookie balance.

Anyway. Buy low, sell high. But what is low, and what is high? Each of the stocks – which are tied to the cookie-producing buildings you own – seems to have a different natural level, although they do each seem to vary all over the place. It looks as if the minimum is $1, and the maximum is up around $250. Things don’t vary too fast, but they do span a wide range. As a result you need to be monitoring the movements fairly regularly, and I just find it far too stressful trying to work out what is going up or down.

And yet there’s the prospect of a 4.5 quindecillion cookie profit …

Having completed Nico’s prologue, I moved into more familiar territory. It is many years since I’ve played Broken Sword, but I remembered most of the story and puzzles in the first section – the way the clown looked with the accordion, the annoying policeman Moue, the workman who had seemingly missed the huge explosion a few metres away from his hole. I made my way to the sewer, where I remember searching for ages in the Playstation version before seeing the tiny red dot of the red nose.

In this version, interactive points are highlighted, which makes all the difference.

Woven throughout the first hour or so of the game are more elements of Nico’s story, with her revisiting the quayside and Imelda Carchon, but the main focus remains on George. Maybe it’s years of experience and cynicism, but the story now seems very unrealistic – travelling between countries at the drop of a hat, particularly as an American; finding very specific villages in the middle of nowhere; a very limited number of people to actually talk to. And Nico, who (from George’s point of view) is always just sitting in her apartment, waiting for him to drop by.

Travelling to Ireland uncovered many stereotypes, and a goat which I remembered to be a pain to pass, but which I seemed to fluke my way past within a minute. I found a gem which had been dropped through the pub’s cellar grate. I paired this up with a tripod that Nico had stolen from the museum, and then found (again seemingly accidentally) where to place these, after an awkwardly-scripted meeting between world leaders in a sewer, which then revealed the next location.

So, I’m off to Syria.

Apologies for silence over the past few weeks, I have been in Paris. In real life, with my family, watching Olympic events and having an amazing time in a city that was fully embracing the celebration of the Games. And virtually, in a Paris with much darker overtones.

In fact, I have had very little time for videogames at all, since most days saw us out until late in the evening, and so I have made very little progress on this. Ahead of my trip I fancied revisiting the Broken Sword series, following an article in Retro Gamer, and since I had to take my laptop with me it seemed an ideal fit. I already owned the first four games on GOG, so I installed the first two and off we went.

As it turns out, I didn’t revisit anything. The first game is on GOG as the Director’s Cut, which includes a side story set before the main game in which Nico finds the body of Pierre Carchon and sets off to solve the murder herself. After following clues to the quayside, I found my way in through use of annoying sliding block puzzles and having to crush a bullet case. I found a lot of documents lying around on a table.

That’s as far as I got; the explosion in the cafe came next, but that will have to wait until I have some more time.