Game of the Week: Minecraft and pain-free construction

Pepper Grinder is out now, which is wonderful – do give it a look if you’re after a fun, chuggy action game with a touch of Drill Dozer to it. I played the game while surrounded by actual drills, as we’re having our bathroom redone at the moment. We haven’t had builders in the house for a while. We put off the current job until it reached the point where you literally couldn’t emerge from the bathroom without a rusted tap in your hand and a cheerful flood of ground water following you into the hallway. It’s been noisy and friendly and fascinating.

Let’s linger on this just a little, because it’s the reason for our actual game of the week. The builders, who are excellent, turned up on day one and immediately put on a radio they’d brought with them, which was tuned to one of those stations only builders appear to be able to locate on the dial, a process I imagine is a bit like those specific alternate worlds Will can cut through to in His Dark Materials. Radio installed, the house was swiftly filled with Ultravox, which, now I think of it, sounds a bit like a builder’s supply brand name anyway. Next, though, came stripping the tiles, which I had assumed would be a forensic process – somewhere between art restoration and the excavation of an archaeological dig. Instead, it sounded like a bunch of wolves were in our bathroom eating the walls for half an hour. Then we looked out the window and our bath tub was magically on the lawn.

Enough of this. Our game of the week is Minecraft, and it’s because while all this noisy, juddering, brilliant real-world building was going on, my daughter was back into one of her Minecraft cycles. In the real world, builders will be sorting our bathroom for a fortnight. In Minecraft, my daughter built several subway extensions while I had a quick lunch and watched her at work.