Come for Beastfolk Barber's cute, furry hairdressing, but stay for it…

Doom developer and Alice: Madness Returns creator American McGee have just teamed up with '90s goth icon Emily's inventor Rob Reger to turn the character into the perfect fixture for my creepy bedroom, and their limited edition collaboration is live after being revealed this April. Now I'm sitting next to my Emily the Strange plush and wishing that she had thoughts, and that I could hear them. It almost never happens that a teenage girl wearing all black gets turned into a very fluffy stuffed rabbit, so I'd like to get her take on it.

Strange things happen when an unstoppable goth force has met an immovable goth object – and every girl I used to be is screaming. This collaboration between McGee and Reger is nearly 30 years in the making; the pair originally met in 1998, "at the exact same time I was bringing my Alice to life," says McGee on Twitter, in reference to his first haunted Alice in Wonderland spinoff game from 2000. "That makes Alice and Emily creative twins!" But this Emily the Strange plush from McGee's fancy stuffed rabbit brand Plushie Dreadfuls marks the creative pair's first crossover, and it's dreadfully lovely.

There are 2,000 total numbered plushies, plus an additional 200 "collector editions" that include a card autographed by McGee and Reger, and they come with the usual Plushie Dreadfuls accoutrements, like a tote bag and a pen. I was proud to walk around the woods this week with my Emily the Strange tote that shows Emily the bunny spraypainting the words "I Love Cats" with an anarchist A in it for good measure, letting all the nearby crows know where my loyalties lie. The matching pen dispenses black, buttery ink, and it's topped with a detailed rubber mold of Emily in her rabbit suit. This special Plushie Dreadfuls set also comes with an Emily the Strange coin purse, which is hairy like her plush's rabbit hood and could hold a few essentials – money, keys, and fake vampire teeth for just in case.

But the real princess here is the plush, which is as detailed and silky as all of Plushie Dreadfuls' products (Emily is my third one). Reger's original character is a subtle young woman. All of the 13-year-old's power comes from her black hole eyes – otherwise, she usually just wears a plain dress, solid black tights, and a sensible pair of sneakers. Her canonical gaggle of four cats are the true fashionistas. Mystery has a trim collar with a star swinging from the middle. Neechee flicks a stylishly striped tail, scraggly Sabbath decorates his hind with a bandaid, and Miles is missing an eye.

Emily's Plushie Dreadfuls reincarnation, however, adds McGee's characteristic whimsy to Emily's bold, original design. There's a broken red heart stitched to the middle of her chest and the red-and-black stripes decorating her arms and legs have the impressive quality of looking smeared onto her fur, with the berry red bleeding onto what would have been her wrists if McGee and Reger hadn't transformed her into a cute rabbit. Her floppy black ears hint at the onyx-dark hair underneath her stitched-on hood, and a cat-and-crossbones embroidered on their apple-colored interior serve as foreboding reminders of her real friends. Those damn cats.

A dark scar curves around her face, mimicking the button eyes and busted ears of McGee's other plushes. They were originally made in the image of Alice's white rabbit plush in McGee's adventure games; the girl held tightly to the deformed doll until the orderlies in the asylum forced her to let go.

I get the sense that Emily the Strange's plushie would never let that happen. The numbered card I received with her teaches me some of her important slumber party rules: "Think for Yourself, Do it Yourself, Be Yourself. Or, better yet, be all you can't be." Like a scarred bunny rabbit, maybe?

Having once been a strange little girl, I used to worry Emily and Alice in Wonderland were the only souls on the planet to share my angst. But as a grown-up, I think my new Emily the Strange Plushie Dreadfuls plush is a reminder that strangeness can never hurt, and it never dies – it simply turns into a good story, or a timeless outfit made up of all-black.

Speaking of throwbacks, this fan made an incredible Lego Final Fantasy set, and now I'm hoping it becomes a real model.

• See all the latest goth plushies at Amazon

If you've checked in on Worms creator Andy Davidson sometime in these past few years, you'll know he's been hard at work on Worms: The Director's Cut 1.5, an unofficial but nonetheless Team 17-approved expansion pack for the original strategy-party mashup's Amiga-exclusive sequel. The goods have finally arrived: you can download the whole thing for free now.

It's got over 40 custom levels, 50 new sample packs for your Worms' voices, new teams and terrain types, and so on. It's a collaboration with fan creators and the likes of legendary indie developer Jeff Minter, who was honored via a Llamasoft-themed level in-game. In an interview with Daryl Baxter, Davidson called the expansion a chance to "celebrate the Amiga."

"The expansion pack is a chance for people to enjoy the full package of DC, with all it could do. Rather than closing a chapter, I hope it gives the game a new lease on life," he told Baxter, saying work is underway on a site players can use to share custom levels. "It would be nice for a wider audience to get a chance to play DC. It’s the version of Worms I’m most proud of, as I feel it’s when the gameplay and humour really clicked."

Notably, Director's Cut never made it to modern platforms, but Davidson said in a post on X that the expansion will play nice with emulators if you don't have old hardware lying around. While working with such an old version of Worms—which as you may know, spawned countless sequels and spinoffs all the way through 2025's Apple Arcade-exclusive Worms Across Worlds—was a chance for Davidson to revisit his favorite take on the series, it was also a challenge.

As he told Baxter, "Going back to the original code did prove much more difficult than I imagined. There was a lot I just didn’t remember three decades on, and scrolling through the code I did wonder how I managed it all in the first place!"