What did you play last week?

(Image credit: DeCoded Production)

Christopher Livingston has been playing Skye, a casual exploration game that also happens to be a flight sim. You fly a seaplane around a nice-looking island with some windmills and stone arches, doing little jobs for the locals like you're the protagonist of a kids' show called Seaplane Sally or something. It's free and, Chris reports, extremely chill.

Rachel Watts has been playing Almost Gone, a sinister puzzle game that seems like the version of Monument Valley they play in Purgatory. She's also been looking into the world of games about exploring virtual desktops, games that temporarily turn your PC into somebody else's like Emily is Away and Her Story. It's something only PC games can really do, and it's given us some clever and strange experiences. Some day I'll get around to Hypnospace Outlaw.

James Davenport has been playing a demo of Mortal Shell, and now the beta is open you can try it too. James found it to be picking up where Dark Souls left off, both in terms of challenge and its storytelling. It assumes you've played a souls-like before, enough to already be good at them so it can get right to throwing the bear traps at your face.

Emma Matthews has been playing Apex Legends, plugging away at the tasks for that sweet battle pass loot, but feeling like it's taking away from the fun. Things like daily quests and log-in rewards are powerful motivators to keep us coming back to games, but they can also feel like obligations to discharge rather than games to play. It's a tough balance and I'd probably feel the same if I'd sprung for the battle pass.

I've been playing Artifact, having been invited to the beta for version 2.0. It's definitely an improved game, one that doesn't give me the pounding behind-the-eyes headache even watching someone else play Artifact set off, but it's still got a ways to go yet. And even with all these changes, its future feels uncertain.

Enough about us. What about you? Have you been playing Satisfactory, which seems to be doing rather well for itself? Has anyone else gone for a sci-fi photography trip in Cellular Harvest? Let us know!

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.