What did you play last week?
Here's what we've been up to. What about you?
Lauren Morton played Creature in the Well, a pinball dungeon crawl that sure does sound intriguing. You run around in a dungeon slamming a ball into bumpers with your weapon, like a series of puzzle rooms designed by a villain who played too much of The Addams Family pinball back in the day.
Christopher Livingston has been playing Spellcaster University, a management sim that lets you construct your own Hogwarts (or maybe Unseen University if you're more of a Terry Pratchett fan), and protect it from rampaging orcs and the lord of evil as well as the students' own magical mishaps. It's such a good idea I'm surprised there aren't more games like it.
Samuel Roberts replayed XCOM, picking up an old save from The Enemy Within expansion and finding it full of soldiers named after people that he used to know. Like a Gotye song, but with more sectoids. This is Sam's last piece for PC Gamer, as he's off to an exciting life of attending every single comics convention. Bye, Sam!
Also on the European side of PC Gamer, Malindy Hetfeld is playing Hades and finding that even though she doesn't normally play roguelikes this one has captured her imagination. Supergiant keep making games in different subgenres and it keeps paying off. There's an interesting interview with them over at Kotaku that's worth reading.
Sam Greer played post-apocalyptic road trip Overland, and found its procedural elements underwhelming, making it hard to care for the randomized characters as well as resulting in some frustrations. I know my eyes involuntarily glaze over when I see the phrase "procedural elements" in a game's description these days.
I played I Love You, Colonel Sanders! By which I mean I made some suggestions to my girlfriend while she played, including that we put the moves on the hot young anime version of the Colonel. We got a game over for that. Oops. It may just be an ad for chicken but it's a funny ad for chicken, and I'm glad the studio who made a VR fortune teller and a visual novel about a witch at summer camp got paid to make it. It made me laugh more than Borderlands 3 did.
But enough about us. What about you? Is anyone playing Stygian: Reign of the Old Ones, the turn-based Lovecraftian RPG? Or how about Untitled Goose Game, which has some excellent waddling animations and makes it tempting to honk even when you're trying to sneak? Or the anime vampire action of Code Vein? Let us know!
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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.
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