What We're Playing

Earlier this week I tried to install Ace Combat 8, only to discover that I didn't have space for its 140GB girth on any of my three hard drives. This is a signal that I should play some of the games I've already got installed, many of which were downloaded months ago and never touched. So this weekend I shall be playing a lot of games for 15 minutes and then deleting them forever.

What about you? I humbly petition that this article's commenters are not sufficiently numerous. Tell us what you're playing down below, and then tell all your friends to do the same.

Dicevaders

I had some fun with StarVaders, a turn-based tactics game about buildcrafting against robot enemies that trundle onto a single-screen grid. Dicevaders is set in the same universe but injects dice into its name and systems, with all your build craft and tactical manipulation focused on adjusting your dice and their odds. Starvaders deserved more attention; hopefully Dicevaders gets it.

RetroSpace

There have been a handful of BioShock-inspired immersive sims this year, and I confess that a phrase like "disco-punk" makes me want to run a

I really should be playing Silent Hill: Townfall, a spooky first-person explore 'em up inspired by the kind of Fife towns some of my family currently live in. Alas, I'm no fan of horror games and I've never Silent Hilled at all. It's hard to imagine starting now.

Thankfully there are plenty of other new games to try this week. Tell us what you're playing in the comments down below.

Sin Reloaded

I have fond memories of Sin, a shooter that released two weeks before Half-Life and which offered a different vision of the future of first-person storytelling. One that was considerably stupider, more tacky, and more Build engine-inspired. I'm not sure I'd ever want to go back, but I'm tempted to at least try that opening bank mission with its working ATM screens in this Nightdive remaster.

Well Dweller

I had a lot of fun with Crypt Custodian, Kyle Thompson's hack-and-slash metroidvania set in a cat-themed afterlife of floating islands. Well Dweller is Thompson bringing his many talents to bear on a Hollow Knight-like, which means it's another metroidvania, but with a

Dare I spend a huge chunk of money on Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave? I haven't loved an entry in the turn-based tactics series since Awakening, and there's a chance I'd be buying something a hundred hours-long that I only end up playing for six. Plus, I have Star Wars: Zero Company right here, waiting, unplayed, if I want some turn-based shenanigans.

And yet, it looks new and shiny. Below you'll find three other new and shiny things you could spend money on, but tell us what you're actually playing in the comments. And what I should do about Fire Emblem.

Trails In The Sky 2nd Chapter

The next entry in Nihon Falcom's ongoing remake project for their classic JRPG series. Trails games are long and numerous, with airships, melodrama, and both turn-based and real-time hack-and-slash combat. I played a couple of hours of the previous game in the series and It Was Not For Me, but if you're more tolerant of cumbersome tutorialisation and adoptive sibling romance then I hear there's a great world and story to explore and hundreds of hours of games

We're not a Nintendo site, which means I have no reason to tell you that I like weird wet Link from this week's Nintendo Direct about the Ocarina Of Time remake. I think it's healthy for games critics to be sceptical of nostalgia-bait revivals of beloved games, but also that such cynicism needs to be married with aesthetic principles that offer stalwart support to the grotesque. Plus, I badly want that new Kirby.

Alas, here are three actually-on-PC games you could be playing this weekend. Tell us what you are playing in the comments, whatever platform it's on.

Roguecraft DX

Rogue 64 was a topdown roguelike released for Commodore 64 back in 2021, and Roguecraft was its Amiga-bound successor with fancier graphics in 2024. Roguecraft DX is the inevitable PC port. It's a pocket-sized dungeon crawler with quick runs, handsome pixel art, and the "craft" in the title is a reference to Lovecraft rather than to item crafting. It otherwise seems fairly traditional, but roguelikes that play it straight aren't as common as they once were.

Wardogs

At a glance, Wardogs looks like every other Battlefield or Tarkov-derived

September always bring an avalanche of game releases, but I'm told that this September is even more of a whiteout than normal. Honestly? You wouldn't know it to look at the PC release calendar, where the month looks exactly as blizzardy as it always does, and pretty much as snow-packed as every other month. I think I maybe just care about different games.

Here are three of this month's releases that you could be playing this weekend. Tell us what you are playing in the comments.

Moonlighter 2: The Endless Vault

Moonlighter has a wonderfully straightforward premise: go dungeon delving for treasure at night, then sell that treasure in your shop during the day. It was partly responsible for popularising what's become a genre, and this sequel with fully 3D environments has now hit 1.0 after a little less than a year in Early Access. I hate the subtitle, but don't hold that against it.

[Disclosure from Brendy: I worked on this game's story in its earliest stages - Graham forgot to say. But as far as I can tell they didn't use a damned word! So if there are zero jokes

Gamescom took place this week, but that didn't stop people releasing new game after new game. I could have packed this list with triple the usual number, but I am but one frail and achy person, and so you get just three.

You can correct this failing yourself by letting us know what you're playing this weekend in the comments.

Blood Dungeon

I wrote about Blood Dungeon, the autoshooter from the maker of Nidhogg, back when the demo came out. I wrote about its manic beauty and its significance as a work of art by a creator who has refined their distinctive voice over decades of releases. I did not mention that the player is pooped out of a butt in the ceiling every time they return to the hub world. Now I have.

Folk Emerging

It's been a long while since I've fallen for a 4X game, and I suspect something smaller and more focussed might be my route back into the genre. Folk Emerging could be it. It's about leading nomadic tribes through the Stone Age, in which you must juggle family politics and deal with brand new inventions like subsistence farming and

What a week it's been. You must be eight or nine months into the school summer holidays by now? Twelve or thirteen heatwaves, effectively one never-ending nightmare of sweaty necks and bleached grass? At least the weekend is here, when you get to put down childish things (the arbitrary strictures of work) and instead commit yourself to the pursuit of being human via the medium of videogames.

I'll tell you what we're playing this weekend if you tell us yours.

Repterra

I grew up watching Saturday-morning cartoon Denver, the Last Dinosaur (he's my best friend and a whole lot more). But what if Denver wasn't the last dinosaur? What if there were, in fact, too many Denvers? This is the nightmare scenario posited by Repterra, a "base-building survival RTS" in which you can ultimately turn dinos into your best friend and a whole lot more, where "more" means using them as mounts in your forever-war against their kin.

Hearth And Hamlet

Brendy Caldwell, Videogame Cop might have outlawed games that play themselves, but I'll continue to smuggle contraband incrementalism into the pages of Jank. Hearth And Hamlet promises "relaxing idle

One thousand games are released on Steam every minute now, but thankfully almost all of them are about tidying up cluttered retail businesses and were made with varying degrees of AI assistance, and thus they can be safely ignored. The three games that remain this week are all spiritual successors to Nintendo 64 classics and I have dutifully listed each of them below.

We've also noted what we personally intend to play this weekend, though we are but lowly serfs kneeling before your own lordly proclamations in the comments below.

Agent 64: Spies Never Die

I have tremendously fond memories of GoldenEye 007 on the N64, although they mostly focus on the multiplayer mode and its custom settings. 'Proximity mines only' on Facility remains an all-timer. Agent 64: Spies Never Die is a straightforward spiritual successor that aims to replicate the feeling of Rare's classic, including a singleplayer campaign, splitscreen multiplayer, and bots to fight against should your friends not want to revisit the past.

Wild Blue Skies

It must be rough to spend years working on a StarFox spiritual successor only for Nintendo themselves to swoop in and both announce and release a remake of their