What We're Playing

I spent all my videogamesing time this week painting the hallway. I've colour drenched the walls and skirting boards a pink colour, which in some moments seems to warm up an otherwise windowless part of the flat, and in other moments gives me the sensation of walking through a Mr. Blobby innertube. I think I like it. Please let me now play videogames again.

But what to play? I've chosen three candidates below. Tell us what you're playing in lieu of troubling interior decorating choices in the comments.

Loftia

All the typical crop-tending, home-decorating, and pet-wrangling of yer cosy buildy crafty Stardewy 'em ups, but here nailed to an MMO, with community building projects and next-door players to bring down the house prices by hanging a sign about farts in their front garden. There's no space in my life for a game like this, but I like the ramshackle, islands-in-the-sky, verdant art style.

Faraway

An arcade game about steering a shooting star around the gravitational pull of celestial objects to form constellations and score points. Faraway claims to be a genuine solo project, having been developed by Steph Thirion

I'm less worried about the rising tide of AI slop on Steam than some other commentators, because bad games don't tend to drown out the good ones. Good games drown out the good games. That's why we select just three to highlight each week in this article, and order that all other games released the same week be destroyed. It's the only way to make sure that your time isn't wasted by games you can't or won't play.

Playing a game that slipped through our net? Share it in the comments below so we can take care of it.

Virtue And A Sledgehammer

Perhaps this makes me a philistine, but I've played enough artsy-fartsy "narrative exploration" games at this point that I do a small eye-roll when I see another one about childhood memories and rooftop conversations. It's a good thing then that Deconstructeam meets that eye-roll with a sledgehammer, which is used here to smash apart your old hometown and the robot simulacrum that now inhabit it.

Tape To Tape

I grew up loving Speedball and Brutal Sports Football, games that captured the essence of a real

Steam Next Fest is underway, so this weekend you should be playing demos. If you looked at the event's landing page at the start of the week you might have been dismayed by the quality of the submissions, but that was when the page showed a random selection of the reported 8000 demos included this year. The same page now defaults to showing personalised recommendations, and I'd wager you'll see very little of low quality or of slop if you look again now.

We may have specific recommendations for demos to play in the coming days. For now, here are some suggestions for other games you could be playing, if you're committed to spending money this weekend.

Final Fantasy Resonance

Square Enix finally apply their "2D-HD" art style from the likes of Octopath Traveller to the Final Fantasy series, aiming to deliver what traditional fans of the JRPG series crave without taking ten years or needing three existential crises to do it. As if to underscore this commitment to feeding you what you want, this is set in a world that mashes up elements and characters from previous games. Airships, crystals, ingénue boys with spiky

We don't write news and rarely write previews here on Jank, but we still want some method of acknowledging the flurry of interesting new games that come out each week. That's what this column is for. Below you'll find brief mention of what Jon, Brendan and I are currently playing, but also three new games that we think seem worthy of at least a glance.

The comments below all that are what really matter, though. That's where you'll find games old and new, all of them interesting enough to be played by at least one person in the Jank community. Join in! It's free.

Echo Weaver

I often think, while lost in some metroidvania cave network, that I wish these games gave me information-game style tools for working out the path forward. Maybe Echo Weaver is what I've been hoping for: this is a time-loop metroidvania that everyone is comparing to Outer Wilds, in which your entire powerset is unlocked from the beginning but you need to experiment with it to learn how it works and gain the knowledge needed to progress.

Poly Fighter

A roguelike beat-'em-up where defeating

By happenstance, my parenting schedule is unusually light this weekend. Which means only one thing: time for all the viruses which constantly and relentlessly assault my body to overwhelm my momentarily relaxed immune system and render me useless for three whole days. The only question now is whether I'll be able to see the Steam Deck screen from my sick bed.

Read what we might play, then tell us what you paragons of good health will play down in the comments below.

Car Park Capital

This looks like a SimCity 2000-era citybuilder, but your goal here isn't to build an American municipal paradise. It's to introduce these innocent peeps to "car commuting", and thus create the need for car parks. Actually, that doesn't sound too dissimilar to SimCity or any real American municipal paradise, because there's a satirical edge to your Car Park Capital's demand that you bulldoze trees and houses to make way for more asphalt. It's in Early Access for now.

Dressmaker

Released a few weeks ago, but I overlooked Dressmaker at the time because it looked outwardly like any other shop simulator. Several friends have since made it clear

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