What We're Playing

What you could play this weekend

Videogames' three art styles: pixel art, embroidery, and skeletons
By Graham Smith
An open book showing new items available to purchase, including a singing gnome and cymbal-crashing monkey.

As you read this, I am still on holiday where, baggage allowance permitting, I will be playing games on my Steam Deck. Which games, I have no idea. Thankfully I have prepared in advance and below you will find your usual collection of games you could be playing. Where would you be without me?

Tell us what you are playing in the comments below.

Scarlet Deer Inn

Three characters, each embroidered, in a painted 2D landscape of trees and grass. A ghost stands to the right of frame.

A side-scrolling medieval folk tale in which every frame of character animation was created via embroidery. I have no idea how this plays out in practice - Thank Goodness You're Here meets Pentiment? - but it looks beautiful and I'm keen to find out.

Hand Of Fate: Hordes

Hundreds of skeletons surround the player, who is firing lasers. Cards sit at the bottom of the screen.

Hand Of Fate was a beloved tactical deckbuilder that seemingly didn't perform well enough to support its developers, who effectively closed down after Hand Of Fate 2. Now a bunch of former staff have re-formed under a new studio to bring some of the series' crunchy deckbuilding into a bullet hell context. It's out in Early Access now.

Offbeat

A desk in a small room, with a pinboard on the wall, drawn in isometric pixel art.

Music is better than videogames, so here's a management tycoon game in which you construct your own recording studio, collect musical instruments, and actually make real music along the way via an in-game beat sequencer that lets you output WAV files. Someone, somewhere is going to learn how to make music with this, I hope.

Hopefully I'm playing something on my Steam Deck that I can write about on Jank at a later date. You can write on Jank about what you're playing right now, via the internet's best and only comment section.

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What We're Playing
Graham Smith

Graham Smith

Graham is a former editorial director of Rock Paper Shotgun and editor-in-chief of PC Gamer. He has now been a games journalist for over twenty years, and retains a bottomless appetite for playing new games and tinkering with old ones.