What We're Playing

What you could play this weekend

Plus what we're playing
By Graham Smith
Men in suits run through a door in a modern house and one fires at the player, who is holding a pistol.

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

Splitscreen multiplayer in blocky, square rooms with repeating wall and floor textures.

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

A small single-fighter craft zooms along a valley, through which a river runs, with a city built into the green hills on either side.

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 own months before your release date. I didn't have the greatest time with the Wild Blue Skies demo, but I still look at the screenshots and the evident polish in the animated cutscenes and see a game I want to play.

Hell Let Loose: Vietnam

Men in combat fatigues run through trees and bushes as dirt kicks up around their feet and the camera blurs.

Jungle setting, lots of foliage, the dust of war filling the air; I assume this must be a spiritual successor to Turok 64, completing this week's theme. Unfortunately all the dinosaurs have been replaced with humans in army fatigues and early Steam reviews suggest players are disappointed by this choice. Brendy tells me he has ambitions to play this because he liked being yelled at by multiplayer commanders in the previous Hell Let Loose game, but I think I might wait for them to patch in the velociraptors.

What we're playing

Brendy: I'm going to clamber into a helicopter in Hell Let Loose: Vietnam and become the hooping and hollering unhinged soldier of every Vietnam war movie, despite only having been in the conflict for a single day of my (I'm sure) very short tour of duty.

Graham: Abiotic Factor beckons as always. We're a few areas from the end now but I think the game is running out of things to show us, and the crafting and cooking systems are only pointing towards projects that don't seem worth the effort. I'm not sure we'll see it through to the end, but it's been fun. I'm also going to put some time into Sovereign Tower and maybe revisit Knytt Classic.

Jonty: I am aiming to try 171, which has been described as a sort of Brazilian GTA and has been in Early Access for a while. Making something even slightly like GTA is a huge lift and this is a small indie team, so my expectations are in check, but I want to see how close they can get.

That's what we're playing, but what about you? Tell us down below, in 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.