What We're Playing

What you could play this weekend

And what we're playing
By Graham Smith
A knight with armour and a shield ready to fight, standing at the end of a stone platform surrounded by water.

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

Robots, your digitised neighbours, about to be slammed by a raised 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

Hockey players on the ice, with a player in a red jersey about to fall on his butt.

I grew up loving Speedball and Brutal Sports Football, games that captured the essence of a real sport while nevertheless lending it greater chaos and violence. Tape To Tape seems to be in that lineage: a roguelite hockey game in which you can bribe the referees, visit the Blademaster to upgrade your equipment, and construct your squad for brawling, while still seemingly rewarding good fundamentals of passing, positioning and shooting.

Queen's Domain

Conversation with a lady sat in front of a wall of books, like a pundit doing a video call on BBC News.

Everyone keeps comparing this to early FromSoft RPG King's Field, which means only one thing: a lot of people are pretending to have played King's Field. I think I can more safely refer to this as Morrowind with a grainy visual filter, a sword that lets you fly, and melee combat in which you need to manage your stamina meter to dodge and use special attakcs.

What we're playing

Graham: I still have a bunch of Next Fest demos installed, most or all of which have not yet been deactivated, so I might take a crack at some of those. Or I might continue what I've been doing this past week: building ornate Tudor homes inside Minecraft.

Brendan: I'm forgoing games this weekend in favour of a movie night with THE BOYZ. Not sure what we're going to watch yet. Got any recommendations? I'd like something incredibly stupid and explosive that will not suffer from us talking over it for the entire duration.

Jonty: [Jonty was last seen loose on the streets of Thailand. We don't know why he's there.]

That's what we're playing this weekend, sort of, 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.