What you could play this weekend

The Steam summer sale continues, which means there's still a relative paucity of new game releases. There's nothing inherent in this weekly feature that requires the three games I pick to be new, but still I have rummaged around behind the sofa to pick three relatively recent games that seem worth your time.

As always, tell us what you are playing in the comments below.

Casualties: Unknown demo

This is a demo I've had open in a browser tab since its release back in April. Delve into caves on alien planets in search of lost cargo, and deal with the strange, hostile environments you find. I'm most interested in this because it has "simulated limb and cardiovascular systems" that require you to fight infections and apply bandages to body parts in order to survive injury. I love a granular wounding system.

Voidling Bound

A "creature collector", but far from a Pokémonlike. This looks like a third-person Risk Of Rain 'em up, in which you find and hatch alien creatures, cross-breed and evolve them with Spore-style body-part combinations, and then directly control one of your choice in wave-based combat. That combat is taking place in the "Abyss" and after each fight you choose whether to delve deeper or quit while you're ahead.

Sand: Raiders Of Sophie

Build a mech fortress for crossing the desert, craft and survive on its back, and then disembark to scavenge for supplies. This is also kind of an extraction shooter, with first-person combat, optional co-op, and optionally other humans trying to steal your loot. The mech also has cannons, so you can steer them around the sand dunes and blast away at enemies that way, too. Sand Of Thieves, I guess.

I'm not a huge fan of videogame math, in which you describe a game by which two or three other games it is a combination of. And yet, that does seem to be how a lot of games are made. Sand and Voidling Bound are seemingly two examples. It's not that they're derivative, exactly, so much as they seem like a Frankenstein combination of distinct systems rather than a single coherent fantasy. "You should have taken an existing product and put a clock in it or something," said Homer Simpson, and the games industry at large agrees.

These games seem cool anyway, but what are you playing? Tell us below, in the internet's best and only comments section.