What We're Playing

What you should play this weekend

Tell us what you are playing in the comments
By Graham Smith
A young blonde girl in blue clothes looks off camera. A man in a space suit his visible behind her, his face obscured.
She's meant to be creepy, right? For some reason?

I've got family visiting, which means I likely won't spend much or any time gaming this weekend. You might be lonesome, however, and what better salve for familial loneliness than a Dad game, of which we've got three flavours this week: a '90s throwback management sim; a blockbuster about showing a surrogate daughter the wonders of the world; and a game about golf.

Tell us what you are playing in the comments, Dad game or otherwise.

Some folks with torches in a medieval town hold leaflets and look confused.
I hope Sintopia is funny, but it might just be sarcastic. Like yer da.

Sintopia

This looks to be inspired by the Bullfrog greats of old, in that it places you in charge of Hell Incorporated. You construct the underworld to turn a profit by punishing souls, while simultaneously using God game-style powers in a pastoral overworld to keep your machinery fed with new sinful denizens. This also means its cheeky sense of humour might cause me to groan myself into the afterlife, but I appreciate that it's not just another 1:1 Dungeon Keeper successor.

A robot gets blasted with electricity as the player, young girl on his back, watches.
No horror but plenty of conflict in Capcom's latest. Like yer da.

Pragmata

Capcom's latest third-person action thingy, and therefore the kind of game I might normally consider too heavily promoted to be worth highlighting here. However, this is also a big budget game that's not a sequel or a known property, and which replaces Resident Evil's crowd-pleasing horror with puzzles. It's a swing, in other words, of an increasingly rare sort. Is it a successful one? No idea, but it's worth having on your radar.

This hole is a bogey machine. Like yer da.

Under Par Golf Architect

I have a lot of love for Sid Meier's SimGolf, a 2002 hole-in-one in which you managed a golf course, constructed the holes, and then played on them on yourself while trying to attract the Mayor to visit. It was not a great golf game, but it was a great management game. Under Par seems to follow in its footsteps but with 3D art that might make the actual golfing part less rudimentary.

I'm an actual Dad and my actual son will be playing Tomodachi Life: Living The Dream on Switch 2, which he's been looking forward to for months. How many years until all the PC wannabe Animal Crossing-likes start having voice synthesis in them, do we reckon? Two? I bet it takes two.

As always, tell us what you are playing in the comments. It's why all of us are actually here.

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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.