What We're Playing

What you should play this weekend

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By Graham Smith
"Rise and shine, Valor o'Lira" says a spirit rabbit. "Cabbage...?" says a white-haired woman.

Pour one out for Brendy who, if you were paying attention, you know has now entered the hinterland of fatherhood. He is already filling Jank's team and subscriber-only Discord servers with tales of projectile pooping and photos of gamer onesies. It will be some weeks before he's able to resume his regularly scheduled videogaming, and so lets do it in his honour.

Here's three games you could play this weekend. Tell us what you are playing in the comments.

A huge purple lizard with a shell and crystal back blasters a laser from its tongue.

Alabaster Dawn

CrossCode was a masterclass in gamefeel and its developers have just released their new game in Early Access. Alabaster Dawn is another action-RPG with a heavy emphasis on exploration, and an art style that uses 3D to deliver the smoothest SNES graphics you've ever seen.

A large man crouches and shoots as a man in a long coat runs, holding two guns. Everything is pixel art.

Huntdown: Overtime

A 2D roguelite blaster in a grim cyberpunk world and a prequel to the original Huntdown, Overtime also launched in Early Access this week. This is the cyberpunk of 2000AD and Verhoeven rather than of Gibson, marked more by back alley brickwork and blood spray than gleaming chrome, so take a look if you want to gib a pixel art man.

A tree-lined road that three people are skateboarding along. Golden hour light filters through the leaves.

Mixtape

I am sick to death of coming-of-age videogames set in or around the Pacific Northwest where all teenage experience is filtered through a magic hour haze and a Now! That's What I Call Generic soundtrack of alternative but nevertheless canonised classics. And yet! Mixtape looks far more stylish than its peers and it's got Portishead on the soundtrack. Tempting.

I've also had my eye on autobattle inventory tetris in Turnbound, alchemical craft 'em up Forage Wizard, and the megastructure parkour of Motorslice.

So, what are you playing this weekend? Tell us 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.