Steam Next Fest has been bubbling up behind the scenes all week, with so many game demos and announcements coming that I’m not even really sure when it’s starting. Some demos are out now, others are being run over the weekend, more are only coming out on Monday… but it means that if you have a PC and want to see what’s coming soon, you’ve got plenty to see and play this weekend.
As part of that, Dom and I played some RoadCraft, a disaster recovery spin-off to the MudRunner series that really makes you feel like a kid in a sandpit. Add to that a game that would be Indiana Jones’ favourite management sim, and that’s my week of games.
Aran’s ramping up his gaming again, since his return from the other side of the planet. He enjoyed his time with Stories From Sol: The Gun-Dog, a sci-fi visual novel, but this weekend has Afterlove EP and Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii booked in for review.
The love hate relationship with Alan Wake 2 has continued for Jim, who hit a roadblock with The Lake House DLC – “It solidified my opinion that while great at piecing together weird and compelling stories, Remedy doesn’t know how to pair this with interesting gameplay. It’s a shame as the final DLC is arguably the creepiest, zaniest part of the AW2 package – I just felt burned out after already putting some twenty something hours into the base game. I’ve now moved onto A Plague Tale: Innocence, hoping to wedge in a playthrough before Monster Hunter Wilds launches.”
Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope would score highly on a password complexity checker, and it scores highly in Ade’s finely tuned “good game” checker as well – “It’s a brilliant TBS game, accessible, fun, and perfect for a quick half hour of gaming.” He’s also had some fun times blast giant bugs in the cities of Helldivers 2 this week.
Bemoaning the difficulty of trawling the PlayStation Store sales of full game gems – all the DLC listings just clutter up the joint, don’t they? – Gamoc’s had a broad spread of games to play this week, including the Tomb Raider 4-6 remakes, Phasmophobia, Orcs Must Die 3, and Palworld. But he also did the important thing and grabbed a month of Game Pass in order to play Avowed… and about 15 other games on there that he was curious about.
Steve has played “the forbidden game” of trying to do his marking and being a dad taxi to his kids. In video games, he finished off Gears 5 and got through most of Hivebusters DLC, but found the game endings have sort of petered out and left too many threads dangling. So he moved on to play Eternal Strands, which has been enjoyable, and is checking out a bunch of demos from Steam Next Fest, with a good few write ups to come.
And finally, Tuffcub has, as always, been playing Destiny 2.
Now then, what have you played this week?
Andrewww
Finally, I managed to log on here again, as there seem to be running too many Evil G. checks in the background, which prevented this for a while.
I played various bits and pieces, either ‘worked’ on backlog or tried games leaving Plus soon. In the second category was The Outer Worlds, but which felt too old fashioned for me, reminded me of gaming about 20 years ago, in a bad way. I also started Life is strange 2, as I recently liked playing Before the Storm quite a bit.
I then finally got to play The shapeshifting Detective from my backlog, but that didn’t click with me just yet. With my daughter I started playing Call of the Sea, until we got temporarily stuck in a riddle.
Stefan L
Ah sorry about that. Hoping to improve the accounts and long in set up soon… ish.
Andrewww
No problem. I’ve recently set up again my new/old Android phone and basically blocked everything remotely associated with G. So I know my settings are a little strict. But if you can kick them overboard at some point, that would be great.