What did you play last week?
Here's what we've been up to. How about you?
Lauren Morton has been playing Early Access dino tycoon sim Parkasaurus, which is the kind of game that provides heatmaps for each exhibit showing how much privacy the animals experience. When you take a step back from management games they look a bit weird, don't they?
James Davenport is still playing Fortnite, in fact he may never stop playing Fortnite. Perhaps our entire world is his personal Purgatory and we exist merely to facilitate a state of affairs where he can only play Fortnite, forever. On the plus side, it has dogs now! On the down side, the combination of dogs and the skin that makes you look like John Wick raises some questions.
Philippa War played the first episode of Life Is Strange 2, and enjoyed it in spite of feeling let down by a clunky minigame. If it's anything like the stealth sequence in the finale of the first series, I totally understand the frustration. I'm still excited to check this out, though I might wait for the whole season this time because there are so many other games on my plate. (Pip's impressions are deliberately vague and spoiler-free if that's a concern.)
The further adventures of Joe Donnelly in GTA Online are always something I look forward to, and last week he jumped into a modded server that recreated Liberty City from GTA 4. Things got a bit janky, but watching open worlds turn freaky can sometimes be more fun than taking them at face value.
Bard's Tale 4: Barrows Deep has impressed Andy Chalk, which is good to hear. The lack of manual saves put me off, but if you're up for a willfully old school adventure like he is then it will probably be for you.
I've been playing Pathfinder: Kingmaker, which has much less interesting combat than Bard's Tale 4 (let me rant at you some time about how taking five-foot steps away for the sake of real-time combat is a mistake). On the other side of the coin Kingmaker lets me quicksave. And, after defeating a bandit king called the Stag Lord, I've unlocked the part of the game where you get to manage your own barony, which has been fun so far.
Enough about us. What about you, readers? Is anyone else playing Bard's Tale 4, or Wandersong, the other game about being a bard that just came out? Has Battlerite Royale's beta got you interested? If you've been playing Kingmaker I'd like to hear how you've been going—especially if you found a way to kill Viscount Smoulderburn, that demilich dickhead who shows up at a camp when you're only level two. Let us know!
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Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.