What did you play last week?

Last week our resident metroidvania expert Shaun Prescott played Timespinner, which at first glance might not seem like much more than a homage to Symphony of the Night but then Shaun goes ahead and says "You can even climb the poison butterflies." Suddenly, it's interesting.

Tyler Wilde is a long-term Rocket League fanatic, and now that Snow Day hockey-puck mode is ranked he's climbed the ladder and almost reached diamond—for all I know he may be there by the time you read this—so that's nice. I'm glad Rocket League is still going strong, even if I haven't played it for months myself.

Freelancer Luke Winkie has been playing Forza Horizon 4, and having some controversial opinions about its cars. Mainly, that a lot of them look goofy and odd which is honestly kind of great. I would drive every one of these freak machines. Even the Puma.

It seems like everybody's got stuck into Assassin's Creed Odyssey, even Samuel Roberts who described himself as "an Assassin's Creed grump" before Origins turned him around. He and Tom Senior were a bit put off by the XP boost you can buy for $10 to bypass the boring sidequest-grinding, however.

Tom also jumped back into XCOM 2 to try out the new Tactical Legacy Pack. It sounds great, I just have to convince myself that it's OK to play this and then not play another entire campaign of War of the Chosen afterwards because there's no way I'll have time to do that if I'm going to finish Pathfinder: Kingmaker this year.

Apart from that I've been trying out 428 Shibuya Scramble, a visual novel whose silliness is exaggerated by the fact it's illustrated not with big-eye/small-mouth Japanese cartoons but posed photography of people overacting. Which is weirdly delightful? Even though there's only a little bit of actual motion in it, I'm reminded of the glory days of FMV nonsense.

Enough about us. What about you, readers? Kicking people off cliffs in Assassin's Creed Odyssey or shooting up Sectoids in XCOM 2? FIFA 19 or WWE 2K19? Clearing the backlog or keeping up with the new hotness? Let us know!

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.