What did you play last week?

(Image credit: Microsoft)

Rachel Watts played Minecraft Dungeons, a lightweight action-RPG that sounds like it's a million miles away from your first night hiding in a hole in the ground listening to the zombies outside, which was my introduction to Minecraft. But a breezy bash-em-up with skeletons and creepers seems like the kind of things our characters who were just trying to survive would aspire to at the end of the crafting treadmill.

Harry Shepherd has also been playing Minecraft Dungeons, and feeling a bit guilty about all the cute sheep and pigs he's been killing for their loot (the sheep drop pork apparently?) which is fair enough. There's a reason most fantasy games choose spiders for their default animal monsters rather than, say, teacup piglets or capybaras.

Morgan Park played Crucible, Amazon's free-to-play hero shooter, and hasn't got a lot of positive things to report. A map that's oversized for most of its modes, characters with so many hit points that fights drag on, and poor performance. Flaws that, taken together, sound like they overshadow anything good about it.

Andy Kelly has been playing Routine, a free horror game about being trapped in a loop of everyday, well, routine. With each loop things get stranger, which makes it sound a bit like Anatomy, but it's more about the mundane with jarring oddness creeping in around the edges.

I've been playing XCOM: Chimera Squad, having put it off until the first patch was released. So far I'm loving the familiar rhythm and the color and personality of it. While some squadmates aren't as fun—I kicked Cherub out of the APC for being boring—with the surly Australian, the psychic alien who keeps reading the comms guy's mind, and Bants the medic, it's now become Brooklyn-99: Tactics. Everybody's got a special ability in line with their persona too, and combining them to wreck face has been a blast.

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.