What did you play last week?

Cozy Grove
(Image credit: Spry Fox)

Rachel Watts played Cozy Grove, which is like Animal Crossing but instead of sinking into debt while building your dream home, you're camping on a haunted island. A haunted island that is haunted by ghost bears. They're friendly though, and one of them is named Jeremy Gruffle. As well as ursine phantasms, there's the usual life-sim stuff but with twists—resource collection plays out like a hidden object game, for instance.

Morgan Park has been playing demos for everything, because he can. The System Shock remake generously lets you try an entire floor of its space station claustropalooza, and the full version of Outriders will let you keep progress from its demo. He's been so impressed by demos for retro Thief-a-like Gloomwood and retro murder-everything-a-like Ultrakill he's talking like an excited Seinfeld character. What's up with that?

Mollie Taylor has been playing The Sims 4, as a survival game with the Eco Lifestyle pack, but mostly with self-set challenges that play to its strengths. This is a game with a hunger meter after all, and base-building of a kind, and (if you're not cheating) limited resources. It may not have hounds crowding around your camp at night, but it does have vampires hovering on your porch cursing the garlic you've hung over the door.

Tim Clark played Destiny 2 to collect some golf balls. Well, a rare crafting material called Ascendant Shards, but they look like golf balls so that's what Destiny 2 players call them. Then they spend 22 hours farming those golf balls by repeating the same mission over and over while the rest of us wonder what it's all about.

Enough about us. What about you? Have you been marching out beyond your walls in Stronghold: Warlords, or messing with scale in Maquette? Let us know!

Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

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.