What did you play last week?

(Image credit: Studio Seufz)

Rachel Watts has been playing The Longing, which casts you as a creature called Shade who serves the ruler of a great underground kingdom as basically an alarm clock. "Wake me up in 400 days," says the King, and then the game begins. As you explore the underground, solving puzzles along the way a clock ticks down 400 days of real time. Some of the puzzles require real-world time to pass as well. I'm sure someone will reset their CPU clock and find out what happens, but I'd rather enjoy the wait.

Emma Matthews has been experimenting with Wallpaper Engine's live desktops to make her PC look nice. As one of those people who still uses the desktop for stuff, and makes regular use of that 'minimize all' button in the bottom-right corner of the screen, I should probably try this out.

Andy Kelly played The Long Drive, a driving survival simulator that pits you and your clapped-out paddock basher against an endless procedurally generated desert. It's still in Early Access but even in this bare form there's something intriguing about the concept of driving as far as you can, just to see if you make it.

Matt Elliott has been playing Resident Evil 2 and turning into a pack rat, sitting on a pile of unused ammo like a dragon hoarding gold. It's the kind of game where the balance between using a bullet and saving it for the next boss fight makes for constant tension, and so the temptation to never use a special bullet ever is always there. Don't do it! You gotta shoot those acid bullets some time.

My Baldur's Gate playthrough made it through Siege of Dragonspear, the DLC Beamdog made to connect the two games. As someone who much prefers Baldur's Gate 2 for its focus on companions with their own sidequests, backstories, and romances—it feels like the beginning of the golden age of BioWare—the first game's always seemed thin, spread out over too many discs. This DLC crams a lot more into less space and is better for it, even if the ending's a little underwhelming. But then, it's not really an ending at all, just a bridge to the sequel. I've plowed straight into Baldur's Gate 2 again with the same character and I'm not slowing down.

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.