What did you play last week?

(Image credit: 2K Games)

Tom Senior played XCOM: Chimera Squad, the surprise new spin-off of the squad tactics series. It's set five years after humanity defeated the aliens in XCOM 2, and now we have to work together with the survivors who've been freed of their control. The new squad are a diverse roster of SWAT agents who banter like it's Brooklyn 99, which is not where I expected XCOM to go but still a welcome change.

Rachel Watts played The Procession to Calvary, an adventure made of Renaissance art collaged together in unexpected ways, yes, a bit like in Monty Python. You play a warrior whose Holy War is over, then sets off to find (and kill) Saint Peter, as you do. A lot of Rembrandts get chopped up in the process, I assume.

Emma Davies has been playing The Sims 4, doing the "100 babies challenge", which is exactly what it sounds like. I appreciate the masochistic challenge run, having once run across Fallout 76's Appalachia in my underwear back when that was briefly a thing, and this one sure does sound like a lot of hard work.

Christopher Livingston has been playing Train Station Renovation, which I imagine is like being Peter Dinklage's character in The Station Agent only with less stoicism and more detergent. It's a game about cleaning up a train station, but aren't most games about cleaning when you think about it? Remove the goblins, take away the junk they leave lying around, it's basically tidying up.

I played OneShot, a JRPG-looking adventure game about a cat-child who has to save a world with no sun. You don't play the cat-child (though you control them), but instead play yourself, sat at your computer, treated as a god by the protagonist. Some of the puzzles hide files on your PC, or even change your wallpaper. It's a bit gimmicky, and the story aims for tragedy, but never made me care about its artificial world—you spend ages jogging along empty paths, and then the ending barrels past in an instant.

Enough about us. What about you? Has anyone tried flying-car cyberpunk delivery game Cloudpunk, or the self-explanatory Drug Dealer Simulator? Have you grabbed Alien: Isolation while it's on sale? 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.