What did you play last week?

Fraser Brown's been playing Imperator Rome, Paradox's latest grand strategy game. The aspect of it that sounds most appealing to me is the way it gives so much personality to your faction's VIPs—Fraser uses the example of buying a tiger as a present to win over one his Consul—which makes me want to go back and give Crusader Kings 2 another shot.

Andy Chalk played Whispers of a Machine, an adventure game about a sci-fi murder mystery. It's apparently got a Nordic noir tone, like The Killing or The Bridge only with a cyborg detective trying to foil a group of fanatics out to create an illegal AI. Sounds like a good, bleak time.

Andy Kelly flew to Hutton Orbital in Elite: Dangerous, which is kind of like a miniature, less maddening version of the Desert Bus journey. It's a boring trip but then boring space trucking is what Elite: Dangerous is all about and if you've come from a Euro Truck Simulator background that's probably a thing you're into.

Joanna Nelius has been hitting the RPG books to figure out what could happen in Vampire: The Masquerade—Bloodlines 2. We know that you'll start the game as a thin-blooded vampire but somehow be able to join one of the game's full-blooded clans later on. She's got a couple of theories about how that could happen.

I played Operencia: The Stolen Sun, a dungeon-crawler I had a blast with for the opening 10 hours but fell out of love with after that, thanks to a lack of enemy variety and a few other issues. It's common to play an RPG and have to look past a slow opening because it gets better as it goes on, and kind of a shame to run into the opposite problem.

But enough about us. What about you? Is anyone playing indie hit Forager, or 2D RPG Dark Devotion? Did you download peaceful freebie platformer Himno or are you breaking bones in Mortal Kombat 11? 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.