What did you play last week?

Rachel Watts played In Other Waters, a game about exploring an alien ocean that won't trigger your phobias like Subnautica did. In it, you play an AI who is helping a xenobiologist, so you only ever see the depths through digital interfaces, safely abstract, while she has to deal with all the big fish and yawning depths and the terror of the deep and whatnot.

Wes Fenlon played Bright Memory, an FPS with the melee combat of a spectacle fighter like Devil May Cry. Only the first half-hour episode is available so far, but it sounds like a fun time what with the energy swording and grapple hooking all over the place.

Emma Matthews has been playing Half-Life: Alyx in spite of virtual reality giving her motion sickness, and has found that Valve's shooter isn't setting off her nausea as much as other VR games. There's a lot going on behind the scenes in games like this to make them more palatable to more players, and in Alyx's case it's paying off.

Feels like everyone but me has been playing Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord. It seems janky as anything but in an enjoyable way, and it'll be exciting to see both how it shapes up and how modders reshape it as they go.

I've been playing Yorkshire Gubbins, a short adventure game set in northern England. It's got the format of a classic pixel-art adventure, only with puzzles that can be solved without a walkthrough. It gets a lot of humor out of contrasting its ordinary setting with strange stuff, like a hidden society of slugfolk and an escaped robot. It also probably helps if you like listening to the accent, which I do.

Enough about us. What about you? Have you been playing Resident Evil 3 or Bleeding Edge? Has anyone had a go at Doom Eternal's multiplayer? Are you using your lock-in time to chip away at the backlog? 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.