What did you play last week?

Andy Kelly played Shenmue 3 and found it to be worth the wait. It's another deliberately slow-paced game that encourages you to chew it carefully and savor the taste rather than wolfing it down, and when you make it to the end the story's still not done. Hopefully we don't have to wait another 18 years for Shenmue 4.

Luke Kemp has been playing Lost Ember, a game where you can hop from animal to animal, possessing anything from a wombat to a hummingbird to a fish. Who doesn't want to be a wombat—have you seen them? There's a whole island covered with them off the coast of Tasmania, and some day I'll visit. Until then I think I'll play Lost Ember.

Natalie Flores has been replaying Final Fantasy 13, finding a cast of characters (and a soundtrack) that elevate it above its reputation. Everybody's got their favorite Final Fantasy, but I suspect everyone also has at least one they defend for not being as bad as other people say it is.

Tim Clark has been trying out Hearthstone Battlegrounds, the new mode that was added to Blizzard's card game out of the blue. It's brought back a bunch of lapsed players, as has the latest expansion, and it'll be interesting to see how many of them stick around and what that means for Hearthstone's future.

Christopher Livingston continues finding the best Slay the Spire mods, for those who've exhausted the possibilities the base game has to offer. It'll be a long time before I get to that point, but it's good to know that when I want to replay it as a slime or a farmer or Sailor Moon those are all options.

I've been playing Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order some more, and just finished it the other night. All those downhill slalom platforming sections get pretty tedious after a while, but the ending's worth seeing if you're into Star Wars and I'm glad I pushed through. Tom's been playing it too, and despite a few technical problems he enjoyed it as well.

Enough about us, what about you? Have you picked up any games in the recent sales, like Disco Elysium, Sekiro, or Total War: Warhammer 2? 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.