What did you play last week? (January 4-9, 2021)

(Image credit: CD Prokekt Red)

Christopher Livingston is still playing Cyberpunk 2077, for the romances. He's finding the NPCs—one of the better-regarded parts of the game—interesting enough that he's developing feelings even for the ones you're not supposed to smooch. It's a sad tale of unrequited love in Night City.

Natalie Clayton played Bloks, a god game that plays like Tetris. You're building a world from molten core on up, via the medium of arranging shapes as they fall out of the sky. The ultimate goal is to build life itself, and then try to keep your little people alive as they build their own civilization on top of your unsteady jumble of blocks.

Fraser Brown played Grounded, Obsidian's homage to Honey I Shrunk the Kids. Unlike the studio's narrative-heavy games, this one's big on the emergent narrative, with animals as likely to turn on each other while you watch as the demons in Doom. For Fraser the story that emerged was first one of Ant War, followed by Uneasy Ant Truce.

Sarah James played Torghast, the endless dungeon in World of Warcraft: Shadowlands. Despite the randomness of this procedurally generated dungeon, including some highly variable boss difficulty, she was getting into its pleasant grind fugue. At least, until it got nerfed. Now it's gone from having highly random difficulty spikes to hardly any difficulty at all, which seems like an overcorrection that's led to even more dissatisfaction.

Enough about us. What about you? Have you been playing Dead By Daylight now that it's in full release? Building a flying SimCity in Airborne Kingdom, or getting giant robots to fight in Override 2: Super Mech League? 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.