What did you play last week?

A lava crab — (Image credit: Concerned Ape)

Most of PC Gamer's staff are still on vacation, but we've kept the site festively busy with a series of articles that were—like the leftovers we survived on for days after Christmas—prepared in advance.

Rachel Watts wrote about Stardew Valley speedrunning, and how the wedding% speedruns focus on Shane. The prickly local doesn't seem like an obvious choice, but a combination of factors like his early morning starts and preference for easily obtainable gifts make him secretly the best option. I married Penny when it turns out I could have won Shane's heart far faster by showering him in parsnips.

Tyler Wilde wrote about Among Us, and the many times it's been cloned since becoming popular. As approximately six million people have pointed out Among Us was not the most original game to begin with, but most of the games that copied it aren't going back to the source—social games in the Mafia/Werewolf tradition. There's one exception, a Chinese mobile game called Werewolf Among Us, but otherwise they copy even the color-coded astronaut aesthetics of Among Us to a degree that's honestly pretty funny.

Katie Wickens tried out a Doom-branded gaming chair and then didn't so much play id's bloodthirsty FPS as descend directly into the depths of a Miltonian hellscape drenched in blood. Things got strange is what I'm saying.

Andy Kelly wrote about Full Throttle, the adventure game classic that he insists is still good actually. That's because, as well as a few of the puzzles where a locked-door keeps you at bay until you've finessed an unlikely combination of items and actions together in exactly the right sequence, it sometimes just lets you solve problems by hitting stuff. In a game about a biker, that seems apt.

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.