What did you play last week?

(Image credit: Daedalic Entertainment)

Chris Livingston has been playing Barotrauma, a multiplayer game set on a sci-fi submarine. It sounds a bit like Space Station 13 only underwater, with the players as the crew of a submersible exploring beneath the ice of Jupiter's moon Europa. Mostly it seems like what they do is die in a variety of amusing ways.

Star Wars: The Old Republic is one of only a few MMOs I've ever been able to get into, and Fraser Brown has nailed down why. It's got some great story moments, sometimes obscured by slow patches and the weaknesses of the genre, but I had a great time as an Imperial Agent and am always tempted to go back.

(Image credit: Square Enix)

Meanwhile, Steven Messner makes me kind of want to play Final Fantasy 14 even while he's explaining why it's such a hard MMO to recommend. If I had a spare 100 hours, well, I'd probably go back and finish Final Fantasy 12 but if I had 200 spare hours then maybe I'd play Final Fantasy 14 as well.

Andy Kelly has been playing Hunter: Call of the Wild, but without doing much of the hunting. Instead he's become a photographer, exploring the woods and using the in-game camera more than the hunting rifle. There's nothing like the sound of wind in trees for giving you a sense of place. It's why Velen in The Witcher 3 is great for walking around in, and it sounds like Hunter's forests have the same effect. Only you ride through them with a quadbike instead of a horse named Roach.

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I've been playing My Friend Pedro, and remembering how much I love slow-motion in games. The first time I played the Mass Effect series it was as an Infiltrator, sniping aliens in glorious bullet-time, and it's just as much fun in My Friend Pedro. Here it's less about lining up the perfect headshot and more about flipping over someone's head while bouncing a ricochet off a frying pan. I've been replaying my favorite levels to get high scores, and though I wish there was a way to tell from the level select screen which ones have a skateboard in them it's remained a blast.

Enough about us. What about you? Have you been playing Amid Evil, the retro FPS with a gun that shoots planets? Maybe The Sinking City, or Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night? Let us know!

Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

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.