What did you play last week?

Christopher Livingston has been playing Planet Zoo, and finding the fast-paced animal management sim to be a bit exhausting. Nobody wants to feel the guilt of being responsible for mistreating animals, where in Planet Coaster it was a weird rush to exploit visitors. The trade-off is that the animals really do seem lovely. You just want to do right by those bears and lion cubs.

Rachel Watts played Tangle Tower, a detective game that's much more wholesome than Disco Elysium and so provided a useful timeout from grubby gutter-sleuthing. The 'cosy mystery' has a place too, because sometimes you want to be Jessica Fletcher instead of an alcoholic mess. Sounds like Tangle Tower provides that, only with Detective Grimoire and Sally rather than Angela Lansbury.

Red Dead Redemption 2 mod - Lenny's Simple Trainer — (Image credit: Future)

James Davenport has been playing Red Dead Redemption 2 (well, replaying it after finishing it on PS4 back when), and he's not the only one. He's got some thoughts on the PC port, which unfortunately has some issues, though having mouse-aim makes the first-person mode a far better option here than it was on the console.

I've finished up The Outer Worlds. While Chris was a big fan of SAM the cleaning robot, I ended up doing all the sidequests for Parvati, the shy mechanic. Totally worth it—helping her get a date and then going on a shopping trip across the system was the highlight of the game. I guess that's damning with faint praise a bit. The combat is perfunctory and the setting's derivative, but I had a decent enough time anyway. Mostly because of Parvati.

Enough about us. What about you? Is anyone playing tavern sim Crossroads Inn, or driving across Utah in the new American Truck Simulator expansion? 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.