What did you play last week?

James Davenport has been playing Golden Light, a game I am really struggling to describe. His summary was this: "Talk to a bicycle and kill meat disguised as houseplants in the weirdest horror game of 2020." If it sounds like a real James Special that's because it is.

Jorge Jimenez has been playing Call of Duty: Warzone with and without the assistance of Razer's gamer gum. You know, for science. His conclusion is that no, chewing gamer gum does not make you any better at gaming, and also it's pretty pricey compared to regular old gum for non-gamers. Thanks for your service, Jorge.

Chris Livingston is still playing Crusader Kings 3, and has noted that there are a lot of bastards in Paradox's latest grand strategy game. Like, actual bastards, as in illegitimate heirs. There are so many affairs going on that keeping up with them is pretty much all spymasters have time for. If this is a bug, it's a hilarious one.

Emma Matthews has been playing ranked Hearthstone, where the Turtle Mage deck has started sucking the fun out of matches. It's a deck that relies on healing, freeze, and damage effects on infinite loops, and is apparently unenjoyable even if you win with it. Which might make you wonder why people play it, but then half a second later you'll remember that trolls exist and also people will always exploit boring ways to win. It's like the card game equivalent of finishing BioShock with the wrench.

Enough about us. What about you? Have you been exploring the meaning of hubris in excellent roguelike Hades? That's pretty much all I've been doing, but I hear that other games are available. Like Surgeon Simulator 2, Star Renegades, or BPM: Bullets Per Minute for instance.

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.