What are we all playing this weekend?

Saturdays are for lying in bed and resting your sore typing fingers, muttering curses at Geoff Keighley under your breath. They’re not particularly mean curses, I quite enjoy covering events like SGF. It’s nice having a few hours where game announcements pour forth like bubbling water. Yes, those bubbles can be the ineffable gassing up of marketing hype, but I won’t dismiss everything we see as pure cynicism.

And besides, as tired as I may be this morning, it’s not as bad as the time I worked a week of night shifts covering E3 at PixelArena.io. At the end of the week, on the last train home, I fell asleep, thouroughly missed my station and got kicked off at the terminus. With no phone battery and no taxis in the small village, I had to sleep in a park until the next morning when the trains started up again and I could get back to my bed in Bath.

But anyway, enough about games of the future and sleeps of the past, this is what we’re playing right now.

Jeremy
We’ve had some plans lately over in Guidestown to possibly go back to big games we missed for walkthrough purposes, so it looks like I may be firing up Clair Obscur: Expeditions 33 this weekend. (It’s not just a JRPG, it’s a Je RPG!) That said, I have also been playing Mortal Shell a little here and there, both to prep for the sequel and also because I like a small-scale Soulslike, so we’ll see which one captures my attention more.

Callum
I’ll surely play more Satisfactory, which has slowly subsumed my entire brain, filling my dreams with wonky constructor placements I need to make symmetrical, and I want to go back to Zero Parades, which I was vibing with before 007 took over my life. But I’ve been saying for a while that, when I have a minute, I need to get back to tinkering in Unity. It’s been on the back burner for a while, so I imagine the main game I’ll play this weekend is shouting at Visual Studio when the door I spent an hour coding to be functional is, in fact, still not functional.

Ollie
Aside from the ever-present chaos of Overwatch, I rushed through the Onimusha demo the other day, enjoyed it a lot, and now want to play it again at a slightly slower pace. Really appreciate just how many ways you can handle an attack that’s coming at you.

James
I will be detoxing from the SGF hype cycle by playing Team Fortress 2, a game for which no marketing has existed for well over a decade, even for the occasions where it would make logical sense.

Mark
Probably more Forza Horizon 6 and perhaps I’ll finally get around to giving Subnautica 2 a whirl. I’ve not played the first one, so the odds of me drowning are probably pretty high.

Edwin
I’m still picking my way through Zero Parades. I had a very entertaining conversation with a drunk international banker who at one point declared “I crave a state of railwayness”. Myself, I am mostly craving a state of lying down, after SGF week.

Julian
If I spend any time playing games this weekend, it will either be Cyberpunk, which I am still thoroughly engrossed in, despite now hitting the 20 hour mark – well past the point I normally slough off an RPG. Though, I was up stupidly late the night before SGF playing Tavern Master on the Steam Deck, and I can’t say with certainty I won’t do the same again tonight.