What we've been playing
A few of the games that have us hooked at the moment.
21st July, 2023
Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we've found ourselves playing over the last few days. This time: arcade royalty, sunny rainy days, and a beautiful new starship.
If you fancy catching up on some of the older editions of What We've Been Playing, here's our archive.
Nex Machina, PC
Developer Housemarque’s Nex Machina has been coquettishly perched on my Steam Deck Home Screen for ages now, promising much but delivering little in its dogged refusal to function even remotely sensibly on Valve’s handheld. As of the latest Proton GE update, though, it’s finally moved from flatly unplayable to intermittently compatible and I could not be more thrilled.
Since our recent reunion, I’ve once again become helplessly ensnared by Nex Machina’s fearsomely compulsive twin-style shooting action; I’ve played it in bed, on the sofa, in the car, out in the garden, stunned that I’d somehow forgotten just HOW DAMN GOOD this thing is.
I am slave to its overwhelming visual excess, its thrumming synth heart, the furious dance of precision and chaos as bullets fly, the world heaves, and enemies swarm, coherence and clarity vanishing amid one perpetual screen-sized explosion. I still don’t understand the magic that makes it possible to play Nex Machina when there’s so much of everything always on-screen, but here I go again, defying logic as I hurtle from one hypnotic fury of choreographed destruction to another. Honestly, I swear I’ll put it down at some point, but in the meantime, I’m heading back in.
Matt Wales
Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Switch
It was a rainy Saturday afternoon, when my daughter asked me if I wanted to visit somewhere sunnier. The answer was easy - yes, I would.
What happened next was glorious. My daughter handed me a Switch controller, and helped me create an Animal Crossing: New Horizons avatar. She then invited me into a world that was completely her own.
As soon as my plane landed on her Animal Crossing island, my daughter set about making me feel as welcome as possible. She gifted me new shoes, a flower for my hair, and a wreath made from seashells. She then introduced me to her residents, before joyously setting off to run through her flower garden, encouraging me to do the same.
To repay her for her hospitality, I shook some trees to gather resources. I was somewhat successful, and managed to procure several piles of wood. However, I was also stung by a swarm of wasps for my efforts, not just once but twice. I swiftly revived and was able to continue on with our island adventures, though, so no real harm was done save for an amusingly gammy eyelid.
As the sun began to set, my daughter asked if I would like to spend the night at her house. Again, the answer was easy. Yes, I would.
When I arrived at her island home, she gave me a kimono to wear while we relaxed. Then, after an evening walk around the island, we settled down on the sofa to watch television. She made smoothies, lit her lava lamp and, once we had finished watching our program, we got tucked up into bed. With the sun now set, we closed our eyes.
It was a wonderful way to spend a wet afternoon.
Victoria Kennedy
Jumplight Odyssey, PC
I’m a sucker for a posh starship and the one you take command of in Jumplight Odyssey is a doozie. Design chronology-wise, it sits somewhere between the original Starship Enterprise and Space Battleship Yamato, with an elegant torpedo hull centring on a nice, fat turbine which narrows to a nautical prow. It’s got a lovely, white-and-blue finish, offset by glowing hangar exits and yellow stripes, with swept-back antennae and snug nacelles that make me think of Thunderbirds. Dreamy! I could absolutely imagine painting that and hanging it from my bedroom ceiling. But if I did that I’d be squandering the vessel’s best feature, which is that it’s actually a dollhouse.
Scroll the mouse to pass through the hull and descend deck by deck, from bridge through crew quarters to engineering and your hangar bays, all teeming with individually named crew members with different jobs, living patterns, personalities and the capacity to form relationships and rivalries. That’s right, this is a management sim in the vein of Two Point Hospital, albeit with a greater sense of urgency. Your ship and its denizens are the last survivors of your destroyed homeworld, fleeing through the galaxy with an armada of villainous Zutopans in pursuit.
Play follows an FTL-esque loop: you enter a system and set about gathering resources via shuttlecraft while scrounging solar energy for the next warp jump, staying narrowly ahead of the advancing red tide on your starmap. You can build and outfit rooms as you go, organising resources such as oxygen, food and water while catering to your crew’s need for pastoral commodities like snack machines or romance or gravity.
There will be ship-to-ship battles featuring turrets and fighter craft, but what I’m really looking forward to, going by the demo, is the shipboard social hierarchy, which feels a bit more involved than the classic redshirt-yellowshirt distinction in OG Star Trek, and not lightyears away from the feudal squabbles of the developer’s previous Armello. Your captain is a literal princess – put that in your tricorder and smoke it, Shatner! - and you can pick officers with managerial quirks that might upset the apple cart at the worst possible moment. Who is my Commander Worf in this scenario? Are demotions a thing? Can I put Worf in charge of weeding out the greenhouse if he ticks me off? Given that I can build a bar, who is my Guinan? I’m looking forward to answering these extremely important questions.
Edwin