What we've been playing
A few of the games that have us hooked at the moment.
16th June, 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: looting, toasters, and ancient memories of spiders.
If you fancy catching up on some of the older editions of What We've Been Playing, here's our archive.
Diablo 4, PS5
It was thanks to the son of a family friend that I first played a number of games. He was a few years older than me and I distinctly remember playing the first GTA on PC with him and giggling that he named his character Gordon Bennett. I was 10.
The first Diablo game was another one. My parents later bought me my own copy but I never got very far into its hellish labyrinth. I was too young and never quite got my head around its complexities. But playing the recently released Diablo 4 brought back a lot of those memories, in particular the bubbling sound effect every time you sip a potion and the tense acoustic guitar soundtrack that's always on the brink of bursting into full metal screaming. Some things haven't changed in the past almost-thirty years.
So far I have found Diablo 4 to be a fairly mindless and repetitive experience. I couldn't tell you what's going on in the plot beyond "Mother!". Its side quest stories always have a demon responsible. My sorcerer is blessed with powerful lightning magic, so I spam attack buttons and watch the demonic bodies amass. Loot bursts out. The numbers go up. I trudge through more immaculately detailed muddy forests and putrid swamps. I tap away at the attack buttons. My eyes glaze over. The hours pass.
Damn this is compulsive.
Ed Nightingale
Toasterball, PC
Toasterball came into my life with this week's Wholesome Direct. Basketball? Tennis? With Toasters? God yes.
Somehow, it's even better than the pitch. Controls are intriguing and playful - you bounce around using the two levels to get air and change direction - and the rules are simple: knock the ball into the enemy goal. But what I wasn't expecting was the endless variation. One round the ground will ripple suddenly or let our electrical shocks. On another the ball itself will be invisible.
I have won points because of complex rebounds and I have lost points because my toaster fell into lava. It's wild, but it also feels weirdly fair. This is the future, then, and we are all hooked on Toasterball.
Chris Donlan
Bleak Sword DX, Switch
I loved Bleak Sword on Apple Arcade, and now it's on Switch and PC I am hooked once again. It's a battling game, basically: you face off in little arenas against hideous beasts of various kinds, using a light and heavy attack, a roll, and a parry. Like Souls games, it's all about stamina management. And it's incredibly challenging at times, incredibly oppressive. It's gloriously horrid stuff.
And as I've been playing the lovely Switch version something has been tickling away at my brain. I fight through spiders and frogs and try to keep space for myself. The trees loom and the soundtrack fills me with foreboding. Somewhere an ancient gaming memory stirs. What is it?
It, I believe, is Forbidden Forest, an old C64 game my brothers had. A simple action game in which your archer works through one horrid level after another zapping beasties with arrows. But I remember now, deep in Bleak Sword, that this game used to really scare me: the music, the huge spider sprites, the sense that things were closing in.
So Bleak Sword is a gift in two ways at least. Here is a recent game I love returned to me, and here is a memory of something older and weirder, a memory of being thrillingly scared by a videogame. Just brilliant.
Chris Donlan