PWB March 2026

Play

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth - this is a very odd game, isn't it? I mean in many ways it is quite brilliant, and it's absolutely stuffed full of content, and all of it's really good, and the characters are superb, and the combat system is much improved. But it has - thirty hours in - absolutely zero narrative drive. I was following Sephiroth at the start of the game, and I'm still following him now, and I'm none the wiser as to why I'm doing that or why the focus of the game shifted from battling Shinra to taking this dude down. Maybe I've missed something, but as I'm meandering around the world at my own pace playing card games and chasing Moogles, it's hard to see where the threat really lies.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time - always at the cutting edge, me. I'm playing this on the Switch 2 using the N64 controller and the excellent CRT filter they've added recently, and I'm having a great time. I know the 3DS version exists, but this is a game defined and limited so much by the crazy hardware it originally ran on that it feels only right to respect that and play the original. It is absolutely wonderful, and while it has obviously aged in very apparent ways, once you get over the initial clunkiness it is every bit as enjoyable to play as it was nearly thirty years ago.

Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor - enjoyably addictive roguelike that keeps me dropping in for twenty minutes or so at a time, there's always something new to unlock or something to level up and it gets satisfyingly difficult quite quickly.

Want

After some thought, I think I'm good on Resident Evil: Requiem for now, at least until I've played the RE4 Remake. It'll come to Game Pass eventually, I'm sure. Likewise the Yakuza 3 Remake, it's not that long since I played the original and I've still got Lost Judgement to tide me over if I get the urge.

I'm intrigued by Slay the Spire II but ultimately I think I'd rather wait for the full release.

So what else is there that's coming up? 007 can't get here soon enough.

Bin

Trump finally dragged us into World War 3. Enjoy your videogames while you still can.

Play
Mass Effect 3 = After finishing the trilogy I immediately restarted ME3 on insane pretending it's a shooty bang dudebro game like Gears of War. I'm actually having a lot of fun blasting through with James and Garrus and seeing what other options the game has when you aren't taking it too seriously. did you know you can ditch Dr Chakwas and replace her with young french Dr Michel? I didn't.

Ocarina of Time - I recently finished this on 3DS. I probably already posted about it. It was good but kind of empty.

Want
After ME3 I'm going to sit down with another long game. I'm enjoying playing all these things I've been putting off for literal years. I might restart Persona 4, Trails in the Sky or Tears of the Kingdom. I stalled out about ten hours into each one.

Play

Resident Evil: Requiem - I may have beat this, but I want to go back and do it better/faster and the more I hear about it, the more I'm tempted to double dip and buy it on the Switch 2, which I hear out performs the PC version on a Steam Deck, given how great this game looks I'm impressed if true. The fact that I'm considering that I hope shows how much I enjoyed the game, especially considering the price.

Also I don't think I pointed this out but Grace's VA absolutely smashes it, she's one the most common points of praise I've seen so far in stream chats and twitter, and deservedly so. It's really nice to see how this game isn't as divisive as Village was and to a lesser extent, 7, not just because this game deserves it but it's just nice to see Resident Evil back on top again you know?

Resident Evil: Outbreak - I have finally stopped making excuses and tried this out, and I've actually beat the first scenario! It wasn't even THAT hard…after a few retries of routing and what not. It was kinda frustrating having AI teamates operating at a fraction of their usefulness that another player would provide, but even then I managed, I gave Cindy a lighter to free up some space and when the time came to use it I managed to ask her to give it back to me. What an experience though, the atmosphere was unique because of the other survivors there, but the difficulty really kept on the pressure in a way the PS1 games could not.

Also obviously I played as Alyssa, her being in Requiem is the main reason I've finally tried this game out, and her unique skill is Jill Valentine style unlocking mastery, so she's pretty good!

Monster Hunter Wilds - Only a few hours of co-op hunts with friends every night or so, but it's felt like a peak MH experience every time. Roll on the expansion

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth - this is a very odd game, isn't it? I mean in many ways it is quite brilliant, and it's absolutely stuffed full of content, and all of it's really good, and the characters are superb, and the combat system is much improved. But it has - thirty hours in - absolutely zero narrative drive. I was following Sephiroth at the start of the game, and I'm still following him now, and I'm none the wiser as to why I'm doing that or why the focus of the game shifted from battling Shinra to taking this dude down. Maybe I've missed something, but as I'm meandering around the world at my own pace playing card games and chasing Moogles, it's hard to see where the threat really lies.

That lack of peril was a big issue I had with it, too. I don't remember it ever really getting better, and even by the end of the game, I don't really know what Sephiroth's Big Plan actually is…

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Play
Gods help me, still World of Warcraft. I made the mistake of trying out Retail, and had what I can only describe as an "old man yells at cloud" moment - everything's different and I don't like it. Perhaps the mistake was trying to play a class I had only just gotten the hang of in MoP Classic, but I started a fresh toon with a class I hadn't played before, and seem to be getting along a bit better. Not sure on the new flying yet, though - you have to pay attention, which seems to defeat the point of solo WoW a little bit.

Aliens: Fireteam Elite. Had this on PS+ for aaaaages, and finally tried it out. It's pretty fun, though it partly makes me wish I was just playing Helldivers II again?

Want
To play Helldivers II again.

Play

With DQ7R finished, I've kicked off a run at Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age, though I don't expect I'm going to make it all the way through (see Want). There's a lot more going on in the plot than I remembered! I appreciate the Hidden Fortress/Star Wars approach to the "main" character more than I did originally, but everyone seems very eager to take alleged traitors at their word. There are a few concessions to the JRPG structure in that way, which are a bit jarring.

Want

Pokopia can't unlock soon enough. I'm trying to avoid details after the Treehouse preview video made multiple references to the game's "plot", but I'm very curious to see what kind of narrative structure it has. Fingers crossed it doesn't get in the way of doing things.

Bin

My inability to go to bed at a reasonable hour (he typed, at 12:30am).

I fucking love FFXII, I think it has a better story than even Tactics too.

Playing enough Maximo during work to decide to finally install Ghosts and Goblins Resurrection on my Steam Deck and holy SHIT, no joke this might be because I'm playing on the hardest difficulty (but it kinda defaults to that so we ball) it might be the hardest game in the series that I've played, it's extremely difficult and I can't even get very far on the NES game without dying…but at least I can feel it's possible.

Maximo on the other hand, is pretty hard but by far the easiest game in the series, you can take more than one hit before being reduced to just your boxers and it's just not as relentless in enemy spawns or platforming, I rather like it actually, solid 3D platformer. (You have to buy saves though, absolute mad lads)

Pokopia is very moreish.

Tinykin finally got put in a sale so I am now playing Pikmin on my Xbox.

Pokopia is very moreish.

Isn’t it just. It’s the Viva Piñata sequel we never thought we’d get.

Tinykin is finally on sale so I grabbed that the other day. I never played much of it before my Gamepass ran out and I'm excited to get back to it.

OK, so as pretty much everyone has said, Pokopia is brilliant.

It's part Animal Crossing, part Minecraft, part Viva Pinata, tasking you with transforming a series of environments and building suitable habitats to attract various Pokemon, all of whom have different requirements and needs. It's absolutely stuffed full of things to do, appears to be absolutely huge and is completely enthralling to play. The Pokemon themselves are a chatty bunch with bags of personality and even the storyline is kind of sweet. I always seem to be doing about ten things at once and yet it's low-pressure enough that if you want to take time out to build a big house or a minecart race track then you can do that as well.

Also, this might seem like a weird thing but it runs like a dream - there's loads going on but it never struggles at all, it keeps track of everything you've done across a series of huge environments and the draw distances are vast. It's weird to have a Nintendo console that doesn't feel like it's struggling a bit technically, it feels like since the Wii at least we've got used to that but Pokopia is pretty impressive as well as being loads of fun to play.

It feels like the first really great Switch 2 game (for me - don't come at me, DK fans) and a real shot in the arm for the Pokemon franchise as well.

If there's one thing I wish Pokopia did differently, it'd be to give the player some way to have more control over when they learn crafting recipes, or what they learn. There are a few types of decoration and building blocks I want to get more of, but I haven't learned how to make them yet and I don't want to rip out the ones that are already in the environment. You can find new food recipes by adding different things to the pot; I'm not sure why there isn't a similar discovery mechanism for other stuff.

Oof yeah this game is dangerous. Just made 2 hours of my afternoon vanish.

Just beat Requiem for the third time, first time was the atmospheric playthrough, the second was a 'let's do some challenges' type of playthrough where you can enjoy simply knowing what's coming this time and live in the moment, the third was a speedrun attempt, not in the internet competition sense but the in game challenge sense for the 'Challenge Points' which I managed to get by beating the game in just under 3 and half hours. (No healing or blood collecting either)

I was thinking when I beat this game and said 'let's see how this fares as a replayable game, will I enjoy it more or less?' and I can confirm that I'm enjoying it so much more with each playthrough, that I kind of think it's now a 9/10 game and not an 8. I started a 4th playthrough almost immediately, with the rewards I got from the last run I now have infinite ammo and that means Infinite Ammo.

Going to squeeze a few more runs out of this I think, get the Platinum and finally move on, they've already announced DLC and I'm here for it, easily GOTY so far until maybe Trails 2nd. It deserves all the hype and excitement it's been getting

Play - Slay the Spire 2
I never really got on with the first Slay. I think it's glacially slow to get going each round, and a lot of the builds and cards are just really dull. Like Balatro, I don't mind it, but it was always absolutely overshadowed by Monster Train, which does everything it does, a lot better. But I was really struggling to get back into the Monster Train 2 DLC (I think I just ran out of steam and had reached Monster saturation point - I have hundreds of hours on it now) so I thought I'd give Slay 2 a go.

And, well. It's fine? It's very like the first one - a little more dense and with some welcome added complexity, but it's still a little stilted, stiff and nowhere near as satisfying as MT2 to play. I do like it more than Slay 1, and it suits handheld play so I think I'll give it a fair shot. But really, I still don't think it's in the same quality class as Monster Train 2 (or 1 for that matter).

As you know I agree with you on the Monster Train / Slay the Spire question (especially when it comes to MT2) but I think you're being a bit unfair on the latter, it's still an incredibly well balanced and strategic game that I find myself going back to regularly.

As such I am very keen to play the sequel but I don't really want to play an unfinished, constantly changing version of it for the next two years so I think I'm going to wait until the final release. By all accounts the current version is already very polished so hopefully it won't take as long as people were expecting.

I have put about 5 or 6 hours into it now, and I like some characters more than others, but it's just so slow and I feel more often than not, you can just be destroyed by a bad draw. Also, Monster Train 2's thing where it shows you damage calculations before triggering the end of your turn, really is the way to go. When you have hundreds of variables, I can't really be arsed working out if I'm 1 point of damage short from killing something.

It's also quite samey. It's a flat plane, it's your deck and some things to kill. Every round. MT has the spatial aspect, which means it's almost like two games in one. Slay 2 could have made the ordering of the enemies important, but it isn't really. It also shamelessly pilfers mechanics from Magic the Gathering, which I guess is inevitable after 30+ years of that game exploring every card game design space, but MT/MT2 don't just have to rip off card game mechanics as it has the spatial aspect to it (so, for example, you can have a deck based on moving the enemies around - card position in modern MTG isn't a thing).

It is also strangely unfinished, with placeholder art and no achievements. Which is all very early access, I know, but seems almost like it's in there just for the sake of being in there. Like, most of it is hyper polished and then it has MS Paint art on a few bits. Mmm. And aspects to the UI are just painful - the unlock screen should never have got past a first design meeting. It's woeful to navigate on a pad and is just a wall of useless shit I don't care about. MT is clear about what progression unlocks what, and it's all shown on a normal screen for normal people.

At its core it's the sort of game that's always never going to be shit, just by virtue of the action of playing cards and doing stuff is always going to be fun. I just think it's pretty disappointing after the first game and feels more like a DLC or reskin. The fact the first character you can play is the most boring one from Slay 1 also hammers this home. I'd put it in the same bracket as Balatro. Fine. Reasonably enjoyable. But Monster Train remains the absolute king of this genre by a mile.

As I type I have a stack of at least 40 games I have purchased since Xmas I haven't even tested to make sure they are all working. A lot of it has been ebay and charity shop grabs, but been playing hardly anything again it seems.

We have been away multiple weekends and my midweek game is always devoted to my football playthrough stuff (just broken 1100 subscribers so that's been a nice milestone given how niche it all is)

My missus dad (we are somehow still not married) has this weekend just signed for a flat in Sheffield for 6 months though. He is a tad overwhelmed by it all and going to be keeping his house back in Leigh but this is a big first step towards the idea of getting him to move his full time and seeing more of him. So am excited by that. It's been particularly miserable the last 12 months with him being isolated by himself and then when he does come and stay we have to sleep in my kids room and this is clearly starting to annoy her now she is older and then I am just not in good enough shape for multiple nights on camp beds etc.

I'm jumping in late because I've finally had some time to play some games this week after finishing a dwarf-painting job which had gone a bit sideways and ended up requiring 7-day weeks until 1am every night.

Play
Death Stranding 2 still. I never just plough through the campaign in any game, but in this one I've taken that to an extreme. I will spend days just building infrastructure, not doing any of the missions, neither main nor side. I'm now getting to the very end of the story, and characters have started breaking the fourth wall and turning to the camera to say stuff to the player. The first time was okay, quite creepy and good even. The second warned us of a long cut-scene, which is at least considerate, but the third one was really shit and egregious. Proper bollocks, and should have been cut. It happens during a lengthy cut-scene that explains a load of stuff (well sort of, naturally none of the explanations make any sense) and a character literally turns to the camera and says, did you work out the hidden meaning behind this name? It completely takes you out of the moment, the "hidden meaning" is completely lame, and I resent one of my favorite games ever doing something so stupid. Still, it's one five-second moment in a 100-hour masterpiece, so it's not that big a deal.

Evil West This is a strange one. I hadn't heard of it, but it's on Game Pass, and it turns out that it is a very 360-era third-person action game. You jog down corridors and have a series of fights. There is no whiff of an open world, to the degree that you get the impression that the developers have never played, or heard of, an open world game. The secrets are all very short obvious detours from the main corridor. The story is stupid in a good way. It's the wild west, but there are vampires, zombies, werewolves, and stuff. You punch them with a big electric fist. There is no subtext whatsoever. Again, it's as if it was written by Garth Marenghi, who considers all authors who use subtext to be cowards. The vampires do not represent the aristocracy impinging on the freedom of the wild west. They represent vampires. If you are reading anything else into it then that is your own moral failing.

As a game, it's like the 360 era never ended, which is obviously a good thing. That era was full of games where you just pushed forward, engaged in the combat, and carried on to see what happened next. There is still something great about that. You don't need to think about anything except how best to punch the vampires. It's not perfect, it does get repetitive, and you soon see that all it's really doing is linking together a series of combat arenas, each of which just give slightly different combinations of the same enemies to give you very slightly different challenges, most of which can be dealt with by doing a big jump-punch forward, the first attack you unlock. The game is not trying to disguise this at all though. I think it's the point, to be honest. I'm just happy to be playing what is to all intents and purposes a new 7/10 Xbox 360 game, which makes it an 8.5/10 today, of course.

Want
More of a need really, but a new car. Mine has got to that stage when it's started costing me money on a regular basis. It's cost £2000 since last August, and I could have put that money towards a new one. I'm thinking I might get a Dacia Duster, but the advert jingle somewhat puts me off.

Bin
Error - It is currently impossible to make a flippant comment in this field due to the state of the world.

Not tried the HD mod yet but playing on RE4 PC is interesting, I was fully intending to use a pad until I felt how smooth mouse aiming was but then I started to get a sore wrist not too long into playing, gutted. I didn't even look at the controls and I instinctively knew what they were, I know it's tank control based so I assumed it was WASD, which it was, two mouse buttons? Well that's clearly aim and shoot baby, then I shot a guy in the knee and the melee button popped up so no guesses there. Somewhere in all of this I have to credit the base RE4 control scheme for just not being very convoluted at all.

Makes me really miss the Wii version, the aiming was practically gamebreaking but as an alternate RE4 experience, it felt incredible, like your third eye just opened, and I don't recall ever having wrist pain like I did from the PC version, which is absolutely nothing compared to the aching wrists I got from playing the lightgun games with the Move controller.

Oh wow, count me as another Monster Train 2 fan, I'm comparing it to Slay the Spire 1 here but it just feels massively more exciting off the rip, presentation almost makes the more minimalist vibes of StS feel…cheap? And mechanically it did feel like I was thrown into the deep end in MT2 but I quickly grasped at a Pyregel build and it made StS feel almost lethargic in the deck/ strategy building by comparison.

I am not flushing StS down the toilet or anything, it's still really good, but man does MT2 leave a good first impression.

Join us! Join us!

Monster Train 2 is brilliant and it's one of those sequels that makes the original game completely redundant (you'll see why). The only thing the first game has going for it is a slightly easier onboarding - as you say, MT2 does chuck you in at the deep end with both the initial clans having a few mechanics going on - but once you've got a game or two under your belt, you should be on board with it.

I think Slay isn't a patch on MT2 for a number of reasons, but the pace is definitely one of the main differentiators. I have been playing the odd run of Slay 2 here and there, but the glacial speed to where your deck begins to do something is off-putting. MT2 really has a "just one more deck" factor.

Anyone here "playing" Dispatch? I really like the general flavour. Strong Invincibles/The Boys vibe (SWEARS and hyper violence) but charming all the same. is it really a game though? It has the Telltale "Mr Boogle Will Remember That" aspect to dialogue interaction + some QTEs and minigames (not a surprise considering who the devs are), but basically you're just watching a fairly entertaining cartoon. I am enjoying it, though.

My brother said he tried STS2 and he felt like he was using the same deck and character he was using in the first game at one point. :thinking:

I think calling it Slay 2 was a stretch. There was more additional content in the Monster Train DLCs for each game.

Also, MTs decision to let you mix clans is the genius bit. Every combination opens up new, interesting interactions between cards and powers.

Anyone here "playing" Dispatch? I really like the general flavour. Strong Invincibles/The Boys vibe (SWEARS and hyper violence) but charming all the same. is it really a game though? It has the Telltale "Mr Boogle Will Remember That" aspect to dialogue interaction + some QTEs and minigames (not a surprise considering who the devs are), but basically you're just watching a fairly entertaining cartoon. I am enjoying it, though.

Yes, actually! I just started it, and have played through the first chapter. I think the moment when a big superhero fight happened in which one participant's knob and balls were flailing around the whole time was when I realised that I was going to enjoy Dispatch. I mean the game may as well have put the words "Feltmonkey will remember that" on the screen.

Absolute elephant in the room energy.

Played the Pragmata demo, for the most part I really liked it and will probably buy it eventually, combat will be really fun if the complexity ramps up a bit it might push me to get it sooner than later. I want to struggle to navigate the grid whilst fighting the mechs because in the demo it felt like a simple minigame to do damage you get for free in other games. The boss at the end gave me hope though, with room filling aoes and being actively aggressive while you're trying to max out damage on the Grid.

Has the same satisfying feeling of blowing mechs into scrap like Vanquish did as well (An amazing game btw) or maybeeven Binary Domain.