What did you play last week?

Tyler Wilde played Hellish Quart, a game of relatively authentic sword fights. Though it's in Early Access the animations have an engagingly real mix of elegance and clumsiness to them. It's the work of the animator responsible for Geralt's moves in The Witcher 3, but you won't find flashy pirouetting here—just a dance of cut and thrust that ends in blood.

Rachel Watts played Minecraft with texture packs that turn everything pastel and pink. The voxel world becomes a land of candycane forests where everything has manga eyes, and when you get to the Nether it turns real freaky. That hellish underworld, made dark and creepy in the 1.16 update, is now fleshy and odd and everything has a face. Brrr.

Christopher Livingston is still playing survival game Valheim, trying a worldmap that makes every boss basically your neighbour. Being able to share seeds for worlds like this means instead of relying on the procedural generation to give you something personal you play a survival game as a more shared experience, comparing how you did directly with other players like in more authored games. It's something I've never tried, but now I'm curious about how it changes the effect.

Andy Kelly played The Black Iris, a psychedelic horror game set in a Scottish research facility. Something has gone cosmically wrong, and you're the unfortunate engineer sent to decommission the place. That means exploring it and piecing together the clues to figure out what happened, and what the mysterious Black Iris really is. It's got a very 1980s British TV vibe to it, a specific kind of low-fi spooky that's pretty appealing if you watched shows like Chocky as a kid.

Enough about us. What about you? Have you tried throwback citybuilder Nebuchadnezzar, or Zombie Army 4 now that it's on Steam? Maybe you missed Tales from the Borderlands the first time and grabbed it on its return? Let us know!