January 24th

Hello and welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little about some of the games we’ve been playing this week. This week, Bertie finally remembers to include Jim’s piece on his Christmas game; Victoria’s household is unexpectedly tense while playing a game billed as a family game; And Tom hides under the bed. And I think he’s still hiding under the bed now.

what do you play

Catch up on older versions of this column in the What We Played Archives.

Star Wars Outlaws, PC

Star Wars Outlaws is my Christmas game, a warm game of 8/10 Ubisofty profiteroles that I can tuck into a gob of my evening for a temporary respite from the chaos that is the holiday season with kids, and their kid cousins, and theirs. Three grown-up siblings who want bankruptcy-level gifts more than Sort of large wooden guff that you can make children out.

Maybe I’m an Outlaws’ Stacking Ring Puzzle kid. Maybe I’m just fine with the fact that it’s highly derivative, a little basic, and not particularly challenging. However, it is a beautiful buffet of Star Wars, which treats the familiar galaxy like Assassin’s Creed treats historical places: with appropriate respect, and with accuracy and enough attention to important details that you feel like a visiting tourist. The place you saw in the picture. And seeing it from a different angle, beyond the frame of those images, adds new context and breathes new life into something that has existed forever.

I feel like that’s what a Star Wars game should do, above all else.

– Jim

Super Mario Party Jamboree, Switch

Scenario: It’s Sunday afternoon and you and your family have just come home from a freezing dog walk. You put on the boiler and get cozy. ‘This is good,’ you thought to yourself as you sank into the chair. ‘How could this afternoon get any better?’

Your son has a suggestion: let’s play something together, he said. Of course! Family game. How wonderfully harmonious this afternoon was. We are the Waltons.

But fast forward 25 minutes and things have changed. A battle was heard as the now brutal family howled like a herd of angry mastodons. Charges are dropped and your arms are pinned by your sides as you try to turn. You realize – suddenly – what your innocent-eyed child has become. Who raises animals like this?! You throw accusations in the direction of your partner; It’s not you. Well, this is my afternoon playing Super Mario Party Jamoree.

Things started off well. We chuckled while dad rolled his first one away; My daughter likes to look through wares in Koopa’s store; And my son smiled as he rang the bell to make the Wiggler move around the map. But as soon as the first star was won, the red mist fell. The Joy-Cons are possessed with increasing ferocity as we try to claim the flags scattered across the large square, or to capture the precise moment between two Toads on a chair. The dueling gloves were thrown. Piranha plants are attacked. Allies have won and lost. It was chaos.

In the end, my son won the Mario Party crown, thanks to a combination of Boo-assisted thievery and dumb luck. Can you believe he was awarded two sympathetic stars at the end even though he was the lead? Two! I Need those stars, not him. I am outraged. But mine, if it is not cruelty.

– Victoria

Resident Evil Village, PS5 Pro

I read all the comments and I saw some people talking about how I regretted my words when I went to the Beneviento house. Well, I was there, and, OK… I’ll never look at slugs the same way again. To say anything else would be a huge distraction from a really cool sequence, but in short, I had to put the controller down a bit while my character was hiding under the bed – which we all know is the scariest place anyone could choose to hide. .

I put my PS5 Pro into rest mode so technically Ethan is in a state of suspended reality for the moment, motionless under the bed. But does he know? As I write this, Ethan has been in this state for 16 hours. Does he know what happened? He thought, ‘What have I done? What have we all done?’ How many Ethans have been sentenced to this surface level purgatory?

Don’t worry, Ethan, I’m here to help you. Of course, I won’t bother with a new game and come back to you in six months. No chance.

– Tom O