Steam Charts: Incumbent Malice

Great Odin's beard, it's only the weekly Steam charts! That is to say, the ten games which sold best on Steam last week.

This week: new entries, old favourites, and a very dirty house indeed.

10. Tales of Berseria (pre-purchase)

An old JRPG series makes a belated move to PC. I'm not at all familiar with the Tales lineage, but screen-o-vids suggest it cleaves close to convention. This might well appeal to folk who felt that Final Fantasy XV's languid carboys and cod-American landscapes were too far off the more traditionally-beaten track.

Incidentally, I just started playing FFXV and I'm having a grand old time. It's so, so silly, which is ideal. Also I'm a little bit in love with James Bond-as-master-chef buddy Ignis.

9. Tales of Berseria

There's yer pre-order/release version split at play. No, I do have access to the info that would allow me to consolidate these two positions and give us a different game at 10 instead. In any case: there's clearly been a big appetite for this, even though it hasn't registered all that much on the RPS radar.

8. Planet Coaster

Planet Coaster's one of those games that, realistically, I'll never get around to playing, because I am conscious that I have neither the spare time or the patience to achieve great things with it. Instead, I choose to live vicariously through videos of others' wonderfully impressive creations, like this here Death Star trench run. Granted, this isn't at quite the same scale, but we had a good couple of years of watching amazing things recreated in Minecraft, and it's most pleasant indeed for me and fellow lazies to have a heir apparent to that.

7. Astroneer

This is fast on the way to joining Planet Coaster as another chart perennial, and it too offers a rich vein of creativity. Another one I'm being an armchair observer of - not purely from laziness, but also because I struggle to settle in one place for long enough in a space game to want to do much in the way of base building.

6. Grand Theft Auto V

I'm really going to miss Peter Capaldi as The Doctor. He was given mostly lousy stories and was unfortunately saddled with the arse-end of the previous Doctor's overblown arcs, but always made them watchable nonetheless due to his sheer presence. To have someone of that kind of skill be this invested in something so fundamentally silly is a rare occurrence indeed. Still, we get another season of him before he goes, and now that his Doctor has settled into an extremely Doctorish hybrid of Tom Baker and John Pertwee rather than the not-totally-successful sociopathic figure of his first season, hopefully his best is yet to come.

5. For Honor

Not due out until Valentine's day (roses are red, violets are blue, I've just decapitated everyone you care about with a poleaxe), but obtaining an early entry in the charts due to excitement around its just-ended closed beta. Leaks suggest that a full open beta is due on Feb 9-12, however, so if that's on the money you should get a chance to sample Ubisoft's knights vs vikings vs samauri multiplayer brawler for no-pennies, before deciding if you want More Of This Sort Of Thing or not.

4. H1Z1: King of the Kill

Didn't make anything like this kind of a dent at initial launch. I never had this pegged as one that would be haunting the charts for weeks on end - and possibly months to come, as there does tend to be something of a snowball effect for multiplayer titles. People go where the biggest playerbase is.

3. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive

I spent a few weeks avoiding the news, as a means of self-protection. Inevitably, current events have made this impossible. I am very worried. I wonder how many regular CS:GO players are similarly worried?

2. RESIDENT EVIL 7 biohazard / BIOHAZARD 7 resident evil

My prediction was correct. A deserved top-spotter for sure - I've been having a grand old 'orrible time with the claustrophobia, menace and gross-out humour of Resi 7. I have a few issues with how it limits progress/egress to very specific items, and the dialogue is hammy without owning the hamminess, but by God this is a tight, agreeably overwhelming and brilliant shocking game. I've been shrieking like a five-year-old on a rollercoaster at it too, whereas I usually play horror games in anxious silence. This is an Evil Dead game in everything but name. Wonderful stuff.

1. RESIDENT EVIL 7 biohazard / BIOHAZARD 7 resident evil

I believe this is the pre-order/release split at play again, as the second Resi 7 package, including a DLC season pass, is specifically dubbed a 'Deluxe Edition' - words which you'll note are absent from the title of this entry. If I'm right on this, that means the Deluxe Edition has not made the top ten - perhaps not entirely surprising, given the big departures Resi 7 makes from series tradition made it something of an unknown quantity. I suspect a fair few players will be picking up the season pass now, though.

I've not quite finished the main campaign myself yet, but I'm certainly on-board for DLC, presuming it isn't just challenge rooms. I want more of the creeping dread that comes from exploring a big place, not knowing when something's going to kick off, not isolated SAW challenges.