What Are We All Playing This Weekend?

By my estimates, this may be the final weekend you have free before you're roped into helping out with Yuletide preparations. I tend to avoid the whole end-of-the-year thing, but I'm looking forward to Crimbling up our flat this year. I think Cara plans for me to do a lot of heaving and hauling and climbing, as the designated Handy One of our flat, and I trust she'll be mulling away. I don't know if I'm up for wassailing though. So, what will you be playing on potentially your last free weekend of the year? Here's what we're into:

Adam: I'll be mopping up the final few story missions in Assassin's Creed Syndicate. I've fought serial killer cultists because Charles Dickens asked me to disprove the existence of ghosts, I've exploded drug factories with Charles Darwin by my side and I've developed a slight crush on bumbling Alexander Graham Bell. It's a silly game, caught somewhere between League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Penny Dreadful, Uncharted and the Arkham games. It's also as much of a pleasant surprise as Black Flag and might be my favourite AC game to date.

Alec: I am playing 'laboriously install my shit on a new PC' (though actually it's made out of second-hand components) as I've rented some squalid office space with some other Brighton games journos - cabin fever has become acute after the best part of a decade working from home. Then I'm going to tell the others to leave, turn off the lights and get on with playing everything I haven't yet played from Adam's list of best stealth games. Why the hell would I ever want to share my game-space with other people anyway?

Alice: My plans have little bearing on reality, as something always pops up or I'm struck by whims, but the idea is to finally finish up The Phantom Pain (I've really dragged this one out), knock out some Binding of Isaac: Afterbirth unlocks, and maybe even start on Dark Souls II. I've waited a long, long time to resume my chill late-night radio antics and think I'm about ready for it now. Handy I took so long that a better version of DS2 came out in that time.

Graham: I'm playing Subterfuge, a game which is not on PC but which is clearly inspired by games that are. Namely Neptune's Pride, about which RPS wrote a sizable diary. It swaps that game's space and spaceships for deep seas and submarines, but otherwise is similarly a strategy game which mixes the goals of economic and territorial expansion with the methods of wheeling and dealing diplomacy.

The second connection with this website is that one of the other players in the game is Adam. We're neighbours, in fact. I hope he doesn't immediately attack me.

John: This weekend I'm playing a secret game that's one I've been most looking forward to all year. I shall also be spending as much time playing the puzzles in the magazine Beyond Sudoku, which is a terrible name for one of the best puzzle collections I've ever found.

Oh, and in my imagination I'll play some more Fallout 4, because in my imagination I won't be looking after a 1 year old most of the weekend.

Philippa: I'm at the Smite super regionals event so I'll mostly be watching other people play but in between that I'll be spending a bit more time with the Paladins beta. Fun fact: I had a few games with it on Wednesday and my worst character was a tiny squirrelly thing called Pip. Literally everyone I have met here is better at being Pip than I am.

But you, dearest reader, what are you playing?