What are we all playing this weekend?

To hell with spring cleaning in spring. We've entered the miserable stage of winter where there's no snow and it's just unpleasant out, so what better time to really spruce up the rooms I'll be huddled up in for another two months yet. Let us consider the welcome arrival of fresh white snowbells a prompt to scrub hard. When spring starts, I'll want to be outside, instantly outside, not cleaning. Anyway! What are you playing this weekend? Here's what we're clicking on!

Alice Bee
is away!

Alice0
The next Steam Next Fest demo-o-rama starts the week after next and... squillions of games released their demo this week. This is a lot of pre-Next Fest demos to check out. Goodness me.

Ed
It's my friend's 30th this weekend, so I'll be visiting them and a few others in London for something lowkey: A nice dinner, some drinks. A chitchat. I'm unsure whether I've got time for gaming, as I don't really game on the train. I prefer to just zone out and listen to a music or a podcast. Right now I'm listening to Ghost In The Machine, a true crime-y podcast about the use of motors in professional cycling (only has two episodes out right now). I know nothing about cycling and I'm hooked.

Edwin
This weekend I'll be playing the early access version of Nebulous: Fleet Command, aka Homeworld for people who know how to sculpt a radar profile. High hopes for it, going by the first few tutorial missions, though the current absence of a single player campaign is a drag. Beyond that, I am going to play Complete My Tax Return, which is a fun spin on Xmas party classic limbo (no, not that Limbo) in which you redefine random impulse purchases as "expenses" until you squeak under an income threshold.

James
I feel like I should probably be trying a big new survival game, and since I'm convinced Palworld's popularity is the result of some strange kind of industry-wide carbon monoxide leak, that really only leaves Enshrouded.

Jeremy
After Palworld took over my life this week (along with the life of everyone else on the guides team), I will decidedly not be playing it on Saturday or Sunday. I'll probably go back to Prince Of Persia or Elden Ring. Or maybe I'll avoid video games entirely and just read a book to cleanse my mind of the horrors I have seen putting dozens of Pals to work. (In all seriousness, Palworld is fine. My personal favourite "it's sort of like Pokémon if you squint" game will always be Dragon Quest Monsters, though.)

Katharine
It's more Palworld for me this weekend, but I'm going to be switching it up with a bit of Lil Guardsman as well. I enjoyed the Papers, Please-ness of Lil Guardsman's demo a while back, and I'm excited to give the full game a go now it's out properly. I might also check out some more very early Steam Next Fest demos if I have a spare moment, as everyone seems to have just jumped the gun and put them live now, rather than waiting until it actually starts on February 5th. My inbox is full of interesting demo shouts right now, so if I find any good ones I'll write them up next week.

Kiera
It's perhaps more games adjacent rather than games orientated but this week I'm going to be painting more of my Warhammer collection. Specifically, I have a set of Stormdrake Guards that have been looking rather sorry for themselves on my shelves. It's high time I gave them a lovely paint job. I'm aiming for a celestial theme, with purples, blues and flecks of white to emulate stars. That's the vision anyway, but there's a high chance I'll scupper it somehow.

Ollie
Like most people, I'll be neck-deep in the survival crafting genre this weekend. But unlike most people I imagine, I won't be playing Palworld. Instead, I'm going to start a new Enshrouded multiplayer game with the family, and I've also got a V Rising multiplayer game going on, which allows me to stretch my dark-side muscles for a while.

But you, reader dear, what are you playing this weekend?