^{Image: Capcom}

We’ve been playing a ton of Mortal Kombat 1 and Baldur’s Gate 3 recently. How about you?

Hello! I regret to inform you that today is Monday, which means that the excruciating crawl towards Friday night has begun anew. While time can be a tricky thing to sort out with everything else you have on your plate during the week, there's always a bit of it left to spend on the things that make you happy.

Fall 2023 is an insanely busy season for the games industry, which is great for me, because I like videogames and I sure have been playing a ton of them lately. I also want to know what you have been playing, dear reader - are you exploring the endless cosmos in Starfield, or digging into Counter-Strike 2 at long last? What else are you planning to check out over this next week?

Myself, I’ve been playing a lot of Mortal Kombat 1 recently, and I will likely continue to do so over the next week. While I usually gravitate towards this franchise's campaigns, I’ve found that its Invasions mode is actually a lot of fun in bite-sized chunks. You navigate different maps and hop from one node to another like a boardgame, only each node presents a new fight with different characters from across the multiverse. I’m using it to grind out a few levels for my favourite fighters, who each get cosmetics the higher their level goes.

Mortal Kombat 1 is what I call a ‘side-game’, the kind of low-stakes game that doesn’t require much of you after a long day. I’ll be playing it in between two other games: Resident Evil 4’s Separate Ways expansion and Baldur’s Gate 3. Resident Evil 4 was one of my favourite games released this year, and Separate Ways launched last week - I just didn’t have time to get into it during an Assassin’s Creed Mirage review.

Now, I finally have time to pull my curtains shut, turn all the lights off, make a hot cup of tea and bask in the glory of Albert Wesker’s remake-era debut. I hear they’re including some cut content in this expansion, and I genuinely can’t wait to sink my teeth into it. Baldur’s Gate 3 is a low-priority game I plan to return to throughout the year, just ticking off one quest at a time before doing other things. I adore this game and its companions in particular, but it does require a lot of puzzle-solving and critical thinking… and save-scumming for the faint of heart. I’ll admit, I can’t help but go down that road when something goes truly wrong in my campaign.

As for non-gaming stuff, I’m almost done with Netflix’s Castlevania Nocturne (which is fantastic!) and I’m planning to check out The Creator in IMAX whenever convenient. I’m also reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer for the first time, and I’m surprised it took me this long. It’s delightful.

What have you got going on this week, friend? What games are you playing, and what are you watching?

What we are playing this week (9/10/23)