It’s October 4. That means the Persona fandom is crying and everyone else is going about a regular Friday. You’re planning your weekend activities. Some of us might hang out with friends we couldn’t see during the work week. Others might be looking to rot in their bed for two days to recover from the unending pressures of late-stage capitalism. For the rest of us, we’re probably playing a video game. Are you looking for video games to spend your weekend playing? Well, you’ve come to the right place. Here are a few games we’ll be using our precious time off to play.
Play it on: PlayStation 5, PC, Xbox Series X/S
Current goal: See if it runs better
I loved Master Detective Archives: Rain Code when it launched last year on Switch. The latest murder mystery excursion from the minds behind Danganronpa had plenty of the twists and turns I’d come to expect from writer Kazutaka Kodaka, and while it took some time to get going, it was one of my favorite games of last year. But it also ran like shit on the Nintendo Switch. Now developers Too Kyo Games and Spike Chunsoft have ported the game to PS5, PC, and Xbox as Master Detective Archives: Rain Code+, and my hope is that it will run smoothly on more powerful consoles. I’ve had the PS5 version sitting on my console for a bit and haven’t managed to get around to it, but this weekend I will finally find out if the port sees the game running like it should. — Kenneth Shepard
Play it on: Switch, PC
Current goal: Bang the drum all day
Almost no one’s talking about Bakeru but I’m having a blast with it. It’s a spiritual offspring of Mystical Ninja (Ganbare Goemon in Japan) by Good-Feel, the studio that collaborated with Nintendo on Yoshi’s Woolly World and a bunch of other games. You play as a kid with blue hair and a pair of drumsticks that can clobber enemies and unlock secrets scattered across 3D levels. A special power gauge opens up additional gameplay mechanics like turning small to fit through tight spaces or hover in the air.
The world feels like a box of crayons nuked in the microwave and then dropped into the ocean. It’s bright, breezy, and handles super well. I’m a few hours in and so far it’s a perfect mix of colorful whimsy, clever exploration, and just having a ton of fun hitting stuff. If this were reskinned as a Nintendo game, tons more people would be raving about it. — Ethan Gach
Play it on: Everything
Current goal: Make my wife watch me falling into hay loads more times
No, you’ve not got the time wrong, it’s still 2024. But in my belated world, the latest big game is Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. I actually started playing it out of simultaneously being frustrated with how much Star Wars Outlaws was annoying me, but also still wanting to scratch that giant Ubisoft-map-shaped itch, and the last time I channeled my DNA centuries into the past was way back when Odyssey came out. I’ve got a lot to catch up on! So much so that I had to get Ubi to delay Shadows into next year, for my own convenience.
I know for a scientifically researched fact that I’ll never actually finish Valhalla, because I’ve never finished a single one of these games, but rather play them until I feel like I’m done. I definitely don’t feel done with this one, yet, despite hammering away at it every evening for a couple of weeks. When I do finally feel like I’ve had my fill, it’ll be time for Mirage.
The best bit of all of this is how much my wife hates watching when my Viking lady dives from the synchro points and into the hay below. It makes her tummy go uncomfortably weird, which entertains me enormously. I am the best husband. — John Walker
Play it on: PS5, PC
Current goal: Finish this thing
My last few weeks have been busy and weird, so I wasn’t able to finish Konami’s Silent Hill 2 remake in time for a full review. Instead, I wrote up my impressions of the first half or so of the game. But this weekend, now that my life has calmed down a bit and it’s my favorite time of the year—spooky October—I’m going to try and dedicate some time to finishing up this wonderful and scary remake.
And then I have like five other games to play as October continues to be a packed month for good video games. Which is nice, if you just play games for fun, but is a pain in the ass for me. — Zack Zwiezen
Play it on: PC
Current goal: Discover the truth at the heart of the world
For the past few weeks, I’ve been singing the praises of UFO 50 here in the pages of the Weekend Guide, and indeed, it seems likely that this extraordinary collection of games by UFO Soft, a developer of the 1980s that never actually existed, will dominate my gaming time once again this Saturday and Sunday. However, rather than once again talking up the collection as a whole for this week’s entry, I’m going to focus on the one game I’ve been playing most within UFO 50 of late: Grimstone, the collection’s epic JRPG.
In many ways, Grimstone feels like a traditional early JRPG. It’s more Final Fantasy I than Final Fantasy IV or VI, with its blank-slate characters who never speak or have any personality beyond what you can glean from their expressive sprites and their natural tendencies toward sharpshootin’, shotgunnin’, or whatever their particular specialty might be. However, as those weapons may have indicated, Grimstone does differ from most early JRPGs in one crucial way: it eschews the traditional fantasy setting most of them employed for a really terrific “weird west” world, one in which gunslingers and ghost towns coexist alongside angels, demons, and all manner of strange and unsettling creatures and happenings. And even if the characters in your party don’t have much depth, the world itself does. What at first seems like a landscape against which a simplistic battle of good and evil is playing out reveals itself to be more complex and intriguing as you persevere through Grimstone’s surprisingly lengthy quest.
I think I’m finally nearing the end of that quest after playing Grimstone pretty obsessively in recent days, though I still have no idea quite what I’ll find at the end of the mysterious late-game dungeon that now awaits me. One thing I do know, however, is that no matter what I find, finishing Grimstone will hardly mark the end of my time with UFO 50, as it still has so many wonderful games whose surfaces I have yet to really scratch. — Carolyn Petit
