Kotaku’s Weekend Guide: Four Lovely Games We Are Eager To Get Back To

Play it on: PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Windows PCs (Steam Deck YMMV)
Current goal: Maybe finish the story? (If I’m ready to say goodbye?)

Another weekend, another few days I will be playing Clair Obscur.

Of all the pleasures and surprises of Expedition 33, one was particularly unexpected: It’s making me social! As I go out into the world and chat with people about games, this one keeps coming up. It seems, from my small sample size anyway, that this game is a rewarding nostalgia trip for us 30-somethings who grew up playing a ton of late-‘90s-era Final Fantasy and other JRPGs.

In our last couple of entries of the Weekend Guide, I’d said that while I may have been enjoying other aspects of it, I wasn’t totally sold on the game’s story yet. Well folks, that’s changed. Clair Obscur has a fantastic plot and premise, but its characters are what really pushed me over. This is a crew of complex 30-somethings (well, 32-year-olds and one 16-year old, to be precise), pondering how they should respond to a crisis. Yeah, that’s pretty relatable right about now.

Like in a good, classic Final Fantasy, these characters clearly need each other to get through the unexplainable journey they find themselves in. In that, the story also provides me with some headcanon-adjacent metaphors about getting older, relying on others, and living in fear of powers that loom over you.

Stuff like this is why I’m a lifelong lover of Final Fantasy VII and VIII (IX also has these elements, of course, but I haven’t spent enough time with that one). So if you’re looking for something to play and have ignored my recommendations for Clair Obscur the past two weeks, maybe the third time’s the charm!

Seriously. This is one of the most enjoyable experiences I’ve had playing a game in the past 10 years at least. — Claire Jackson

Play it on: PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Windows PCs (Steam Deck YMMV)
Current goal: No goals, just chaos

I’ve already played a bunch of this excellent sequel to the splendid Journey to the Savage Planet. I enjoyed that game, but I really love this one. It’s third-person, a lot sillier, and it makes kicking the tiny little creatures who inhabit its perilous worlds all the more cruel. I’m not entirely convinced the sense of humor in its spoof ads is for me, but exploring ever-further around these bonkers planets with my ever-growing suite of abilities and weapons is such a satisfying experience. I’m on the second planet now, about to find the third, and it’s a blast. — John Walker

Play it on: Windows PCs (Steam Deck YMMV)
Current goal: Protect my kingdom

In some ways it feels like the makers of Drop Duchy took a bunch of genre mechanics, dropped them into a blender, and then flung the resulting concoction against the wall to see what stuck. It’s a deckbuilding roguelike puzzle strategy game that mashes a minimalist city builder into the mold of Tetris. Tiles fall and you have to arrange them inside of a grid. Get a full line and instead of clearing away it will transform into part of a map, granting you resources from the corresponding terrain that appears. Cards, meanwhile, are placed to create buildings or to wage war against enemy units that eventually appear.

It’s both kind of bonkers and surprisingly clever. Time is not really of the essence. Drop Duchy is a pretty chill game from what I’ve played so far. But the formula feels like a neat spin on tile-placing city builders like Dorfromantik. I wish it leaned a bit more into the frenetic urgency and planning of actual Tetris, but for now I’m enjoying myself enough to see if more playthroughs end up yielding deeper strategic tradeoffs in other parts of the game. — Ethan Gach

Play it on: PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Windows PCs (Steam Deck OK)
Current goal: Survive the Shadowlands

I gave Baldur’s Gate 3 the old college try back when it first came out but, while I admired much about it, the combat didn’t quite click with me, and I abandoned the attempt somewhere late in Act 2. Following the recent news that the game’s final major patch has now landed, though, I opted to give it another shot, starting fresh from the beginning, and it’s all going much better this time around. Something in my brain has shifted, and where the combat once often felt like a slog, I’m now enjoying making the most of my party members’ varied abilities to overcome the game’s many challenges.

However, that doesn’t mean that things always go my way. I’ll avoid spoilers, but early in Act II, there was a battle which my party survived, but in which a number of innocents perished. I know it’s possible to handle the battle such that this doesn’t happen, and I thought long and hard about loading an earlier save and preventing this tragedy from occurring. Ultimately, though, I decided that the story is more interesting to me if I keep it pure, accepting the consequences of this failure, even if it means I miss out on some “content” later on, as no doubt some of the characters who died would have had more to do in the game’s third act if they’d survived.

I think of it this way: if this were an actual tabletop RPG campaign I was playing and one battle wound up having dire consequences, I probably wouldn’t beg and plead with the DM to let me try the battle again from the start. That’s not really how D&D works; failure is interesting in its own way, and I think this tragedy should only make my party members hate the game’s main villain even more. Plus, this way I have an incentive to play the game again at some point in the future and keep all those characters alive. Part of what makes Baldur’s Gate 3 so impressive is the way that its story can flow in many different directions and accommodate the results of so many successes and failures. I personally wouldn’t feel right about forcing things to go the way I’d like them to. Here’s to living with our failures! — Carolyn Petit

And that wraps our picks for the weekend. Happy gaming!