10th of September, 2021
Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we’ve found ourselves playing over the last few days. This time: falling, driving, and travelling back in time a bit.
If you fancy catching up on some of the older editions of What We’ve Been Playing, here’s our archive.
Downwell, Switch
Here is a game you feel in your ankles: Downwell, a roguelike about plummeting through space with guns attached to your feet. The guns reload when you hit the ground, and if you don’t want to shoot enemies you can also land on many of them and start a combo going. That beautiful jolt of impact – right through the ankles and up the legs.
It’s lovely stuff, playing a sort of unbaked cookie of a little fellow, falling through dirty pixelart spaces that feel like Metroid one moment and the Addams Family the next. I like to play with the VBoy filter that dunks the whole game into the doomy Cold War red visuals of the Virtual Boy. It makes a game that’s gleefully oppressive just that little bit worse – by which I mean better.
I missed Downwell on iOS, but its arrival a while back on Switch is oddly perfect. The perfect game to play between other games – just as long as the ankles hold up.
Chris Donlan
iRacing, PC
A new season of iRacing beckons, and so after a brief hiatus I’m dragged back in to try some of the newly released tracks and cars and maybe, just maybe, actually commit to a full season of regular racing rather than making an awkward, accident prone cameo in an endurance event as is my usual way.