29th August

Hello and welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little about the games we’ve been playing. This week, Kelsey didn’t have to sacrifice a limb to play Elden Ring for the first time again; Bertie mucks around in the Prancing Pony with edgy Aragorn; and the rest of the team travels back from Germany. More to come from them next week!

What have you been playing this week?

Here’s another question: do you remember what you were playing last week? You don’t have to! The What We’ve Been Playing archive has you covered.

Elden Ring, Switch 2

I’ve already written at length about the opening hours of my experience with Elden Ring on the Nintendo Switch 2, and spoilers in case you’ve not read it yet, but it’s not half-bad. There’s a few frame drops here and there and I worry how, later, the faster, more-demanding bosses will fare. But so far it’s honestly just really nice to be able to alternate between playing the game docked and handheld.

Sure, I find the text a little small on handheld, but the sheer novelty of being able to play Elden Ring wherever I am is something I’ve been longing for for years (without having to buy a Steam Deck, that is). It’s also been lovely to experience the game from the very beginning again after years of barrelling through New Game Plus and randomisers galore. I always joke about how I’d sacrifice a limb to play Elden Ring for the first time again (I wouldn’t really, but still), and playing it from fresh on the Switch 2 has certainly come pretty close to that being a reality (and my limbs are still intact!).

-Kelsey

The Lord of the Wings: The War in the North, PS5

I’ve been playing a game for review that I’m excited about but I can’t talk about it yet, but I’ll be able to share my thoughts soon. Otherwise this week has been so busy I’ve struggled to play much or remember what my name is. Bernard? Boris? Bertha? I even missed Big Walk Tuesday, as I’ve come to think of it, but you lovely lot organised a stand-in Walk instead, which I love.

This gives me some white space to say more about The War in the North, the surprise-remastered edition, which I had much more fun with than I expected. Maybe it’s the power of the brand, ever-propelled by the ageless Peter Jackson films, but just being in the LOTR world, in the Prancing Pony pub – with Strider-era Aragorn sitting in the corner looking all thuggish with his hood up and smoking – is thrilling. Not quite the voice I was expecting, though.

There’s more width to the game than I’d reckoned on. I thought an action RPG like this would point us at some orcs and off we go, but we – my partner and me in split-screen co-op – noodled around Bree for ages, doing little quests for people with dlightfully dodgy regional accents. Voice acting has come on a lot in the 13 years since this was first released.

It’s a decent package. The action’s pretty good – the concept fits brilliantly with the endless battles of the books and films – it’s got the appropriate murky grey-brown colouring of the films (or perhaps just that era of consoles), and I’m enjoying it. Maybe I’m being kinder to it because I’m looking back on it like a museum piece, but it’s great that it’s had another shot at life all the same. Forget the classics: remaster the duds.

-Bertie