What we’ve been playing – surfing, line-riding and house parties

20th September

Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we’ve been playing over the past few days. This week I’ve managed to convince the wonderful Christian Donlan to write it all! Look, I offered, OK? We made a trade, a secret trade. So this week it’s a Donlan special, and he’s been surfing, connecting lines and throwing house parties (that I wasn’t invited to?).

What have you been playing?

Catch up with the older editions of this column in our What We’ve Been Playing archive.

Microsoft Edge Surf, PC

My PC exploded last week, which was not an enormous amount of fun. Then I had to buy a new one, which was miraculously even less fun. Is there anything more stressful than trying to pick a new PC?

One of the good things to come out of it, though, was the discovery of this surfing game, um, Surfingthat Microsoft wings your way when you’re downloading updates for your new PC. It’s a very simple endless runner type of thing, and it appears to be based on SkiFree, and it popped up in my life when I was quite stressed and annoyed and fidgety. It popped up and made things a little cheerier for a few minutes, and for that I am very thankful.

You can play the game outside of getting a new PC, incidentally, but you do need to use Microsoft Edge.

-Donlan

Oxytone, iOS

Oxytone is a reminder that every day there are probably dozens of brilliant games being released on smartphones, and it’s maddening easy to miss them.

To miss out on something as good as this, for example, would be a real loss. Oxytone’s a sort of blend of those old Pipe Mania games and something like Dorfromantik. You place hexes on the screen, all of which have a tangle of lines within them. You’re trying to coax one specific line to travel back and forth along the map without hitting an end point.

It sounds complicated but it isn’t all: you just place hexes and rotate them to get the line-ups that seem most promising. You can learn the game and steadily improve just by playing it.

More than anything, I live for the combo system in this game. When your line loops back and takes you through a bunch of tiles you’ve already laid, you get this rising ring of notes and your score goes through the roof.

There’s something slightly otherworldly about Oxytone, and I think it might be a work of genius. If you don’t fancy it on smartphone, I think it’s available on PC and Switch too.

-Donlan

Party House in UFO 50, PC

It would be impossible to do a What We’ve Been Playing this week without dipping into UFO 50.

Party House is my favorite at the moment. It’s a deckbuilding game that took me a long time to realize that it was a deckbuilding game. That’s because it’s also a game about throwing a house party, inviting guests, and hoping that the guests together bring enough popularity and money in for you to keep throwing parties.

It’s all about creating synergies between guests, cobbling together pairs who boost each other’s stats, relying on guests who come with useful actions, and avoiding guests that either cost you resources or may cause fights with other guests. Inevitably, though, I lose games because I get too drawn into the fiction. I start creating house parties filled with my favorite guests regardless of how well they chime together. Still, compulsive, strange and fascinating stuff!

-Donlan