What we’ve been playing – Open-world dress up, plant puzzles, and festive levels

21st December

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, we love a nice festive level, tackle some plant-based puzzles, and explore a brilliant open world while wearing some tremendous outfits.

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

Astro Bot, PS5

Look, I’ve got so many games on my list that I’m keen to play, but when Astro Bot got a free winter/holiday themed level I had to play that immediately. It’s, as expected, rather lovely. I wrote a completely original song, not at all based on an existing Christmas classic, to celebrate its release.

DualSense rings, are you listening,

What a pain, Retro Rampage

A beautiful sight,

Puzzle Piece tonight,

Walking in an Astro wonderland.

Gone away is the Deckster,

Here to stay is my blister

Damn that time trial,

Live in denial,

Walking in an Astro wonderland.

-Tom O

Botany Manor, Xbox Series X

Welcome to the last weeks of December, aka: the weeks where we play ‘Let’s mop up all the millions of great games we missed from earlier in the year’. I’ll be honest, readers, despite playing loads of games from January to March this year, and then another truckload in these latter months from September onwards, I’ve got a great big gaping hole of games I’ve missed from the spring and summer months – something I’ve been trying to rectify with some rapid-fire quickplays lately to see what grabs my attention and what doesn’t.

One game I wolfed down in a single evening recently was Botany Manor, a sedate puzzle game about growing all sorts of weird and wonderful plants inside a picturesque Somerset stately home. These aren’t your typical roses and daffodils, though. Rather, these rare and exotic strains will only bloom under very specific circumstances – the right room temperature, say, or having its soil juiced up to a particular pH by crushing certain apple varieties into it. My favourite was the Wolfglove, which only bursts into life when you recreate specific sounds and wind speeds inside an old tower to mimic the environment of its mountainous home.

It’s very artfully done, and the puzzle of working out what conditions you need to induce require a fair bit of brain power to suss out, putting together clues and information from notes, letters and observations you’ll find strewn about the desks, bins and tables of the manor. I was expecting it to be another one of these cosy game pushovers where all the thinking is done for you, but I was pleasantly surprised by the rigour of its cerebral challenges. Plus, it’s just a wonderful space to noodle about in, its bright and vibrant colour palette and seemingly interrupted spate of picnics and discarded deckchairs bringing touches of The Witness to it. It’s a very jolly time, if a little summery for such a wintry, end of year playthrough.

-Katharine

Infinity Nikki, PS5

Despite playing a lot of open-world games (welcome to guides writing), there’s not many that I genuinely enjoy exploring. I may get sucked into ticking-off side quests for a short while, but there’s a reason the last Ubisoft game I completed was Assassin’s Creed 2: open worlds just seem so big, and scary, and boring a lot of the time. But when a game understands what its audience wants, an open-world isn’t a challenge anymore – it’s an invitation.

Watch on YouTube

Infinity Nikki invites us to find hot air balloons, bubble blowers, magical hopscotch, and giant bird-like Sky Monarchs, which you can ride on the back of to take in the fairytale sights of Miraland. There are also adorable fairy-like Faewish Spirits to help, cute animals to pet, and thousands of pieces of clothes to customise your Nikki with, to fit whatever style you’d like to see her in while exploring.

It’s massive, yes, but Infinity Nikki’s world seems like it’s designed in service to how happy and joyous it can make you feel, not how much it can pack in to keep you distracted. It’s not perfect – there are bugs at launch, and the standard open-world trappings like collectibles are still present, but for the most part, Infinity Nikki is about as upbeat and cheerful as it gets in video games. Not what I was expecting from a series with its roots in the mobile dress-up genre, that’s for sure!

-Jessica

Don’t get too festive in the comments just yet. We’ve got a Christmas special edition of What We’ve Been Playing going live on Christmas Day morning. See you then.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard, PS5

I’ll admit I’ve never been the biggest Dragon Age fan, though as a lover of fantasy RPGs and Mass Effect, on paper the series is right up my street. I’ve played Origins and Inquisition, but they always felt a step behind their big sci-fi brother and, beyond some fun characterful moments with companions, felt generic compared to others of the genre.

Veilguard has changed my view a little. Its streamlined gameplay is more akin to Mass Effect but better and more focused for it, while the new visual style helps to give the game its own identity. With its rounded characters, flamboyant hair tech, and soft lighting, I feel like I’m playing a Pixar fantasy in a L’Oreal advert, with some truly spectacular environments too. It looks great!

It’s been years, though, since I played Inquisition and without deep lore knowledge the story of Veilguard felt nonsensical and its characters not as immediately likeable. And beyond its dated quest design, it was the repetitive combat that frustrated me above all. I played as a mage and spent most of my time dodging enemies rather than attacking: between constant aggro, enemy animations that seem perfectly timed to interrupt your spell-flinging, and a lock-on that constantly removes itself when interrupted by the environment, I was near catatonic with rage by the game’s end.

And yet (!), somehow I felt compelled to see it through. For the most part I found Dragon Age: The Veilguard to be mindless and monotonous, but I think that’s actually what I needed right now. After a long year of plenty of lengthy, complex and challenging RPGs, I was keen to lounge on the sofa and sink into something a little more relaxing. The check-list missions, button-bashing combat, and follow the marker quests proved surprisingly engrossing. Right now, that’s good enough.

-Ed