Weekend Playlist: what are you playing?

The release drought is drawing to a close, and gamescom is almost upon us. How did you spend your gaming time this weekend?

July is a deathly month for triple-A releases and news. The whole industry is either on holiday, recovering from E3 or building up to gamescom.

This is a grim time for blockbuster fans, but on the other hand it's a great time for everyone else, granting a chance to broaden your gaming habit with something new, take advantage of all the indie treasures that pop up to fill the gap, or knuckle down with some unfinished titles or catch up on your pile of shame. The whirlwind of summer sales ought to have left your digital libraries groaning.

So let's brainstorm. Let's workshop this. What did you play this weekend? Was it any good? I'll start us off, since the rest of Team VG247 is either on its way to gamescom 2015 or resting up ahead of what we hope will be a really fun week.

• Year Walk

  This unusual point-and-click adventure released in 2013 for iOS, and made it to Steam last year. I think I picked it up in a Humble Bundle, and had never tried it. It's pretty short but really good; there are some satisfying but not ridiculously difficult puzzles, and some very creepy moments drawn from its roots in Swedish folklore. I spent a very happy few hours with it.

• Neverending Nightmares

  I was a Kickstarter backer of this project (I rewound the credits to see my name, of course) but only just got around to playing it through. It's pretty creepy, but the scares wore thin after a while due to the volume and repetition. Nevertheless I'm really glad I played and can't think of anything else quite like it.

• The Swindle

  "I will not play The Swindle all weekend," I told myself sternly. I played it a lot, though, and got further than ever before - which is not hellishly hard. I hit a difficulty spike and have to master the Steam Purge to get much further, I think. It gets super, super hard if you're as awful at platforming as me (you're probably not, nobody is).

• Journey

  To celebrate Journey hitting PS4 I invited my dad over for a tea party and made him play it. He struggled a bit - 3D platforming and twin analog controls are much harder than those of us who grew up with games can possibly understand. Eventually I ended up doing a fair whack of the controlling but he had a good time anyway. What a great game it is.

• Hackycat

  Now that I finally have an iPad I play Hackycat all the time. You kick cats into the air. It's pretty good, hey.

• Mind: Path to Thalamus

  Another Humble Bundle treasure, I was really enjoy this surreal first-person puzzle adventure until the umpteenth crash saw me giving up in disgust. The whole Myst-like genre is really taking off in the indie scene, with varying results. This one seems pretty good; I'll have to figure out what gremlin in my ageing gaming rig causes it to throw a tanty.

• Kentucky Route Zero

  You can see I was working through my indie backlog, can't you. This one is so good. I got halfway through the second episode before I had to go to bed, and I dreamt about it all night. I'm thinking about moving to the US, so I can drive around weird backwaters on the weekends. I suppose I could do that here, but Australia is drying up faster than my patience for misogynist triple-A dinosaurs, and dust is less pleasant to look upon than Mad Max movies suggest.

That's my list, then: so what have you been up to? Still plugging away at the enormous Batman: Arkham Asylum or even The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt? Checking in with Life is Strange? Enjoying Rocket League or The Swindle? Maybe some of the entries from our best games of 2015 so far list?