Weekend Playlist: what are you playing?

Video games! Remember those? Raise your weary limbs or limb substitutes and communicate with us re: our collective entertainment medium of choice.

Welcome back to VG247's mental mining operation, where we exploit our most valuable resource (you) for our own nefarious purposes, to whit: game recommendations.

The release schedule generally takes a little break over December and January in terms of big triple-A launched, but the big Q! blitz is not far off. This is a perfect time to clear some of your backlog or catch up with the meta on your favourite multiplayer efforts before things kick off again. So how are you tackling it? We want to know what you're playing, what you think of it, what's next on your radar - all that good stuff.

We'll get you started. It's mostly me this weekend, having attacked my Steam backlog with a powerful fervour, and also because I forgot to email everybody else for their round-ups. Soz!

• ARK: Survival Evolved

  I understand young Matt is enjoying himself in the wilds, punching trees, taming dinosaurs and establishing an island paradise. I would love to join him, but I have belatedly realised that my gaming PC is very much in need of an upgrade. Woe.

• Don't Starve

  I know for a fact that Steph has a heck of a lot going on every weekend, which makes the time she manages to pour into Klei's 2D survival sandbox even more impressive. It's a grand tribute to the developer's ever-expanding vision that there are still new adventures to be had; the characters' differing abilities and the procedurally-generated worlds offer incalculable variation.

• Cibele

  I finally got around to one of the indie darlings of last year. Cibele is a very personal-feeling game which you can knock it over in an hour or so. You'll spend most of that time peeking into the folders on a simulated desktop or running raids in a very stripped-back simulation of an MMO, but the real point is the uncomfortably real (and true) story of two gamers getting to know each other online.

• Broforce

  We have lost Patrick to the comedically hyper-American, hyper-masculine Broforce. He may arrive late to the party but nobody can say he doesn't go all out when he does arrive. Can we get him to write down some words about it? I'll try leaving him pointed messages in Slack and see how we go.

• Richard & Alice

  Remember how I started playing this back in September last year? Several of my other projects fell to pieces this weekend so I finally found time to tick it off. I only saw one ending and went and read about the others, because Time is Money and I wanted to eat a sandwich, but even having seen just one path: wow. Pretty amazing.

• Regency Solitaire

  Hidden object and free-to-play have conspired to pretty much kill off casual gaming on your PC, but there was a time when there was a terrific lively scene full of weird and wonderful stories and genres, best illustrated by PopCap's early catalogue. Indie gaming has taken up some of the slack but Regency Solitaire is a real throwback to the best of those times. I finished the story mode this weekend and immediately uninstalled it so I would stop playing. Then I gave several copies away as gifts, sabotaging productivity.

• XCOM 2

  You know how everybody seems to have been playing XCOM 2 over the holidays? I was included among this select number but didn't check my email for several weeks, so am running super late with my preview. Then my ridiculous PC decided on its own whim to upgrade to Windows 10, and my key was invalidated. If I can figure out how to get back in I hope to be able to tell you more about how great it is.

• Warhammer: End Times - Vermintide

  It's basically Left 4 Dead only the enemy is rats. I love it. If you can get three (or even two) pals to join you, it's terrific fun. I refuse to play as anyone but the sarcastic Witch Hunter, whom my head canon dictates is a sexual deviant, and who has a delightfully snarky antagonism with the Bright Wizard. The loot system is a bit of a grind, unfortunately, but maybe I just need to put in another 200 hours or whatever.