17th May 2024
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 look up at the sky, with our eyes and through our phones; we live out our fantasies as a tiny fire trying to find their way home; and we find the best cat game you have probably never heard of.
What have you been playing?
If you fancy catching up on some of the older editions of What We’ve Been Playing, here’s our archive.
To see this content please enable targeting cookies. Northern lights, iOS
Okay, not a game, but hear me out. My wife and I were just about awake at 11 on Friday night and we saw the Aurora out the window.
Here’s the game part. We didn’t really see it. You couldn’t see much in the sky with the naked eye. The lights only appeared when we took pictures on our phones. Suddenly, the grey night sky over the neighbour’s house was stained a leafy green. Minutes later there were shimmering icicles of coral light hovering above the houses in our street, and a red glow on the horizon.
All of this just on our phones, mind. Eventually it got to the point where you could see a very dim white shape in the sky unaided, but the colours and everything were purely on the phone screen.
It reminded me, inevitably, of AR: that slightly spacey feeling when you’re interacting via a screen with something that isn’t really there, or isn’t there in the same way you are. I had no idea that the northern lights existed in the same realm as the games Niantic makes, but frankly I’ll take it.
The Last Campfire, Switch
This was on sale a few weeks ago, so after reading Chris Donlan’s Last Campfire review, I thought I’d give it a shot. It follows the story of a little Ember trying to find their way home, but it’s so much more than that.