Seven-day speedrunning marathon Awesome Games Done Quick 2021 has ended, raising a brilliant $2,758,847 million (around £2 million) for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. It’s the second-highest amount ever raised at the event, right behind last year’s winter marathon, which is pretty good going considering this year was the first fully digital AGDQ.

Despite not having a roaring crowd sat behind them, the speedrunners still put on an excellent show from the comfort of their own homes. Here are a few of my fave runs from the week.

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Every month as part of its Book Of Heroes business, Hearthstone releases a short single-player adventure, telling the life story of one of the big characters off of Warcraft, via card-based boss battles. They’re lovely, and I really like them. The new Book Of Heroes just became available, and features everyone’s favourite mellifluous fantasy bigot, the paladin Uther Lightbringer.

Uther is a sort of cross between Obi-Wan Kenobi and Bean Dad, who in Warcraft lore does such a piss-poor job of mentoring young Prince Arthas, that the geezer only goes and becomes the Lich King. Over the eight battles of Uther’s story, the paladin himself narrates these events from his perspective, and some insights are gleaned: Uther used to be a priest. Uther really, properly despises orcs (in a way that gets quite uncomfortable to listen to). But most of all, Uther used to be an ABSOLUTE MAD LAD>.

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I love Frontier’s trio of park-building games, but they are strange beasts. All three (that’s Planet Coaster, Planet Zoo, and Jurassic World Evolution, for the record) are slightly shallower management games than I usually tend to enjoy, but they make up for it with severe overperformance in every other regard.

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Most videogame documentaries look like early ’00s webcomics. There’s usually a couch, some talking heads, maybe the occasional establishing shot of a building, to let you know that the couch is inside a building. Archipel is something else entirely. A YouTube channel dedicated to creating documentaries about Japanese artists and creators, it has raised the bar – and mostly just by making people go outside.

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Tomb Raider: 10th Anniversary Edition was a remake of the original Tomb Raider under development for the PSP by series creators Core Design. The project was cancelled in 2006 and re-skinned as an Indiana Jones game, which was also cancelled. Now, thanks to the Internet Archive and some Tomb Raider super fans, you can play this cancelled game – sort of, a bit.

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One of Valve’s yearly, player-voted Steam Awards is called the “Labor Of Love” award. It’s designed to reward a developer that has been continually updating a game for years. Naturally, the award goes to games with big, satisfied communities with lots of players to vote, and in 2020 the award went to Valve’s own Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. The other nominees were Among Us, Terraria, The Witcher 3 and No Man’s Sky.

Worthy games, but I’m going to make a belated pitch for a left field contender: Planetary Annihilation: Titans, a real-time strategy game that hoped to follow in Supreme Commander’s big robot footsteps, and which has been quietly humming away under new developers for the past couple of years.

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It looks like the leak was right: Valorant‘s next agent is a tricksy teleporter named Yoru. The character was unofficially revealed by a Russian YouTube channel earlier this week, but now Riot Games have made him official. Edgy lad Yoru is set to debut in the tactical FPS next week on January 12th, which just so happens to be the start date of the game’s new Episode and Act to boot.

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It was true when John wrote his Pictopix review four years ago, it was true when the game got a huge update for its first anniversary, and it’s true now at the puzzle game’s 4th anniversary. The celebration is a smaller gift this time, but Pictopix is still great.

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There are a handful of VR games trying to be the headset-wearing equivalent of Counter-Strike or Call Of Duty. Pavlov VR is one such modern military shooter, only it’d quite like to be Day Of Defeat or Medal of Honor, too. Released on Thursday, update 24 – also known as the WW2 update – adds Axis, Allied and Soviet weapons and player models to the game – and fully functioning tanks.

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I do quite like this time of year in the UK, where most the place gets wee bits of snow scattered around in dribs and drabs. One day, I’m screaming about snow and delighted by the weird snowmen I find in the park. Then it melts and a pal a hundred miles south gets a go. Then back up to me. Then ooh a rare snowy day in London. It’s fleeting enough that one pal or another is always excited about snow. Which is nice.

What are you playing this weekend? Here’s what we’re clicking on!

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