What we've been playing - oppressive city builders, helpless chickens, and inspired updatesA few of the things that have us hooked this week.Image credit: Hello Games Feature by Robert Purchese Associate Editor Additional contributions byChristian Donlan, Matt Wales, and Tom OrryPublished on Feb. 1, 2025 1st FebruaryHello and welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we've been playing this week. This week, we hunker down from storms and pray for the safety of our tiles in Dawnfolk; we put a full-stop on Resident Evil Village but find ourselves ruminating on the fate of chickens; and we return to No Man's Sky yet again, as it expands, yet again.What have you been playing?Catch up with the older editions of this column in our What We've Been Playing archive.Dawnfolk demo, PCCute!Watch on YouTubeDawnfolk is a wonderfully oppressive citybuilding game that a good friend of Eurogamer recommended to me. It's tile-based and has a lovely pixelly aesthetic. It pretends to be a normal citybuilder, but is actually something a little darker and more interesting.The game is a tile-based thing. You start by turning the tiles you have control of into houses and resource-gatherers, as in traditional citybuilders. As you do so, you're slowly working outwards and getting access to more and more tiles. It's clever stuff even here, with adjacency bonuses for certain buildings and little mini-games when you want to hunt deer in the forest, say, or chop down trees.All of this is great, but then the game's cycle begins. Every so often a storm arrives and there seems to be some malevolent force at the heart of it. The game suddenly turns from expansion to a kind of huddling down. The storm blows in and I hope I don't lose too many tiles and damage my economy too much.Survive the storm and you get to rebuild - but you also know by now that another storm is coming. Human life is this thing that flickers and thrives between moments where nature reasserts control. Lovely, horrible stuff, and that name - Dawnfolk. What a perfect piece of creepy poetry.-DonlanNo Man's Sky, PCReminds me a bit of Star Wars film The Force Awakens, when those spacecraft are flying over water.Watch on YouTubeOkay fine, Hello Games, you got me again. Not that I was ever really out to begin with. After not quite managing to keep up with No Man's Sky's ceaseless geyser of content updates last year, I finally got the chance over Christmas to knuckle down for its Expedition Redux events and scoop those limited-time awards I'd missed out on. And while limited-time anythings are a bit of an irksome trend at the best of times, it feels a particular shame that No Man's Sky's Expeditions don't stick around more permanently given how wonderfully additive so many of them are.Just this last year alone, we got tales of a fisherman consumed by obsession, Starship-Troopers-meets-cosmic-body-horror, haunted whispers from cursed starfleet crews, and even temporally unstable adventures across a boundary fractured universe. Most of these refocus No Man's Sky's myriad systems in interesting ways, and many feature side servings of narrative that widen and deepen its idiosyncratic, existentially horrifying overarching lore. Oh and they all come with some cool rewards.To see this content please enable targeting cookies. But expeditions aren't why I'm here, despite having wittered for two paragraphs now. I'm actually here to talk about No Man's Sky's first update of 2025, which, it turns out, is a cracker. Released this week, it picks up some long gestating story threads and births a long-dormant presence into the universe that poses an interesting question: what if No Man's Sky gave players the power of a god, letting them shape the universe to their arbitrary whims? And having done so, there's something genuinely thrilling in knowing an infinitesimally small but permanent corner of No Man's Sky's universe has sprung to life in a specific form solely because of my fleeting fancies. Could such god-like powers be a glimpse at No Man's Sky's endgame?And that's before all the other cool stuff. Worlds Part 2, like last year's first half, is very much an explorers update, and Hello Games' myriad systemic refreshes have helped even old corners feel new. But it's the new-new stuff that's had me gasping most this week. Gas giants! Jungles! Planets littered with ancient archaeological wonders! And perhaps best of all, actual proper water worlds. These endless expanses of ocean are intimidating enough on the surface, but slip beneath the water and they're terrifying: fathomless depths of impenetrable blackness; unimaginable water pressure; wild, weird sealife, and far, far below, vistas of extraordinary bioluminescent beauty. It's horrifying and I hate it but it's gorgeous and I love it. Enough writing, though; the Nautilon awaits and I'm going back down.-Matt.Resident Evil Village, PS5 ProI'm lycan what I see!Watch on YouTubeI've now finished Resident Evil Village and for the most part I think it was pretty great. In fact, it's only the final boss battle that I felt was underwhelming, in a way that a lot of final boss battles are. The game also throws a lot of proper nonsense storytelling at you towards the end, but I am fine with this as Resident Evil isn't exactly a game I play for grounded realism.Favourite parts? Well, I love the fish man and the doll woman, and some of the factory's claustrophobic corridors are superb. Least favourite parts? Well, it's a ridiculous thing given the content of the game and series, but I found it hard to shoot the chickens for their meat. They just seemed so helpless. I knifed one once as I had no bullets and felt bad about it for a whole afternoon. People are silly.-Tom O