Kotaku’s Weekend Guide: Four Games To Send You To The Stars (And Realms Beyond)

Play it on: PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Windows (Steam Deck Nope!)
Current goal: Defeat The Witness
Buy it from: Humble Bundle

I was in LA last week for Summer Game Fest, which ground my Final Shape progress to a halt at the worst possible time. While everyone else was glued to the raid race, enjoying the wild 12-player final mission it unlocked, and has been deep in the post-game grind ever since, I’m still barely past the half-way point in the main campaign and, I gotta be honest, it was a slog up to that point. In terms of story and presentation, The Final Shape is everything I’ve hoped for so far, but those early missions had nothing on The Witch Queen.

Fortunately, literally everyone else I’ve asked has said the back-half of The Final Shape is its strongest, and a genuinely bold display of the game’s ambitions firing on all cylinders. It’s been a while since Destiny 2 sucked me in like a live service black hole, but I can’t wait to experience some of that again this weekend. In fact, I’m almost glad I missed out on the initial wave of everyone completing the expansion, because now I can experience the campaign in my own time, without the anxiety of the power grind or keeping up with the rest of the Destiny 2 community zeitgeist. I’ve been spoiled enough to know there’s an Avengers-style showdown coming and I can’t wait. After all, it’s one I’ve waited 10 years for. — Ethan Gach

Play it on: PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Windows (Steam Deck YMMV)
Current goal: Enjoy some more Remedy weirdness

Alan Wake II was my favorite game of last year. Its mix of survival horror gameplay with a meta-textual story about trying to make the perfect sequel blew me away. I was also amazed by its gorgeous art design and wild melding of mediums, including film and even musical theater. So to say I have been looking forward to the game’s DLC would be an understatement. Now Night Springs, the first of two planned DLCs for the game is here, and I finally have time to play it this weekend.

Night Springs is a bit of an oddball expansion for Alan Wake 2. It’s a collection of three non-canon self-contained stories about side characters from the base game. What that means in practice is that developer Remedy is having more fun than ever, as the studio can handwave away any wild things they get up to in the DLC as not part of the canon. There is a story about the Alan-obsessed waitress we see in the base game, a meta-story about actor Shawn Ashmore playing a fictionalized version of himself, and even a Control crossover starring Jesse Faden. They all seem as different from each other as possible. I don’t know exactly what to expect in all of these bite-sized adventures, but I’m sure it’s going to be a lot of fun. —Willa Rowe

Play it on: Xbox Series X/S, Windows (Steam Deck YMMV)
Current goal: Mod the absolute hell out of this game
Buy it from: Amazon | Best Buy | GameStop

Just what am I doing with my life here? To be clear, that’s a question I ask myself regularly, but right now I’m asking it because I’m looking at another weekend of playing Starfield. After over 100 hours with the game for a review last year, I really, really thought I was done with this game. But then official and community mods got added and, would ya look at that, I can start trimming away all the things I don’t like and start adding in things I do like!

Starfield, in so many ways, is a very, very tired formula out of Bethesda. But as I’ve said countless times on this site, there are some genuinely very interesting premises and, damn, the game sure can look pretty sometimes.

And you know, once you learn to ignore all of the damn loading screens in-between the various stages of planetary travel, conceptualizing the actual scale of this galaxy is pretty neat. Given that the Creations’ mod suite is barely a week old, there aren’t a ton of mods to sift through just yet. But that kinda makes it a bit easier to try out more than a few to see if they’re worth becoming essential, go-to ways to play this big space game.

Slowly but surely, I’m starting to believe that the game I wanted out of Starfield is within my grasp. — Claire Jackson

Play it on: PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Windows (Steam Deck YMMV)
Current goal: Brew all the Elfroot
Buy it from: Amazon | Best Buy

Yeah, I know, I know, I’m like one of those people who discovered Fallout 3 for the first time because there was a TV show. But, for what I believe to be really good reasons, I never played Inquisition. That’s odd to me, given Dragon Age: Origins is one of my all-time favorite games. I was, in fact, the very first person in the world outside of BioWare to finish it! I spent 120 hours playing it for its world-exclusive review, and I adored it. I was even one of the few people who didn’t hate the second game on its release. But by the time Inquisition came along, things were different. It came out the year I had a kid, and boy did I no longer have time to play a 700-hour RPG. And when I looked at it, and saw it didn’t even vaguely resemble the first two games, I had no inclination to try to fit it in.

Working with people at Kotaku, I’ve learned just how loved Inquisition truly is. First the dearly departed Ash Parrish, and now completely besotted Kenneth Shepard, has been enough to make me believe I’m missing out on something, even if the stupid game doesn’t let you zoom out far enough to satisfactorily control battles with its third-person action game delusions. So I’ve installed it on my Xbox, rather than the PC on which I would otherwise play any and all RPGs, in the hope that a controller will convince me to embrace its heresy. I’ve already closed a few green flickering portals, and plan to spend any spare moments I get over the weekend seeing what’s what. I’ll admit, in a sneaky 10 minutes playing this morning before dropping the boy off at school, I found some Elfroot behind a building, and that suckered me in hard. —John Walker

And that wraps our picks for this weekend. Stay cool out there!