Weekend Playlist: what are you playing?

Winter is coming, and video games are fun again. What's caught your fancy after all the excitement of gamescom 2015?

It's happening: the long dry summer is coming to an end. This is bad news for your banging beach bod, but great for games - publishers have been woken from their dozing slumber by gamescom 2015 and remembered we might want to give them some money at the end of the year, so they better tell us some interesting things about their games.

So now that we're all excited about vidya again, what did you play this weekend? We had a really diverse list in the comments last week and I know a bunch of you walked away with recommendations. Team VG247 will get the ball rolling:

• Dark Souls

  Perhaps because Dark Souls 3 was front and centre at gamescom 2015, Team VG247 has gone a bit Souls crazy this week. Sherif, our resident fan, spent most of the weekend playing Dark Souls 2, and Matt installed Scholar of the First Sin and is restarting; he said he's determined to do it "properly" this time. I started a new Dark Souls run myself, on PC. Gonna go all-mage, I think; see how it works out.

• Destiny

  Having discovered The 100, I am once more in love with Destiny and intend to play it every day, forever. I ran Prison of Elders and did a bunch of Queen's Bounties for keys. Pat also got back on board Destiny after taking a full week off while away at gamescom.

• Lord of the Rings Online

  Lord of the Rings Online is going through one of the inevitable server closures and migrations that beset MMORPGs, and to Steph's great horror, her home server is on the hit list. She said she needed to tie up loose ends and save her houses, which were about to be foreclosed. Steph and her Kin have been on that server since launch. What a shame.

• GTA Online

  No surprise to hear Matt's gonna be back in GTA 5, since he's obsessed with it and probably missed it terribly while away at gamescom. There's a double XP event on as well as steep discounts on Pacific Standard vehicles, which is a powerful lure.

• The Order: 1886

  Matt has promised to play The Order 1886 and tell us all about it, now that the dust has settled. Personally I think we already know everything we need to: it has tonkers in it, and occasionally a man rushes about nude and you see one flapping about. Game of the Year.

• Galak-Z: The Dimensional

  Proving he's down with the latest trends, Sherif spent some time this weekend with the latest indie darling. Galak-Z seems pretty cool; it's a 2D shooter with procedurally-generated levels unique to every player, all of which are connected to each other. It's like a twin-stick rogue-like, and hails from the team behind Skulls of the Shogun.

• Don't Starve: Reign of Giants

  Steph and I both have a bit of a problem with Don't Starve, Klei's charming 2D survival crafting sandbox. I refuse to install it on my iPad because I would never. Stop. Playing. Steph has no compunction about letting it swallow her weekend gaming time.

• Banished

  Steph is also pretty obsessed with Banished, a wonderful town-building sim in which your citizens regularly starve, freeze or otherwise meet their untimely demise rather than, you know, setting up a trading empire and carving a new civilisation out of the wilderness, as you intended. I have provided her with some hot tips which were in turn given to me by my buddy Grace, namely: fiddle with the UI until it is usable.

• Sound Shapes

  Sound Shapes is free with PlayStation Plus. Remember how everyone was raving about this musical platformer when it launched on Vita? Well, Sherif played it this weekend and says he thinks he's going to uninstall it. Ouch.

• Limbo

  Pat has installed Limbo on PS4. I am also considering this but I recall not being able to get past about the eighth screen when I tried it on PlayStation 3, and I'm not sure better visuals will improve my performance in this regard. Will Pat smash through it in mere hours with his mighty brain? I'd like to say yes, out of loyalty, but knowing what I know about the extent of his patience I have some doubts.

• Saints Row 4

  Early last week I came across some truly delightful SFW FemBoss slash Shaundi art on Tumblr and remembered how very, very much I like Saints Row. For all its over the top nonsense and eye-rolling attempts to be "edgy", it's genuinely inclusive, warm and very funny. Anyway, I realised I had never finished Saints Row 4 so played it for 25 hours or something over the course of the week, finishing on Saturday afternoon. Am now very much looking forward to Crackdown 3.

So that's us - quite a gaggle of titles. But what about you? Let us know what you what you've been up to. Did you take advantage of the GTA 5 event? How's The Witcher 3 after the latest patch? Are you doing a Fallout run before the new one hits? Any Hearthstone action this weekend?