Now Playing, part 16

We have a cure for your Monday coming on the 15th -- our October issue will be charging out in the world! And to get you ready, here's a sneak peek at two of our contributors and what they've been playing lately:

Marvin Shackelford

I'm in the middle of losing a week to Assassin's Creed Odyssey -- big and pretty but not as stunning or fun as Origins -- and I've been listening to Meat Puppets -- II -- and Don Cabellero -- 2 -- and Mastodon -- Remission -- CDs in the car lately. Just blew through The Golden Girls and working on South Park on Hulu.

Scott Fenton

I’ve been playing Undertale, an indie game created by developer Toby Fox and originally released in 2015. I’m smitten with the game’s sense of humor, how regularly it upends the player’s expectations of how this kind of gameplay should work. The game is an RPG in which your character encounters random enemies while exploring the game world, but you don’t have to battle these foes. You can choose, instead, to spare them—or even flirt with them. When you flirt with skeleton monster Papyrus, you can tell him, “I can make spaghetti,” or you can bluntly let him know, “I have zero redeeming qualities.” If you choose to battle the ghost enemy you encounter, when you eventually defeat it, the ghost reveals, in an all-lowercase monotone, “I was just lowering my HP because I didn’t want to be rude.”