As the years go by and current hardware becomes increasingly incompatible with the past, the first Gothic gets harder and harder to play, making it the perfect target for a remake. The 2001 RPG is a cult classic for a reason, ahead of its time in worldbuilding and nuanced NPC interactions. I'm about halfway through Gothic 1 Remake now (review codes were only sent out four days before release), and while it has so far pulled the original into the near-modern era in terms of presentation and controls, it doesn’t touch much else. This is a mixed blessing. It’s great because Gothic already forced a higher level of engagement and immersion out of us, refusing to hold your hand in a way that still resonates in 2026 – but it was also often challenged and overshadowed by the poor quality of its story, the pacing of quests, and shallow combat, and none of that has changed either.

I first played Gothic soon after my time with The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind, which came out around the same time. I immediately identified them as similar games in many ways, but different in at least one stark one: while they are both dense worlds designed to get lost in with lots of mysteries to find and foes to fight, Morrowind invited and encouraged me to fulfill my destiny as the hero of this clandestine peninsula, while Gothic couldn’t care less about my survival, my progress, or my fun.

Ironically named the Hero, you’ll spend much of the first half of Gothic feeling like anything but. From the moment you are dumped into The Colony, a work camp and open air prison surrounded by a magical one-way barrier, you are met with tribulations as grand as the complicated political climate that the survivors here live in and as small as the tiny critters that can one-shot you in combat if you’re not careful.

This remake’s best upgrade is easily how it looks and sounds. Gothic had a unique style even back in 2001. It was the definition of “doing a lot with a little,” thanks to low-poly models with muddy details arranged and colored in ways that really evoked a sense of place many bigger budget games didn’t. The forests have big trees that block out the light from the sun, which is a huge contrast to the brick and mortar ruins where people are making new lives. All of this has been enhanced, with modern lighting and models that make the old castles and caves of the Valley seem more like real places. The grassy and rocky lands that make up the uncivilized spaces between The Colony’s settlements look verdant and appropriately wild now.

The sound design was always strong, too, especially in the sound effects and ambient nature noises. All of those are more robust than ever, even if the droning background music selection isn’t all that special. But the best enhancement is the completely revoiced script. The original Gothic had some abysmal voice acting and this remake does a great job upping the bar to at least “good.”

Training Days

Gothic’s difficulty is baked into its design in ways that aren't simply enemies that hit you hard. It starts with how little you are even told about how to play. The remake does you a favor the original didn't, including a small glossary of important controls for how to do basic things like pick up items and attack with bows. Otherwise, most of what you learn comes from trial and error. For instance, the lockpicking minigame, though not overly difficult to understand, is something you just have to throw yourself against until you get it, even if it means wasting a ton of picks. Thankfully, the modernized control scheme and the inclusion of controller support help sand down some of the early game edges that came from a basic inability to interact with the world around you correctly, which does get you off the blocks and into the ore mining rat race more quickly.

Combat also benefits from the revamped controls, making it easier to swing and hit enemies. This does not make combat easier overall, however, which is still just as dangerous as it was 25 years ago. Your hero starts off weak, and even lowly molerats can send you to the game over screen in a hit or two. Leveling up gets you Learning points you can spend at trainers to raise your stats, which goes a small but gradual way towards making you dangerous in your own right. Once you get better gear, you stand a better chance, but weapons of any real note can be a big investment early and armor even moreso, the latter being the biggest factor in surviving more than a few blows.

You'll be pretty bad at handling any weapon you pick up without training. It's cool to see the difference between wielding a one-handed weapon untrained vs trained (or eventually mastered). Untrained, you clutch a short sword with both hands for dear life, flailing awkwardly with every swing, while trained attacks can flow into combos with the proper timing, and can critically hit enemies. This is a fun example of a game’s storytelling goals being met both with interactive and non-interactive elements at the same time, but it still means that melee combat feels bad for a large chunk of the early game, only getting better if you can scrounge together enough money and save up a couple of levels worth of Learning points to get trained. And even after that investment, while the act of swinging a sword feels better, the actual action never evolves beyond standing in front of bad guys and bashing them until you or they are dead.

Leaning on ranged attacks from a bow or crossbow is the safest (and most costly) early game option, and though training makes your shots more accurate over long distances, it's an approach that evolves even less than melee. Magic does help both of these strategies, with offensive spells that are just better ranged attacks like fireballs, or support options that can change the size of enemies or summon monsters to help you out. Some of these spells can even have out-of-combat utility, like transforming yourself into a bloodfly so that you can fly from place to place and cut down travel time. But magic doesn't become a real factor until the mid-game, and by then you’re probably pretty well invested in other skills and stats, making the pivot to a “magic based” build a hard task unless you plan well in advance.

Listen and Learn

Information about this world has to be teased out of it, either by talking to its denizens or picking up context clues from the environment. When agreeing to quests, don’t expect objective markers to appear on your map to guide you. Hell, don’t even expect a map at all unless you plan to buy or steal one first. Especially in the early hours, Gothic trains you to pay close attention to what you see and hear. It can feel daunting at first, trying to remember where specific NPCs are at certain times of day or establish who the most important people in town are based on their jobs or how other people talk about them. Your screens are free from the tooltip detritus of modern games of this ilk, but the reward for engaging with the Gothic at this level is how great it felt every time I could navigate to a point of interest on the map based on memory and context clues alone.

Unfortunately, the overall story of Gothic doesn’t fulfill the promise of its great setting and world. The denizens of the mining colony have basically revolted and set up several microgovernments, each with their own hierarchy, economies, and organizational goals. You’ll need to join in with one of the three camps early in order to get a stable foothold in the region and start working towards your own personal agenda. Each of these camps are unique from one another and present different social and moral quandaries that are really cool to exist among. The Old Camp is the largest and most established and does the most direct interaction with the outside world, but it's also the most obviously corrupt. The Swamp Camp is a cult-led theocracy out in the wetlands filled with people who pray to a new forbidden god now that they are out of the reach of the mainland church. The New Camp is a hodgepodge of people who don’t want to live in the former camps, and is largely a pretty ruthless meritocracy where the strong and capable can have anything they want.

I’ve spent my playthrough getting into the good graces of the Old Camp, which meant impressing its leader, Gomez, enough for him to elevate me into his troop of personal guards. To do that, I had to spend a lot of time in the camp schmoozing his people enough to vouch for me, which meant doing favors for them or catching their attention in other ways. It also meant navigating the social structure of the place, sometimes the hard way. Elite guards patrol different sections of the camp and run protection rackets for the people in their districts. They would constantly try to shake me down for money in a “it would be a shame if something happened to you” kind of way, and more than once co-conspirators would try to set you up to have that thing happen to you if you don't. They all have their own allegiances to their own paying customers, of course, so if you get into a fight in a place where you didn’t pay a guard but your opponent did, they will act accordingly.

This attempt at immersion doesn’t always land consistently, though. While most citizens in these settlements are pretty vigilant against weird and potentially criminal behavior by you, its easy to avoid any real consequences if you're caught. People will stop and make a fuss if you walk into a house uninvited, but so long as you leave before someone starts swinging, everyone goes back to normal. I've been caught more than once failing to pick the lock on someone's personal treasure chest, simply walked out of the room before they questioned me, and they never brought it up again. It's the kind of videogamey stuff that happens all the time, but it stands out as odd in a game that has such an emphasis on character behavior and relationships.

Not every camp approaches social dynamics the way the Old Camp does, but in the early parts of Gothic at least, you’ll find a surprising wealth of these social lattices. Lots of early game quests put your dedication to joining a camp in direct conflict with your relationship with a different camp, meaning choices can have pretty definitive outcomes depending on how you navigate them. One quest had me chasing a guy out of town at the direction of a guard captain, only for a different guard to get mad at me about it because that person was his main source of smuggled goods. This sort of dynamic-feeling social structure was always Gothic’s biggest strength and it goes untouched in the remake. That unfortunately also means that when the main story finally gets into full swing and the rote “save the world” tale spins up, the complete shift away from all this nuance makes the back half of this game comparatively boring.

That isn’t to say that the parts that work are perfect, anyway. You’ll fight boredom throughout thanks to the uneven pacing of the story progression in every act. Back to the Old Camp example, you can impress everyone you need to impress to get a meeting with Gomez, but you still can’t actually do that until you hit level five, which means you may have to go out and grind or spend some time in other camps you don’t intend to join just to find some way to get enough experience points to meet this arbitrary goal. These gaps spent wandering around doing busy work were at least sometimes rewarded by small but neat discoveries in the wild early on, though those were mostly a new plot point that let you feel your way through the dense tapestry of the world some more. I'm only in Act 3 right now, but if the faithful one-to-one retelling of everything up to this point is any signal, the rest of the campaign is about to get pretty linear and very underwhelming.

While I still need to reach the credits before I put a final score on this review, it’s at least clear already that Gothic 1 Remake is undeniably the best way to play this cult classic RPG – and not just because its an old game that has become hard to run on new PCs as time forgets it. The scope of the changes are largely quality-of-life improvements, making it easier to look at, listen to, and interact with on basic levels. Everything of substance remains unchanged, which means the earnest and ahead of its time worldbuilding remains a high watermark for the genre, feeling like a clever and fresh take even all these years later. It also means its already one-dimensional combat, uneven pacing, and disappointingly dull main story have aged like milk. Here’s hoping there are more adjustments made to a back-half I don’t remember too fondly, but I’m not holding my breath.

Like the man himself, a James Bond game should ooze style and swagger. There’s no point in a timid tie-in with neither the balls nor ability to bring the Bond fantasy to life, and I’ve never particularly wanted one that simply gaffer tapes all the loudest bits of Call of Duty together and stuffs them into a tuxedo. What I’ve wanted is a Bond game that’s confident and charismatic; one that both ebbs patiently and peaks violently as it segues between social stealth, dangerous infiltrations, gadget-driven shenanigans, and destructive, never-tell-me-the-odds action. What I’ve wanted is a Bond game like 007 First Light – and what we got is the best Bond game I’ve ever played.

First Light’s greatest success is just how impressively developer IO Interactive has executed on its mission to create something it can call its own within a very established universe. What we get is something that’s unmistakably Bond – and respectfully adjacent to everything that has come before it – but confidently occupies its own space as a uniquely separate take.

That is, it never seems like a situation akin to 2001’s 007: Agent Under Fire – which felt like the series was in a holding pattern before EA cut another cheque for Pierce Brosnan. No, this is a fastidiously assembled world of its very own – inspired in all the key ways by the work of creator Ian Fleming and the expectations bred by the films, but tailored for IO’s take on the series like a bespoke suit. First Light has its own M, its own Q, and its own Bond – and, after playing it, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

First Light doesn’t rush this world building, patiently moving through Bond’s first encounter with MI6 as a Royal Navy aircrewman in the wrong place at the right time, to his initial double-0 training, and onto his transformative first field mission that sets up the core story to come. In another developer’s hands all of this may have been smooshed into a single opening tutorial, or partially handwaved off in a cutscene. Not so in First Light, which unfolds much more like a prestige TV series than a film. While I’ll stress vehemently that this is absolutely the last thing I’d want from current screen rights owner Amazon when it comes to Bond’s live-action future, for First Light’s purposes it works splendidly. It feels perfectly suited to sit back and play, say, a chapter at a time. There are 17 overall, and it took me around 18 hours to reach the end without rushing too much. The writing is excellent, blending a world of serious consequences with a steady supply of on-brand one-liners. The music is impeccable, too; a masterclass of restraint that sensibly limits the use of Bond’s iconic musical stinger to major moments, meaning I got chills each time it occurred.

The chapters are lengthy and rich with peripheral detail to explore, and this significantly bolsters First Light’s ability to build a world I can feel properly immersed in. The pace of both the action and the story is excellent, crescendoing brilliantly in its final act as the stakes explode (along with everything else) and IO takes a moment to fulfill one last Bond fantasy I’d feared it may have forgotten.

While I always felt properly propelled along, I have enjoyed the fact that – beyond a few time sensitive sequences and chases – First Light is more than happy to let you linger and absorb the detail. This is great as, since the world around Bond has been so thoughtfully and convincingly fleshed out, I found it largely impossible to blitz through. Whether it’s Bond’s London apartment, or the bustling MI6 headquarters packed with staffers, the iconic secret agent is seated in a believable world that doesn’t fall to pieces the second you try to scrutinize it. As a Bond fan, it’s delightfully immersive, and Easter eggs abound. You try moving through Q-Lab without pressing every button. Q’s helpless lackeys aren’t going to temporarily blind themselves, after all.

Perhaps above everything, I just adore the attention to detail – from the big-picture consideration of giving Bond the long, vertical scar on his right cheek the character boasted in his literary origins, to tiny embellishments like the scratched rims and ziptied trim on the busted-up, 2006 Aston Martin that acts as a test mule at MI6’s Malta-based training camp. If you don’t walk around and ogle it like I did, this car only spends about a minute or two on screen during the chapter. Yet the fact that IO saw fit to weather, damage, and field repair it like a teenager’s taped-up, track-day drift toy speaks volumes about where the studio set the bar for the level of authenticity it wanted to capture here – and I love that. Aston Martin is here with multiple models, as is Jaguar, Land Rover, and Triumph, and that’s meaningful. It doesn’t feel cynical; Bond is a British institution, and First Light surrounds him with others.

First Light is in rare air in this regard; it’s a licensed game built with an obsessive desire to faithfully bring an existing property to life. As its own take, it’s on a slightly different track to famously brilliant movie tie-ins like Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, The Warriors, or even RoboCop: Rogue City – but IO’s commitment is the same. There are too many seamlessly embedded references to moments from various Bond films to argue that the movies aren’t at the bedrock of what the studio has built here.

First Light’s pace also allows us to marinate with these new riffs on the characters for a lot longer, which helps immensely. There’s no doubt that coming out of the gate with such a young version of Bond was a risk. Irish actor Patrick Gibson’s portrayal of a Bond in his late 20s – and brand new to the world of international espionage – is not initially the one we know. He’s an archetypal hotshot, cocky and inexperienced. He’s a successfully suave ladies man already, but encumbered with a little too much misplaced confidence elsewhere. However, this gives Gibson’s Bond room to grow as he becomes a product of all the new role models he’s suddenly found himself surrounded by.

These include Q (whose patient and more fatherly attitude makes sense in this context, because it now leaves room for him to potentially become a little more hilariously exasperated as Bond continues to break or lose everything he ever gives him) and Bond’s training mentor John Greenway (ably portrayed by British actor Lennie James in a similarly strong performance). The upshot here is that the Bond we get by the end is the patriotic, heroic, and appropriately horny man of mystery we’re very familiar with, but watching him get there was something we’d never seen before.

With IO Interactive being the home of the Hitman series since its inception way back in the year 2000, First Light admittedly shares some very obvious DNA with its bald-and-barcoded stablemate. Running on the studio’s in-house engine, the look and feel are immediately familiar to me as a veteran player of the Hitman series. For the most part, this is a strength; Bond feels weighty and grounded as he smoothly moves, climbs, and vaults around, and First Light typically looks quite fabulous, from its crowded clubs to its wide-open natural spaces. Playing on a standard PS5, there were occasions where I found myself staring at a texture that seemed far murkier than it ought to be at such close proximity, but it’s otherwise sharp and packed with fine, granular detail.

The sandbox nature of Hitman’s level design is also here to a certain extent, albeit in the more managed fashion of 2012’s Hitman: Absolution. That is, First Light stitches together open areas that have multiple approaches with linear sequences you need to play the way the developers dictate.

There are levels here with large, crowded areas akin to those like the Paris fashion show in 2016’s Hitman, or the German nightclub in 2021’s Hitman 3, while other sections are a little more adjacent to something like the Uncharted series. The latter sequences are occasionally guilty of limitations that look a little silly in practice – like Bond’s inability to clamber up a small, rocky slope or duck under a waist-high booby-trap string. However, this is the kind of seam you can typically pick at in even the best third-person shooters in the business.

First Light also repurposes a lot of Hitman’s distraction-based sneaking. For instance, you can still turn on loud items and such to lure guards from their posts – only in this case it’s something Bond can do from afar thanks to the embrace of gadgets. Gadgets are obviously a core component of the 007 fantasy, and First Light features an array of them (my favourites are the laser and the missile pen). The only thing that gives me pause is IO’s solution to restrain their use. Gadgets are a consumable, so there’s a requirement to shuffle around and gather up battery power from loose phones, and replenish your chemical supply by scooping up gobs of hand sanitizer. The fact that there’s always so much of this stuff laying around means gathering it is just an arbitrary task, which arguably could’ve been easily replaced by a cooldown timer.

At any rate, I should note that this isn’t simply Agent 47 by way of His Majesty’s Secret Service, and there are a bunch of bespoke tweaks here that imbue First Light with its own, very distinctly Bond-branded flourishes. His abilities as a brawler put 47’s to shame, and there’s a layered system of dodges, counters, and satisfyingly devastating environment attacks. Melee combat is perhaps a little clunky at times, particularly when Bond finds himself swarmed, but it is nonetheless a major distinction from the Hitman series.

First Light is also far more suited for run-and-gun shooting. I initially found the shooting a little clumsy – and did find myself wondering about the worth of a mechanic that allows Bond to toss an empty gun right at the face of the nearest goon. Eventually, however, I almost started to relish running out of ammo, hurling an SMG like an oversized shuriken into some hapless bloke’s head and snatching his own weapon. The times I got it right, which increased the more accustomed to the action I got, were incredibly satisfying.

For clarity, there are also parts of the Hitman formula that haven’t crossed over into First Light’s universe. Disguises, for instance, are limited to only when they’re scripted necessities for the story, and Bond can’t hide or drag the bodies of guards he’s knocked out – which does leave the stealth feeling a little archaic in 2026. I’ll certainly concede that the idea of James Bond collecting a big pile of corpses doesn’t pass the sniff test, but it would’ve been nice to be able to at least yank a knocked-out bad guy behind cover in order to allow me to remain undetected a little longer.

If you’re a fan of life simulators, you’ve no doubt heard critics, developers, influencers, and all manner of social media-savvy people wax lyrical about the complexity of creating a compelling social simulation. As I said in my own inZoi review last year, curating a world that’s both representative of the murky mess that is being human and enjoyable to play is a seemingly impossible undertaking that few have managed. And yet, after spending 35 hours in Paralives crafting families, building homes, and sowing discord among residents, I have a renewed hope. This ambitious challenger to The Sims’ throne has captured not only the practical elements of humanity but, importantly, the weird ones we sweep under the rug, too. While its Early Access start has a lot of room to grow before it slays the reigning king of the genre, it’s certainly on its way.

Your time in Paralives begins on a train, with a quick tutorial for how to handpick the actions of the Parafolk (the name Paralives gives to its digital citizens) as God of this world. You’ll initially do so with predesigned families, including the father-son duo of the ​​Marquez household, who hide secrets beneath their chirpy veneer, and the party-loving trio from the Wolf household, who need to get it together if they want to pay the bills. These families all feel thoughtfully written and have their own issues to connect with, which is a boon for people who prefer a rich backstory to bounce off. But if you’d rather get straight into the nitty-gritty of people pottery like me, you can also create your own household via the Paramaker mode right away.

Comparable in layout to The Sims 4’s Create-a-Sim, the Paramaker mode splits avatar creation into three main sections: Appearance, Clothing, and Personality. From here, you can curate the look of your digital person through a selection of pre-fab facial and body features, dress them in stylish garb, and finally choose what kind of digi-person they will be with various traits. There is also the option to fine-tune your creation by using your mouse to tug and drag at anchor points to twist up their features like putty. It’s a reactive and rewarding process, particularly if you’re working from a reference photo.

There aren’t a great deal of options for customisation just yet, though it’s clear there’s been a particular effort made to replicate the diversity of the real world with what’s available. Hair presets span a variety of textures, including straight, wavy, curly, and coily, plus there’s an option to select hearing aids and prosthetic legs. What’s more, you can layer items like piercings, jewellery, and tattoos to really amp up your character’s personality. This blend of options safeguards your households from the cursed same-face syndrome, and ensures that every person you meet out in the world doesn't look like they're all related either. Clothing, too, has a decent variety and caters to a range of styles from goth to coquette, even including a full-body morph suit – to each their own.

No matter what you pick, Paralives' standout art style evokes the nostalgia of classic Telltale games like The Wolf Among Us. This dynamic comic book approach is not only easy on the eyes, it also helps details like wrinkles, facial hair, and eyelashes really pop. That’s particularly true as your Parafolk emote and perform actions like cooking or scrolling on their phone while ignoring their chores – they’re just like me, for real! By leaning away from the hyperreal and toward the more cartoonish aspects of humanity, Parafolks feel slightly goofier and a lot more likeable than the people of their competitors, conjuring favourable comparisons to The Sims 2. In this way, I found myself connected to their plights more so than the undeniably trendy but slightly soulless inhabitants of Krafton’s InZOI.

Unfortunately, the wheels start to fall off in the Personality section of character creation, which feels quite limited at the moment. You’ll give every Parafolk a Vibe, a Social Perk, and a Talent area, each of which is intended to influence how they move through the world. For example, if you choose the “Good at taking care of other people” Social Perk, that character can make chicken soup for sick friends. Alternatively, if you pick the Gloomy option for their Vibe, they will be happiest when in a bad mood. As you play out their life, you’ll unlock more slots to fill, though these choices don't translate clearly into practical gameplay. And, frustratingly, even with drastically different personalities, most of my households reacted more or less the same to major incidents.

Rounding out the start of each new family, you’ll also need to choose a specific Storyteller, which is a unique mechanic that will dictate the difficulty of your day-to-day life. Storytellers dole out cards every dawn that cause random events to happen in the lives of your Parafolk. One day, you might get a free computer from work. Another day, one of your household members may be encouraged to cheat on their spouse. This system adds much-needed entropy to your household's otherwise routine shenanigans. While many of the prompts seemed repetitive in concept, I found them to be effective in practice — they do well to keep things fresh in the long term, which is one of the biggest bugbears of the genre.

Once you have your household, the next step is to find a home, which once again gives you the choice between a pre-designed estate or an empty block with a budget to spend on all the essential amenities, like beds, baths, and beyond. Similar to the Paramaker, Paralives' build mode currently has a fairly limited pool of items and options, but there's at least enough customisability here to keep you busy building for hours on end.

In construction mode, you erect walls, add windows and doors, and then decorate the space with a selection of modern interior options. It’s an approachable process, thanks in part to a togglable snap tool that ensures your architecture is balanced and beautiful. Still, cowboy builders need not worry as there’s plenty of room to get weird with it, too, and Paralives isn’t keen to hold you to any building code. When renovating your space, you can place items almost anywhere you’d like. As a huge fan of cosy, cluttered spaces, I squeaked with joy when I realised I could stack ramen cups on top of kitchen fridges and select random throw pillows to jazz up plain couches. Yuckier touches like mould, damp, and body hair can also be dotted around for the sickos out there, with Paralives allowing you to make a truly bespoke, if totally gross, living space.

This customisation is a double-edged sword, though – while beautiful, much of the world isn’t actually interactable. Those ramen noodles might create a cool vibe, but they can never be eaten, and the cosy throw pillows will never crumple under the weight of a sleepy character, which feels like a missed opportunity. Such aesthetically pleasing but useless items also crop up in the open world and inevitably lead to deflating moments as you realise you can walk through a moving train completely unscathed. There has been an effort to provide the background city with a sense of liveliness through a daily newspaper and rotation of activities like run clubs and BBQs. Even so, these events can feel rather flat, with locals milling around as if on a timer. As such, Paralives' setting doesn’t feel like an entirely cohesive society just yet.

Moment-to-moment survival comes down to meeting a few basic needs: Hygiene, Hunger, Sleep, and the Toilet. Achieving these needs is a constant uphill battle, though failing them so badly that you die isn’t so easy either. As with real life, Parafolks' days are split between working a job that pays the bills, toying around with home appliances, and chatting with the locals to try and make friends. The way you progress is fairly rudimentary; you’ll often be stuck reading a book to level up skills or waiting out the in-game clock for a work shift to end. Thankfully, there is some reprieve in the socialising portion, with Paralives opting for a refreshingly alternate approach.

Instead of selecting another character and choosing a conversation topic, you’ll need the Parafolk to interact long enough to fill a conversation meter. From there, you’ll have a small pool of subjects to choose from, which includes asking other Parafolk if they’re single in a flirtatious way, telling jokes, and chatting about general life events. At first, I didn’t love this radical style, but it grew on me over my play sessions, and I eventually realised how handy this hands-off approach was. Instead of sitting with one of my household members, clicking topics on repeat, I could move on to another task or person while they were schmoozing, and periodically jump in to keep the conversation flowing. Like spinning personality plates, I could lock in as one started to wobble, before jumping over to another conversation to keep that one in play, too.

Alas, not even expert helicopter parents like me can keep everything in check, and across my time with Paralives, I fell prey to the inevitable chaos of an Early Access life simulator. One day, during some routine cupcake-baking, my house burned down because the firefighters kept spawning just outside my front door without being able to step through it, as if they were mocking me. Soon after, another of my households got stuck in some kind of viral loop, circulating a sickness through the entire family, like a never-ending, festering plague. During this time, they all had to take turns running back and forth between their beds and the home’s single toilet – no prizes for guessing how that shook out.

Such unfortunate occurrences might seem like frustrating, gameplay-halting events that make you want to ragequit. But its spirited art direction and goofy charms manage to make these scenarios feel funny and endearing to experience, as if they were intentional. Where the day-to-day activities lacked the depth to keep me entertained, these scrappy edges showcased more of the rich, chaotic personality that bleeds through all aspects of Paralives, and makes it stand out as a worthwhile contender amongst its more substantial and established peers in the genre.

After the opening hour of Mina the Hollower, I found myself dropped into a hostile world with no obviously “correct” path to follow and roaming enemies that could kill me in just a few hits no matter what direction I chose. That’s about when I realized this retro RPG was hiding far more than I expected beneath the surface – and once I burrowed on in, I never wanted to come back up. Mina is a tough-as-nails adventure gorgeously done up in the style of the Game Boy Color’s best, and it isn’t shy about those influences. It borrows The Legend of Zelda’s open-world structure, adds a healthy amount of Castlevania’s horror setting and haunting chiptunes, and peps things up with a surprising dose of FromSoft’s Souls games in its combat and progression. But somewhere in that mix, Mina becomes more than the sum of those parts, cleverly riffing and remixing them them with consistent brilliance. Its blocky exterior disguises rich combat systems, some of the best puzzle solving ever put to screen, and a funny, deeply weird world I loved to explore.

Developer Yacht Club Games is no stranger to retro tributes, with its standout Shovel Knight series drawing heavily from NES classics like Mega Man. While Shovel Knight stuck to its source material pretty closely, Mina uses Zelda games like Link’s Awakening and the Oracle duo as a foundation for a much deeper, more modern take on a top-down action-RPG: You have a jump that will get you over small gaps but never up to a higher ledge, an overworld that partially scrolls but has distinct edges between regions, and of course start out with a stubby little weapon (actually, several to choose from). These are not the Zelda games you usually see developers aim their sights at, but I love how the seemingly-limiting constraints of imitating the early handheld Zeldas conceals Mina’s inner complexity.

However, very much unlike the Game Boy games it draws from aesthetically, and more like The Legend of Zelda for NES (or Breath of the Wild decades later), Mina has a completely open world. There are no paths blocked until you get some special item, and nothing but your own skill level keeping you from going to any one of its four initial dungeons first. You just need to fight your way there. And if you can’t cut it, there’s probably another area to try instead, a clever place to grind for money and levels, or some side quests that lead to optional upgrades.

Mina’s world is often surreal, dreamy, and uncanny. Built around the central village of Ossex, the Tenebrous Isles are an entrancing mix of gothic fantasy and magically-infused steampunk tech. There are plenty of adorable animal denizens, like Mina, but also building-busting giants, perfectly friendly abominations, and a whole lotta possums – which are a type of monster. Cutesy overworld sprites are sometimes subverted by ghoulish character portraits when you stop to chat. It all smacks of the David Lynch-inspired characters that make up the otherworldly island of Link’s Awakening in just the right way (and that’s not some snooty art school connection I’m making, Twin Peaks has been widely cited by the devs as a major influence on that 1993 Zelda game). Additionally, these characters all have lives that are affected by your actions, and many end up holding a greater purpose in the larger story, which has some fun (if predictable) twists and turns, but really saves the good stuff for the end.

Mina herself is a bit of an enigma. She’s a monster slayer, but also something of a mad scientist who has outfitted Tenebrous Isles with tech that is being mysteriously sabotaged. The plot follows whether her machines are actually good or bad, and while brave little Mina seems to act heroically in this kill-or-be-killed overworld, often solving problems for the Islefolk, she also causes a few: Without spoiling anything, those can come back to haunt you. This little white mouse explores a lot of grey areas, and I love that!

Dungeon Hollower

There are six main dungeons spread across the Tenebrous Isles, each with a matching area that leads up to it – a swamp, a beach, a crypt… you’ve played a video game before. There’s even a small but very cool nod to Castlevania here, with short establishing shots showing the boss towers silhouetted in the distance for every area – and then those creepy spires showing up in backgrounds as you climb, just like Dracula’s perched lair. While most of Mina’s art choices are limited to blocky tiles, these sweeping scenes and backdrops show off some stunning pixel art that helps set the mood.

(And then there’s the soundtrack: Pure Castlevania! Baroque jams performed on a glorious, beepy boopy NES/Game Boy soundalike instrument set. I’ve been associating this sort of gothic Casio sound with tense horror action games since 1987 and it still feels totally rad when executed this well in 2026.)

All six areas are filled with charm and challenge, but one called Septemberg especially stood out as a piece of storytelling I’d never experienced before. It’s a region frozen in autumn, with gusty winds that blow you around, piles of fallen leaves, pumpkins, and a general Halloween vibe. All of it is out to kill you. You quickly learn of a lurking terror in your midst there, and the escalating nightmare of trying to manage that threat through a hedge maze, a lightning storm, and more is an absolutely bonkers, adrenaline-inducing sequence I couldn’t stop talking about with others who had seen it; just an incredible amalgam of schlocky, spooky-season fun.

While you could go to Septemberg as your first area or not find it until much later, there are areas you can’t access immediately, but the way to reach them is never a dungeon-based upgrade. It’s a secret passage, a side quest, or, in some cases, by using a specific Sidearm (secondary weapon) or Trinket (ability-modifying equipment) that you find while exploring the overworld. This is the best and most pure kind of open world, and it’s executed excellently here. Mina dangles a prize just out of reach to challenge you: Can you get to that treasure chest from another screen? Can you survive long enough in the water to reach that gap under a bridge? Should you go in that creepy hole in the ground right now with no save point in sight?

Mina’s move set as you meet these challenges is all her own, and it is a ton of fun to learn and master as you explore. Her ability to burrow beneath the ground and then pop up for an aerial leap is multipurpose: It’s a dash, a dodge, a long jump, and eventually a graceful way to dance around an enemy like a furry lil’ ninja. There’s a learning curve for sure, and effectively working this move into my hacking and slashing took time. There are no counters or dodge rolls here, just sliding under an enemy to get the better of them. But once I got the hang of burrowing, it became a versatile combat tool that made Mina feel extra nimble compared to, say, a certain squat, little Hylian.

Morsel Combat

There are two other aspects of Mina’s arsenal that will surely catch Castlevania fans’ eyes – and ears – right away. First off, the whip: Mina’s Nightstar (actually described as a mace on a chain) is one of five possible weapons to pick from, and it’s a fantastic go-to option (and, of course, any aspiring Belmont’s choice of weapon). I stuck with the Nightstar for most of the roughly two-dozen hours it took me to reach the credits, but I ended up also falling in love with the daggers, Whisper and Vesper – more of an Alucard thing. The Nightstar is good for delivering fast, heavy damage at a safe distance (and you can upgrade it to do the useless, dangling chain thing, ala Castlevania IV!). But the daggers, when boosted by a Trinket that adds an attack multiplier for landing hits without missing, became an awesome boss killer.

The other system ripped straight out of Castlevania are the Sidearms, which give you a variety of secondary attacks depending on which Sidearm pickup you grabbed last (all of which are in predictable locations you can remember to return to). Options like the sword and axe function almost exactly like sub weapons in Castlevania, and are even replenished the same way, with a resource called Joules that is spent each time you use one (just like so many Hearts in classic Castlevanias). There are some weird Sidearms, though, like the Iron Steed – a bicycle with a sort of jousting rod attached that serves both as a quick option to dash around and a way to jump over huge gaps to reach secret areas. Other Sidearms I liked were a little ghost that attacked enemies and drained Joules over time, and a demon pet on a leash that acts as your own personal Chain Chomp.

You can augment most of Mina’s moves through swappable Trinkets, which provide buffs that boost your movement, attack, or defense in helpful and sometimes wacky ways. I was able to expand my Trinket slots to activate five at once, and my preferred combos for exploration (long jumps, increased burrowing time, wall grabs) were very different than those for combat (DPS multipliers, a revive, health extenders). For instance, one Trinket allowed me to float slowly down after a jump, and that became essential to how I moved through this world – but it was useless in most boss battles, so I’d replace it with an attack buff that shocked enemies at the save room right before a big fight. There are dozens of trinkets to find – some extremely useful on their own, and others that only add up to huge results when used together. Unlike many games where I tend to stick to a formula I find that works, I was always excited to experiment in Mina.

The Bones Are Their Money

The other way to upgrade yourself brings us to Mina’s third major influence: FromSoft heavy-hitters like Dark Souls and Bloodborne. The “Souls” currency equivalent here are Bones, and they serve the exact same purpose: Experience points gained from both combat and exploration that you must either spend or risk losing upon death. Mina isn’t nearly as punishing, however, as you can quickly gain multiple Sparks that will prevent you from losing your Bones on death, getting stuck inside the enemy that killed you or in the room where you died until you can recover them. This leads to a loop familiar to Souls players that’s just as hard to resist here: Do you delve deeper on this outing, getting more Bones and items, or do you run back to the nearest save point and “Bone Up” first?

Boning Up allows you to spend an escalating amount of Bones to level up either your main weapon attack, defense, or Sidearm attack, with a fourth option to store the Bones for safekeeping in a “savings account” of sorts, which is impervious to death. I found that going all in on attack was the best bet early, and did a fair amount of grinding to do so.

Finding grinding spots proved a major component of Mina, which I had a lot of fun with in the late game especially. It was cool to feel slightly OP at times if I found a really good spot, though that does mean pushing through the already tough intro first. Dumped into the open world after the on-rails opening area, you are nudged in the direction of the Crypt to the east of Ossex as your first dungeon, but the path there is really, really hard at starting levels. Once I hit an area with a particularly invincible-feeling set of knight enemies, I was caught a bit off guard by Mina’s difficulty curve. But fear not: This first hurdle is also the biggest, and it can be solved simply by spending some time to level up your attack, maybe some defense, and look for secrets.

This is because Mina starts to throw a lot more Trinkets at you, as well as opportunities to score Bones naturally as you explore. In this way, Mina, which is a very hard game, sets itself apart from another recent 2D action game notorious for toughness: Hollow Knight: Silksong. In Silksong, your primary options are usually to “get good” or just go somewhere else. There are items and upgrades to find, but grinding just to level up your stats doesn’t exist, and that limitation made that particular Metroidvania-with-bugs feel less open than something like a Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.

In contrast, Mina let me solve difficulty checks like bosses in multiple ways, which I appreciated a lot. You can certainly learn a tricky boss’s patterns, or you can grind for Bones to up your attack and then absolutely roll it. Alternatively, you could play with your Trinket build until you find some combo that makes that particular boss a breeze. All of these upgrades really matter: Enemies that take 10 hits could take half that after a Bone Up, and then half that again, so just finding a clever grinding spot can make things much easier. Crucially, that grinding feels perfectly tuned to allow for multiple playstyles, not like a slog you are forced into.

Souls-Tyke

Your healing and life bar also owe a debt to Dark Souls, but there’s a really fun and twisted… twist to it. You have a stock of health potions called Plasma Vials, but you can only replenish your health bar if you attack enemies. Each hit you land fills in the missing section of your bar with a yellow part called Plasma, and that Plasma can then be converted into good old fashioned red health when you use a Vial. So that means if you are getting low on health, you have to go on offense. There are a few environmental items that can help you heal, and Trinkets can once again play with Vials and Plasma in cool ways, but the core healing system presents an amusing gamble that I ended up loving – and making plenty of wrong bets on.

Of course, every Souls-inspired game also has its version of a save point that both heals you and restores all the enemies to the world. Mina’s is cute and clever: A tiny “Underlab” specific spots let you burrow down to where you can use stored Bones to level up, swap Trinkets, and change weapons. The main loop of Mina becomes centered largely on whether or not you can make it to (or find) the next Underlab, or whether you should retreat to the last one you visited. This sets up that ultra-tense, risk-vs.-reward version of exploration that makes so many games so appealing and hard to put down, from Resident Evil to Metroid. After each successful outing, you’ll think, “Just one more try – at least I know where the enemies are now!” A neat twist to Mina’s Underlab is that you can outfit it with things like a way to store Sidearms, replenish your Joules, and even look at a rudimentary map that tracks collectibles by region.

Speaking of maps, Mina does not have a detailed, room-by-room one to pore over for secrets. While this makes it a lot more like Dark Souls and Bloodborne in terms of the sheer, terrifying unknown of what’s ahead, it cuts out Zelda, Metroid, or Castlevania’s ability to constantly probe the edges of a pause-screen map to sniff out some collectible hidden past a breakable wall. There are plenty of secrets out there; you just have to probe every element of a room in order to find them. This helped me focus on the combat, platforming, and survival, which I did appreciate, but filling out a map is one of my favorite activities in any game. However, I didn’t miss it as much as I thought I would since it significantly ups the challenge of finding secrets in a fun way. (And over at IGN Guides, you know we are hard at work on a map, so you will have an option I didn’t!)

Small Wonder

A game with so many disparate influences like this always runs the risk of becoming a mishmashed hodgepodge, but Mina’s inspirations are all awesome choices that mix well together. The result is a sort of Breath of the Wild moment for top-down adventure games: Mina takes a bunch of ideas found in the most popular open-world games of the modern era and squishes them into the ‘90s Zelda mold. What comes out is a game Nintendo would be too scared to make, FromSoft has already tried, and Konami gave up on for two decades.

And despite being so referential, Mina is actually quite unpredictable, and frequently plays up the element of surprise. These surprises can be small: A giant hand pulls you into a shop; some creep just shows up in your Underlab; a freaky clown jump scares you only to tell a dad joke. Or they can be really big. While I obviously won’t spoil anything here, Mina’s triumphant ending is its biggest surprise of all. It may set up more questions than answers, but this conclusion and the run up to it is undoubtedly one for the books, full of excellent twists I didn’t see coming. And darkness – “Tenebrous Isles” is accurate. Look it up.

To get to that ending takes a while, too. After 23 hours, I rolled credits with 72% completion and immediately started into New Game+ to find all the stuff I didn’t the first time around. Those 23 hours were more than enough for me to fall head over heels for Mina, but there’s a lot more, too. You can go for 100% completion within your original save thanks to a clearly labeled point of no return – but what’s interesting is that, since your completion rate and all the treasure you’ve found will carry over into New Game+, you can continue to chip away at that 100% goal in your new save as well. Returning to boss fights with all your gear or noticing that crack in a wall you forgot to delve into the first time around is a blast. I’ve never played a game that allows you to do a second playthrough with a bunch of chests sitting there open, while others remain undiscovered. It’s extremely cool.

On top of that, each New Game+ through the seventh run has unique permutations: The initial version I’m on now has far fewer save spots, making runbacks an absolute killer (which, blissfully, is not a concern at all in the base playthrough). And for you oldschool cheat code fans, there’s a massive menu of modifications to turn on and off, which range from goofy to helpful. You can even toggle on a sort of "God mode" for when you get stuck – just remember that this disables the “Feats” (achievements) system. I left it alone for that reason, but started a new save up just to mess around with it, and it’s fantastic for making Mina more accessible.

Bubsy was one of several video game mascots that tried to nip at the heels of Mario and Sonic in the ‘90s, but this quick-witted feline’s oddball, comical nature ended up being more memorable than the actual games he was in. Still, Bubsy has an endearing appeal – if maybe as a meme more than a mascot – which makes the go-for-broke energy of his next game, Bubsy 4D, all the more admirable. It tries to recapture the fast and fierce reputation of those early platformers, funneling that energy into a modestly sized, meta-level redemption story that gives Bubsy his proper due.

Equal parts parody and legit legacy sequel, Bubsy 4D sees the washed-up video game mascot clumsily make a comeback. This time, he reluctantly has to save the galaxy from another invasion of the returning Woolies, along with a new enemy known as the BaaBots. Guided by his friends, along with his Gen-Z-coded niece and nephew, he'll once again take to being the main character of a video game platformer – whether he likes it or not. While many retro-inspired 3D platformers these days tap into nostalgia, Bubsy 4D's take is a bit more self-deprecating and aware of the series' shaky legacy, but not to the point of feeling mean, and its portrayal of a down on his luck video game character is very charming.

Bubsy 4D plays out exactly like you’d expect a classic 3D action-platformer from the '90s to, with that added edge and charm of a Saturday Morning Cartoon. Made by developer Fabraz – known for great platformers like Slime-San and the more recent Demon Tides – it really leans into freeform platforming as you skillfully chain different maneuvers together to barrel through a variety of stages. It's the type of flow that rewards you for understanding the physics and rhythm of the action, which is a welcome new direction for the Bubsy series. Across three unique worlds with their own sets of stages, Bubsy uses his various skills and quirks to barrel through enemies and some wily obstacle courses in style

I really liked the energy of Bubsy's movement, which is brought to life by his anxious whining and mannerisms. It actively leans into that comical style he’s known for, and Bubsy 4D has a particularly compelling, dynamic flow to the action. My favorite moments came from darting through worlds built around computer e-waste, where I was climbing tall towers and using Bubsy's ball form to zip through the air in order to make it across the map.

Unlike 1996's Bubsy 3D, 4D is all about building up speed through these levels with his dash and rolling abilities. He's not quite Sonic when it comes to going fast, but it is particularly satisfying to find a quick pace with the ball maneuver. At its best, Bubsy 4D nails that slick, satisfying sense of mastery over your character, especially one as fun and whimsical as Bubsy.

However, I was a bit disappointed with the activities in these stages. While they do focus on the collectathon variety of 3D platformers, where you have to grab all of the knick-knacks and hidden items to score upgrades, the stages themselves feel rather sparse upon deeper exploration. With very few enemies to fight and side-activities to take in across the relatively few stages in the main campaign, it makes the more open-zone levels feel uninteresting and like a bit of a slog to clear compared to the tighter, more focused stages.

Still, there’s generally a flow to the action that I found satisfying. When it was firing on all cylinders, it made me feel like I was in deep as a 'speedrunner' with how well I could build up momentum and bypass massive gaps between explorable areas. However, it did take me some time to come to grips with the movement style, which can feel slippery and imprecise when trying to nail precision jumps. Most of my failures came from those awkward moments of falling off the ledges, using up all my jumps and leaps to attempt to save myself. During the higher-end stages that require a bit more precision, this was a frustrating hurdle to overcome.

What I found most disappointing was the brief campaign, which I finished in under four hours. While I can appreciate Bubsy 4D’s bite-sized nature, what's here doesn't quite feel as complete or ambitious as it could have. Just as it was building to a cool peak, I unexpectedly hit the final stages, and then came the ending. It results in a conclusion that’s both unfulfilling and a bit disappointing, as I was finally reaching a rhythm with the rise in quality of its late-game level design and encounters. It does provide opportunities to revisit previous levels to find missing collectibles and secure time trial finishes at least, and there's even a permadeath mode called 9 Lives that limits your hits before a permanent game over, but the overall package does feel a bit light.

Still, Bubsy 4D's charm and stylish tone really elevate it in many ways. It's packed with nods to classic Bubsy games, and many video game tropes in general, making it a full-on parody of 3D platformers. Though the characters never directly break the fourth wall to acknowledge they're in a video game, they totally lean into the heightened, cartoon reality of an action-platformer. The pause screen also includes occasional gags, with Bubsy momentarily panicking when he finds himself whisked away from the action and left to sit in a menu.

Along with some unlockable moves that poke fun at the “Coyote Time” game design concept that lets you linger in the air for a moment after running off a ledge, which is a must-get, there are also some great costumes for Bubsy, which include the retro-3D skin from his ill-fated first trip into the third dimension. There's even a neat option to turn on the classic Bubsy 3D tank-style controls for full authenticity – or if you're feeling especially daring for a challenge. While this style of referential humor can wear thin at times, I really appreciated how tongue-in-cheek the writing was. A standout is Bubsy's niece and nephew, who always poke fun at his attempts to appear cool.

Tonally, what makes Bubsy 4D so different from other games of the series is that it fully embraces the style and atmosphere of early 3D action-platformers in the vein of N64 classics like Super Mario 64 and Banjo-Kazooie. At the same time, however, it leans into modern flourishes that give it an extra bit of energy, elevating it beyond being just another homage to that genre. And while Bubsy's first 3D game was not particularly great three decades ago, Bubsy 4D still includes some rather fun and even respectful nods to it, including a tribute to the classic Bubsy developers in the ending credits.

We made it to the Magic Door with less than 10 seconds left. A couple of last-second run-ins with the guards that populate the Constable Guildhall took time we didn’t have, but we managed to escape – our contract completed, our mission objective fulfilled, and our pockets loaded down with the ill-gotten gains we’d liberated from the cops. Not a bad day’s work. Moments like this are when Thick as Thieves sings: sneaking out of a tough situation, figuring out a new way to get where you need to be, a last second escape with zeroes on the clock. Combine co-op play, a couple of thieves with unique toolkits, excellent level design that constantly forces you to make interesting decisions, and a surprisingly compelling story, and Thick as Thieves has enough to keep you coming back for one last job. I just wish there was more of it. (And that I could kill Hauntstables. If the Hauntstables have no enemies, I have departed this Earth.)

Thick as Thieves is set in 1910s Kilcairn, a fictional Scottish city that meets at the collision of magic and technology. You break into (get it? Do you get it?) the Thieves’ Guild by stealing the Vistara Diamond. But the diamond ain’t just a big shiny rock on a stick; it reveals nearby guards, hidden traps, and even treasures – and wilder stuff like hidden magic doors where the really good loot is kept. Uncovering the nature of the Diamond means uncovering the history of the city itself, and a prominent family who lived there, and pretty soon what started as a simple heist becomes a small part of a much bigger story that took me around 12 hours to tie the knot on.

Thick as Thieves’ setup – get in, get what you came for, get out – means there isn’t a lot of what you’d consider a traditional story. Most of it is told though text-based communiques that hand out your mission objectives or congratulate you on a job well done, and scattered notes that provide clues about the location of (or security surrounding) the things you’re there to snatch mid-mission. What’s here is compelling, but you kind of have to look for it, and a good chunk of it is especially easy to miss if you’re playing co-op – which you absolutely should be if you have a friend who wants to get grabby with other peoples’ things.

Thieving effectively means being aware of your surroundings and not getting caught, so if you’ve ever played a stealth game, you’ll be at home here. Crouching under trip wires, avoiding pressure plates, turning off rotating turrets, and avoiding magic eyes are the name of the game. Most of the time you’ll be crouched, moving slowly as you snuff out candles, turn off lamps, and try to make as little noise as possible. The actual thieving comes in the form of a cute little minigame to pick locks in order to open doors or snag treasures secured in display cases. You’ll also collect clues that lead you to each mission’s big score or its story-based contract, both of which are active at once. The former could be anything from stealing enough stuff to hit a certain monetary threshold or finding specific items, while the latter requires you to “acquire” an object that only appears if you’re on that contract. It’s best to do both, but you’re not out of luck if you only do one (preferably the contract).

Avoiding traps is simple enough if you pay attention (or use the Diamond, which makes things much easier), but the guards themselves are another thing entirely. Their patterns are predictable, but they’re alert to most sounds and even catching a glimpse of you will cause them to investigate. You’re a thief, not a fighter, and if they catch you, they’ll tell you to stop resisting (even when you’re not) before zapping you with lightning until you’re dead. If you want them gone (and you do), your best bet is to sneak up behind them and knock them out.

If they see you first, you’re not entirely defenseless. A smoke grenade will stun them long enough for you to put them to sleep, and you can always run. Plus, completing contracts and absconding with loot will level you up, giving you access to consumable items like the Insult Fairy, which distracts guards by doing exactly what you’d think, or the Pickpocket Fairy, which does… exactly what you’d think, and is super handy when you want a guard’s key without getting near him. So yeah, guards can be annoying, but the best part is you always have an out (unless you’ve already spent it), and unless you trigger a trap that locks you in a room with one, you can always run.

And if you’re smart, you can just avoid them entirely. Each thief has four slots of usable items: one is reserved for the Diamond, two are for any combination of smoke grenades, fairies, and other useful tools, and the final is unique to that thief. Thick as Thieves has two: the Spider, which is what you start with, and the Chameleon, which you unlock. The former has a grappling hook that can allow you to pull yourself up, down, and all around, and the latter can copy the form of a guard and use it to walk around in disguise.

The Chameleon is cool and suave and has some great voice lines (“and a penny for the vicar!”), but the Spider has all of that and a grappling hook, so she wins. Why walk past an annoying guard when you can just go over him, you know? What I like most, no matter who you choose, is that Thick as Thieves is always encouraging you to play smart and make good decisions. You’ll start off very cautious, but playing smart also means realizing that guard is in your path and the fastest way to where you need to be is to bomb his ass with a smoke grenade and choke him out. Yeah, being stealthy is great, but I like that you’re rewarded for playing offense and taking smart risks, too – like sprinting to get past a magic eye before it spots you.

But all the tricks in the world will only get you so far. Eventually, you’ll run into Hauntstables (incredible name, by the way), who are Constables cursed to be cops for all eternity. Some of the lore frames this as punishment, which feels valid for choosing to be a very intentionally corrupt cop, but nobody should be forced to be a cop forever. I feel for the Hauntstables when they complain about waiting forever for a cup of coffee or say it feels like they’ve been on this shift forever because, well, they have. But man they’re a pain.

The big deal with Hauntstables is that they’re ghosts, so they can go through walls, ascend through floors, descend through roofs, and can’t be knocked out. They also hurt you if they get too close, so if you are spotted, you need to move. Getting away from them is tricky, and you mostly either need a smoke grenade to stun them or clear path to book it down to have a chance. Sometimes you’ll die not because one spotted you, but because you were low on health and he just happened to walk by. Slither Sap, one of your equipable items, allegedly has a “strange interaction” with them, but I have thrown a lot of Slither Sap at these cats and nothing seemed to happen. What does work, though, is turning on gramophones. Hauntstables do not like bagpipes. Their loss is your gain, but these guys are going to send you to an early grave more than once. Luckily, you do respawn, just without whatever loot you snagged (though you can bank your spoils at certain single-use stashes scattered across the map), which is dangerous when you’re up against a timer.

The most annoying thing about Hauntstables, though, is that they get stuck. Normal guards will see their buddies unconscious on the ground and pick them up before searching for you and then eventually going about their business if you stay hidden, but Hauntstables can’t pick people up, so they can get stuck in an infinite loop of “see guy on the ground, be shocked, be unable to do anything about it, see guy on the ground” and so on. This is funny, but it also means that Hauntstable won’t go back to his patrol path, which is a pain if you’re trying to get past the area he happens to be stuck in. Usually, this eventually resolves (especially if you die), but it’s annoying, though never gamebreaking.

What carries Thick as Thieves, aside from the charming art, roguish… rogues, and general Cool Vibes are the levels. There are unfortunately only two: the aforementioned Constable Guildhall and Elway Manor, but they’re both so good that I can almost forgive it. Each is a multi-story behemoth ripe with hidden paths and tons of ways to get where you need to be, and they do change from time to time as some paths open and others close. Combine that with your thief’s skills and the ever-changing objectives you’ll have when you enter each level (as well as difficulty options that add more traps and guards), and I never got bored.

There’s a joy to mastering these levels and knowing exactly how to get where you need to be, but there are a couple downsides. Certain notes – like the ones that explain that Hauntstables don’t like gramophones – appear on the map every time, which can be irritating when you’re looking for mission or contract-specific clues and you find one you’ve seen before. It’s also just kind of a bummer to finish a contract and know that the next one will either send you to the other level or back to where you just were. Variety is the spice of theft, after all.

My favorite thing about Thick as Thieves, though, is the online co-op. It’s fun to split up and explore separate areas, coordinate to take out a guard, or have your buddy save you at the last moment, and vice-versa. And getting picked up next to the stuff you dropped is way better than respawning in a safe area. It does make levels easier, but it’s so much more fun to play with a friend that I kind of don’t care. Besides, you can always crank up the difficulty setting if you’re into that.

Parody, when done correctly, can be one of the sharpest, funniest ways to show your love for something. That task comes a little bit easier, and all the more richer, when the target in your sights is a man who dresses up as a bat and demands to be taken seriously all too often. Lego series developer TT Games is no stranger to this world, having jumped into Gotham on more than one occasion in the past and delivered consistently fun pastiches of some of pop culture's most beloved characters for two decades now. In Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight, it's back at the top of its game, built lovingly brick-by-brick with fun always foremost in mind, especially in an open world that eclipses its linear levels. A top-tier Lego game with playful twists on Rocksteady’s Arkham series that hit the mark more often than not, it's a strong send-up of the Caped Crusader, delivered with a kiss from a rose.

Legacy of the Dark Knight embraces its Lego building blocks more than any other game in the series to date. By that, I mean its overall structure is somewhat like if several Batman kits were thrown onto the floor and jumbled up, only to be reshaped into original creations of their own. TT Games has taken storylines from each of Bruce Wayne’s big-screen outings and crafted its own tale from those beloved scenes, just performed in plastic. For example, its first chapter slams together moments from Jack Nicholson’s Joker rebirth in Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman movie with the Falcone-centered Iceberg Lounge infiltration of Matt Reeves’ The Batman, and does so effortlessly with comedic charm.

It’s at its best when being reverential to those movies while also exercising its license to mess around with them at will, consistently throwing unexpected mash-ups onto the screen. The overarching story may not come together quite as well as I’d hope, due to it leaving it quite late to tie earlier events and characters together, but in terms of delivering an enjoyable remix of the movies, it hits the nail on the head. Instead of one epic tale, it’s better to think of each of its six chapters as its own mini comic book run, as new allies fight by Batman's side to thwart the plans of an iconic villain. For example, one string of missions may end in a much less leather-obsessed version of Batman Returns’ Penguin story, but you’ll take on the likes of Condiment King along the way. It’s these deviations from the familiar film stories that often delight the most, and I enjoyed each time I thought I knew exactly what the twist on a certain scene was going to be, only to have a curveball thrown at me laced with delightful nonsense.

Through a series of roughly 20 linear missions, you’ll fight, puzzle, and platform your way around Gotham locations in a way that will feel familiar if you’ve played any Lego games in the past. Where things are different, though, is in its combat, which takes a leaf out of Rocksteady’s Batman Arkham series by introducing its counter and dodge-based melee system, albeit soundtracked with a comic-book-esque Chudd!, Thudd!, and Krakk!. It feels slick to wield as you take on hordes of criminals and rack up combos reaching into the 100s, pressing the parry button whenever a flashing prompt appears over one of their heads. It’s a step up from the traditional Lego formula of just pressing the attack button until foes explode into their component parts, with a reasonable amount of enemy variety keeping fights relatively fresh, even if I was left desiring a little more in terms of interesting encounter design.

I played on the Caped Crusader difficulty, which is a step up from the “Classic” Lego experience, but in truth, never came close to losing a fight. I also realise that a tough challenge isn’t necessarily what TT Games are trying to pose here — though there is Dark Knight difficulty if you’re looking for something approaching it. I would have liked to have been made to figure out how to approach combat encounters a little more, though, with stealth takedowns coming all too easily and brawls not evolving much beyond the early hours. Most fights consist of dealing with multiple waves of basic grunts and the odd brute or ranged sharpshooter thrown into the mix as you roll and jump around a walled arena. Each member of the seven-character-strong roster feels identical to control in basic combat, too, with everyone from Nightwing to Jim Gordon packing the same punch. I would have welcomed a little more variety in their movesets here and in how they move around Gotham, as each is equipped with their own version of wings or gliders that all feel exactly the same. That grapple and launch into a long swoop does feel really good, though, so it’s hard to feel too aggrieved.

Where they do differ, though, is in their gadgetry, with each member of the extended bat-family housing two distinct tools on their belt. I particularly enjoyed sending one of Catwoman’s feline friends to scratch the face off enemies with a quick flash of a laser pointer, as I did summoning in Batgirl’s drone to electrify and stun grouped-up goons. Each playable character also has their own skill tree to explore, including some very fun unlockable ultimate abilities that can be unleashed once you’ve filled up your focus meter by landing successive hits. A particular favourite of mine is Batman’s batarang-powered move, which can unleash a swarm of bats onto a horde, stunning and dealing damage to each of them as they get lost in the flurry of plastic wings and teeth. I’ll admit to being initially worried that the relatively thin number of playable heroes could work against Legacy of the Dark Knight, especially when we’ve become accustomed to Lego games containing rosters stretching into the hundreds, but each character does have a substantial amount of depth to sink skill points into here to make them distinct from one another.

Puzzles, and not combat, are where they show off those unique skills more than anywhere, though. Each level is a great mix of problem-solving and fighting, and although it never becomes truly brain-teasing, it does make you pause for thought every now and then. Knowing when to switch between the two characters you’re locked into playing as during a mission is half of the battle, as you work out if a pipe gushing chemicals can be stuffed up with sealant from Gordon’s handy foam cannon or a small vent can be crawled through by one of Selina Kyle’s cat companions. Of course, like pretty much every Lego game, it’s all playable in two-player local co-op (the lack of online is a frustration), with some puzzles requiring coordination and timing to complete. Many bits of tech also come packed with their own enjoyable minigames, such as Batgirl’s hacking batarangs, which trigger a short puzzle section where you need to avoid enemies in a maze made up of concentric circles. These minigames don’t really develop in complexity over time, but there’s a decent amount of different types, so you’re never doing too many of the same in a row.

After a stop-start prologue tutorial riffs on Batman Begins’ League of Shadows training in a way that takes far too long to get through the basics, it settles into a good rhythm and then really hits the heights late on. A highlight is a late riff on The Dark Knight’s high-speed truck chase, which dynamically switches up the action between vehicle and foot. It carries a sense of momentum that many of the missions prior to it lack, and I would have liked to see more like this when it came to mission design, because when it really sings, like in this sequence, it all comes together wonderfully.

But the critical path has never been what I've enjoyed most when it comes to Lego games. Instead, finding those offshoots and exploring the open world on the hunt for collectibles is really where Legacy of the Dark Knight comes alive. There’s no shortage of things to find in Gotham either – while this version of the crime-ravaged city isn’t the largest, it’s packed full of opportunity. From hundreds of skill token-containing chests and villain-themed trophies to smash in each region to more involved Riddler and Cluemaster conundrums to solve, it feels like there’s something to do on every lofty rooftop and dingy alleyway.

Then there are more involved chains of side-missions to complete, too, which often lead to encounters with Batman villains not involved in the main story. For example, I had a great time following The Case of Waylon Jones, which tasked me with role-playing as The World’s Greatest Detective and analysing compounds by matching up shapes to their corresponding atoms or following trails using a UV light. Catwoman’s hunt for the Falcone fortune is also a great set of side missions, which involve several mini-heists and safecracking antics. It’s never overly complex stuff, but it always offers that welcome bit of variety and helps build out the fantasy further. Legacy of the Dark Knight loves keeping you busy without it ever feeling like busywork. After finishing its main story missions after 12 hours on the dot, I was still left with 53% of its collectibles checklist to complete, but have since achieved 100% at the 34-hour mark.

Rewards for completing these tasks are varied, too, with certain outfits, vehicles, and appearance-modifying red bricks granted depending on the mission. Those rueing the smaller roster size will find comfort in knowing there are still 100 different uniforms to unlock, ranging from comic book classics for the purists to the more maverick lime green, toxic waste-themed Batman Ninja look, if that’s what your heart desires. As well as gaining these from completing levels, you can spend your hard-earned studs at one of Bat-Mite’s many stores dotted around the city. Like a Tom Nook who’s shunned island life for the infinite cold and darkness of Gotham, he’ll offer funny, meta-tinged quips while you browse his wares. Alongside costumes, he also sells decorations to place around your Batcave, granting a level of fantasy that Bat-fans have never had before. The lair itself is a joy to take in, too, with each of your collected goodies proudly displayed in towering wardrobes or exhibition spaces customised to your own desire.

There's charm overload at every turn, with cutscenes that are often hilarious as silliness is always prioritised through slapstick physical humour and goofy dialogue. “We may not have health insurance, but boy does this make up for it”, could be heard from one enemy as I pummelled him and his friends a fresh shade of purple to add a new colour to the funhouse ball pit we were brawling in. There’s a clear love for all things Batman here, with the DC hero and the culture around him always the target of affectionate mockery. That could be riffs on popular memes, such as Michael Caine’s infamous “Batman Begin” Twitter post, or the fact that you may just be wandering around the Batcave minding your own business when the Batphone rings. Who’s on the other end of the line? Well, that would be Bane, gloriously voiced by What We Do in the Shadows’ Matt Berry, who loves nothing more than to crank call you with some wonderfully childish messages.

There’s always something to grab your ears or eyes, from the colourful wonder of the Joker’s parade from Batman ‘89 to the fiery, deathtrap obstacle course of The Flying Grayson’s circus show. But outside of grand spectacle, there are also the small details that I couldn’t stop myself from taking a closer look at, such as the fibrous texture of the heroes’ capes, the way raindrops trace down the scuffs of plastic minifig heads, or the way Batman flails his arms around like an inflatable tube man when on the back of a motorcycle. Zooming around this open-world Gotham is fantastic, too, with each of the 30 vehicles feeling distinct from one another. I particularly enjoy the heft and weight of the tank-like Tumbler from The Dark Knight — the perfect tool for smashing through the city’s destructible decorations and scooping up the stud currency that erupts from them.

Whether it’s the shrunken world of Grounded or the monster-collecting hijinks of Palworld, it really only takes one great idea to make all the familiar parts of a survival game feel completely new. Subnautica did just that way back in 2014 by plunging the usual formula underwater, easily emerging as one of my favorites by the time it left Early Access in 2018. Eight years and one icy spin-off later, Subnautica 2’s own Early Access debut has once again pulled me in like an ocean current, and the game-changing addition of co-op multiplayer makes the depths a little less lonesome. Of course, with red barriers waiting for you outside of the small map that’s currently available and a short list of gear and craftables to work through, I started to run low on new things to do and build after just a few hours, which does make this ocean feel more like a pond at the moment. But that won’t be a surprise to anyone who followed the original from its early days, and dipping my toes in now has made me extremely excited for the updates that await us in the months and years to come.

Returning fans will recognize most of the weird stuff going on in Subnautica 2. A creepy water planet filled with dangerous sea life? Check! A sci-fi story that goes from mildly stressful to soul-crushingly depressing in a matter of hours? Check! Building massive bases and crafting gear and vehicles solely so that you don’t have to keep swimming to the surface to catch your breath as often? You know it! This sequel doesn’t change a whole lot about the core structure of the first game, and wisely submerges itself almost entirely back into the water after Subnautica: Below Zero experimented with more action on land. You’ll gather resources that help you travel farther away from your life pod and explore deeper reaches of the ocean, facing new threats as you do – whether that be infected waters filled with hostile lifeforms or oppressively hot regions with volcanic geysers that threaten to boil you alive.

One area Subnautica 2 improves upon its predecessors is its story, which takes the mostly environmental storytelling style of the original and pulls it up from the depths, offering something that’s even more compelling (and often a complete bummer, but in an intentional way). Though we don’t get to see more than a tease as of its Early Access release, this early section is already chock full of interesting characters and sci-fi concepts, as well as some truly devastating revelations along the way. What’s great is that while this story is certainly more direct, it manages to tell it while retaining the sense of isolation and mystery that feels like an essential part of the series. If anything, learning more about the state of the world and the terrifying planet you find yourself on only heightens the disquiet as you explore. And if this is just a taste of things to come, then I genuinely fear what’s in store.

While the story is a significant leap forward, many of the survival mechanics remain mostly the same with a few new additions and optimizations here and there. You’ll still hunt for various crafting materials like copper and silver, scan every bit of flora and fauna in sight to unlock new schematics, and cook up all the kelp and seafood you can stomach so you don’t starve. That process is a bit more streamlined now as just about every material has multiple functions to make collecting them a worthwhile use of your time – no longer will you be filling up your storage with acid mushrooms and feel quite silly a few hours later when you realize you grabbed more than you’re ever likely to need. The pacing (at least in the sections currently available) also feels much better, as I always felt like I knew exactly which materials to hunt for and which areas I should explore next, and never felt my progress slow in the 15 hours it took me to hit the current wall.

One interesting new idea is the ability to modify your genes via the bio lab machine, which can either be built in your settlements or found in the world. These allow you to gain access to new active abilities, like one that lets you quickly dash around underwater after a cooldown, or passive abilities, like one that gives you a larger lung capacity. The ability to customize how you play is a pretty neat feature, although (like everything in this Early Access build) there’s only a handful of options at the moment, so it’s a bit hard to tell what that system will look like once it has a chance to evolve over time.

The survival loop might not be particularly novel, especially for those who have braved Subnautica’s waters before, but per usual, the main draw is that you’re required to explore increasingly unpredictable and dangerous depths if you hope to continue moving forward. That’s where Subnautica 2 shines, as each new stretch of water or unexplored cave features untold dangers, surprising lifeforms, and bits of lore to find along the way. Some areas are covered in diseased lifeforms and swarming with carnivorous fish until you can identify and destroy the sources of the corruption, while another has an enormous clam-like creature hiding valuable resources within its shell that can be claimed by those willing to risk waking it.

Moments like these, where everything is new and unexpected, are the best parts of Subnautica 2, so it’s great that they occur at a near-constant pace throughout the currently explorable area. However, once again, the only downside is that you will run out of new areas to explore somewhat quickly if you are looking to jump in right now. Exploration shifts from feeling like a dangerous delve to a bit like a casual farming game once all the mystery is gone and you know where everything is, especially once you unlock and upgrade the Tadpole (a vehicle that makes traveling quick and oxygen storage mostly irrelevant).

Base building, one of the other major pursuits you’re bound to spend loads of time on, has been greatly improved in Subnautica 2 (though it faces a similar shortage of stuff to chase in its current state). The best adjustment to building is how much simpler setting up, expanding, and modifying bases is, as you can now just place a room and then tug and pull at it to increase its size in any direction, adding windows, hallways, and doors as you go with almost no friction. Building is often one of those things that you lose hours to in survival games, but often feels like you’re fighting against the shoddy mechanics in order to do so. This was almost never the case in my time with Subnautica 2, which is downright impressive given how easy it could have been to make building bases underwater a complete pain in the neck. The addition of currents throughout the world is also an interesting new wrinkle, not only because they add some chaos to exploration by whisking you away, but also because they can be used as a renewable power source if you set up camp nearby, which I found quite clever.

By far the biggest addition, more than all the evil fish and scary seawater, is multiplayer. I really enjoy playing survival games with friends, so this feels like something that absolutely needed to be in the sequel. Playing in co-op is exactly what you’d expect – you can invite folks to your world and start exploring, collecting, and building together, and that’s a pretty awesome time, even if it does make progression go startlingly fast and remove some of the fear and isolation found in the solo experience. The only drawbacks are that you currently can’t play in someone else’s world unless they are actively online, and offline worlds are forever separate from multiplayer saves, so your friends won’t be able to come see all the neat stuff you’ve been working on if you started that particular run in singleplayer mode.

On paper, it will always seem a little odd that it took the Forza Horizon series until the sixth game to find its way to Japan. Few countries on Earth command the same level of renown as Japan when it comes to automobile culture – the home of drifting, Daikoku PA, and one of the few cars to ever get Dominic Torretto out of a Dodge. Regardless of how you slice it, a stopover in Japan certainly feels long overdue. However, after playing Forza Horizon 6 for the last week, I can’t help but be glad developer Playground Games waited. For mine, that’s primarily thanks to the astounding step up in map quality. It goes beyond just being the biggest or the most beautiful (which it is, no doubt). Crucially, it’s also the most credible and car-friendly, and I can’t understate how much richness and believability this adds to the world itself. Every corner of the map feels like a place I can pause or park, meaning everywhere I arrive feels like a destination.

And when everywhere is a destination, the journeys are almost limitless.

From moment to moment – particularly while participating in races – it’s fair enough to say that Forza Horizon 6 resembles past games in the series in a number of obvious ways. At its core, it offers more-or-less the same brand of class-based racing as its predecessors. The timer clicks down, you mash the throttle, and then fight your way to the front of the pack. It’s still great racing, and I will say I feel like I’ve caught the AI making more impressive evasive adjustments than I recall them executing in the past. Broadly speaking, however, the racing itself remains similar.

On a gamepad, it all feels quite familiar too. The handling is still a successful blend of simulation-inspired elements – with a tangible sense of weight and grip – with smooth and approachable steering controls. For anyone unfamiliar with the feel of Forza Horizon, it’s by no means a punishing and impenetrable driving simulator that’ll fling you off the road for the mildest misjudgement. However, it’s also not a point-and-squirt, pureblood arcade racer like Burnout Paradise, either. That said, on a wheel it does feel like there’s a very welcome increase in the amount of front-end grip – and less of that slightly skatey feel that’s been present in past games. This is good news, whether you’re negotiating the many, many kinks and hairpin turns that characterise Forza Horizon 6’s greatest stretches of road (it’s impossible to choose just one, because there are so many highlights this time around) or needing that responsiveness to avoid traffic on the freeway that loops around a huge portion of the map.

It’s at this point you might be wondering whether Forza Horizon 6 is just Forza Horizon 5 on a new map, but to claim so would be far too reductive – totally ignoring what has changed.

Forza Horizon 6 arrives with an adjusted and more satisfying approach to its campaign progression – one that straddles a middle ground between the curated structure of the original and the unbridled freedom embraced by Forza Horizon 5. It’s brought with it numerous boosts to car graphics and audio, resulting in the best looking and sounding cars in the long history of the series. There’s been a massive increase in what’s possible with the user-generated content creation tools, and we can now customise garages, construct wild, private race tracks on our personal estates deep in the Japanese countryside, and even build in multiplayer anywhere around the open-world. Touge racing, open-world car meets, drop-in-drop-out time attacks and drag racing with no loading – the implementation of a customisation feature that long-time Forza players have literally been waiting 20 years for – the list of tweaks and improvements squeezed into Forza Horizon 6 is long.

But before I circle back on some of these elements, allow me to explain what it is about the map itself that has me embedded in it like a tick on a hound dog.

Tokyo Gift

The style of Forza Horizon 6’s riff on Japan should come as no surprise to those familiar with the series’ history of pilfering a pile of picturesque segments of a country that have otherwise no business being directly next to each other and… placing them directly next to each other. It takes a distilled and shrunken version of Tokyo City and surrounds it with rolling hills, open farmland, soggy fields, dense forest, sharp mountains, quaint villages, rural race circuits, and – overlooking it all – sweeping highlands and the Japan Alps. The blend of natural beauty and engineering spectacle is just outstanding, from the way low sun lights the patchy snow and lush fields on the fringe of the alpine region, down to the snaking, multi-level ramps and freeways that loom over Tokyo’s dense metro and industrial areas.

It makes no geographical sense, but it’s also not attempting to. This isn’t really Japan as much as it is a Japanese-themed amusement park for cars. It’s supposed to look fabulous and be extremely engaging to move through, and damn if it isn’t both those things in spades.

At its most gorgeous, Forza Horizon 6 is a total showstopper. Maybe that’s gazing over the Tokyo skyline from the highest point on the map, or perhaps it’s emerging from a tunnel to see the wilderness unfolding in front of you, with the freeway flanked by looming mountains carpeted in dense forest, and snowy peaks rising behind them. No Forza Horizon map has nailed the sense of both natural and man-made scale quite as successfully as this one. The fact that it accomplishes this with zero crashes and no stuttering, ever, is as commendable as ever.

But it goes far beyond the postcard-friendly vistas, because I also find myself entranced by the smaller nuances. I’m now a week into my campaign and I’m still consistently finding myself pausing to bust out the camera and pore over the more subtle details on display. Maybe that’s the flaking paint of the concrete pylons of a tunnel that’s become overgrown with vegetation to better blend into its natural surroundings. Maybe that’s distinctions in the actual road surfaces themselves, from the grooved sections within tunnels to the corrugated asphalt that forms the narrow route to your large estate property to the north of the map. Maybe it’s all the idiosyncratic coloured road markings stencilled on the freeways, alleys, backroads, and mountain passes (where the warning paint is already scarred with the burnt rubber of bold drifters that have come before you).

Maybe it’s the fact that every single parking lot I’ve discovered around the map (and there are many, many more than I’ve been able to keep track of) appears to be entirely bespoke to its location – whether that’s the enormous, multilevel, Tokyo Drift-style one by the docks, a modest lot tucked away beneath an overpass, or just a few spots lining the front of a konbini.

I would’ve loved to have seen a full spectrum of underground parking lots, and on that one specific note it's arguable that Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown – which is based in the similarly dense Hong Kong and has many underground, polished-concrete parking garages, complete with working boom gates – has Forza Horizon 6 slightly beat. Like Solar Crown, however, Forza Horizon 6 does feature petrol stations. They’re not interactive, but they are realistically everywhere, all over Japan. There’s only ever been one in the whole Horizon series before – a single outback petrol station servicing Australia’s entire eastern seaboard back in Forza Horizon 3.

What I love particularly is just how car-adjacent the presence of so many places to actually pause, park, and pretend to fill up a car makes Forza Horizon 6’s map feel. It isn’t just a slab of land with some roads draped across it to drive up and down; all of these considerations make Japan feel like a world built to host cars. It doesn’t just have places you can race them, drag them, and drift them. It has places you can park them. Places you can pause and photograph them. Places you can meet and hang with friends around them.

Japan is a world that respects the car. Of course, Japan is also a world that respects the bicycle. But the car does not respect the bicycle. It is the natural order of things for cars to disrespect the bicycle.

And Forza Horizon 6 allows that, too.

It’s All in the Wrist

The cars look fantastic, but specifically they look more seated into the world than ever before. That’s especially true in frosty weather, where they become encrusted in a rough sheen of ice and water vapour floats from the exhaust as they belch hot gas directly into the frigid air. I love the long-awaited ability to place decals on glass in the livery editor. I’m not one for ostentatious and complex vinyls on my street cars, but I do love the subtle sense of ownership imbued by the simple act of being able to create and place a couple of stickers on my rear glass.

Car sound is the best it’s ever been in the series. The highlight is easily the incredible and noticeably improved echoing that you get in tight spaces and tunnels, something I’m enjoying constantly thanks to the frankly antisocial and aurally irresponsible amount of downshifting I’m doing in tunnels. But there are understated improvements elsewhere, too, like the faint squeak of performance brakes that have copped some punishment.

I do enjoy that Forza Horizon 6 brings back the curated, wristband structure of the 2012 original, and I think the overall sense of progression is considerably better because of it. With a special, sealed-off section of the map that’s exclusively available only after you’ve reached the top rank of the Horizon Festival, this campaign has a really overt crescendo – more so than previous games. It works well here, and it’s nice to have a clear endgame and a final goal. Each wristband graduation culminates with a large-scale event, which is either a traditional Showcase race or a new Rush event. Only two Showcases may sound low, but I would argue that the Rush events (which are basically giant obstacle races) remain pretty Showcase-adjacent. That is, they still involve aircraft zooming around the vicinity in some capacity – you’re just not racing them specifically. Showcases are just on more straightforward routes, which is smart considering it gives us a lot more time to actually look at, say, a giant mech stomping towards Tokyo. That one may just be the wildest Showcase in the series to date.

Overall, the tighter career structure only temporarily infringes on the freedom afforded to customise races that players of Forza Horizon 5 should be accustomed to. That is, while a race will initially have a set class and car theme locked, after this has been completed you can use the custom options to race it on subsequent occasions in any other car from your garage. It’s an effective compromise between a more traditional approach and the totally malleable nature of Forza Horizon 5.

Playground Games did make something of the decision to have your player character arrive at the Horizon Festival as a tourist in Japan rather than an existing ‘Festival Superstar’, although your identity as a tourist doesn’t really seem to inform much. You’re still immediately presented with a trio of pre-modified cars to start with and, while it seems like you’re choosing one, you’re actually gifted all three. Part of me does wonder whether using Forza Horizon 6’s new aftermarket car system – where cars for sale are positioned around the world to drive up to, view, and purchase in real time – could’ve been a more immersive option. Perhaps we could’ve headed out to cruise Tokyo in a borrowed car to find one of our own to buy and modify – or maybe it would’ve been neat to have needed to take a road trip to one of the permanent race tracks on the map to, say, meet a local getting rid of an old project car, or clapped-out track day gem. The race and drift circuits on the map are oozing with grassroots motorsport charm, and I love visiting them.

However, this is a pretty minor complaint considering how quickly and regularly you begin to accumulate cars. Playground has scaled back the wheelspin prize mechanic to be far less common, which is smart because I think it has gotten overused. However, credits still arrive at a decent clip – and there are more hidden cars than ever before, with the most barn finds to date and nine additional “treasure cars” on top of them. Clues to find treasure cars are uncovered by simply driving around the map, which is just one of the many ways Forza Horizon 6 incentivises exploring at your own pace.

Call of the Elder Gods, from developer Out of the Blue Games, handles a careful balancing act between story-focused adventure and puzzle solving with grace. As the long-awaited follow-up to 2020's Call of the Sea and its emotionally gripping puzzle-box adventure, it's another rare Lovecraft-inspired game that effectively wields the surreal mystery and emotional stakes of confronting the unknown, rather than the macabre aspects of cosmic horror you may expect. The original game focused on exploring a winding, lush island that gradually revealed deeper mysteries and crushing loss with its protagonist, Norah, and Call of the Elder Gods continues the story as a noticeably tighter sequel with two new protagonists who embark on a parallel journey set in motion by its predecessor.

Call of the Elder Gods is set two decades after the first game and has you playing as both newcomer Evangeline Drayton, the daughter of Frank Drayton from the original game's ill-fated expedition, and returning character Professor Harry Everhart. With Evangeline experiencing a lapse in memory and dreams of an ancient city of elder gods, she seeks out Harry Everhart for answers on what was uncovered from that expedition. All the while, the original protagonist, Norah – played by actor Cissy Jones – narrates the story's events with a level of self-awareness that adds an even stranger layer of intrigue.

While Call of the Sea's remote island jungle was equal parts an interactive mystery box filled to the brim with puzzles that tied into some heartfelt storytelling for protagonist Norah, Call of the Elder Gods is more of a globe-trotting Indiana Jones-style adventure – complete with familiar stylings like streaking red lines going across maps to give it that sense of scale. This change expands the series' scope and leads to some unexpectedly profound and bizarre moments for its protagonists that even stretch across time and space.

It channels the tone and style of Lovecraft's short story "The Color Out of Space" over the course of its five-hour journey. Yet, it takes it even further by drawing on his novella "The Shadow Out of Time" as the story escalates into out of body experiences and time-bending phenomena. Call of the Elder Gods takes the time necessary to absorb you into the perspectives of its characters as they explore the Everhart estate, ancient caves in the backwoods of Virginia, and all the way to the remote deserts of Australia.

I really enjoyed the way the story escalates with Harry and Evangeline traveling to increasingly peculiar locations, such as an abandoned Nazi compound housing corrupted eldritch experiments and even the ancient city of the distant past; it leans into the aforementioned style of sweeping adventure that'd make Indy proud. Although it works for the most part, I wasn't as connected to each location by virtue of its brisk pace as opposed to the original's more cohesive setting. Just when I was taking in the fantastic visuals and mesmerizing atmosphere of a specific chapter's location, I would be whisked away to the next area, which sometimes funnels you into less imaginative enclosed spaces. This disconnect also extends to the in-game animated cutscenes, which showcase the strong personalities of its characters, but can also come off as stilted transitions between chapters.

Much like the original, Call of the Elder Gods puts a keen focus on investigation and puzzle-solving across its chapters. With the help of Norah's trusty journal, which keeps track of all relevant information, the puzzles evoke the classic Myst and Riven approach to collecting clues left by other characters and inspecting environmental details to overcome obstacles. There is some genuinely inventive puzzle design at work within Call of the Elder Gods – I appreciated those organic moments where you're learning how the pieces of its puzzles fit together in the process of deciphering solutions just before the eureka moment, and it's one of the great joys that complements its wondrous atmosphere.

One of my favorite early sections was exploring the estate grounds during a storm. I had to carefully position the statues at right angles to unlock access to a gated area, all while thunder and heavy rain was coming down. It's a sequence that starts leaning into the Lovecraftian influence of directly placing you in strange situations where otherworldly forces creep in to add a subtle sense of dread. Much like the original, Call of the Elder Gods weaves its sharp, visually striking environmental presentation to uplift its story-driven puzzle-solving. But it takes things further with a larger variety of spaces to explore that show the escalating stakes of the journey, which gives each chapter a unique theme and flavor.

Compared to the more straightforward progression and ramping up in complexity with puzzles in the original, Call of the Elder Gods's more fragmented structure unfortunately leads to uneven difficulty at times. While I generally felt in sync with the pacing and level of challenge, so much so that I was able to knock out some of the seemingly complex puzzles with ease, some challenges were a stark jump in difficulty in terms of an overload of information and moving parts to keep track of. This was particularly troublesome when trying to get a handle of the more machine-heavy puzzles, which took a lot of cycling back to my journal as if I was combing through an instruction manual. I even hit some walls that left me retracing my steps for extended periods to find any missed clues that would help lead to a solution.

There is a handy hint option in the main menu to offset those periods of being stumped, which will outright give you a step-by-step breakdown of puzzles in select chapters. It's a helpful feature that will keep you moving along and prevent stalling in your progression. Yet, I felt some aspects of the puzzle-solving could have benefitted from more natural ways of leading you on or just better explanations of the mechanisms behind its puzzles.

Thankfully, its stumbles don't drastically detract from what Call of the Elder Gods is all about – that feeling of uncovering a great mystery across time and space. It does so in a less isolating way compared to the original, and with the two strong leads whose connections to otherworldly forces naturally unravel as you take in clues and progress. Call of the Elder Gods even includes moments where you'll swap between both Harry and Evangeline to solve puzzles in tandem.

My favorite interactions between the two are during story moments where you'll make decisions on how they'll react to an interrogation, or a deeply affecting moment of personal trauma. This is all while a sinister cult is chasing the very same thing you are, trying to stay one step ahead to seize what it believes to be some kind of ancient power – it provides the adversarial element needed to keep the stakes high and broaden the consequences at hand.

Overall, it's an elevation of the original game with its clever use of its dual perspectives, and I was impressed by both Harry and Evangeline's parallel emotional journeys as they grapple with their memories of the past and the possible futures that lay ahead of them. The strong writing and voice performances by actors Yuri Lowenthal and Mara Junot, respectively, really do well to bring the characters and story to life. However, Call of the Elder Gods doesn't quite stick the landing as it closes with an unsatisfying finish that leaves a lot of its mystery on the table. Still, Evangeline's arc as a new protagonist adds greater weight to the original game, giving its story of the failed expedition a more poignant sense of tragedy.

Arguably the most famous episode of the 2004 Battlestar Galactica TV series is also one of the first, called 33. In it, every 33 minutes, the relentless Cylons show up like clockwork to pursue Galactica, driving the crew to the breaking point. It was a brilliant concept for a TV show, and a very similar idea works quite well for Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes. This roguelike strategy game about leading a small fleet on a quest to link up with Galactica immediately after the destruction of Caprica borrows that ticking clock and combines it with an unceasing barrage of both missiles and crises, giving a tense edge to its strategic resource management and relatively simple 2D tactical combat.

It's definitely worth watching at least the first season of Battlestar Galactica before diving into Scattered Hopes, in part because it's a classic sci-fi show in its own right, but also because it'll help you understand a lot of the mechanics that separate this from similar games. In short, every faster-than-light jump you make in your Gunstar – a smaller version of a Battlestar that's effectively very similar and leads a fleet of mostly unarmed civilian vessels – kicks off a race against the turn-based clock: you have a scant 10 turns to not only repair and upgrade your ships and crew, but also collect resources and manage the political friction between different factions of survivors, as well as handle an intentionally overwhelming number of crises before the Cylons arrive. At that point you have to avoid taking too much damage for two real-time minutes while the FTL engines spin up again, and repeat.

Even though you're not playing as Galactica or any of its crew, using the eerie theme music from the show goes a long way to establishing the BSG vibe. The art direction also generally works toward that goal, because while Scattered Hopes' 16-bit style doesn't look as true to the show as 2017's Battlestar Galactica Deadlock did, it's at least interesting in its approach (and serves it nearly as well as its clear space roguelike inspiration, the legendary FTL). What's not to like about the bright-blue flash of a nuclear explosion in space? The exception is when it zooms in on Cylon motherships at the beginning of each battle, where the pixelated textures on 3D models get stretched in unflattering ways. It's eye-catching, though, how that style is mixed with high-resolution portraits of the randomly generated characters that pop up during the frequent dialogue scenes. They're not animated beyond a subtle distortion effect that makes it look like they're breathing, and there's no voice acting at all, but the tradeoff is that there's a lot of variety to the crews that I appreciated after a few runs.

Combat sequences are a pretty straightforward real-time tactics game that you can pause at any moment to assign targets, use special abilities, and move ships out of the way of missiles and other attacks. These are relatively small-scale skirmishes, so you never have more than five fighters on the map – usually it's more like three – but you also have the weapons of your Gunstar available to launch when you spot an opportunity to wipe out a group of clustered ships with a flak burst or a well-placed nuke. (One of my favorites allows you to detonate enemy missiles remotely, so you can set off Cylon nukes as they pass by their own ships.) A fair amount of battlefield complexity emerges as your officers and fighters earn new traits from leveling up, and you have to figure out how to optimize active and passive abilities like earning temporary speed boosts after a kill, bouncing ballistic weapons from one target to another, or reflecting damage back at attackers, among many other possibilities.

On that note, I can't help but be a little disappointed that Scattered Hopes doesn't make any effort to replicate the show's flashy dogfighting; instead your Vipers, Mantises, and more are abstract representations that fly straight at their targets until they bump into them, then stop and duke it out until one or the other explodes. Meanwhile, artillery ships like Raptors have to hold completely still in order to bombard from afar, and support ships try to keep their distance. Next to the cinematic approach of something like Sins of a Solar Empire 2 or Homeworld 3, that looks a little lame – though I can understand how having everything flying every which way might make the action tough to follow when there are a couple of dozen Cylon ships and nuclear missiles screaming toward your Gunstar and you simultaneously have to keep your ships out of the blast radius of your own area-of-effect attacks.

There isn't a huge amount of variety from battle to battle, simply because the Cylons rely heavily on a handful of ship types that mostly just jump in around the map and mindlessly charge your capital ships unless your fighters draw them away. You can count on plenty of easily swatted Raiders and their heavy counterparts, augmented by smaller numbers of artillery ships, missile launchers, stealth ships, hacker ships, minelayers, and the especially annoying evasive Dodgers. That predictability (including the way the time and location of their arrival is precisely forecast) is the main thing that makes it possible to fend off so many of them with just a few ships of your own. But there are at least a few meaningful differences between fights: each Cylon mothership you square off against (which are mostly smaller cruisers, but Basestars show up for boss fights) gives its accompanying fighters certain bonuses, such as speed or damage boosts, and some can even neutralize your non-nuclear missiles. Occasionally, battlefields will also be littered with devastating minefields to avoid or asteroids that provide defensive bonuses you can use to your tactical advantage.

In every battle, though, you're always watching the two-minute timer tick down until the moment you can jump to safety, often getting out by the skin of your teeth while an enormous final wave of Cylon ships fires into the empty space your Gunstar and two civilian ships occupied an instant before. That's a built-in tension that Scattered Hopes makes good repeated use of. It is slightly maddening, though, that the auto-pause triggers when the clock counts down to zero but not the instant your last fighter docks – that's almost always the moment I want to mash the Jump button to avoid leaving anybody behind.

As you progress from sector to sector, you're usually given two options for which path to take (in typical roguelike fashion) and I've found that the single biggest predictor of whether I'll have a good run or not is if I luck into recruiting several new crewmembers in the first few jumps. Not only can these officers pilot fighters and man Gunstar weapon stations to boost their abilities, they also each give you at least one free action to resolve a situation (which would otherwise cost valuable supplies) or gather extra resources and better ships. That's absolutely invaluable because the benefits snowball quickly – even though having more crewmembers makes it a little trickier to figure out which one of them is the Cylon saboteur. You can recover from a small crew early on if you manage to rescue and upgrade civilian ships that automatically generate a ton of resources, but nothing beats pure manpower in my experience.

It's never a surprise when a new crisis pops up since they're marked on a timeline in each sector, but they're usually inconvenient because you're probably already struggling. A lot of the problems that arise are one-offs that can be dealt with quickly, but many are strung together as fairly elaborate stories with multi-part resolutions that require your team to fix airlocks, repair damage, treat wounded civilians, arrest suspects, or even fight special battles before they're resolved and their negative effects are lifted. There are even personal quests that pay homage to Starbuck's death wish from the show and uncover characters' hidden pasts, unlocking powerful upgrades. That said, for a game that's meant to be played over and over again, it seems like there aren't quite enough of them to go around; I was only a couple of runs in before I was having to click though a bunch of dialogue I'd already read, rushing to the decision at the end about which faction to please and who to raise tensions with. (I've even gotten the same story event multiple times in a single run.) Yes, one of the show's most quotable catchphrases is "This has happened before and it will happen again," but this is taking that a little too far.

That's especially true of the hidden Cylon story that happens on every single run (except, notably, on the one where I accidentally got them killed before they were revealed). It's not really about deduction, but a process of elimination as you're given "clues" every jump that highlight suspicious crewmembers, which you then have to guess at and spend resources to investigate until you get lucky. That part isn't all that interesting, but the fact that there are two different ways the confrontation can play out based on whether the Cylon knows they're a Cylon or not is a fun twist, and there are interesting decisions to be made in both outcomes.

A run of Scattered Hopes takes a bit on the longer side for a roguelike, usually around two hours. (There's an achievement for finishing in under 90 minutes.) But that means your crew and ships get lots of opportunities to level up on the journey, and you gather progressively more randomized passive and active abilities that you have to mix and match based on whatever comes your way. Pairing an officer who had the Radioactive Bullets skill with a Viper that had bullets that could ricochet from one target to another was a fun one, as was putting a crewmember who significantly reduced cooldowns and had a chance to earn extra resources from every kill onto a missile launcher with a big blast radius. One time I ended up with four powerful artillery ships that, thanks to stacked range bonuses, could fire across the entire map and completely dominated every late-game battle.

Of course, it took me a while to get to the point where I was regularly winning – my first six runs ended in failure, largely because the Hades-style progression system withholds some pretty crucial abilities like more starting resources, re-rolling random upgrade choices, restarting a failed battle, and increasing the odds of getting legendary-quality items and traits. Once you unlock a fair number of those, victory becomes much more attainable – though, naturally, you'll also unlock new Gunstar variants that put more focus on castable weapons rather than fighters, and every successful run as each of them unlocks a tougher version where things can go wrong that much faster. So even though I've already done 35 hours worth of runs, I haven't gotten anywhere near beating the toughest challenges.

Making the leap to space feels like a big departure from the usually grounded horror of the previous games in Supermassive's Dark Pictures anthology series. But Directive 8020 reminded me that the sense of isolation, living in a bubble surrounded by forces hostile to human life, makes the dark beyond a great fit for this genre. Kicking off the second "season" of these self-contained tales of terror, the four-year hiatus after 2022’s The Devil in Me has brought a number of much-needed technical improvements and gameplay tweaks – though some of them are more well-considered than others.

Directive 8020 follows the suspenseful journey of the Cassiopeia, a sleeper ship sent to scout for humanity's first exoplanet colony. This is framed to the crew as humankind’s last hope to escape a dying Earth, though clever little hints start to add up that suggest the company line might not be entirely truthful. There's a lot of crawling around in vents and trying to get critical systems back online after unexpected crises arise, with both the art and the plot wearing their love for films like Alien and The Thing proudly on their space suits.

The Cassiopeia itself is an interesting mix of Ridley Scott retrofuturist aesthetics and a cleaner, more modern look that sometimes made me think of the Todd Howard-ism "NASApunk." There are little homages to classic space horror, like terminal loading screens that look like they could have been downloaded right off of the Nostromo, but it's not quite as grimy or hard-edged. When the mysterious threats finally take center stage – which I'm not going to spoil too much about for obvious reasons – it doesn't just look like someone copied H.R. Geiger's homework.

It's really hard to say much more than that, since slowly discovering the nature of what’s trying to kill you is a big part of what I loved about this story.

The writing is pretty sharp from bridge to stern. Across eight episodes that took me around 10 hours to complete the first time, the crew is put through a harrowing “choose your own adventure” gauntlet of paranoia, corporate conspiracy, simmering tension, and eventually adrenaline-pumping terror. There's a big twist that didn't feel obnoxiously obvious, but also didn't come out of nowhere. I was able to figure it out ahead of time by being a thorough explorer and connecting the dots, so it felt like I earned that, not like it was fed to me, and that's always a tricky needle to thread. Other theories I had ended up being incorrect, so the writers managed to surprise me regardless.

The characters are endearing, memorable, and complex. And they're all brought to life by Supermassive's impressive performance capture tech, which has been among the best around for a while now. In certain lighting, the models do have a little bit of an uncanny valley feeling to them, though, as a side-effect of this being the highest fidelity game the studio has ever put out.

Like previous Dark Pictures games, you can improve traits like Serious or Playful for certain characters through dialogue choices, which eventually leads them to unlock one of two mutually exclusive Destinies, cementing what kind of person they become for the rest of the series. I found this had mixed results this time around. In cases where it simply served as a culmination of a character's emotional arc, I enjoyed it. But there were a few times where it locked me off from being able to make a certain story choice – perhaps the obviously correct one – and I didn't love that. If a trait like Serious or Professional can have negative consequences on a high-stakes space mission, that doesn't seem like something I could have figured out based on smart thinking. I just guessed wrong. How would I have known that could be a bad thing?

There's also not a lot to do for some of the crewmembers in the back half as a byproduct of the branching story. By the time you get to the last couple episodes, practically anyone could be dead already based on your decisions. This results in a handful of conversations where it feels like there are five people in the room but only three of them get to talk. It's probably a small price to pay for how many different permutations are possible – after one playthrough, the menu said I had seen only 58% of the possible scenes, to give you some idea – but it is a bit awkward.

The big new mechanic for this flashy return of The Dark Pictures is active stealth sections that have you trying to avoid a prowling enemy using cover, darkness, and distractions. It's nothing revolutionary, but it does help Supermassive's formula not feel like so much of a visual novel with quicktime events and limited exploration. That being said, I did find by the end that it's maybe a bit overused. Most of the sections involving mortal danger default to this sneaky routine rather than using the other tools in the Dark Pictures toolbox.

There are a lot of difficulty and accessibility options in Directive 8020, which is nice. If you don't like life-or-death quicktime events, you can adjust them to be much more forgiving. There's a "parry" mechanic that can allow you a cooldown-based free getaway if caught in a stealth section, which I think basically trivializes them on the default setting. But you can tweak that, too. The big choice is between Explorer mode, which allows you to rewind to any previous scene, and Survivor mode, which forces you to keep playing and live with your decisions. And that opens up a whole can of worms.

I chose to play through the first time on Survivor, but even when you have that mode active, you can open the menu at any point to see a new scene tree which details all of the possible paths and their unlock requirements. It even contains some pretty big spoilers if you're not careful. Now, I know you could simply not look at that screen. But even glancing at it once to see how an episode is structured, which is trivial to do and doesn't come with any kind of spoiler warning, was more information than I would have wanted about how the sausage is made.

It kills some of the tension to know that there are certain scenes where death isn't a real possibility, whereas previous Dark Pictures games had me on edge and ready to hit those QTE buttons at any second. And there's really no going back from that. I would highly recommend resisting the urge to look at this screen at all, at least for your first playthrough. I wish I hadn't, and I wish there was a way to disable it completely.

That said, once you have finished the story, this tree does become a useful tool for going back and seeing what other paths you could try out. It's the only way to find out there are a total of 44 different unique character deaths to witness, if you're into that kind of thing. There are even some Easter eggs that require the rewind feature to find, which is neat.

The audio in Directive 8020 is a little hit or miss. The voice acting is clean and crisp and the sound effects themselves are excellent and effective. But on my surround sound headphones, the directional audio was always kind of imprecise and the mix was a little bit off no matter how much I tried to tweak the settings both in-game and on the hardware side. This is merely distracting when someone's voice doesn't seem to be coming from where they're standing on screen, and potentially deadly when you can't really hear where a threat is coming from.

The needle drops at the end of each episode are great, though, with a variety of ethereal, emotive tracks that help set the mood. I was disappointed by the fact that you're not greeted by Pip Torrens' mysterious Curator to introduce the story, though. And I missed the phenomenal Khemmis cover of O' Death that served as the first season's theme song. I don't think that framing device is entirely gone, thankfully, but I'll let you figure out what I mean by that yourself.

True nostalgia isn't the replication of a specific place or time, but of a feeling. It’s those flashes of emotion that transport us back into memories that have long sat dormant. I was born too late to be a teenager in the '90s. I grew up thousands of miles away from the schools of Northern California. I've barely stepped onto a skateboard outside of a couple scraped knees in the summer of 2003. But none of that matters, and Mixtape knows it. Australian developer Beethoven & Dinosaur fills each and every moment of its coming-of-age tale with incredible music, perfectly hand-picked to set the tone for its free-flowing chapters in a way only nostalgia can. As original as it is reverential, it's a masterfully constructed dose of new memories hinged brilliantly on how they remind us of our own.

The “coming-of-age story” is perhaps my favourite framework in all of fiction. That longing for a time I didn't live in, and being given a chance to hang out with friends who never knew me, are sensations I find myself coming back to often. This is far from the first video game to tackle the concept, of course, but it might be the first one to have nailed a tonal balance that hits just right for me. I've tried to enjoy the Life is Strange series more than once, but it's always leaned into corny territory just a little too much for my taste. Mixtape, on the other hand, feels more rooted in how actual people talk, and is all the better for it. Sweet without being saccharine, thoughtful but never forced, and always funny.

The story centres on Stacey Rockford and her group of friends as they look to make the most of their last day together and reminisce about past adventures before she skips town to chase her dreams in New York. You aren't given choices here, but experience these fully-formed characters’ hijinks and heartaches, warts and all, and they feel all the more realistic for it. That’s not to say their recollection of those adventures isn’t laced with flights of fantasy, though, as they have clearly been embellished in Rockford’s mind, allowing each to be presented with lashings of style as if they were playable music videos.

There’s a great sense of spectacle later on that I wouldn’t dare spoil, but particular early highlights include a trippy softball practice session soundtracked by “The Touch” (anything that reminds me of Boogie Nights is an instant winner) and a police raid of a house party that you escape by hurtling downhill in a shopping cart. It's the most irresponsible, yet highly enjoyable, use of one since Johnny Knoxville and friends barreled along in a supersized cart to kick off Jackass: The Movie. And in some ways, Mixtape shares a similar sense of reckless abandon, zipping along at a pace and smartly reflective of a time in life where you're so eager to enjoy one moment after the next that you almost forget to savour them fully.

Where Beethoven & Dinosaur’s debut game, The Artful Escape, used psychedelic metaphor to tell a tale of self-expression, Mixtape is far more grounded in its exploration of friendship and how those closest to us help us grow. It’s a story that won’t necessarily surprise, but will comfort, and one that is often hilarious — like those aimless afternoons you’d spend with friends without any specific goal for what the day had in store, but you’d always end up learning something new about them, whether they’d planned on revealing it or not. Obviously, those unlocked memories aren’t yours; they’re Rockford’s, but these moments are just so well observed that they come across as universal, as if they could be ripped straight from your teenage Facebook or MySpace page. In many ways, it's best to treat Mixtape, well, like a mixtape — with no knowledge of where it will go next beyond a trust placed in the creator.

There’s no interest in fail states or high score chasing here, instead prioritising existing in and enjoying the moment. Its simple mechanics match its simpler times, with each twist aiming to elicit a fresh emotion through interactivity in a way that only video games can. That can be as simple as hitting a series of buttons to headbang in rhythm to Silverchair’s “Freak” blasting out of a car radio or designing your own slushies from a selection of flavours. Some, though, are a little more out there, such as the recollection of Rockford’s first kiss, where you take control of a pair of tongues (one on each analog stick) and awkwardly navigate some brace-caged teeth. That an option to press a button labeled “That’s Enough” almost immediately popped on screen is a very funny, and merciful, touch.

Each memory sequence spawns from a keepsake found around the world that smartly serves as the key to unlocking cherished memories. In this regard, Mixtape is somewhat similar to What Remains of Edith Finch, although I’d never say it carries the same emotional weight as Giant Sparrow’s masterpiece, instead sidelining deep-rooted familial trauma for a focus on youthful joy. Any replay value is found in wanting to revisit these short pockets of fun. They won't change, nor will the relationships or conversations within them, but familiarity is at the core of nostalgia, and I can see myself treating Mixtape like one of those comfort films you pop on every couple of years. You know what's going to happen, so the surprise factor is gone, but spending time with characters whose lives are only a few hours long is still valuable. That’s probably why I’ve played it through its roughly three-hour campaign a full three times already.

Best friends Slater and Cassandra are excellent foils to Rockford, too, with an instant sense that these three have been a close-knit group instantly delivered via quick-hit, sarcasm-fuelled jabs at one another and the sort of goofy noises spilling out of their mouths that only occur when you feel completely comfortable around someone. Referring to a T. rex as “the Barry Manilow of dinosaurs” is one such amusing observation among many. It’s yet another example of the writing and performances coming across as almost effortlessly natural, which is such a difficult thing to accomplish. Cassandra, in particular, has some standout scenes and ended up being my favourite of the bunch, even if some aspects of her character change a little too abruptly to be 100% believable at certain points in the story.

Rockford herself is an aspiring Hollywood music supervisor, and as such, pop songs from the early '90s and decades before propel much of the adventure. Big artists are here, but not always alongside their biggest hits. It's a nice touch, as if someone like Rockford — a music connoisseur who dreams of a profession centered on unearthing audio gold to match a mood — has curated the soundtrack. I particularly enjoy the way you can walk around her bedroom and get treated to amusing analysis of the albums strewn around the furniture in the style of Patrick Bateman, though with far less violent undertones. The opening skate to Devo’s “That’s Good” is the perfect high-energy pace-setter, whereas the scuzzy “Love” by The Smashing Pumpkins provides a fantastic backdrop for some explosive angst. And then there are songs like John Paul Young’s “Yesterday’s Hero” which I had never heard before, but now can’t stop listening to due to the way it’s used here. I’m not sure I’ve felt a game connect so intrinsically to its music in such a charming way since Simogo’s excellent Sayonara Wild Hearts, and I simply couldn’t get enough.

It consistently hits a delightful cross section of games, music, and movies. From Dazed and Confused to Ladybird, it reminds me of some of my favourite coming-of-age stories, without ever feeling like pastiches of them. Mixtape does this elegantly and with a genuine love for a genre its creators clearly hold close, as Beethoven & Dinosaur itself comes of age with its sophomore effort. But it isn't just tonally looking towards cinema; it plays with the form, in turn becoming a mixed-media wonderland of a video game. There's the glorious, painstakingly handcrafted Spider-Verse-esque animation that enraptures at a glance, along with the use of grainy live-action stock footage, music-video-like editing rhythms, and fun fourth-wall breaks. It's not afraid to experiment and nerd out when it comes to stamping different styles on different scenes, and is all the better for it, keeping things constantly fresh.

Look, I was always going to be a mark for Mixtape. As a coming-of-age movie lover with an ear lent to guitar music of decades past who often indulges in the bittersweet sensation of melancholy, Beethoven & Dinosaur may have made it just for me. I mean, it even references David Shire’s unused Apocalypse Now score in an early scene — I can’t help but fear I have been actively spied on. But the beauty of Mixtape is that you don't need to be exactly the type of person it's for to get a lot out of it. Much like nostalgia, it brings out feelings you may have long forgotten, through faces and songs you may have never seen or heard before, but which bring familiar, faded emotions with them all the same. It reminds me of times I once enjoyed, but in hindsight wish I had held dearer in the moment. It's a mistake I didn't let happen again with Mixtape, as I savoured each and every minute, all the way to its final, powerful button press.

The best rhythm games are Combo Mad. They let you express yourself, alter your play, match the beat to your tools and show off. They’re not all this way, of course. But the good ones – the ones that get that music isn’t just playing the right notes in the right order – have more in common with Devil May Cry and your favorite fighting game than you might think. Dead as Disco, a literal beat ‘em up from developer Brain Jar Games, is as comfortable in that space as a well-worn leather jacket. Even at its Early Access launch, it’s got the sick licks, fancy footwork, and consummate style to be a real contender. There are a couple parts of this album that I don’t love, but it’s about as close to being all killer no filler as an in-progress release can get.

Charlie Disco was dead to begin with. You must remember that, otherwise nothing that follows will seem wondrous or maintain any sense of mystery. But it turns out you can’t keep a good man down, as Charlie has risen from the grave to put the band back together: one soul for one night and one last show as Dead as Disco. According to Vice, the floating German skull-as-disco-ball who’s there to enforce your contract “to ze letter,” Charlie got snuffed on the world tour, after which the rest of his band sold their souls to Harmony and became mega Idols. Your job is to convince them that they were better as a quintet and figure out who killed Disco.

Dead as Disco isn’t heavy on plot, but what’s here kept me interested and the performances are good. Charlie doesn’t really remember what happened (or who offed him), and all he has to go on is Vice’s word and the state of the world as it is now, ten years after he bought the farm. When you confront Prophet about selling out to Harmony, he tells Charlie that he sold out long before the rest of them did. Disco doesn’t believe it, of course, but then what does he have to go on? Vice’s word? Would you trust a bedazzled floating skull? You won’t see the end of Disco’s story here; this Early Access, after all. But there’s enough intrigue that I wanted to learn more about the characters and see what would happen next.

The real power behind Dead as Disco’s chords is the moment-to-moment joy of beating up enemies to the, um… beat. If you’ve ever played Hi-Fi Rush, you’re gonna be right at home here. Combat marches to the tempo of the tune you’re jamming to, so if you’ve got rhythm, timing your attacks, dodges, and counters will feel like headbangin’ to a joint you know by heart. Now, every attack always lands on the beat, so combat feels good even if Charlie’s doing his best Steven Adler impression. You don’t gotta be right on time to succeed, but if you can sync your moves up with the song, you’ll hit harder, dodge better, and build more Fever Meter you can cash in for special moves like Fever Rush, which allows you to play Charlie’s drumsticks on his foe’s heads.

When you’re movin’ and groovin’, Dead as Disco’s fights are remarkable. Hit a combo, pause long enough to pull off a counter, spend one of your takedown tokens to yank a guy out of the fight before he gets to swing, exit the animation early with a well-timed dodge, and then hit the guy who’s recovering from his swing with a finisher. Regular enemies aren’t super challenging, but some are so fast you can only counter them. Others require you to break a shield or keep an eye out for leaping attacks and lasers. Fortunately, Disco can cancel just about any action into any other, so you’ve always got an answer, and playing around these requirements is fun. Combat is quite simple, but it feels so, so good, and when you’ve mastered the beat of a song and know how to handle the variety of enemies you’re facing, it’s pretty amazing. And damn if it doesn’t look stylish as hell no matter what you do.

That’s good, because as strong as Dead as Disco’s combat is, there’s not a ton of stuff outside of it. You’ve essentially got three ways to jam in the Early Access build: Challenges, which will both teach you how to play and then task you to do so under modified conditions or while accomplishing specific tasks; Free Play, where you can take on any of the 30 currently available tracks – some licensed, some original – at your leisure, and even upload your own; and the main story levels, where you face off against your former bandmates.

These are Dead as Disco’s most impressive moments. They’re multi-stage fights against each Idol, complete with some absolutely bonkers stage transitions, unique mechanics, and plenty of minions to break up the action. Each one feels pretty unique, and the songs you’ll battle to the beat of are absolute bangers. I mean, come on. Punk-rock-skull-in-a-vat Hemlock fighting you to a sick version of Maniac? Yeah, buddy. Of course Aurora, the human AI-designed-just-for-you-turned-near-deity fights you to a pop song. What else would it be?

By far my favorite of these fights is the one against Prophet: a slickly produced hip-hop track guides you from the streets where everything started to a sold-out arena. And when you transition from the small frys to the head honcho via one of those rad-as-hell animated sequences? Cinema, baby. Sure as hell better than some sanitized musical biopic, you know?

If I have one issue with these fights, it’s that they can be a bit unforgiving until you have some upgrades under your belt, which can be painful when they’re several minutes long. By the end, you’ve seen everything a boss has to offer and are just going through the motions of the fight in a way that dulls the best parts of Dead as Disco’s focus on player expression. It’s not enough to ruin any of them – I think they’re all good – but I was always ready for them to end before they actually did.

Speaking of upgrades, every song you play will reward you with fans that you can use to upgrade Disco’s Beat Kune Do. Knock off a boss, and you’ll unlock a special move to spend Fever on, as well as a new, smaller upgrade tree. Dead as Disco’s skill trees aren’t huge, but they’re meaningful. Every time you unlock a health upgrade, or even something as simple as the ability to follow up a drumstick after you throw it, you’ll feel it, which is exactly how it should be.

The Challenges and Free Play are more limited because they lack the sheer star power and production of the boss fights, but the former is an excellent way to learn Charlie’s moves while challenging yourself and the latter is a chill way to explore the setlist or chase high scores. I particularly love the ability to upload your own tracks and play around with them. I’ve never been much of a “make your own fun” guy, but it’s hard not to admire the moxie and tools on display. Was it ambitious of me to make my first uploaded track Meat Loaf’s “Bat Out of Hell?” Absolutely. It’s mad long. But I loved that I could. And if all your music’s on Spotify or you’re just not into that, there’s plenty of rockin’ tunes preloaded for you to jam to. Putting Novul’s “Big and Rich” in here is a hell of a choice, is what I’m saying. Save a horse, ride a cowboy.

Between gigs, you’ll head to a dive bar called The Encore where you can spend fans (which is kinda weird when you think about it) to fix up the joint, buy memorabilia, find collectibles, and use all of that stuff to learn more about what happened to Charlie – and what’s gone down in the 10 years he’s been away. Beat an Idol and they’ll be in The Encore for a chat, too. It’s a fun way to learn about the members of Dead as Disco, and you’ll usually have to find items in the bar (or their levels) for them to keep the conversations going. Guitarist Deckard “The Machine” Voltair took his nickname a little too seriously, and now that he’s replaced just about every part of himself in the pursuit of mechanical perfection. Before, he just needed a cane. If you want to keep him talking, you’ll need to get him some juice. It’s good encouragement to play more challenges and tackle their fights again after you’ve cleared them once, because otherwise you’re just playing for the love of the game. Dead as Disco has more than enough to do, but like any great musician will tell you, the motivation for playing ultimately has to come from within.

Running around a big city as you and your buds fight off ninjas, annihilate slices of pizza, and leap from rooftop to rooftop sounds like a perfect premise for a VR game, so it’s a pretty big bummer to see such a radical idea miss the mark in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Empire City. This flawed adventure isn’t without charm – hanging out with friends as anthropomorphic turtles is consistently funny, and the parkour elements that have you dashing across skyscrapers are pretty strong. But, like a pie that’s too light on toppings, Empire City just doesn’t hit the spot in the ways it needs to. With weak combat, thin quests that quickly outstay their welcome, and an impressive amount of bugs, this flimsy six-hour adventure left me disappointingly shell-shocked.

Before we dive into the ways Empire City is often underwhelming, it’s at least worth celebrating one area where it rarely let me down: the writing. True to the shockingly consistent track record of the series, the dialogue in Empire City is quite good, with some very amusing one-liners and loads of punchy banter from our cold-blooded adolescents. That said, you’ll be hearing many of those funny lines a whole lot, and the repetition weighing down so much of this shelled romp applies to its jokes as well. Even the best joke is far less funny the 12th time you hear it.

The story itself is less interesting than the dialogue, too, with a grab bag of TMNT characters doing exactly what you’d expect them to do with zero deviations. Bebop and Rocksteady are altogether unthreatening and goofy partners in crime, Karai serves as a morally gray companion with a murky history, and April O’Neil is just doing her best as she lives out her life as a sewer dweller. Your familiar group of allies conspires to thwart the telegraphed machinations of some tired foes in a forgettable story that is already quickly fading from my memory (and I rolled credits mere minutes before writing this).

When it comes to the fantasy of playing as the Ninja Turtles, the part Empire City gets closest to nailing is the parkour. Though its three open-world areas are quite limited, leaping across rooftops and climbing pipe drains as you hunt down the Foot Clan is definitely a highlight. Jumping, dashing in midair, and grapple hooking are all pretty stellar movement options early on, and you start to feel like even more of a badass once you unlock upgrades like a double jump, making yourself impossible to hit as you pull off daring stunts to get around town. Climbing and leaping through the air are two of the things that VR adventure games are best known for, and while Empire City doesn’t come close to some of the greats like Stride or Blade & Sorcery, it’s still more than serviceable and is certainly one of the best parts of this particular VR package.

Those parkour chops are wasted on the levels, though, which are the least interesting (and often most downright annoying) parts of Empire City. The three miniature hubs (East Side, Chinatown, and the Docks) are barren and charmless cityscapes you’ll revisit over the course of your adventure as you’re encouraged to participate in the same handful of extremely simple activities that pop up over and over again every few minutes. The idea here is that there’s always some minor crime to stop, similar to Insomniac’s Spider-Man games, and that you’ve also got regions to free from the Foot Clan’s control, similar to something like a Far Cry game. But Empire City’s versions of those ideas are incredibly underdeveloped and poorly executed, as you’re repeatedly sent the same small number of side quests ad nauseum with almost no payoff for completing them – and your reward for liberating each part of the city is for absolutely all of them to return to Foot Clan control the second you turn your back for longer than a few minutes. That means you’ll spend a pretty big chunk of the main story doing consistently boring and occasionally irritating chores.

There are a few things that make these open-world hubs slightly more bearable, such as time trials that ask you to do things like sink basketball shots into a hoop, throw ninja stars at moving targets, or collect floating letters Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater-style (minus the skateboard, despite how fitting that would have been). While completely unnecessary and devoid of any rewards that I could see, these serve as welcome distractions that inject just the tiniest bit of variety into otherwise incredibly tedious areas. There are also a couple collectibles hidden around to hunt for, some of which are just fun to track down for vanity reasons, like the chess pieces that you’ll need to complete your chess board back at your base, or the items and blueprints that actually have an impact on gameplay. These things go a small way toward making each region less annoying to spend time in, but only just so.

It certainly doesn’t help that you’ll have to do a whole lot of extremely sloppy fights along the way. No matter which of the four turtles you’re playing as, combat is an absurdly one-dimensional process of slashing, dashing out of the way, and repeating. There’s the smallest amount of variety beyond that, like the use of gadgets every now and again or a “Focus Mode” that lets you do a bit more damage, and the latter does help you get through the slog of combat a bit faster. But attacks often sail right through enemies without doing a lick of damage, blocking and parrying is pretty inconsistent, and sometimes a fight will just lock up altogether so you can’t hit anything with your weapons no matter how long you sit there and swing them. It doesn’t really matter all that much when death simply respawns you nearby with no progress lost, but it’s still such a letdown to not be stoked about the fighting in a dang Ninja Turtles game.

You can also sneak around and attack enemies from the cover of darkness like a true ninja, which at least saves you the trouble of having to contend with the combat’s shortcomings, but this method comes with plenty of caveats of its own. It’s much less obnoxious to just bop most enemies on the head from behind and keep on trucking, but you’re allowed to get away with quite a bit – you can almost walk right out in front of people without being detected, and enemies scarcely seem to notice when you incapacitate their friends with ninja stars right in front of them, allowing you to pick them all off in short order. It’s pretty rough, especially when both melee combat and stealth in VR have been done so well in plenty of other games, including fellow hero simulator Batman Arkham VR.

Throughout your adventure, you’ll collect the one thing that makes all Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles more powerful – trash, of course – and use it to level up your character, unlock upgrades, and craft consumables like smoke bombs and healing items. Although the actual means of acquiring this trash involves a whole lot of smashing crates, as well as the repetitive side quests with the lame combat that dominate Empire City, unlocking all the goodies that make your turtle a better warrior is actually pretty gratifying. Giving yourself a double jump, the ability to detect nearby collectibles, or even just more health are all worthy things to invest in.

It’s especially neat that each turtle levels up in different ways according to their personality, like how Raphael gains more health and does more damage by default, while Donatello gains more slots for tech upgrades as the resident “does machines” guy. It’s a bit of a letdown, though, that any resources spent investing in one character don’t carry over to a different turtle if you want to switch. After playing the first hour as Donatello, I wanted to try out some of the others only to find I’d have to start their progression over from scratch, which meant I spent the vast majority of my playtime locked into a single character when I would have preferred to mix it up as I went.

Even when the action let me down, Empire City’s most redeeming quality is that you can play it with up to three friends at once, and watching your buds be silly looking turtles doesn't get old. The fact that the faces match the expressions you’re making and your mouth flops open cartoonishly when you talk is a nice touch, but even just shooting hoops back at the sewer base or seeing who can complete a time trial in the open world faster makes these otherwise forgettable tasks more memorable. In the same way that party games or other recent co-op contenders are only as good as the company you keep, Empire City does at least set itself up to be really entertaining if you’ve brought the right group along for the ride. Plus, you can get through the bland combat quicker by working as a team, and thus spend more time on the worthwhile pursuit of having impromptu dance battles.

Of all the issues Empire City has, the biggest by far is how inconsistently it works on the technical side of things. For a game that takes only six hours to complete, it’s pretty remarkable how many times it broke on me. One time I was unable to pick up any consumable items, while another it stopped letting me interact with the hacking minigame I needed to do to progress, and another still it straight up didn’t check off critical mission objectives after I completed them, forcing me to reboot and start again. Worst of all, if you run into any issues that force you to restart the mission or close the program in any way, you’ll lose all your progress since mission objectives are normally not saved until you’ve completed them. When I was 20 minutes into a quest and ran into a critical bug, I had to start that entire mission from scratch and just about chucked my headset out of the window.

It certainly seems like we’ve entered the era of the Tag Fighter. We’ve got 2XKO repping 2v2 tag action, Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls planning to introduce the world to a 4v4 fighter later this year, and now Invincible VS representing a more familiar 3v3 structure. Developed by Quarter Up, a team comprised of much of the core group that developed 2013’s fantastic Killer Instinct reboot, Invincible VS is a fast paced, hard hitting, extremely mechanics-driven successor of sorts to Killer Instinct’s unique style of 2D fighting. That style may be polarizing for many, and its ancillary modes are a bit underwhelming outside of an impressive, but very brief story mode. All of this makes it another tough tag fighting contender, but one that’s far from [Invincible Title Card]

While not immediately apparent just from looking at it, Invincible VS’s fighting system is actually quite unique, with the closest approximation being the aforementioned Killer Instinct. Like KI, combos are a two-way street – a mind game between the attacker and the defender in almost every interaction. The attacker needs to focus on building their combo while keeping an eye on a meter to make sure that it doesn’t fill up all the way, otherwise that combo will drop. The person getting combo’d wants to keep an eye on that meter too, because as it fills up, the other player is going to want to look to reduce it, and the main way to do that is by tagging their teammate in. However, if the defender is able to react to that tag right before they get hit, they can execute a Counter Tag, which will halt the combo and reset the situation back to a neutral state.

But here’s where the mind game comes in. Let’s say I’m comboing my opponent and I think they might use a Counter Tag. I can either delay my tag to try and throw off their timing, or I can do a hard call out by feinting the tag all together, which will leave my opponent wide open if they fell for the bait. On the flipside of that though, if they don’t actually go for the Counter Tag, then I’m the one that gets left completely vulnerable and the tables turn.

When this all works as intended in a match between two players that both know about the existence of this little minigame (meaning, they played the tutorial), it’s awesome. Successfully baiting out that counter tag with a feint is incredibly satisfying, and it’s also nice to feel like you still have a chance to escape a long combo if you’re able to make the right reads.

Counter Tags aren’t the only way to break combos, either. If you’re desperate, or the opponent simply isn’t tagging to even give you the opportunity, you could use an Assist Breaker – but that does come at the steep cost of two bars of meter, a lengthy cool down on your assists, and 50% of one of your assist character’s max health (which will refill as long as they’re not tagged in). To be blunt, I hate this mechanic in its current state. In most fighting games, this kind of get-out-of-jail-free card is only usable once a round, or maybe even once every two rounds, because being able to break out of an opponent’s combo at will is incredibly strong. But here, not only is it uncapped, each character has three bars of meter that are full right from the start.

What that often means is I’ll start a combo, they’ll Assist Break, we’ll fight for a bit while their assists are on cooldown, and maybe I’ll manage to land a snapback to forcibly tag their partner in and permanently remove that life. So far so good. But then, the second that cooldown is up and I start a new combo, they just do another Assist Break because their other characters have been waiting patientily with three full bars of their own. Granted, this likely won’t happen against opponents who understand that they are literally killing their own characters every time they break a combo this way – but whenever I was matched up against someone who didn’t realize this, which was very common throughout both the open beta and the limited pre-launch time I got online with the full game, it just dragged out the match.

Dragging out the match is additionally frustrating because, when the timer runs out, the person with the most combined health among their characters doesn’t just win the match. Instead there’s a sudden death between the two active characters where their health bars are restored based on the life of the remaining inactive fighters and both players are afflicted by constant damage over time. It just feels kind of bad to have the lead when the time runs out and then potentially lose the whole thing based on one interaction.

As far as how that action actually feels, it’s pretty stiff. It’s very much in the same vein as Mortal Kombat and Killer Instinct, so you’ll probably feel right at home here if you’re already used to those games. But as someone who prefers the smoother movement and animations of games like Guilty Gear Strive, 2XKO, Granblue Fantasy Versus, and Street Fighter 6, it did take me quite a while to warm up to how characters in Invincible VS get around.

On the plus side, Quarter Up did a really great job making the 18 fighters that are available at launch feel like their TV show counterparts. The ones that are supposed to be fast feel lightning fast, and the ones that are supposed to hit hard hit extremely hard. Then you’ve got wild cards like Cecil, who’s able to teleport around the screen like a mad man and hit from just about every angle thanks to his arsenal of weaponry and army of zombie cyborgs. The sheer amount of armored moves on characters like Monster Girl and Titan can be pretty obnoxious, and getting in on Rex can feel like a nightmare if he’s in the hands of a good player – but, in general, there’s a great spread of distinct and interesting playstyles

Rexposition

If you’re an Invincible fan first and foremost, you’ll be happy to know that there's a full-on story mode here that features an original story co-written by Quarter Up’s narrative director Mike Rogers and Helen Leigh, who’s a writer and producer on the Amazon Prime show, along with involvement from series creator Robert Kirkman. That authenticity goes a long way in making this compact campaign feel a bit like a filler episode of the actual show that was never aired.

A quick warning that I’ll avoid spoilers for this story, but there will be some unavoidable ones from the show for those who haven’t seen at least the first few seasons – but you really need that context to appreciate what’s going on here in general.

It begins with a strange scene: Invincible in the middle of a fight with Omni-Man, only this isn’t a flashback to their season one showdown or anything. Omni-Man is in a traditional Viltrumite uniform, he’s teamed up with Lucan and Thula, and it's hard to shake the feeling that things are just a bit off throughout the entire first third of the story. I won’t say more than that, but it was fun to piece things together on my own as Mark tries to do so himself.

The story mode is only an hour long, and while that is short by any measure, even for a fighting game campaign, it’s at least well paced and the fights between various characters never feel forced. Every fight is well contextualized, makes sense narratively (and isn’t just two friends fighting to the near death under the guise of a “sparring match”), and never drags down the pace of the plot. The cutscenes themselves are excellent as well, utilizing the same “animation on twos” style that the Spiderverse movies employ to great effect. Most of the voice cast from the show is accounted for and do an excellent job, and even the people brought in to cover for the actors who didn’t reprise their roles are fantastic as well.

The biggest issue with the story mode isn’t its length, it’s the fact that it ends without a real conclusion. Again, without going into spoilers, it all wraps on a pretty unsatisfying cliffhanger. Hopefully there is a free DLC continuation in the works, because otherwise this is just an hour long episode of build up with no actual pay off.

The rest of Invincible VS meets the standards of a modern fighting game, but never exceeds them. There’s a traditional arcade mode with short, occasionally amusing character endings, but fighting against the CPU feels uniquely bad in a game that is so built around conditioning and baiting your opponent. There’s a fairly basic training mode, but no combo trials, and no character guides. There’s a replay viewer to watch your own recent and saved matches, but no way to search for replays from other players (nor is there replay takeover to try and lab out a solution to a problem you encountered in a match). At least there are some cool rewards for leveling up each character – there are more than 300 customizable elements for your profile tag, covering badges, titles, backgrounds, and frames, all pulled directly from both the show and the graphic novel.

The rollback netcode is also stellar, and that comes without any caveats. Every match I’ve played so far has been buttery smooth, both in the open beta from a few weeks ago and during the limited amount of pre-release matches that I’ve played against other people during this review period.

Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era’s primary goal is to return to the form and function of the much applauded Heroes of Might and Magic 3. It picks up some tricks from later entries, sure, but you’ll largely do the same things today that old heads like myself did back in 1999 – and this revival makes a good case for why that era is considered the peak of the series. While its Early Access launch is definitely still under construction, Olden Era captures the essence of that one-of-a-kind turn-based strategy that has gone all but missing in the scene for decades.

If you’re not familiar with Heroes of Might and Magic, the basic setup is this: you and your enemies each manage heroes and towns on a top-down map, taking turns sending your warriors out to scour the land for plunder and power, killing anything standing between you and your prize in tactical grid-based battles. That first part happens on the overworld map, dense with exotic looking buildings and monuments, most of which you can interact with. In them are usually resources you need like building materials or gold, troops waiting to be recruited by anyone who can spare some coin, or magic items that don’t hurt to have, especially if you can accumulate big bonuses by equipping sets of them. It can sometimes feel like regions of the map are dense with stuff to vacuum up relentlessly, with an occasional pack of guardians standing watch to create a firebreak for your raging consumption inferno.

I was never disappointed to find a new building to pull up on, but that feeling of “discovery” – where I'm seeing something that looks awesome or with some intriguing long-term strategic potential in an unpredictable way – dries up pretty early on. What remains is a frillless but enjoyable barrage of decisions that always have to be considered. Do I spend gold to recruit troops from outside of my faction that are decent and convenient, or focus on the ones waiting at home several turns away that would benefit from all of my faction-flavored bonuses? If I don’t attempt to fight the guardians of this crypt now, will an opponent swoop in and steal it out from under me while I wait to accumulate power?

Maps can keep you guessing a bit thanks to an element of randomness that shuffles where certain points of interest are every time you start a new game. The strength of enemies on the map is kept purposefully vague, but unlike in past games where the tooltips would hint at the power of an enemy camp by alluding to its size, Olden Era will just straight up tell you if taking a fight is a good idea or not. Sometimes, stronger monsters will be closer to your starting camp, other times not so much. Though it keeps repeated games on one of the dozens of available maps fresh, it can make trying to capitalize on things like the aforementioned equipment set bonuses feel largely out of reach as you can’t guarantee you’d ever be able to find every piece required before a game ends, if they are even on the map at all.

The unique faction units are a vibrant blast of variety and creativity, though. From the lowly tier one grunts to the mighty tier seven juggernauts, every faction’s cast of soldiers is an expressive joy to field and play. Most factions are remixed versions of old favorites: Temple are the Haven knights from back in the day complete with holy warriors and literal angels, for example. The demonic Inferno is replaced by the insectoid Hive, which answers the question “what if Hell was somehow worse?” My favorite is the brand new Schism, the icy cult of elves who went too deep into the water and brought extraplanar horrors back with them.

All six have distinct identities in battle. The Hive’s molten bugs are an overwhelming melee force, and it can be tough to make it out of combat with them without heavy losses. The Dungeon can do a little bit of everything, as their mix of teleporting dark elves, mighty minotaurs, and scaly dragons cover all bases. This also means that not every faction feels great immediately, even when leaning into their strengths. The Grove has expensive units that can become powerful after significant investment. The Schism’s power comes from its ability to increase the size of their armies passively, but that only happens through winning battles. Tuning and balance is often an expected hurdle with Early Access games, and that's no different here. Figuring out what is a playstyle choice versus a legitimate concern is going to be an ongoing conversation.

Every faction has the same amount of units across the same tiers, but they are all balanced so differently that you have to approach each of them with a different gameplan. That may sound obvious, but army composition is really the only time you have to approach Olden Era in this way. That’s partly because units can be so mechanically different from one another from tier to tier – the tier one Hive Parasite actually does extra damage to higher tier creatures, making them more of precision instrument versus the tier one Necropolis Skeleton, which is just a cheap and reliable meat… er, bone shield. Many units also have powerful abilities that you can spend focus points during battle to use, which adds another tactical wrinkle to everything.

On top of that, all of these units can be upgraded into two possible alternative options, each with their own potential nuances and changes. I wish these upgrades felt more consistently different across the board, though. While the bow-wielding Sylvan Fauns can upgrade into either a more powerful archer or trade the bow for a sword to become a light-footed menace in melee, relatively few units present a choice that feels so obviously stark. I'm sure the differences between the 80+ options will become second nature when I hit my 100th game, but I wish there was a more illuminating way to see the consequences of these choices in the meantime.

Heroes act as the leaders of your warbands that can influence units with passive abilities or change the balance of battle with big spells. The six factions have a good amount of heroes to choose from when starting, each with their own novel skill, like giving a bonus to a specific unit or having an advantage when casting spells from a certain school of magic. They also get a more generic subclass that can be evolved into a powerful version of itself if you have the right collection of skills. This can be truly obnoxious because the new skills you get are chosen from a random pool every time a hero levels up. Some subclasses can tilt the RNG scales so you’ll see certain options more often, but you can only gain eight unique skills total, so it's possible that you’ll never actually find the five needed to improve your subclass. I’ve probably only done it twice in the 25 hours I’ve played so far.

Heroes are also sort of bland in general. Their portrait art is great across the board, really evoking a sense of personality that does not actually come out during play. The spells they can cast all come from a wider pool and are learned semi-randomly, which makes magic feel generic. This isn’t to say spells aren’t powerful – some of my best games came from magic-focused heroes devastating battlefields with lightning bolts or powerful disruption and debuffs. But being able to have a spell-based gameplan is completely up to the luck of the draw when you build your magic generating buildings and how many extra resources you’re willing to spend to buy more. Spellbooks rarely reflect the themes or characteristics of the characters casting them.

Settlements serve as your bases of operations out in the field and can also suffer from similar identity issues. Every day (each turn) you’ll be able to build a new structure that either provides new or upgraded units, more spells to your spell book, fortifications against invaders, or general economic benefits. They’re rendered beautifully and at least appear starkly different from faction to faction, but they all provide largely the same functions. You’ll likely build them up mostly the same way regardless of if your home is a temple to the sun god or a demonic beehive.

Factions usually have a unique building or two, but they are not created equal. The Temple’s Scouting Skyship that increases the vision range around the city is nice to have, but pales in comparison to the Grove’s Mycelium Roots that allow heroes to travel to any city you control instantly. Even the new Law system – essentially a research tree where you spend points accumulated passively and by spreading your influence across the map – feels a little copy-paste from faction to faction, with keywords swapped for faction specific details (unit growth buffs and signature stat boosts, to be specific).

When it's time to dive into combat, things will seem straightforward at first, but these battles really are the main draw. You move units across a hex grid, avoiding the occasional trap and terrain feature in order to reach the best positioning to get enemies gone. Units are either melee, long-reach (can attack from a space away), or ranged, so there isn’t much fuss when determining how to attack, and every creature will retaliate against a melee attack with one of their own. I love the simplicity of your attack options, though it can be hard not to just lean into ranged army compositions instinctively since melee is such a high-risk endeavor. This doesn’t negate melee units at all, but I did feel naked if I ran a squad of just face-checking bruisers, especially in the early game.

Flanking and backstabbing aren't a thing here, so much of the depth and nuance of combat comes from initiative, which determines which units act in what order and can be manipulated by having units wait and delay their turns to let others act first. It does often cause fights to feel like you and your opponents will spend the first half of every turn making your most valuable units stare at each other before they’re eventually forced to move, but who you have wait becomes an important tactical choice as battles get more intense. Spells that can alter movement speed and initiative like Web and Ice Bolt can help break these stalemates, and they are way more valuable in Olden Era than I remember similar options being Heroes of Might and Magic 2 or 3, where all you ever really had to do was cast Bless and Stoneskin and send your units on their way. It’s a pretty savvy and interesting combat system this time around, though I do wish the battlefield variety did a little more to spice things up from fight to fight.

Of the modes currently available in Olden Era, Campaign is my least favorite right now. It's more story-focused than past campaign modes, and even has some opportunities to make choices that will significantly change how you progress through it – specifically who you as Gunnar, a minotaur scout of the Dungeon faction and lieutenant of The Triumvirate, will ally with as you investigate a looming threat to the world of Jadame. That’s neat in theory, but it comes with lots of small annoyances like unskippable cutscenes. Its also where I encountered the most bugs, from a couple weird crashes to a mission branch that asked me to make nice with a faction in order to find its leader, even after I’d already found them and recruited them to my party. My biggest gripe with it, though, is that it renders a lot of the most interesting systems inert. Many city dwellings are restricted and can't be built, you don’t interact with the advanced subclasses or laws at all, etc. These are obviously so that progression through the more tailored maps can be controlled, but it's the worst way to play this game, especially if you haven't gotten any reps in other modes yet.

On the flip side, I really like the new Arena mode, which is just Olden Era combat between two players. You draft a hero, skills, artifacts, spells, and units almost like a trading card game, then square up with an opponent for a fight to the finish. This means you’re subjected to all the ways randomness can affect these things more than anywhere else, but it's still a great way to learn and test synergies without having to play hours of a full run at a time. I couldn’t try too many Arena matches during the early review window, but im eager to jump in and test my might when the pool of players opens up.

And while Classic mode is the “right” way to play, forgoing story for a pure test against either CPU opponents or other human competitors online, I’ve also been really smitten with the Single-Hero mode, which restricts all teams to just one roaming conqueror who holds all of your army’s strength and the fate of your faction’s survival in its hands. It helps focus the flow, and is perfect for new players who want to learn the ropes without having to think too big at first. But it also appeals to a returning player like myself as someone who is eager to find the line between the creeping grind of faction supremacy and the free time afforded to an adult with a job and a family and friends and…

Look, if you're just going to leave valuable resources lying around in strategically placed caches, of course I'm going to clear them out. I'm trying to save the world, not earn a halo. The next player can just man up and find their own. You see, the big feature that Tides Of Tomorrow is bringing to the party is the ability to see the actions of previous players and experience interactions with the world and NPCs shaped by their behavior. You can see their physical actions in the world using a second sight-style power that lets you watch a ghost version of them for a short time, while NPCs will refer to them by name and help or hinder you depending on their behavior. If they were a picture of virtue and, say, helped a particular faction, you'll find that people are more inclined to return the favor, but if your predecessor committed a crime or started trouble, you'll have to find different ways to complete your objectives.

As someone that has been conned before by the whole "your choices really matter" when it comes to game worlds, I was interested to see if this could live up to the promise beyond a couple of key moments. Ultimately, it did. Sure, some of the more life-or-death type scenarios came with a cheeky little note that the events will only affect my reality, but otherwise the consequences felt real enough to be interesting. To underscore this, at the end of each section of the game you'll get a The Walking Dead-style report outlining your choices and the impact they'd have on the next player, which was satisfying. You also get categorized as you play; I was tagged as tree-hugging survivalist. This became more meaningful as I played; my 'pro-nature' ranking meant I got some extra dialogue options, and some were blocked off because I hadn't earned my chops as a troublemaker.

All of this is happening on a flooded, failing remnant of our world, one where different gangs have taken control of structures that loom out of the sea. There are Marauders, Reclaimers, and Mystics, and you'll need to work with all of them. The storyline does have more than a hint of Captain Planet about it, with plastic ultimately representing the ultimate evil, saving the whales (or whale-like things) being a major plot point, and lots of lines that sound like your Aunty Bethany when she hit menopause and started talking about being in harmony with nature. The cast of characters borrows heavily from gaming's big book of tropes - a badass but ultimately caring woman, religious zealots with opaque motivations, a big old selfish crime lord - but despite that, I did find myself making major decisions using how it would affect them as my north star. All of the characters are dealing with the effects of a disease called plastemia to some extent, a horrifying effect of the state of the world that sees people slowly morph into multicolored mannequins, ultimately leaving behind a plastic corpse. The only cure is a drug called Ozen, which is in short supply. You can buy it, steal it, and find it out in the world if you want to save some lives; the only catch is that you need it, too.

A little meter acts as a ticking timebomb of illness, but unless you're out there like some sort of seafaring saint, it seems in place to give a general air of dread rather than a serious countdown. I was an absolute bastard about chugging Ozen at every opportunity, whatever the moral implications, and I still keeled over at what felt like a pre-ordained moment for the storytelling.

I expected the novelty of the vision power would wear off, but it's been cleverly woven through puzzles and encounters in varying ways. You can see a route through a heavily guarded area, guess someone's preferred moves in Rock, Paper, Scissors, and beat a dodge in a boxing match. In some scenarios you'll want to watch what your predecessor did and do the opposite to avoid a nasty end. All players can also just throw out an emote - pointing, dancing, there's a wheel of choices - so if you want to be extra helpful, you can assist your followers by indicating secrets or puzzle solutions. I occasionally did a little jig just for the hell of it.

Ultimately, some of my favorite moments came from small, satisfying impacts I could have on the world. One character asked me to set a law for their tiny nation; another wanted me to give my people, Tidewalkers, a new name. If someone calls you a Fish Whisperer, that might be my fault. I liked repairing ladders and bridges, knowing that the next player would benefit, but I also had no qualms about buying out a shop's entire stock of Ozen. After one playthrough I felt like I'd experienced the mechanic as far as this story was concerned, and - other than a random jet ski race that made me want to throw myself into the actual sea - I kept being pleasantly surprised by it as the story went on. You could restart the game and follow a different player to see how their choices changed what you encountered, but while I enjoyed my time on the open sea, I wasn't curious enough for a second playthrough. It did make me keen to see what the developer could do with the mechanic next though, because I'll be there day one to try it out.

Rachel Weber is the Head of Editorial Development at IGN and an elder millennial. She's been a professional nerd since 2006 when she got her start on Official PlayStation Magazine in the UK, and has since worked for GamesIndustry.Biz, Rolling Stone and GamesRadar. She loves horror, horror movies, horror games, Red Dead Redemption 2, and her Love and Deepspace boyfriends.

You ever had one of those days when Blackbeard boards your ship, shoots you, leaves you for dead, and you wash up penniless and alone on some uninhabited island having only survived due to mysterious, dark magic? Who hasn't, right? Windrose, a piratical survival crafter that just launched into Early Access, uses that universal experience as a starting point for some in-depth exploration and swashbuckling during a mythical reimagining of the Golden Age of Piracy. And there's enough depth and polish here already to match a lot of full games, even with an unfinished story and some rough edges.

Windrose takes after Valheim in a handful of ways, including the fact that you don't actually need to eat or sleep in order to survive. Rather, food provides stat buffs without which you can easily get one-shot by any wandering wild pig. So it's important, but you're not going to starve to death because you went AFK for a little while. The building system is pretty flexible – my earliest shelters looked very Robinson Crusoe-chic, but I eventually unlocked the parts needed to get a nice Caribbean hacienda going. Decorations even extend the duration of your rested buff, giving you a mechanical reward for taking the time to spruce things up.

From chopping down trees to mining ore, there are a lot of familiar survival game chores to do. But for the most part, I found Windrose to be pretty respectful of my time. If I had to do something repetitive and tedious, I usually didn't need to spend so much time on it that I lost all interest.

You start out in a lush, coastal jungle where the biggest threats are wild boars and your main goal is to get your first ship built so you can get back out on the tides. Moving into the mid-level highlands, human enemies with sabers and guns as well as predators like wolves become more common, and points of interest can feature mini dungeons with clever and challenging puzzles. At the end of the current Early Access journey, you venture into the deadly cursed swamps, where spending too much time in certain areas can cause madness and instant death.

The escalation of mechanical challenges and supernatural elements – oh yeah, Blackbeard is up to some kind of necromancy, by the way – meant the loop of arriving in a new area and working toward the next upgrade tier didn't get too repetitive. With even more biomes planned for the full release, I'm curious to see just how supernatural we can go. The swamps are already pretty wild!

Whether you’re facing off against wildlife or the restless dead, ground combat is probably my favorite part of Windrose. The devs describe it as "Soulslite," which is a label I'm a bit hesitant to use as a big soulsborne fan myself, but it is quite responsive and kinetic. Parrying opponents at just the right time removes shield icons from their health bar, which can eventually stun them and let you really go to town. Pistols are quite powerful, but take a long time to reload. And weapons like sabers, rapiers, and chunky two-handers feel very different to fight with, including their unique special moves.

The end chapter bosses are brutally tough, too. Even with fully upgraded gear, I definitely got some of that Souls feeling in these hectic but satisfying encounters. My one complaint here ties back to how stats are so heavily based on consumables – as a result, dying to the same boss several times while you're learning the fight can require you to leave and go grind for resources if you don't want to face them in a greatly diminished state. And that can get tedious.

There are also some edge cases where the enemy AI causes everything to fall apart. Melee foes have a tendency to completely mob you and shove you into a corner while you get wombo comboed to death from fifty different directions. This can normally be avoided by simply running away and using terrain intelligently. But the two most miserable missions in the entirety of Windrose were these ones that required me to board a pirate ship and fight like a dozen zombies in very close quarters. You can't even stand on the deck of your own ship and shoot at them because they're scripted to respawn if you're not on their vessel. I eventually had to cheese the whole thing by getting them stuck on a railing. This is simply terrible encounter design. But at least stumbles like that are rare.

In comparison to the ground combat, which is generally strong but has some rough patches, naval engagements flip the script by being somewhat unremarkable with occasional moments of greatness. Cannons fire on realistic trajectories that require you to lead targets, so there is a high skill ceiling here. But overall it feels kind of arcadey. There's no mechanic for wind direction, for instance, which I thought was especially odd, and you never have to replenish ammunition or hire more crewmates, either. Co-op partners are better off on their own ships since there's not much they can do on yours that you couldn't do solo, which isn't my preference. Boarding action s can be a great time, though, since your crewmates will help you out in those, preventing the problem of getting mobbed by too many enemies in a tight space.

The wave modeling is dramatic, with large swells making even the current largest pilotable frigates seem small while also providing cover from enemy cannons. But storms at sea can feel a little underwhelming. I don't think it's possible to capsize even in the freebie rowboat, for instance. I also have some small nitpicks about stuff like the way waves hit the shoreline. They seem to spawn a fixed distance away and arrive all at the same time, which doesn't look especially realistic. I do like the stylized realism of Windrose's world all in all, but it can seem a bit gloomy and Baltic out on the open water, with constant clouds and navy blue seas, for a game set in the sun-drenched Caribbean.

I really enjoyed the music and sound design, though. And yes, there are plenty of sea shanties to enjoy on long voyages across the gigantic map recorded by a full chorus – both familiar favorites and more obscure tunes. The sound of waves against the hull or seabirds circling sell the world in a very rich way. I'll just never get tired of cruising the Spanish Main while some crusty old sea dog from Liverpool belts out a melodramatic lament with the lads to a prostitute he's convinced he fell in love with before she was cruelly taken from him. That's what the good life is all about, you know?

As far as character progression, Windrose feels a bit stingy at the moment. That’s especially true of talent points, as I didn't feel like I got that many to play with – which is a shame, because they unlock neat playstyle enhancements like faster reloads or more health recovery from quickly landing counterattacks, à la Bloodborne. But I'm also unsure how much bigger Windrose is supposed to get. Experience points exclusively come from completing quests and exploring points of interest, and there are only so many of those, which means the current level cap is somewhere around 15. Maybe with the full release, it won't seem so restrictive.

After 2024’s Vessel of Hatred expansion left me dangling off a narrative cliff like a hapless Sanctuary peasant, Lord of Hatred had quite a lot riding on its ability to deliver on that momentum and give me a reason to become hopelessly lost in its loot-filled grind once again. The good news is that it’s done exactly that thanks to a tight, satisfying campaign, two new classes that I’ve already spent dozens of hours experimenting with and min-maxing builds for, and an endgame that’s so loaded with things to do that I occasionally forgot some of the systems even existed. If you’ve been waiting for a reason to dive back into Diablo 4’s particular brand of misery, Lord of Hatred has plenty of compelling reasons to do so.

As a proper end to the demonic battle that’s been building since 2023, Lord of Hatred’s cutscenes are unsurprisingly jaw dropping, but it’s the writing and pacing of this short and sweet 8ish hour campaign that stands as some of Blizzard’s best work yet. It had me on the edge of my seat from beginning to end with all sorts of twists, turns, and tragedies, references to deep Diablo lore, and motivations for even its most irredeemable characters that had me debating demon philosophy with my friends in party chat as we smashed our way through gobs of imps. Sure, the campaign is only a tiny part of the inevitable hundreds of hours that will be spent mindlessly exploding loot goblins into sparkly treasures, but part of the reason I’m so attached to this depressing and violent world is precisely because of the mysteries, drama, and unforgettable characters that occupy it. Lord of Hatred takes full advantage of all of those things, making it easily one of my favorite Diablo campaigns to date.

That campaign primarily takes place in Sanctuary’s latest locale, Skovos, a mediterranean-style island that plays an especially interesting role in Diablo’s lore as the birthplace of humanity. This new region has many of the things we’ve come to expect from the series, like an incredibly alarming human-to-horrifying-monster ratio and destroyed places that are covered in disgusting fleshy blisters (and whatever the heck a “corpse clot” is). But plenty of things here are a breath of fresh air, too – namely, beautiful and not-yet-destroyed areas that reflect the fact that this ancient place has been spared the worst of the horrors the mainland has faced all these years. The region has also got lots of diversity to it, from Lovecraftian-coded foggy shorelines to volcanic hellscapes, each adding new reasons to keep on trekking around in search of loot. Skovos isn’t nearly as densely filled with new dungeons, but the stuff that is there, especially the new Strongholds to conquer, are all well worth doing.

Aside from the finale to the story and some new places to explore, Lord of Hatred also introduces two very cool character classes to shake things up. The returning Paladin is about what you’d expect if you journeyed across Sanctuary as one in Diablo 2, with loads of protection abilities and ridiculously powerful build options like the aura build my co-op mate designed so he could just walk around destroying everything in his path without even having to lift a finger. The Warlock, on the other hand, is completely new to the series (not counting Diablo 2 having recently retroactively added it in for the 30th anniversary, of course), which has you claiming Hell’s power as your own in a wide variety of diverse builds. That ranges from the Necromancer-like Legion options that are all about summoning demons to do your fighting for you, to the Vanguard build that turns you into a demon yourself, for those who prefer a more personal touch to their wanton destruction. The Paladin is pure nostalgic comfort food that I’m glad to have added to the roster, but I prefer the new hotness of the Warlock, especially just how diverse you can get with it by going down each of the four disciplines or by mixing and matching them together to create something unexpected.

What’s even bigger than these two new skill trees, though, is that the six already available have been completely reworked. The changes are mostly centered around the fact that, instead of having a bunch of highly attractive passive perks that did simple yet incredibly efficient things like increasing the damage you deal or the attacks you can withstand, they’re now built around making more meaningful choices. For example, in the Warlock tree you can pick between making your defensive wall of demons encircle your enemy, trapping them within, or breaking apart into a pack of vicious sluggers after a period. As the Sorceress, you can now decide to take your fire hydro snakes and turn them into ice snakes instead if that elemental effect is more your speed, or if it works better with whatever mad scientist build you’re concocting.

These changes are really awesome, as they push you away from picking the boring, passive upgrades and instead help your character feel much more unique, even when playing alongside those using your same character class. Still, there’s also plenty of fat to cut, like how skills now allow you to sink up to 15 points into them versus the previous five. After you’ve picked your base skills and modified them to your liking, the rest of the leveling experience is pretty much just deciding which ones to focus your points into, recreating a lot of the same uninteresting decisions we were making with the previous trees. I still like the changes they’ve made here, especially the added freedom to augment how these powers work in more meaningful ways, but I do wish they’d have gone a bit further in that direction.

Once you’ve bested the campaign and maxed out your character level, you’ll quickly find yourself in the all-important endgame loop, which involves navigating an absolutely staggering number of upgrade mechanics, the gathering materials you’ll need to farm for them, as well as scooping up the best gear you can find and obsessing over every little stat they rolled. This is the crux of the Diablo experience, and Lord of Hatred is its most dense, meticulously customizable version yet. That means you’ll have to contend with truly some of the most obscenely complicated menus around, which have only grown more cumbersome over the years, but you’re in for a relentlessly rewarding ride if you go through the trouble of learning it all.

Having been along for the ride from the start, I love obsessing over every little detail and finding tons of ways to maximize my lethality. Finally finding a piece of gear that perfectly fits your build or saving up enough materials to re-roll a stat that gives you that extra DPS you need to break through to the next world tier is exactly what chunky ARPGs like this one are all about. Rolling into an endgame activity to watch all your careful preparation and planning turn into you absolutely stomping all over enemies and melting the boss in half a second is downright awesome, and knowing that there’s plenty of runway with 12 tiers of endgame difficulty (up from just four previously) is just insane.

The latest addition to that min-maxing meta is the Talisman system, which allows you to collect magical runes that slot into yet another loadout menu. Practically speaking, this is a clever way of offering set bonuses that are usually found on specific armor sets, except here you can use whatever armor you want while Talismans stand on their own. It took me a while to wrap my head around it honestly, just because I’m so used to the entire idea of a set bonus being a reward for collecting and sporting armor pieces that belong together, but decoupling the need to use specific pieces of equipment ends up being a pretty smart move – though it does add another thing to optimize and obsess over, and frankly Diablo 4 already has so many of those that I sometimes forgot about Talismans altogether. Still, they’re a neat addition and I’m glad they exist, especially since it gave me another thing to squeeze a few extra stats out. That’s always welcome!

There’s also the Horadric Cube, a nifty magical device that does everything from turning common items into uniques(!) to adding yet another stat boost to your best masterworked gear, at the cost of locking it out of any and all future augmentation. After spending hours tinkering around with this thing, I still feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface with all it can do – but it’s already quite the game changer, offering numerous new ways to squeeze even more power out of all that grinding you did. Combined with the loot filter, which allows you to target specific items with specific affixes as you continue your climb toward ever-greater power, the endgame journey has fewer annoyances than ever before. Now you can create rules to automatically filter through the loot you earn down to the most minute details, removing the need to sift through all the junk you don’t need (so long as you have the strength of will to figure out how to configure those rules to your exact specifications).

Speaking of the endgame grind, Lord of Hatred takes yet another stab at providing a more compelling laundry list of activities to engage with while you carry out that search for loot. To be fair, I also praised Diablo 4’s vanilla endgame based on my pre-release review time with it, but the benefit of hindsight and a couple more weeks of playtime on the live servers ultimately saw it wear pretty thin shortly thereafter, so it’s hard to say for sure whether or not this attempt will fare any better after a few months. What I can say is that the system Blizzard built in this version has the least friction and the greatest variety of things to do so far, and the dozens of hours I’ve spent with it have been really enjoyable.

The main tool Lord of Hatred uses to get you into that long road of grinding is called War Plans, which works like a curated playlist of activities that you’re directed to one after another, all of which offer compelling rewards. The best part of this is just how easy it is to jump from activity to activity, since you no longer need to hunt for Nightmare Dungeon keys or manually walk over to Helltide events – you can now teleport to the next activity on your playlist in a matter of seconds and keep the good times rolling. One moment you’ll be blasting your way through the Pit, the next you’ll jump over to go stomp out a lair boss, before returning to the war table to collect a batch of rewards. As you progress, these trees will offer more branching paths for you to pick from and will start offering modified versions of these events that target specific rewards. Even cooler are the new perk trees associated with each of the endgame activities included in War Plans, which allow you to modify how these events work and lets you customize your loot for doing so. Again, it’s still hard to say whether or not this will have legs after we’ve been running War Plans for a few seasons, but I like their chances of keeping my attention – or at least not annoying me with weird barriers to entry just to run these activities.

That said, though the premise of the entire War Plans system seems to be reducing the headache of accessing endgame content, it has a pretty fatal flaw in how it works when you’re playing with friends. Since your War Plans playlist is randomized each time you run it, and your friends each have their own specific things to tackle in their own orders that are unlikely to align with yours, if you’re tagging along with a buddy to run through them, you’ll almost instantly feel like a second-class citizen when you see a fragment of the rewards they get. You still get “credit” for tackling these activities, including loot at the end of each bested challenge and some XP to go towards your various War Plans skill trees, but your actual progress toward your own War Plan will only advance if your next activity just so happens to align with theirs. When I wasn’t the party leader picking the next activity, I felt like I was wasting my time and playing inefficiently by not making progress on my own playlist, and when I was the party leader making the picks, I felt guilty that my co-op buddies weren’t seeing the same level of progress as me. It’s one of those small details that completely undermines an otherwise good thing, and weirdly disincentivizes even doing War Plans in co-op altogether, since it’s more efficient to just work on your own playlists in parallel. Truly, a massive oversight that will hopefully get corrected in short order.

The other major endgame activity is Echoing Hatred, effectively a horde mode that throws every enemy it can find at you and asks you to withstand the onslaught for as long as you’re able. It starts out at the lowest world tier difficulty, then climbs as you push through waves of enemies until it inevitably reaches absurd levels of challenge that lead to your inevitable loss and rewards you relative to how well you performed. Interestingly, access to this activity is locked behind a fairly rare (at least in my experience) consumable drop you’ll need to get every time you want to test your mettle, but this mindless, brutally challenging marathon is exactly the type of activity I love in ARPGs, and I also found it pretty useful as a way of gauging which world tier your current build is ready to withstand. It is a bit weird that so much of the endgame (specifically the War Plans system) is about removing barriers to getting back into the endgame action, while Echoing Hatred appears to be a super fun mode you’ll only get to play every once in a blue moon for whatever reason.

Finally, Lord of Hatred adds the feature we’ve all been asking for: Fishing. Don’t be fooled by the tidal wave of apocalyptic monstrosities that surround you – Diablo 4 is a cozy game now. In between killing demon lords and being driven to the brink of madness by the horrors you’ve been forced to witness, you can pull out a fishing rod and just chill out, my friend. Frankly, there really isn’t much to this bizarre minigame, as you kinda just fish for a bit in each region to complete your collection and then have no reason to ever fish again. But it’s kinda hilarious that they bothered to add this in at all, and as someone who loves dense ARPGs and relaxing cozy games in equal measure, it speaks to me personally. Here’s hoping they add dating mechanics next (Blizzard, feel free to call me about this – I have suggestions).