In some ways, Samson reminds me a little of 2025’s MindsEye. That is, like MindsEye, it’s regularly gorgeous, has some neat vehicles, and is intentionally narrower and far less GTA-adjacent in scope than it may look like at first blush. However, also like MindsEye, Samson is pretty bad. With extremely janky combat, predictable car chases, and a small pool of constantly repeating missions, this open-world driving-brawler hybrid became a dull and annoying slog long before I reached the end of my 12-hour stint with it. Worse, even though I’ve cleared the mammoth $100,000 debt that drives Samson’s daily grind of crime, a game-breaking bug has left me soft-locked out of actually finishing the main missions and rolling credits. It’s as if this game doesn’t want me to finish it properly any more than I do.

Samson’s setup is simple: you are ex-con Samson McCray, who’s recently returned to his neighbourhood of Tyndalston. It’s the 1990s, but disappointingly the choice of time period has virtually no impact besides forcing McCray to use payphones. There’s certainly no ’90s music on the car radios. In fact, there’s no car radio at all, so there isn’t even anywhere players could potentially mod or dump their own.

McCray has a $100,000 debt being held over his head by an out-of-town crew using his sister as leverage, and must make daily payments to keep them both alive in the long-term. Parallel to this, there are 14 story missions involving some criminal rivals of McCray and his Tyndalston pals, of which Samson served me up seven before getting gummed up by some kind of bug that has prevented me from seeing the rest.

There’s a finite amount of jobs you can take on per day, and the sense of urgency and pressure this places on your actions is quite compelling for a brief time. Before I grew weary with the general sloppiness of the brawling, the bugs, and the overall repetitiveness of the missions themselves, chipping away at the huge sum was an admittedly compulsive loop.

Each day is broken up into three sections – afternoon, evening, and night – and you initially have six action points to devote to taking on missions that cost two or three apiece. You must complete jobs to scrape together enough cash to service your debt every single day, and if you come up short you’ll be greeted by hired goons paid to pound it out of you the next morning.

Damn, Son

Allow me to note that I’m well aware Samson is not exactly a big budget game and, on the Venn diagram of open-world action-driving games that operate on the fringe of Grand Theft Auto’s turf, there admittedly isn’t exactly a ton of crossover. At its core, Samson is really a straightforward open-world brawler with a basic driving component, and that’s it. However, its narrow scope isn’t its problem; the problem is how drastically unfinished and unrefined it all is.

Make no mistake: Samson is regularly very good-looking. From the way the midday sun pierces into McCray’s crumbling apartment, to the wafting steam emanating from manholes on the rain-slick streets, Samson’s visuals have truly been wonderfully realised. Tyndalston itself is also a genuinely fascinating place to inspect, thanks to its remarkable level of detail. The world is better described as more of a single neighbourhood rather than a city on account of its small size, with the main part of town just a few blocks wide and flanked by two waterside industrial zones – plus there’s a thin strip of freeway across a river accessible via several bridges. However, keeping it small has clearly allowed developer Liquid Swords to dress it with layers upon layers of credible urban grime. From the piles of garbage and stripped-down cars to the splashes of unique graffiti and hastily scrawled slogans, Tyndalston feels lived-in in a way that not all open-world games manage.

Unfortunately, Samson’s admirable aesthetics can’t counteract the shonkiness of its combat, the dullness of its driving, or the dreariness of having to do the same missions over and over for no measurable payoff.

Samson’s strictly hand-to-hand brawling is clunky and graceless – and there’s no firearm combat at all, which begs the question of whether this whole game might have been better off set in a different country altogether. Cops will occasionally fire on McCray, but they often forget they’re armed. At one point I killed a man surrounded by police in the forecourt of a precinct, and not one of them thought to pull a pistol. Enemies appear to have very little environmental awareness, struggling with tight spaces and doorways, and getting hung up on props and clipping through parts of the world. Sometimes they just ignore your presence altogether.

With no lock-on available, fights typically devolve into spamming McCray’s light attack button and swinging the camera around as you swipe at the air trying to connect with opponents. There’s also a slow and highly telegraphed heavy attack that lands with a pleasing-enough meaty crunch, but it’s not something you can use much when surrounded by enemies.

Combat isn’t particularly responsive, either. For instance, staggered opponents will have a prompt appear above them for a finishing move – but getting this to trigger feels inconsistent. I often found myself simply spamming the button with no result, before subsequently giving up and windmilling another salvo of punches out ahead of McCray until his fists find some face flesh by accident.

Extracting him from combat is even more frustrating. Mashing the dodge button is effective enough, but his ability to actually sprint away is seemingly blocked when being swarmed by thugs – that means trying to turn and slowly jog in the opposite direction will just get you punched in the back of the head a bunch.

Some fights can be avoided by staying in your car, but there’s a limit to what you can achieve behind the wheel. A bit of this is the result of Samson’s habit of having invisible enemies drag McCray out of his vehicle and toss him several storeys into the air – just far enough away that you’ll automatically fail the mission. This may well be a trade off for all the times enemies will go through the animation of yanking him out of his car without actually doing so, leaving you able to continue driving.

More annoying, however, is how enemies generally have a supernatural ability to simply skate out of the way of your speeding vehicle – like animals and pedestrians in licensed racing games that aren’t permitted to let you run down living beings. Unless the environment prevents it, your car will often just push enemies out of danger like identical poles of a magnet. This is not only annoying, but it looks awful and unfinished, particularly when trying to mow down large groups. For some reason, however, enemies are completely oblivious to reversing cars – so if you back towards baddies, they’ll simply run mindlessly toward your rear bumper until you smear them onto the asphalt.

Magnum Bogus

Unfortunately, the driving pillar of Samson’s action isn’t any sturdier. There are a smattering of driving-specific missions – including checkpoint races, deliveries, takedowns, and getaways – but none of them are especially enjoyable.

Getaways are probably the most disappointing, since the wanted system transparently cheats to get a fix on you. Even when you’ve broken line of sight, if you stop, police will continue to make all the correct turns to get you. Failing that, Samson will simply spawn in a new police cruiser out of nowhere directly behind you. Think you’re safe tucked away down an alley, far from the initial pursuit? So did I, until a police car blinked into existence metres away and slammed straight into me – seconds before the cooldown timer had finished.

Takedowns are disappointing, too. Despite Samson’s trailers hinting at the prospect of thrilling crashes as enemy cars wipe out and tumble alongside you, this doesn’t really happen much. What we typically get is rival vehicles bumbling around town on predefined routes. You’ll know when a T-bone is on the cards because, after a few takedown missions, you’ll know exactly where your targets are going to turn. Watching your rivals doing the same laps of the neighbourhood makes for very formulaic chases.

Occasionally they’ll get hung up for no apparent reason and refuse to proceed, giving you an easy target to smash into. However, sometimes that takes too long and the moment you wreck that car, the other vehicles are too far away and you’ll instantly fail. Other times your own car won’t survive long enough, meaning you’ll have to hoof it to the closest parked one – Samson bafflingly doesn’t let you carjack vehicles with drivers in them already. If you’re lucky, there’ll be one close by. If you’re not, you’ll be running for a while.

Takedown missions often end the millisecond you cause enough damage to your final target. At that point, the action will freeze to congratulate you on your success, but the moment play resumes the target car will disappear off the face of the planet. Sometimes all the cars in the area will disappear.

Much like the 2015 Mad Max game’s Magnum Opus, there’s an overt attempt in Samson to have players become attached to McCray’s personal vehicle. It’s perhaps not a coincidence considering there’s a good deal of talent at Liquid Swords who formerly worked at Mad Max developer Avalanche and, as a total car dork, it’s something I fundamentally understand.

In practice, however, it just doesn’t work. The cost of repairing McCray’s car is roughly as much as a typical mission will pay out, so the requirement to constantly do so in order to keep using it is too big a burden – and an unnecessary one at that. I quickly pivoted to using stolen cars to complete missions. Aside from mild variations, excluding McCray’s one-of-a-kind muscle car, I think there are only about four different traffic cars in Samson. That’s really very low for the genre, however (with the exception of a few checkpoint races with particularly unforgiving time limits that I quickly learned to avoid), I eventually found I could reliably complete missions in any one of them.

I took down the same street racer on several occasions in an old Ford Econoline-style van, and at one point I disabled a whole four-car convoy in a boxy old off-brand Chevy Caprice. The ’90s European and Crown Vic-inspired sedans don’t feel appreciably slower than McCray’s car, and I completed plenty of checkpoint races in them. I see what Liquid Swords was trying to do, but it pushed me away from McCray’s car rather than increasing my desire to nurture it.

Tyndals-done

There’s a whole XP system with perks and upgrades, but none of them feel meaningful. They largely just increase attributes like health and power and such, which means little when enemies get similarly stronger alongside you.

Reaching the end of my loan repayments only took me halfway through the XP levels, so I can’t really say if you’ll eventually outpace your enemies if you level up all the way. That said, there’s simply no good case to keep playing Samson after hitting that point. Clearing the debt got me a giddy phone call from McCray’s sister, Oonagh, and… that’s it. From that point on it’s noted McCray can keep what he earns, but there’s no purpose to have cash on hand other than to afford car repairs – and I have no desire to keep playing the same recycled missions I’ve already completed three or four times each.

If you want an open-world brawler with a little drama baked around it, play Sleeping Dogs, where the hand-to-hand combat drastically outclasses Samson in every way. If you want satisfying car chases in hefty American land yachts, play Driver: San Francisco. If you want an open-world action driving game designed to foster a relationship with a single vehicle (that simultaneously showcases the best of what a core part of the Liquid Swords team is capable of), play Mad Max. And if you want an open-world crime epic that actually feels like it's set in the ’90s, just dust off a copy of GTA: San Andreas.

Between the ubiquitous virtual assistants cheerfully patronising us from almost every electronic device and the disposable slop that nobody asked for clogging up our social media feeds, it’s becoming pretty hard to escape artificial intelligence these days – but it could be worse: what if you had an AI actually implanted in your brain? Such is the premise of Replaced, a 2.5D action platformer that follows a scientist named Doctor Warren Marsh who’s on the run after a sentient AI called REACH is shoehorned into his skull. The twist here is that you don’t actually play as the scientist, you play as the AI that’s effectively puppeteering him – with your sole objective to return to the laboratory so you can unpair from your human host. It makes for a compelling 11-hour quest that winds its way through an alternate ‘80s America rendered in a pristine pixel-art style, and one that I ultimately remained engrossed in despite some dull sidequest design and combat that occasionally felt more unresponsive than a muted Siri.

It really can’t be overstated just how stunning Replaced’s 16-bit inspired game world is. It basically updates the look and feel of classic 2D adventures like the original Prince of Persia and Flashback in a similar way that Octopath Traveler’s HD-2D style transformed SNES-era RPGs, enhancing primitive yet personality-packed character sprites and pixelated landscapes with 3D depth and lighting that really pops. From ruined scientific research facilities, to neon-soaked streets, and down into the flare-lit depths of an underground enemy hideout, Replaced’s world is consistently captivating to explore. Developer Sad Cat Studios is clearly – and quite rightfully – proud of its work, since REACH will occasionally pause to marvel at some immaculately crafted cyberpunk skyline that looms in the distant background. I really appreciated these opportunities to stop and pore over every perfectly crafted pixel.

REACH and Clear

REACH isn’t equipped with a particularly extensive arsenal, but its omniscience seems to include the same martial arts info dump that Neo had installed in The Matrix, since it turns Marsh’s pencil-pushing scientist body into a kinetic killing machine. Armed with a gun that transforms into a baton, REACH is able to indulge in a sort of 2.5D tribute to the Batman: Arkham style of fisticuffs anytime it finds itself surrounded by burly police squads or menacing underworld mutants. In addition to delivering simple strings of skull-cracking combos, coloured indicators that appear above each enemy’s head briefly telegraph when to dodge and when to counter, so Replaced’s skirmishes demand something more than merely button-mashing your baton-smashing. Meanwhile, the use of REACH’s gun is sporadic since it can only be fired after first charging up with successive melee strikes, while getting hit or performing dodges depletes that gauge, putting further emphasis on striking a careful balance between attack and evasion.

It’s a mostly engaging system, and it gradually introduces welcome strategic wrinkles such as tank-like foes that need their armour stripped off before you can damage them, and other more nimble nasties that will dodge every incoming attack other than counters. It’s just a shame that it’s all regularly undermined by controls that frequently fail to respond – at least in the PC version, even after a day one patch. In particular, the button to apply a medkit routinely failed and often saw me copping a death blow while REACH was seemingly fumbling with its coatpocket. At other times, the input to deflect an enemy gunshot was apparently ignored and REACH’s arms would remain rooted to its sides while it copped a dose of hot lead to the face, which was equally frustrating.

As much as I think Replaced’s visual design is an absolute standout, it too managed to spoil the combat on occasion. Since you’re only ever pit against a set number of enemies at a time, reinforcements often linger in the background waiting for their turn to enter the fray like the curiously courteous extras in a Bruce Lee movie. The trouble is that it’s extremely tough to discern one 2D plane from the other in the heat of battle, and I’d invariably find myself trying to land blows on enemies that technically weren’t there, making me swish my baton through an empty space and leaving myself open to a genuine threat waiting to strike while I was distracted.

Thankfully, I found Replaced’s platforming sections far more consistent. Though it doesn’t ever reach the heights of Shinobi: Art of Vengeance or Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound’s complex midair maneuvering, it is fun to wall-jump your way up narrow elevator shafts, monkey-swing along suspended ceiling pipes, and carefully flip past electrified surfaces. There are also a number of interesting environmental puzzles to solve throughout, such as carefully positioning industrial fans to boost the double-jumps powered by REACH’s multipurpose pistol. To be fair, there are some cases where the checkpointing seems a little severe, and a number of times I had to painfully retrace lengthy platforming stretches after mistiming a jump and falling to my doom, but for the most part I got a kick out of Replaced’s pixelated parkour.

Attack of the Drones

When you’re not throwing down with increasingly well-armed riot squads or fighting a one-on-one battle with gravity as you scramble and flip up the side of a skyscraper, Replaced changes things up in the form of regular instant-fail stealth sections. Initially these deadly encounters with surveillance drones feel pretty uninspired, and patiently waiting for the arc of a spotlight to swing away from your position so you can scramble to safety behind a stack of conveniently placed crates is something that’s been repeated in the likes of Limbo and the Little Nightmares series many times over at this point. However, Replaced eventually makes its sneaking a little more involved with the welcome addition of a hacking system, which both introduces a neat little shape-matching minigame, as well as the ability to temporarily disable enemy turrets or create distractions for mechanical sentries. I appreciated the more puzzle-oriented form of stealth that Replaced’s hacking provided, I just wish it had been introduced earlier on.

Those stealth sequences may demand a rigidly slow and steady approach, but it's the story pacing that staggers to a crawl each time you return to the train station hub between outings. This combat-free zone offers a series of sidequests of the bog standard go-here-and-fetch-that variety, forcing you to shlep your way through the various tent-lined streets and makeshift hospital areas inhabited by homeless hordes in search of trivial items like missing comic books or food for a local dog. While it’s true that much of this busywork is entirely optional, skipping these uninteresting chores means you miss out on vital rewards like health boosts and expanded medkit slots that prove to be pretty crucial against the heavier enemy groups in the story’s second half. I would have preferred if these menial tasks had been scrapped in favour of just buying upgrades with a currency or an XP system before hurrying back to the more exciting main objectives, but as it stands each trip to Replaced’s train station felt like my progress would go off the rails a bit.

That said, I was a big fan of the playable arcade cabinets found in the station’s basement level, as well as the funny interactions with the sassy young girl who operates them. The inclusion of playable Frogger and Space Invaders clones may seem pretty antiquated in an era when each Like a Dragon adventure features fully-working Sega Rally or Virtua Fighter machines, but since they each have a high score table you better believe I still sat on them until I topped it. Those aren’t the only nostalgic nods I appreciated either. I also loved the Wingman, a sort of GameBoy and Walkman hybrid that can be whipped out of REACH’s pocket in order to play catchy collectible synth tunes or to scan the environment for enthralling scraps of story.

In fact, it’s the story, in tandem with the jawdropping visual design, that ultimately had me hooked on Replaced all the way through to its rousing climax, in spite of any issues I had with its frequently fussy controls or sidequest stumbles. REACH’s journey and evolution feels surprisingly human given its artificial origins, and the quirky cast of side characters show plenty of personality despite the fact that each and every interaction with them is entirely text-based (even the so-called ‘audiologs’ you collect in the environment can only be read rather than heard). Sad Cat Studios has crafted one heck of a dazzling sci-fi dystopia, and with some post-release patching it could still be elevated into something really special.

I love noir. I’ll take all kinds: the hardboiled detective, the seedy crime story, neo noir, classic pulp – you name it, I’m buying. So when Mouse: P.I. for Hire sauntered onto my screen the way Ilsa walks into Rick’s in Casablanca, I was pretty excited about it. But noir isn’t just an aesthetic to be thrown on like an old coat as you’re leaving your office at the behest of a leggy blonde. While Mouse: P.I. for Hire clearly understands the style and tropes of classic noir films and novels, as well as 1930s cartoons more broadly, it doesn’t seem to get why those things are there, or how they are used to tell compelling stories. By fusing a hardboiled detective mystery with a fast, retro-style FPS, developer Fumi Games has made a shooter that is thematically incoherent, with the apparent aspirations of its story contradicted at every point by the actual action. Of all the Steam Libraries in all the PCs in all the world, Mouse: P.I. for Hire walked into mine. And I wish I liked it more than I do.

Mouse follows Jack Pepper, a private eye in a world where everyone is a mouse, after Wanda Fuller from the Mouseburg Herald sets him on the case of a missing magician. As you’d expect, that spirals into a much larger conspiracy that includes an attempt on a mayoral candidate’s life and racially motivated mouse-on-mouse violence as bigger mice oppress the smaller shrews. Same as it ever was, even in Mouseburg, and the requisite twists and turns you’d expect from any good detective story make this tale solid enough.

What bothers me, however, is how overly-referential so much of it is. This is a world of mice, so everything is about cheese. Everything. A bad guy? He’s a cheeselegger. Run into a lady mouse with a sultry voice? It’ll be described as “gorgonzola piccante slapped on a mozzarella platter.” Someone need to assure you they’re telling the truth? They’ll swear on Maw-Maw’s cottage curds. This is charming initially. Then it never stops. Everything is a reference to the fact that everyone is a mouse and mice like cheese – and when it’s not, instead it’ll be a reference to an old cartoon, or the fact that this is a video game. I should have probably guessed the former when one of the first things I saw was a steamboat named Willie, but at least that and the spinach power-up that gives you Popeye arms is cute. Recalling the Igor/Eye-gor joke from Young Frankenstein? Not so much.

And it doesn’t end there. Run into a series of robot boss fights? Jack will say that he hopes they don’t "rule of three" this thing, which, of course, is exactly what happens. If you’re looking for the Cheeselegging Foreman, Jack will quip that he doesn’t look like much of a boss… more like a mini-boss, and then laugh at his own joke. The voice actors, led by Troy Baker, do an admirable job with what they have, but nothing in Mouseburg is allowed to just be. It has to be a mouse reference or a (literally) cheesy one-liner or a reference to something else. It’s hard to care about anything in Mouse: PI For Hire because it never stops making jokes about everything. It just wants to remind you of other, better things. Surely that’s enough, right?

At least the shooting is better. This is the latest in a wave of “boomer shooters” inspired by old school FPSes like Doom or Quake, and it’s a decent one at that. You start with a pistol and Jack’s fists, but you’ll soon acquire a shotgun, dynamite, a James Gun (which is just a Tommy gun), and more unique stuff like the Devarnisher, which shoots what looks like Elmer’s glue that melts the flesh from your enemies’ bones, leaving only a skeleton. Throw in stuff like a double jump, dash, spinning tail for hovering, and a slide, and Jack’s got some stylish moves when the bad guys show up. This ain’t Quake, but it does feel good. It doesn’t hurt that all of it, from reload animations to random conversations, is rendered in an absolutely gorgeous black and white mix of spritework and 3D models. The worldbuilding may be thin, but Mouse: P.I. for Hire is still dressed to the nines.

Even here, though, I have issues. Weapons can feel weak, especially the shotgun – it’s got the audio kick of a popgun, and there’s a strange disconnect to seeing something that sounds like a kid’s toy blow off some poor mouse’s head as you paint the white of the world with the black ichor that spews out of his neck. Enemies mostly come out of doors marked with a skull that you can’t enter, robbing those areas of anything remotely resembling a sense of place. Levels also really like to pull the “we’re going to lock you in a room and throw baddies at you until they’re dead or you are” schtick a little too much for my taste. None of this is ever gamebreaking, mind; the combat is fundamentally good enough to carry you to the end of the roughly 12-hour campaign, but sometimes it feels like being at a show that’s never quite bad enough to leave. And at least on the normal difficulty, health items are so generous there’s rarely a challenge.

Like any good boomer shooter, there are plenty of secrets to find – newspapers, cash, weapon upgrade schematics, baseball cards, and so on – fragile walls to blow up, and even locked safes to open with your tail, which pulls double duty as a lockpick. Some of those locks are on a time limit or must be solved in a limited number moves, and you only get one shot at the good stuff they hold; others are so easy you could probably solve them by letting an actual mouse run across your keyboard. It’s very jarring.

Once you’re done with a level, it’s back to the hub, which encompasses Jack’s office, the local bar, store, weapon upgrade shop, and so on. My favorite thing here is the baseball card minigame you can play at the bar. You’ll switch between pitching and being at bat, using the cards in your hand (players and abilities) to try and score as many runs as you can. It’s fun! What I like less is the whole “being a detective” thing, mostly because I never got to actually do it. Any clues you find will be pinned to Jack’s caseboard, and once you get them there, Jack will just intuit where to go. No work on your part required. What’s the point of being a gumshoe if all the answers are handed right to me?

That brings me to one of my major problems with Mouse: P.I. for Hire. Look, I hate to be the guy who brings up “ludonarrative dissonance” in a video game review in The Year of Our Lord 2026, and if you’re rolling your eyes right now, I can’t blame you. But it’s an actual issue here. Jack Pepper is a P.I. who kills more people in a single mission than Phillip Marlowe has in every book Raymond Chandler ever wrote combined. I don’t care how corrupt the cops are: a private detective can’t break into a police station and slaughter them en masse and then go about his day. In one particularly nonsensical scenario, Jack inadvertently burns down an opera house to save a guy running for mayor, and he ends up fighting… an opera singer? And shoots her? Is she dead? Did I just kill an actress for being angry I burned down her workplace? If I didn’t, have I left her alive and unconscious inside a burning building? Mouse: P.I. for Hire doesn’t tell me, and doesn’t seem to care either way.

None of this is to say that noir cannot or should not be violent, but that violence usually has a purpose. Much of Elliot Chaze’s seminal novel Black Wings Has My Angel is about robbing an armored car, but the book builds to that – it’s a big deal when it finally happens, and the characters have to reckon with the fallout once it does. Jack Pepper, on the other hand, is a walking catastrophe and nobody in Mouseburg seems to care. He largely gets to go about his business and is portrayed as a down-on-his-luck everyman P.I., like the characters who inspired him, when he is, at best, a mass murderer. Does that make for a more fun video game? Maybe. But it’s bad noir, and a worse detective tale. In the stories Mouse: P.I. for Hire references, violence is an unfortunate but unavoidable part of the human experience that shatters the people it touches. Here, it’s just entertainment, and that weakens the whole concept.

“But Will,” you might say, “this is a goofy, Looney Tunes FPS. Why should I care about any of that?” And the answer is because Mouse wants you to. It wants you to believe that this is important. You spend a lot of time talking about these characters, about putting together the clues you need to get to the bottom of what’s going on, and about Jack’s motivation for doing the work (he allegedly needs the money, which both leads to him taking cases and doesn’t track when I’m super rich from all the killing). All of that makes a lot less sense after you’ve gone to Tinsel Bros. Studios and single-handedly eradicated the mob hanging out there, all while doing a bunch of Tomb Raider/Indiana Jones/Conan the Barbarian impressions as everyone says you should be an actor. Give this guy a week on the job as chief of police and Mouseburg would be the safest city in the world because nobody would be left alive to commit crimes in the first place. It’s hard to buy into Jack as the regular guy who needs to gather evidence I’m told he is when he’s just wiped out the local police department, you know?

You ever had one of those days when Blackbeard boards your ship, shoots you and 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 around 30 hours in, I'm having a rousing little time with it.

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. Scrounging up bananas and coconuts, I got to work on my first shelter, and the building system is pretty flexible – though everything looks very Robinson Crusoe-chic early on.

Chopping down trees and gathering plant fiber is a familiar affair. Once I worked my way up to mining, though, things slowed down a little. Ores like copper and iron can generally only be found in instanced caves, and a lot of those are mostly empty. No enemies, no treasure – just rocks to hit. That can get a little bit monotonous. But overall, Windrose has been fairly respectful of my time in terms of the amount of resources it expects me to collect to progress. So some tasks may be tedious, but I'm not forced to spend ages doing them.

Where things get fun and interesting are at the combat-focused points of interest around the map, which so far have been fairly straightforward: up to four chests full of valuable and rare items guarded by wildlife, enemy pirates, or sometimes the creepy undead. Yeah, Blackbeard is up to some kind of necromancy, by the way. I'm not sure exactly how yet. But we'll get to the bottom of it.

The devs describe the combat 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. Ground combat may be my favorite part of Windrose so far.

In comparison, the ship battles are currently unremarkable. I've only acquired the first vessel, the scrappy ketch, but it all feels a little bit arcadey for my tastes. I love the wave modeling, and the way big swells can make even the largest vessels look small. But there's currently no mechanic for wind direction. Steering can be kind of awkward since the UI doesn't tell you how far you've turned the rudder. And while firing cannons is heavily skill-based with detailed trajectory modeling, it's just not as satisfying as fighting with a sword and a boomstick yet. Of course, damaged ships can be boarded for extra loot, combining the best of both systems.

The map is absolutely gigantic, too, which is great. Even since getting my first proper ship and exploring for another 20 hours, I don't think I've even seen fully 5% of it. I haven't even been to the main hub or Tortuga. Islands are divided into biomes of increasing difficulty – again, much like Valheim – and I've made it to the boss of the first area. But he is an absolute monster with the gear I have right now, so I decided to explore to earn better gear and more stat points before taking him on again.

There is a limited system of point-to-point fast travel, which I'm a little bit conflicted about, as I would rather just sail from place to place. I think fast travel can be a bit self-defeating in these kinds of games since it makes the world feel smaller. There are already some server settings that allow for a more immersive experience, like turning off map markers for points of interest. And of course, I can simply not click the fast travel button, but that's something I'd maybe like to be able to turn off entirely in the future.

The biomes look really slick, too. They've gone for a kind of stylized realism that hits a sweet spot between ultra fidelity and more of a sylized feel that is overall really effective. As someone who has lived by the ocean, I have small gripes here and there. Waves near the shore seem to spawn a fixed distance from the shoreline and arrive on the sand all at the same time no matter where you're standing which is… not how waves work. But it's Early Access still.

So far, Windrose has made a strong first impression. Especially with its skill-focused pistol-and-blade ground combat and dastardly difficult bosses, I'm hooked by its exploration and progression. I'll be updating this review as I discover new things, with a final verdict to come once I've seen all this Early Access release has to offer.

I mean this in the best way possible: Pragmata feels like a game straight from the Xbox 360 era. It's the kind of third-person action-shooter that hangs its hat on a specific gimmick, but then plays everything else fairly straightforward. By executing on the important parts really well, Pragmata is able to let its punchy shooting, creative hacking mechanic, and tough fights do the heavy lifting. The storytelling around that stuff isn't exactly its strong suit, even with how much it emphasizes its budding father-daughter dynamic, and I'm a little disappointed it didn't do more with what was initially an interesting space drama setup. But Pragmata is focused on the action first, and that part is so compelling and so satisfying that I didn't even think twice about 100%-ing it.

Something I appreciate about Pragmata is that it doesn't really waste time getting you in the flow once it starts. A brief intro gives you just enough to understand Hugh, the main protagonist, before a rogue AI turns the Moon's space station and endless supply of robots against his crew, leaving him as the lone survivor. There's a brief conversation about how the crew's company resorts to 3D printing at an unfathomably massive scale to fabricate most of what exists on the Moon, and how it's easier for it to just reprint infrastructure than actually maintain it properly. It's an effective opener that establishes a sensible premise for the rest of the roughly 12-hour campaign, although the overall story doesn't really explore this with much depth. It's more concerned with the truth about a humanoid robot girl named Diana, who quickly becomes Hugh's partner in crime – she takes care of the hacking while he takes care of the shooting, and this is where Pragmata shines.

Hacking happens in real-time whenever you aim down sights, asking you to solve a grid-based pathing puzzle by drawing a route from one point to another using the face buttons on a controller. Successful hacks expose enemy weak spots and make them susceptible to real damage. This is Pragmata's marquee feature, and there's no avoiding it since enemies are basically impenetrable otherwise. My biggest concerns in the early hours were if this mechanic would get tiresome and if it could evolve in interesting ways as you progress – thankfully, those concerns were quickly put to rest, as it proves to be one of the best ideas I've seen in a shooter in a good long while.

The more "Open" blue spaces you include in your route, the longer enemies stay vulnerable. The yellow "Nodes" you have equipped will pop up on the grid at random, which tack on additional status effects like spreading hacks to nearby robots, increasing damage potency, or turning robots against each other. Tougher enemies and bosses have more complex grids with obstacles that can block or sabotage your hack as well. So not only do you need to keep an eye on the battlefield to dodge imposing foes and keep them in your field of view, you also need eyes on the hack to solve it as quickly as possible. Juggling the two broke my brain at times, and as frustrating as it might get when more enemies are thrown at you, finding a smarter approach and making the most of the weapons available to me made the hardest fights conquerable and intrinsically rewarding.

The shooting just feels good, too – between the shotgun and charge rifle, landing a direct shot on a robot's weak spot has a satisfying weight and feedback to it. The grenade launcher clears crowds with authority and the stasis net can buy you much needed time to execute a hack, hit a clutch shot, or just reposition. And once I unlocked the automatic rifle to replace the pea-shooter pistol, I took every opportunity to let the chopper sing, so long as I could control the wild recoil from its beefy shots. It's sometimes an annoyance to deal with the "heat" buildup on the pistol and rifle, but I found continually swapping weapons between cooldown periods to be an effective way to get more out of the great gunplay. These weapons are categorized in your loadout, so you can't just take everything with you, and while there are numerous other options with varying functions, I dug my heels in with a weaponset that was both effective and fun as hell to work with.

The heavy weapons have limited ammo, however, so there is a degree of scavenging for guns that you'll have to do in the middle of a fight, which also leads to neat moments of adapting to the situation. But more often than not, I wanted to get that sweet finisher on enemies – certain weapons and hacking with specific nodes drives up a stagger meter, and if you can fill it, you're rewarded with an execution that comes with a quick camera cut and a nice, big damage number.

Some of the ways Pragmata harkens back to old-school design principles also comes from its level design. They're fairly linear with plenty of rewards, resources for upgrades, and bits of storytelling in datapads and holograms to find off the beaten path, often asking you to search the environment for hidden paths to those goodies. (And it's pretty sick seeing Diana rip a data vape to expand her ultimate meter.) Oftentimes, tight corridors lead to open spaces for combat arenas in a predictable rhythm that largely works, though it does get somewhat repetitive toward the end of the campaign. And as impressive as Pragmata can look at times, I did get pretty worn out by how frequently you're fighting within the confines of sterile space station walls. Even still, I was happy to retread levels to pick up all the collectibles when I unlocked the ability to access certain areas for the love of the game (and to max out the levels on my favorite abilities and gear).

Pragmata doesn't really push above and beyond the cadence it establishes in its early hours, but at least I knew I had intense combat encounters waiting for me at a brisk pace. And, of course, the boss fights that cap off each level are definite highlights. Hugh and Diana are dwarfed by these monstrous robots and their unique attack patterns, as well as how they can manipulate the hacking grid, throw tough challenges at you while bringing a bit of spectacle to it all. I also appreciate specific moments that use the hacking system outside its typical fashion, in the same way you might see a QTE punctuate a big fight or keep you engaged during a cutscene. It highlights Diana's place not just in the story, but also in how she's just as integral to the gameplay itself as Hugh.

Between main missions, it’s nice that you get a ton of simulation missions you can play back at the hideout hub area, sometimes challenging you in unexpected ways by showcasing offensive techniques or enemy quirks you can then take advantage of in real-level situations. However, some of the more granular mishaps in how Pragmata controls can rear their ugly head here. For example, Hugh's momentum is pretty unpredictable, so when these missions ask you to do some basic platforming, the inconsistencies in movement tend to be infuriating. Thankfully, these aren't prohibitively difficult, and rarely do the main levels require you to do things like this.

All that said, Pragmata is one of the few games I felt compelled to clear 100% – all the simulation missions, all collectibles in every level, and all the post-game content. While it took me roughly 12 hours to roll credits, doing all the extras took it to a worthwhile 15-16 hours. As of this review, I can't show or detail what's in the post-game, but just know that it's worth seeking out – not just to get more out of the fantastic gameplay, but to also see what kind of curveballs lie ahead, if you can figure out how to find them all. And when it comes to boss fights, Pragmata certainly saves its best for last.

While Pragmata is mainly concerned with making sure you have fun while out in the thick of the action, it still shoots its shot with a story that tries to pull at your heartstrings and weave in broader sci-fi drama. It starts with some really smart ideas of what a theoretical spacefaring future might look like, extrapolating the technology we have today and taking it to an unhealthy extreme. The very existence of a fabricated Earth-like place opens up fascinating possibilities, but much of that gets sidelined for a more predictable story. Rogue AI gone mad: check. A robot girl who's learning about humanity: check. One man who can save the day with laser guns and the will to fight: also check.

You'll find well-written data logs and some voiced holograms that flesh out employee drama and exactly what went wrong on the Moon before Hugh's crew arrived. I especially liked the series of entries hidden behind camouflaged walls that tells you about an employee who played hooky during work hours. And then there are ones that undermine what the story actually wants to say – some of the most important information about Diana and her existence, which should have been told in the main dialogue, are relegated to data pads. It's absolutely head-scratching how flippant Pragmata is about these details.

Ultimately, it wants you to care about Hugh and Diana, and the found father-daughter relationship that eventually motivates them. At times, I found it charming in a way that made me really root for the duo. When you find REMs in levels – fabrications of real-world objects like toys, crafts, and electronics – and bring them back to the hub area, Diana has a curiosity about them that's heartwarming, especially when she brings Hugh drawings after you get her crayons. Moments in which he explains to her what life on Earth is like which helps put her place in the world into perspective, too.

Hugh's not a particularly interesting character, though – not just because he's pretty generic, but also because his attachment to Diana isn't really grounded in enough that's tangible or developed on screen. It just kind of happens without taking enough time to foster a believable bond that aligns with his goals, so some of their dynamic feels forced. It's disappointing because this duo is such a good spin on the companion campaign idea when it comes to the actual gameplay, with Diana being crucial to why Pragmata plays so well. Maybe the story just isn’t meant to be anything deeper than the popcorn-flick it is, and maybe that's all it needed to be when I so thoroughly enjoyed the action side of things.

The Seven Deadly Sins universe is something of a monster, providing fans with buckets of content spanning manga collections, TV series, spin-offs, games and films. Sure, it’s not One Piece or Bleach, but it’s still a substantial mountain to climb if you want to truly understand what’s going on. Adding to the lore's existing complexity is Netmarble’s gacha consolidation, The Seven Deadly Sins: Origin, a time-bending mystery that plays with fan expectations, delivering an original story to unpick one quest at a time. Origin seems like a compelling character-action game at first, backed up by vibrant, series-appropriate visuals. Alas, like many of the lower-tier attempts at this saturated genre, its repetitive gameplay and resource-riddled submenus provide far too much friction as you get into the meat of the dreaded gacha midgame.

Set in a version of the Kingdom of Britannia, The Seven Deadly Sins: Origin centres on Prince Tristan of Liones and Tioreh, the children of key figures from the original show and manga. One day, the duo uncover a dangerous cavern that, in addition to serving as a handy tutorial area, causes the world around them to shift. With extratemporal events popping up all over the place and a strange, nefarious infection sending chills through the world, your job is to tie up as many loose ends as you can to get the realm back on track, a process replete with the usual perspective puzzles and combat encounters. Regardless, as a fan of the anime who has since lost their spark for the series, this clever twist on the lore reminded me of what I loved about The Seven Deadly Sins to begin with: Its loveable range of characters pulling off stylish moves, framed by beautiful fantasy backdrops – though Origin’s nostalgic charm offensive is only effective at maintaining this mirage for so long.

As you crest your first hill in the glorious land of Britannia and feast your eyes on the cel-shaded world ahead, it’s easy to get distracted. Questions like: "Is that a treasure chest behind that rock?” and “What do you think is hiding in that giant bird's nest in the sky?” flood the mind and elicit a kind of excitement only an open-world landscape can provide. It’s a pity, then, that these questions slowly give way to mechanical answers that require sustained investment and optimisation to enjoy. Despite the visual smokescreen, you soon realise how cold the world feels to actually explore.

This is in part due to a lack of technical polish that plagues Origin’s loot-covered terrain. Rabbits shimmy in unison like professional backing dancers, and textures are blurry up close, particularly when you press up against them in search of dodgy objective markers and inventory-bolstering goodies. Moment-to-moment character animations aren’t convincing either — Prince Tristan’s climbing stance is dubious at best, a far cry from the body contortions Link pulls off in Breath of the Wild.

Further issues with camera positioning forced me to restart the game multiple times, which only added to the overall sense of irritation. While none of these problems are dealbreakers in isolation, they do stack up to put a damper on the adventure, the creaking edges of the game creating disconnection from the overarching story, which is genuinely interesting. It felt like the only way I could feel a sense of achievement was through clearing objectives as fast as I could, and following the golden path whenever it was presented, lest I summon some kind of game-breaking issue. Standout locations like the castle grounds of The Kingdom of Lionel and the pastoral glades that surround it help mitigate this sense of frustration somewhat by providing carefully recreated spaces to wander through. Ultimately, though, I found myself hungry for a more considered, holistic gacha experience like Genshin Impact

Thankfully, you unlock movement abilities early on in The Seven Deadly Sins: Origin, which helps to distract you from your disappointment. I was pleased to see open-world essentials like the ability to climb and swim, as well as a Da Vinci-esque wooden glider I could deploy to whizz through the sky. There is one more addition to your movement toolbelt, too, and that’s a pig-steed that fans of the show will recognise as the loyal garbage-eating scamp, Hawk. Alongside allowing you to speed down roads and across dragon-bone graveyards, the chunky swine’s brand of adorable humour helps to pave your path through the game with light banter as you uncover more of its mysteries.

With the only barrier being a surprisingly generous stamina bar, Origin’s traversal skills allow you to cheese your way across Britannia as soon as you’re cut loose from the tutorial. Don’t get me wrong, there are some particularly egregious progression-shaped roadblocks that require you to complete certain missions and acquire items to progress into new areas, but at the very least, I was glad that Netmarble provided these skills up front, so I could experiment even so.

As you stretch your legs, you’ll uncover glowing Warp Points that reveal the map’s busy topology and allow you to jump between central locations as you please. Initially, these additional goalposts prompted me to get creative, sneaking past fiends or flying across peaks to reveal more of the world. (Shoutout to all the Breath of the Wild sickos out there who opted to unlock every Sheikah Tower before doing the main story…) Still, once you’ve pushed through the limited pool of self-inflicted challenges, Origin seems more concerned with keeping you playing by rewarding you with repetitive busywork rather than providing any kind of meaningful progression. Inevitably, as a result, I found myself losing interest in Prince Tristan’s plight, fueled only by the serotonin boost that comes from seeing the ‘mission complete’ banner when wrapping up another dull task.

Seven Deadly Sins: Origin’s saving grace is its familiar, tried-and-tested combat system, which meets the bar set in the genre. On top of a jump, dash, and dodge, each character has a normal attack, a special attack, and a skill attack, with the latter two dealing more damage but requiring you to wait for them to cool down before triggering them again. On top of that, each hero also wields a unique ultimate move whose heightened damage arrives courtesy of well-animated character-dependent sequences – I’m still not sick of seeing Prince Tristan brandish his sword with volcanic intent. It’s a bright, flashy game in motion, yet remains approachable thanks to a simple control scheme.

Unfortunately, the enemies don’t hold up their end of the depth bargain. They aren't nearly as reactive as you may hope, operating more like sentinels than living, breathing bad guys. Say you’re strolling down a hill and get spotted by a sentient shrub. They’ll do nothing but chase you within their designated zone of operation and wallop away until the screen turns black. I was by no means expecting the intricate back-and-forth of a series like God of War here, but the bar is so low in gacha games that it feels egregious not to try something different. I would have preferred more cohesive fights that took advantage of Origin’s supernatural effects and mechanical additions – something like Monster Hunter’s part-breaking brawls – to really differentiate it from every other character action gacha game out there.

This issue feels particularly flagrant during boss battles, which were rarely complicated enough to make me break a sweat, let alone elicit any kind of heart-pounding emotion. Simply put, you’ll chase and hack away at your target regardless of their imposing stature, navigating a barely perilous arena to unseat their health bar. The enemy designs do much of the heavy lifting here, making reference to the funky creatures you find in the source material, like the towering speckled Albion. Even so, it feels like a huge waste to provide such a gratifying combat system when there’s no reason to actually master it, so long as button-mashing to the next checkpoint gets the job done.

Early on, I faced off against a lumbering beast that smacked the ground like an infant in a tantrum, sending fireballs raining down on me from above. My job was to avoid getting hit by the immolating stones while smacking the baddie's fists until they fell backwards, revealing a glowing orb in their stomach. I’m sure you’re getting Deja Vu while reading this…From here, I needed to scale the monster, Shadow of the Colossus style, and whack the orb on repeat, before it would get up and start losing its temper all over again. The smoking gun was that stamina limitations meant I had to wait patiently before I could climb the beast to smack the orb, leading to idle moments in the middle of the fight that killed the pacing, and my broader sense of enthusiasm towards Origin’s gacha-poisoned architecture.

Many of the game’s most important battles feel highly derivative by default, lacking unique design elements or crafty quandaries to separate them from the established norm. I shouldn’t be sitting there reminiscing about boss battles from Spyro 2: Ripto’s Rage due to a comparatively lethargic encounter in 2026. Is it too much to ask for a gacha game to lean into the context of its IP, or find another way around this tried-and-tested formula that could provide a deeper sense of challenge? I can concede that encounters like those in Origin are deliberately simplistic and designed to be moreish, but is that in service of the player or to direct them towards the storefront with greater efficiency and speed? It doesn’t feel like Netmarble is too interested in finding the fun in this regard, and it’s fairly damning when compared to something like Arknights: Endfield, where the factory-building system provides a refreshing and inspired throughline to follow alongside a more conventional structure.

At first, your team of heroes in Origin consists only of Tristan and Tioreh, though it soon grows to include up to four members thanks to the looming gacha systems that hand you additional characters throughout the odyssey. You’ll earn a currency called Star Memory, which can be forked over to pull randomised gear and new companions. It’s a recognisable loop that, like much of Origin, doesn’t stray from the norm in pricing or style, and despite my own affinity for the genre and a rose-tinted lens on the source material, it still stings to glance at the Shop tab and see so many convoluted systems propagating through the mid to late game, reducing my favourite characters and their journeys into marketing tools.

On the upside, Origin doesn’t require you to spend money to succeed, though notably, it doesn’t provide you with much premium currency through organic gameplay either. Despite spending over 50 hours grinding, I barely earned enough to pull the gacha more than a handful of times, and even then, my pulls were more often than not total duds. That’s the ball game, at the end of the day, but I was at least hoping for some kind of glitzy fanfare to accompany my hard work, or a means to demonstrate how these pulls could enliven my moment-to-moment experience. Instead, all I got was a pop-up menu from the shop prompting me to enter my details so I could roll the dice again.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: very few games have stuck with me as long after completion like the original Life is Strange did way back in 2015. While we’ve had some great spinoffs and an excellent follow up to that original story with 2024’s Life Is Strange: Double Exposure, it still felt like the series was missing something. Sure, the point-and-click adventure gameplay has definitely evolved since Max’s adventure in Blackwell Academy, and Double Exposure took the series to new heights with a more refined writing style and mature approach to some heavy topics, but it always seemed to be missing that one core aspect that made the original resonate so much with so many people over a decade ago.

Thankfully, with the return of series co-protagonist Chloe, Life is Strange: Reunion finally feels like all the necessary pieces are in play to not only deliver another chapter to its ever expanding world, but it also acts as a shining example of how to end a long lasting story like Max and Chloe’s.

The story in Life is Strange: Reunion starts about a year after Double Exposure and swaps between Max and Chloe's perspectives. This version of Chloe is shown to have moved on after what happened in the original game and became a manager for an all girl punk band. She’s become her own woman, and even though she's now in her thirties, Chloe is very much still the same character she was in the original game, just with a new hair color. She's been dealing with strange visions involving Max and eventually decides to figure out what happened.

Max has moved on and grown in her career as a teacher and photographer, and while the ramifications of what happened at the end of the last game are still lingering with multiple timelines merging into one, it seems like for the first time in the entire series, Max is able to move on with her life and has found a place to call home. Naturally, since this is a Life is Strange game, that happiness is abruptly ruined by a fire that not only destroys Caledon University, but also causes Max to witness some pretty brutal deaths of her students and friends. I was pretty surprised at how quickly the game went from 0-60 and within minutes of watching the title card pop up on screen over a picturesque fall day during golden hour, I was watching Max fail to save a building full of people choking to death in a fire. Eventually she uses her powers to blast back three days and the whodunnit-it mystery the series is known for begins, and it never really slows down from there.

Without getting into any more spoilers, the story takes a few twists and turns that I genuinely wasn't expecting and its choices definitely felt more meaningful in Reunion than they did in Double Exposure, True Colors, and even the original episodic game. There were choices I made that completely changed the way I played the ending and the fate of way more characters than I had expected. Because of this, I was eager to go back and play the game multiple times to see everything Reunion had to offer and decide which ending was the “best” for me. And there are plenty of threads to uncover here.

From easily skippable text messages, to Max and Chloe's journal entries, and a handful of very well executed podcasts to listen to. Reunion does an excellent job at building its world and telling a compelling story without having too much additional bloat and exposition. Sure, there are quite a few conversations with NPCs that probably didn't add anything to the world other than a little bit of flavor, and there were a few times in the game where I wished there was a skip dialogue option, but when compared to other Life is Strange games, it's pretty obvious that Reunion’s story is significantly more focused this time around in the best way possible.

Death anxiety plays a massive role in Reunion's story. By this point both main characters have dealt with the deaths of each other and tons of people around them. Max has both witnessed and participated in Chloe's death multiple times by now, and Chloe has had to deal with knowing that she's died a few times and has visions of Max killing her. The stakes are pretty high in Reunion because, unlike past entries dealing with themes such as loneliness, depression, and generally growing up. Life is Strange: Reunion gives Max the ultimate “what if” by giving her back the most important person in her life, just to have her taken away again, and again. The plot really hits its highest points when we see what happens to Safi, Chloe, and the rest of Caledon University whenever Max rewinds time and tries to fix the future.

That’s not to say that its storytelling was perfect. There were a few instances where I felt like there could have been a few more optional people to talk to and things to interact with to help make Caledon and its surrounding areas feel a little more lifelike. Around the start of the third act, it really felt like Chloe and Max didn't get enough time to talk about their lives and how strange it is for Max to see the love of her life come back from the dead (a death I chose for her back in 2015) or how Max and Chloe's relationship deteriorated not long after they left Arcadia Bay at the end of the first game. While they do have a few instances of catching up and talking to each other about past traumas and how they ended up back together, Reunion could have used a little more time with the two of them talking over how traumatic someone coming back from the dead would be.

The gameplay in Life is Strange: Reunion is about what you would expect from a point-and-click whodunnit game, but still adds a few new twists that make this final outing for Max and Chloe interesting. Max has her usual time reversal powers that need to be used to solve some pretty interesting puzzles, like a sequence where you need to cut the power to a handful of explosives in a very short amount of time. Admittedly, I died a few times while trying to figure out the optimal path from bomb to bomb and there are a few instances where the combination of the game's score and characters expressing their anxiety made for some surprisingly tense moments. Something past Life is Strange games never managed to pull off.

Conversations involving Max typically ended with me hitting the rewind button and trying to get a better answer out of someone, while most of the time this was required to progress in the story, there were a few instances where I was subtly given the choice to rewind time and not tell a character something and leave them completely clueless. This open ended dynamic with Life is Strange's core choose your own adventure mechanics was an interesting addition to the gameplay and made the story feel even more like my own custom tailored experience.

Chloe’s gameplay, on the other hand, involved a new talk back mechanic where I would need to make the correct answers in order to “win” an argument with someone. These weren't as easy as seemed and there were a few times I messed up a confrontation and lost the argument. Unlike playing as Max, I didn't have the luxury of rewinding time to fix my mistakes and had to live with my choices. By adding this additional gameplay dynamic to Life is Strange it made Max’s powers more dynamic and special and made playing as Chloe more fun because I couldn't just rewind time and get the answer I wanted.

While Chloe and Max’s gameplay was fun and exactly what I was expecting in Reunion, I was a little disappointed that there weren't any sort of mini games outside of being able to use Max’s camera in a very limited fashion. For a series about a world class photographer living in one of the most lush and picturesque environments I've seen in a video game, it's always irked me that there is no sort of photo mode other than using Max’s camera to take photos that can't be saved anywhere in the game unless it's of a specific collectible object. Past titles had some sort of mini game included and Reunion just doesn't.

Which leads me to my biggest issue with Life is Strange: Reunion. The game was a great experience overall and exactly where I wanted to see the story go after the end of Double Exposure, but throughout my time with it, I felt like it was a little short. Now don't get me wrong, these days it's nice to play a game that doesn't require 100+ hours of my time, and it's refreshing to get a story that's as concise and tight as Reunions. But there was a point when I was getting to the end where I was wishing there was just one more environment to explore or one more character to interact with or a flashback sequence or something. Perhaps some of that is knowing that a story I've been following for the last decade was wrapping up and I wanted more, but from a general gameplay standpoint, it felt like Reunion could have used just a little more backstory considering that this is the end of the main plotline in the series.

Life is Strange: Reunion’s presentation is exactly what you would expect from the series at this point. Its cinematography is an excellent emulation of an A24-like film, the music is once again a major highlight with both its excellent score and appropriate needle drops, and the environments look great, even more so when playing on PC with the visuals cranked up to “hella high.” It's definitely something that will hold up over the years thanks to its cartoony but also realistic looking art direction and outstanding facial capture and performances from its cast.

The original Super Meat Boy was built all around speed and precision; regularly demanding players make unbelievable jumps at high velocity, land on a box the size of Meat Boy himself, jump again while maintaining momentum, all while avoiding saw blades, insta-death salt waterfalls, and all forms of other hazards along the way. That’s hard enough to do in 2D, so the idea of requiring that level of precision while also contending with a Z-Axis made the thought of a 3D Super Meat Boy seem like an unsolvable puzzle.

I’ll say straight up that even though the attempt is respectable, Super Meat Boy 3D does not completely solve this problem. Far too many of my deaths came from frustratingly jumping straight towards a wall or platform, only to find out that I was actually slightly behind or slightly in front of it, causing poor Meat Boy to jump towards nothing and turn into super meat paste. Fortunately, levels are so short and respawns are so quick that deaths are just a slight inconvenience, and much of that frustration is forgivable when you consider how well developers Sluggerfly and Team Meat have managed to preserve the spirit and unique feel of Meat Boy, resulting in an uneven, but nevertheless entertaining follow-up to an all-time classic.

If you’re unfamiliar with the 2010 Xbox Live Arcade original, Super Meat Boy was a 2D platformer about a cube of meat, chasing after an evil fetus in a suit and top hat, trying to save his girlfriend, who happens to be a cube of bandages. Levels were lightning quick, often lasting no more than 30-45 seconds, enabling the level design to focus on extremely difficult and hyper-precise platforming that you were expected to die over and over again to.

The easiest way to describe Super Meat Boy 3D then, is to simply point at the title. This is the same Super Meat Boy, but as a 3D precision platformer instead of a 2D one. The story of Meat Boy chasing Dr. Fetus is the same, there are once again five worlds, each world is capped off with a boss battle that mostly just requires you to dodge three phases of increasingly difficult hazards, there are Dark World versions of every level unlocked by getting A+ ranks on the Light World versions, and unlockable guest characters from a variety of other indie games gained by finding hidden bandages within a level.

It’s a formula that works to great effect once again, providing players of different skill levels with a layered set of goals with satisfying rewards that all serve to expand what would otherwise be a relatively short run time. The base goal of beating all of the light world levels took me about 4 hours, then I spent another four hours getting A+ ranks on all of those levels to unlock the Dark World levels, and now I’m in the middle of a Dark World playthrough, and after that I could look towards finding all of the bandages and unlocking all of the characters, which is a daunting task since not only do you have to find the hidden bandage in a level, but you also have to clear it without dying with the bandage in tow. So while the base game is fairly short, getting everything Super Meat Boy 3D has to offer will take quite a bit of time, and the completionist route has some tantalizing rewards in the form of more levels and characters that each approach levels in a different way.

The Dreaded Z-Axis

On the gameplay side of things, Super Meat Boy 3D does a great job of translating the feel and movement of Meat Boy into the third dimension. He’s super fast, stops on a dime, can either leap 50 yards ahead with a full press and hold of the jump button, or do the shortest of short hops with just a light tap of it, conveniently giving him just enough height to jump over a saw blade. The level design, especially in the harder stages demands a lot from the player, and fortunately the controls are tight enough to enable you to meet those demands.

That said, there’s certainly a learning curve when it comes to controlling Meat Boy in 3D. By default, Meat Boy’s movement snaps in 45 degree increments, even when using the control stick, meaning he basically can only run in 8 directions. For some levels, this is helpful because it prevents you from drifting to a side when all you need to do is or jump in a straight line. That slight amount of drift could be all that it takes to make you unaligned with an upcoming platform or wall. But on the other side of that, being restricted to only 8 directions can make movement feel imprecise and sticky. It’s a learning curve that I eventually overcame, but it never feels perfect, which is a word I would use to describe the controls and feel of the original game.

Sluggerfly and Team Meat smartly added a new air dash ability to Meat Boy’s limited repertoire of techniques that allows him to instantly halt his momentum and dash in a direction, which is great because it’s much harder to judge distance in 3D than it is in 2D, and having the ability to instantly correct yourself if you overshot a jump, or quickly latch on to a wall after leaping around a corner is a godsend. Not to mention it makes for great high risk movement tech since you can do a short hop into an airdash for a quick boost of speed that’s faster than just straight up running, which is especially fun when trying to find ways to shave off an extra second or two of your fastest times while going for A+ ranks.

The level design does a good job of introducing new hazards and types of platforming challenges at a steady pace to keep the game fresh. You’ll go from straight forward obstacle courses where you just need to hop on a bunch of platforms while avoiding all varieties of sawblades, to vertically oriented levels that have you sliding down walls and making leaps of faith through openings in the ground, to speed focused levels where you have to move fast to avoid getting exploded by missile turrets, etc. Every level has a distinct feel, and even while they might use the same traps or hazards, they always twist them in a certain way that makes them feel new.

Despite that though, the actual quality of levels in Super Meat Boy 3D is pretty inconsistent, and the bad ones are usually bad because of perspective issues. There is a little red ring that always appears underneath your character to let you know where they actually are, relative to the ground, but the ground isn’t always at eye level, and when you’re making giant leaps over large gaps in an attempt to wall cling to platform that’s off center, trying to find the right angle to approach from can feel like a guessing game that usually ends up in death. Dying is all part of the process in SMB3D, with each death teaching you a lesson about timing, or a trap that came out too fast for you to react to on the first go around, or how hard you should be pressing the jump button, etc. But deaths to perspective or camera issues don’t teach anything. They’re just empty lessons that do nothing but build frustration.

Darwin's Paradox! really taps into the joy and simplicity of a fun cartoon for its quirky alien invasion adventure. With a simple setup of an octopus clumsily trying to survive on land, it gives way to some wacky, slapstick platforming encounters that totally capture the fun, charming vibe of a Saturday morning cartoon. Developer ZDT Studio offers up a plucky puzzle-platformer that carries a lot of energy, but it often struggles to maintain those good times when it gets hung up on overly long, clunky encounters that drag down this otherwise fun jaunt.

Set in a stylized cartoon world that feels in step with Pixar's Finding Nemo, Darwin's Paradox! follows a clever and oddly lucky octopus who is thrust into increasingly zany encounters. After a mysterious, otherworldly presence encroaches upon their underwater home, Darwin and their octopus friend are whisked away to the surface and separated. But it's not enough that Darwin has to figure out how to survive on the surface – it's also a post-alien-invasion Earth, with creatures and machines settled in and planning further domination.

The setting and cartoonish tone of Darwin's Paradox! is a really fun and energetic take on a puzzle-platformer – and it's one of my favorite things about it. With no dialogue for any of its key characters, the story shows a growing escalation of bizarre encounters that Darwin finds themselves in. Along with navigating my way through a seemingly infinite warehouse filled with UFO-branded boxes, I also had to carefully sneak around an alien-occupied shipping dock to avoid the gaze of nearby enemies, which featured some cheeky references to publisher Konami's classics like Frogger and a more front-facing nod to Metal Gear Solid.

The characterization and storytelling are very light throughout its modest five-hour runtime. Still, Darwin's Paradox! and its take on a fish-out-of-water story plays well to the strengths of the lovable character, whose expressive emotions help make their journey feel more lively as the odds get ever hairier. Unfortunately, the modest scope can feel stretched at times, making some environments a bit lacking in personality and a few sections feel overlong. The ending is unsatisfying after a rousing final act, which felt more like a tease of a hopeful sequel than a proper conclusion.

Darwin's Paradox! is similar to the Little Nightmares series in its gameplay, focusing on careful platforming, stealthy movement, and problem-solving with environmental obstacles. It largely sticks to very familiar kinds of encounters and puzzles where you'll have to pull levers and hit buttons to proceed, but where Darwin's Paradox! differs is the slapstick comedy energy that it brings.

It trades the scares and high tension of Little Nightmares for the stylized, comical whimsy of Looney Tunes. This opens up some encounters where you'll use Darwin's abilities to sneak past or even fling yourself up to higher levels to proceed. Some of my favorite moments are when Darwin has to sneak past the invaders while they're doing martial arts training, or when taking on a disguise to try and blend in with enemies. Darwin's journey goes between both the surface and underwater worlds, which opens up a variety of scenarios that help mix up the pacing.

While that gameplay formula stays mostly lean throughout, with only a few sections introducing some game-changing abilities, I appreciated seeing Darwin's abilities get some decent mileage. Along with a camouflage ability to blend into the environment, Darwin can spit ink to hit distant targets or create clouds of concealment underwater. The ability that gets the most use is Darwin's wall-climbing, which allows them to scale walls and grip onto moving platforms.

The platforming throughout is fun and exciting. I enjoyed seeing the slower-paced, methodical encounters culminate in spectacle-driven ones where chaos erupts, and you'll have to Mr. Magoo your way out of certain situations. That said, the movement and precise platforming required to complete these sections can sometimes be a bit too clingy, leading to moments where I attached myself to objects I didn't intend to, which resulted in some sudden deaths.

There are also sudden difficulty spikes in some stages. Some of the more nuanced encounters end up being overpunishing scenarios that push the patience required for trial-and-error, leaving me feeling like Wile E. Coyote running into a brick wall. While there is a hint system in case you get stuck on a challenge, the clues are mostly vague, such as reminders to use the dash button or learn to mind your surroundings. Some of these challenging moments involve simply finding where to go or which objects to interact with.

In one of the more frustrating areas, I had to sneak past sound-detecting machines while hiding out in underwater brush and avoiding spotlights. Darwin's Paradox! generally doesn't give you too much to juggle in terms of complex encounters, but when it does, it can sometimes feel out of step with what came before. It was disappointing to see just how many imbalanced moments there were, which messed with the flow of what was largely an evenly paced experience otherwise.

Still, I appreciated the mostly chill tone, which gives you time to take in the fantastic details and comedy gags. I especially enjoyed finding hidden paths in each level that led to collectables. These not only add some extra context to the world but also toss in jokes, like a movie poster for an alien Snake Plisken knock-off that was popular with the invaders. These collectables add a bit more flavor to the minimalist narrative, which was appealing. There's also a set of unlockable costumes for Darwin, which includes a Solid Snake-inspired outfit.

From ARC Raiders to Escape From Duckov, extraction shooters seem to be enjoying something of a renaissance right now, to the delight of FPS fans like myself. But of all the newcomers to that space, none have captured my attention more than Marathon since I first played its early alpha over a year ago. Even through some of Bungie’s recent lows, the notion of taking the high-stakes looting deathmatch that is an extraction shooter and combining it with the unparalleled shooting for which the studio is known has always been an awesome idea. Now, having sweated it out for over 65 hours in Marathon’s most unforgiving maps and game modes, that rad concept turned out exactly as well as I was hoping it would, with absolutely stellar gunplay, a shocking amount of compelling lore to dive into, and a loot grind so hard to step away from that I’ve had trouble finding time to finalize my thoughts in between runs. There’s still plenty of room for tweaking – whether it’s balancing some of the playable Runners, adding a map or two, and especially cleaning up the war crime that is the UI – but this is already my favorite extraction shooter, and I have no doubt I’ll be playing it for some time to come.

I’ve always had a difficult time describing exactly what makes a Bungie gun feel so damn good but, whatever it is, Marathon’s got it. Maybe it’s the deliberate musicality to weapons, like that crisp snap from a rifle report, the metallic clink of a trigger, or those amazing hollow thuds when you land a shot. Maybe it’s the way recoil feels rhythmic, with pulse rifles kicking like a heartbeat and handcannons bucking theatrically. Maybe it’s the way the world reacts to your shots, with shields crackling and splintering and enemy NPCs staggering in place as you riddle them full of holes. Maybe it’s invisible qualities, like the almost perfectly tuned bullet magnetism and finessed projectile speeds, all working together to make you feel slightly better than you actually are. An old Bungie dev once told me that the secret to building a great shooter is in making four seconds of gameplay that feel perfect, then repeating those four seconds as many times as you can. I don’t know if this remains a guiding philosophy of the current team but, in any case, they really seem to have nailed just that.

With Bungie’s world-class gunplay making the migration to Marathon, it’s not surprising that some of the same flaws I associate with the studio have also made their way over, the chief of which is bad geometry. From getting caught on parts of the environment that feel like they shouldn’t impede me to the fairly hit-or-miss mantling, I find myself once again screaming during especially tense moments when my character can’t seem to climb up a ledge for the third time in a row, while my teammates suffer through an ambush without me. Movement in general can feel a little frustrating early on, like how you take severe fall damage from fairly moderate heights and constantly have to keep your eye on the “heat” gauge (effectively a stamina meter) or risk overheating and becoming a sluggish blob for a time. This becomes less of an issue once you’ve snagged a few perks from the upgrade tree, but I can also already imagine how bad it’ll feel to go back to not having them every time progress resets at the end of each season. In some ways, these limitations serve as interesting obstacles for you to work around, forcing you to approach vertical environments (especially during fights) with extreme caution, or making you think about how much running you’re doing – both to prevent overheating and also to remain undetected by enemy squads. But they can also be a bit irritating, especially when combined with awkward terrain that can frustrate otherwise smooth looting and gunplay.

As someone who adores PvP, one massively refreshing aspect of Marathon to date is how far it deviates from the group hug energy of ARC Raiders’ PvE-friendly community. Don’t get me wrong, cooperating with other players can be a good time, but one of the major drawbacks is that you don’t get to see the PvP shine when it happens so rarely. In a game like Marathon, with Bungie’s legendary FPS chops on full display, I’d be pretty disappointed if PvP encounters were as uncommon as they’ve become in ARC Raiders, because those gunfights are without question the best part of any match. And by God is Marathon an absolutely disgusting pit of vengeful players mercilessly shooting and stabbing everyone on sight – these are my people. The pressure of two teams squaring off in claustrophobic, dark hallways, as you try to outmaneuver one another makes for some of the most tense encounters I’ve ever had, and the loot reward you get for winning those firefights is worth the stress (after all, the best way to loot is to let someone else do it for you and then take it from their cold, dead hands).

The mark of a great extraction shooter is that “one more run” feeling, and a big part of that lies in how fun the long-term loot game and progression is. That relies on both the badass weapons and gadgets you’ll find, as well as the quest items you’re asked to collect if you want to unlock an upgrade or complete a mission you’ve been given. After dozens of hours, I’m still completely glued to my screen. I’m poring over dense menus and trees to figure out which map I’ll need to play to complete this quest or loot that item, then going into battle with a specific set of objectives in mind – only for it to all go to hell when I run into a rival gang and the shrapnel starts flying. Finding a prestige-tier weapon or piece of equipment that completely changes how you play, like a backpack that generates ammo from thin air whenever you score a kill, makes all the pain of defeat you’ll inevitably suffer worth the heartache. But even when you lose it all, you might at least clear a quest or manage to gather a few materials needed to buy an upgrade that makes you just a little less likely to get your ass handed to you in the future. Unlocking a perk that decreases how much heat you generate from running around, or reduces the fall damage you take, can be a pretty big game changer in the long run – so I almost always felt like I was moving the needle forward in some way.

If there’s one thing holding this awesome progression climb back, it’s the fact that onboarding is quite tough, as very little is explained to you. I certainly benefitted from having played loads of extraction shooters before, as well as the crash courses Bungie gave me during previous preview sessions – but even with all that, there are still lots of moments where you just have to puzzle through some of the more complex systems. With a whole bunch of confusing mod slots to fill and upgrade menus that demand quite a bit of your time to fully understand, it takes quite a few hours of playing to get the hang of some pretty basic stuff. Worst of all are the extremely poorly explained mission objectives while out in the world that are sometimes represented by a single floating icon. This is by no means at the same level of obtuseness as something like Escape From Tarkov, and some of this friction seems like it’s just part of the extraction shooter DNA, but I could definitely see some folks bouncing off Marathon because of stuff like this, and that’s not ideal.

There’s also an impressive amount of diversity in the small handful of maps currently available. Perimeter, the starting map, is a spread out series of structures that isn’t the most interesting map and has a lot of empty space, but is perfectly tuned for newer squads as they rotate from each of the miniature hubs and start to dip their toes into the kill-or-be-killed nature of Tau Ceti IV. Dire Marsh is a massive, sprawling swamp that’s a sniper’s dream, and ups the ante both in terms of the loot to be claimed and the caliber of the players it draws. Outpost is perhaps the best extraction shooter map ever made, with tons of loot and secrets crammed into its tiny, highly vertical design. It corrals players into near constant conflict as they race to acquire keycards and break into the vault-like facility where all the best goodies are kept. Extracting from each of these maps requires you to significantly level up your skills and understanding of Marathon’s challenging gameplay and mechanics, providing yet another ladder to climb as part of its already stellar progression systems. That said, I can’t help but feel a bit disappointed at having only four maps to explore at launch, even though those four are pretty great across the board. Here’s hoping Bungie can stick the landing with the live-service model by providing a steady stream of new places to battle it out over time.

Marathon makes use of the hero shooter model, with different character classes that have pre-loaded abilities that compliment one another and appeal to different kinds of players. However, this is one area in which this shooter falls a bit short. Sure, you can turn invisible or hide yourself in clouds of smoke as the slippery Assassin, or heal and revive others as the support character Triage, but these archetypes are mostly generic shapes of characters that we’ve seen a bunch already– and are done a bit better in plenty of other games. They’re certainly not bad, and I’ve actually had a great time giving each a try to figure out which I jive with the most. But compared even to Bungie’s own Destiny, where each class has an extremely unique identity and a suite of interesting skills, Marathon just feels a little underwhelming in this regard. It’s also only been a couple weeks since Marathon came out and I already feel like certain Runners lag behind their peers, like how weak Recon’s ability to ping enemy locations is relative to Destroyer’s defensive shields and devastating shoulder-mounted rockets.

After the server slam a few weeks back, one of my main complaints was that the UI and menus were an incoherent mess that I still felt like I was wrestling with after 20 hours. Now, having gotten quite far into the weeds with the final product, that frustration has only deepened with understanding. While certainly as stylish as just about everything in Marathon, the menus are a painful jumble of squares and rectangles that feel like they were designed with vagueness in mind. For example, it’s baffling to me that mods are represented by identical, nondescript icons, so you have to physically hover your cursor over them to even understand what they are. Managing your inventory, which quickly becomes a convoluted jumble of hard-to-identify items, can be quite frustrating for this reason – especially when you’re in the heat of combat and need to make a swap of some kind, but first have to figure out which absurdly generic item is the one you’re looking for. There are other small things, like how the controls handle swapping held items for ones you find, or moving things like mods from your weapon to your backpack that are just way more cumbersome than they need to be. This is the area I think needs to most immediately improve – it’s quite messy as of now.

While bad UI isn’t the most surprising issue in an extraction shooter – where that’s practically the industry standard – one area in which Marathon unexpectedly excels is through its lore and drip-fed story. After almost every mission I’ve had factions to meet or chat with, a few quick lines of dialogue thrown my way, or some lore unlock for me to read. I’ve found myself really interested in learning more about this creepy world and its bizarre inhabitants, like the bioscience AI Nona, who talks to you as a weird silk worm and asks you to unlock the hidden potential of your Runner shells. Once you reach level 25 and start getting pulled into the Cryo Archives and the endgame content, these loose threads and hints at the mysteries of this unsettling universe start to feel like they’re coming together. I won’t spoil the particulars, but longtime fans of the Marathon universe should be pretty pleased with what’s in store, and I’m really curious as to where they’ll go next.

Speaking of the endgame, I’ve spent a fair amount of time now diving into Marathon’s most harrowing mode yet, the Cryo Archive, and am happy to report that it’s one of the most intense and badass things Bungie has created in a long while. The special map requires that you bring some of your best loot into battle (a minimum ante of 5,000 credits worth of gear), and transports you to the first floor of the UESC Marathon ship from the original game. What starts out as a straightforward process of taking down beefed up NPC enemies and unlocking higher levels of security clearance to access other wings of the ship devolves into absolute mayhem when you inevitably encounter enemy players armed to the teeth and fighting for their lives. With the best loot currently available up for grabs, and a fairly high barrier of entry just to get into the map, this place is guaranteed to be packed almost exclusively with tryhards leaning all the way forward in their Secret Lab chairs with your demise occupying their every thought. Not only are you expected to outplay them all while surviving a constant stream of robot foes, but you’ll have to learn one of the most labyrinthine maps I’ve ever seen and figure out various puzzles to open up vaults or even extract out of the level. You’ll also need to contend with the possibility of eventually reaching the final boss in the center of it all, while also keeping your eye on the timer that ticks down from 30 minutes and will kill you if you don’t find a way out in that time. My runs in Cryo have been filled with devastating losses and overwhelming victories that made me feel like an absolute badass (and rewarded me for my sweatiness accordingly), and it’s been incredibly hard to step away from these past two weekends.

There’s also a ranked playlist that requires you to bring in a certain level of valuable gear (similar to Cryo Archive), and pits you against some of the most skilled players Marathon has to offer as you try to acquire a certain threshold of loot before successfully extracting. It’s an awesome addition, since it turns every map into the same cesspool of no-lifers that you find in Cryo, and offers some unique cosmetics and other incentives for risking it all in the name of glory. I’m not nearly good enough to seriously compete in this mode just yet, but could absolutely see myself practicing and grinding my gear to the level where I could compete here. The prospect of that climb lends a near limitless level of replayability for an aspiring cold-blooded killer like myself.

I should also mention just how good Marathon looks and performs, as even playing on my regular, ol’ Xbox Series X I almost never encountered connection problems, dropped frames, or technical issues. Really the only issue I’ve encountered were two or three crashes that happened while I was in the middle of a match, but I was able to load these matches back up and rejoin the action anyway. Not only are the frames rock solid, but environments are stylish as hell, with spooky and offputting loading screens that show weird metaphors for transhumanism and immortality – and gorgeous levels that have an odd, artificial feel to them. I will say that after playing more than a dozen hours in a single day I left feeling like I was losing my mind from prolonged exposure to that incredibly unsettling aesthetic, but hey, maybe that’s how I should feel about my life.

When I was in 7th grade, I thought Mega Man Star Force’s themes about friendship and brotherhood were profound. Its villains were cartoonishly evil, spouting lines like, “who needs friendship when you have power?” I ate all of that up! Playing through the Mega Man Star Force Legacy Collection almost 20 years later, I now couldn’t help but wince at the cringy dialogue. That’s not a shock given this Nintendo DS series was tailormade for kids like me back then, but it was still fun to get a chance to reexamine these games on a deeper level two decades on. And when taken as a whole, Mega Man Star Force Legacy Collection has a still-poignant story arc about gaining confidence through camaraderie packed alongside exciting card battling, newly restored content, and welcome quality-of-life improvements.

This collection contains the entire Star Force trilogy, consisting of seven games when you tally up all their different versions. While purists can play them as simple remasters, they’ve also been updated with helpful features that can be toggled to enhance the overall experience, like toning down incoming enemy damage or making Mega Man’s Buster power stronger. There’s even a rearranged soundtrack, redrawn card art, and a gallery filled with concept art and scrapped ideas to celebrate its history. Online functionality like PvP and card trading are supported too. Much of the feedback from 2023’s Mega Man Battle Network Legacy Collection is incorporated here, making Star Force Legacy Collection even more of a robust package.

All of the Star Force games follow the adventures of a young boy named Geo Stelar, who becomes reclusive and anti-social after his father disappears in space. That is, until an alien named Omega-Xis (Mega) convinces Geo to merge with him to fight off other aliens that are coming after him in exchange for information about his father. Thus Mega Man is born. The first Star Force uses this setup to tell a touching tale about how Geo comes out of his shell and learns to make friends thanks to Mega’s headstrong personality.

The main cast is strong throughout, in part because each of them is going through their own personal issues. Class president Luna’s commanding personality comes from her strict parents, while the idol Sonia deals with the pressures of the music industry. The other aliens hunting Mega down prey on these negative feelings and merge with them to create monsters, which Mega Man then has to defeat – all while Geo learns that he’s not alone. That “monster of the week” structure works well in the first Star Force because it gives more characters an opportunity to grow alongside Geo. It’s an, ahem, stellar introduction.

The monsters themselves also standout. The Mega Man series often borrows bosses from its different incarnations, but Star Force’s bosses are based on constellations like Taurus, Cancer, and Gemini, resulting in something much more original. This gives Star Force its own identity that differentiates it nicely from other Mega Man series like Battle Network.

Unfortunately, Star Force 2’s story takes a bit of a tumble as it tries to mimic the same structure as the first entry. It’s about an evil scientist who wants to bring back an ancient civilization, but this time the alien bosses merge with forgettable side characters instead of the main cast. As a result, there’s not nearly as much emotional investment, and the main villains don’t live up to their full potential either. Mega Man’s rival, aptly named Solo, is his antithesis and rejects all bonds and friendships. He’s the most compelling of the new villains, but his backstory isn’t fleshed out enough, which is unfortunately a running theme in Star Force 2.

Star Force 3’s story, however, is a terrific rebound. While its bosses are still mostly side characters, the main villains surrounding them are much more interesting. The bond between orphans Tia and Jack evolves throughout the story, giving them proper redemption arcs by the time it ends. Additionally, the “latest advancements in technology” finally make Mega visible to Geo’s friends, allowing for fun interactions that weren’t in the previous entries. Although Star Force 3 likes to beat its themes over your head with a hammer, the main concept centers around “purpose.” Basically, friends who work together towards a common goal can achieve anything, like stopping a giant meteor from crashing into Earth. Sure, it’s corny, but it’s a fitting cap to a trilogy that’s all about the power of friendship.

Each game also has expansive post-game content, adding more lore whenever you’re finished playing the main story. Star Force 3 has the most impressive of them all, bringing back characters from the previous games and fleshing them out even more. And that includes offering harder enemies to fight and optional super bosses.

Playing Cards

Mega Man Star Force’s combat is a blend of mostly real-time action with some light turn-based card battling. When Mega Man’s Custom Gauge is full, the fight pauses and brings up a screen with randomly assorted Battle Cards that can hit enemies, bolster his moves, or guard against enemy attacks. After confirming which cards to use, Mega Man moves in real-time as he positions himself to either strike or dodge incoming assaults. It’s not dissimilar to today’s roguelike card battlers such as Slay the Spire 2 or Monster Train 2, but with a twist that makes it fun and exciting in its own way.

Since Star Force takes place approximately 200 years after the end of the Mega Man Battle Network series, their combat systems are similar. But Star Force separates itself from its progenitor by having Mega Man only able to move left and right, with his back facing you instead of having you look down at a grid. That makes the series feels very familiar if you’ve played Battle Network, but this simple change is surprisingly refreshing.

In battle, Mega Man can only pick cards that are identical or in the same column on the selection screen. This encourages you to strategize and prioritize certain cards in order to create combos. Depending on your performance in battle, enemies can drop currency or even new Battle Cards to customize your deck, called a Folder here. There are certain rules you have to follow, such as having a maximum of 30 cards per Folder, with up to five Mega-class cards and one Giga-class card. The deckbuilding elements in Star Force are engrossing as there’s so many different possible combinations to choose from.

If you hit an opponent right as they’re about to unleash their own attack, you’ll perform a counterattack and draw an extra card from your Folder, so you’re incentivized to play thoughtfully and not just spam attacks. And if you’re in one of Mega Man’s transformed states, you’ll even have the chance to execute a Big Bang instead, which are ultimate attacks that inflict massive damage. Counterattacks are satisfying, and seeing the Big Bang rip enemies to shreds is the cherry on top.

Where Star Force and Star Force 2 are mechanically similar, Star Force 3 takes the extra step to add some more combat features. Here, Battle Cards can sometimes land behind others on the selection screen and can’t be picked normally. Instead, they have an alternative effect, like how electric elemental cards will add paralysis to another card regardless of whether they’re in the same column. It’s an interesting yet polarizing wrinkle that allows you to switch your tactics on the fly if your current selection isn’t showing much promise.

Alternatively, you can choose to use that background card for its normal effect, with the drawback being that it’s the only card you can use for that turn. You can always just choose to use a different card too and the background card will eventually come to the foreground, letting you select it normally for its primary effect. That alleviates the randomness of the mechanic if a card you really needed ends up being behind others first.

Pick and Choose

Each game in the Star Force trilogy has multiple versions, just like how the mainline Pokemon series approaches it. Depending on the version you pick, Mega Man gets different transformations and types of Giga-class cards. In the first Star Force, the version differences aren’t too drastic. You have your choice between Pegasus, Leo, and Dragon, each with an exclusive boss fight and unique Big Bang attack. Although these transformations are mostly aesthetic changes, they still shake up battles a bit while providing a solid foundation for the subsequent Star Force games to iterate on.

Thankfully, if you go online and add people to your in-game friend list with a different version than you, you get access to that version’s transformation. That means you won’t need to play all three versions just to see everything for yourself. Unfortunately, the Legacy Collection doesn’t support crossplay, so you can’t battle against or trade cards with players on other platforms. It’s a huge missed opportunity, and kind of ironic given Star Force’s themes about forming connections between people.

In Star Force 2, there are also three different transformations for Mega Man: The lightning sword-wielding Zerker, the wood Ninja, and the flaming dinosaur-head Saurian, all of which are a step up. You can combine two of them to gain the benefits of each, making the transformations much more interactive and engaging compared to the first game. You can also combine all three to become the powerful Tribe King, which has all of the glorious powers of each, but only lasts for three turns. It’s hard to pull off, but incredibly gratifying when you do. Plus, its tremendous Big Bang attack can completely turn the tables during boss battles, making the effort worth it.

Star Force 3 is the most similar to traditional Battle Network games, yet simultaneously the most innovative, making it the best of the trilogy. It introduces “Noise,” where Mega Man can mutate into different forms based on enemies from previous games, giving him unique abilities. It’s reminiscent of the Style system from Battle Network 2 and 3 in that these forms are permanent but can be switched whenever a new one is unlocked. And like Star Force 2, you can also combine two of them. There are 10 different Noise forms between both versions, resulting in a staggering 100 possible combinations. It was fun to experiment and see which one fit my playstyle the most.

There's also a Noise percentage gauge that builds up during battle by using strong cards to overkill enemies. The bigger the card’s attack power and the opponent’s HP, the higher the Noise level rises. Noise also gradually drops over time, so Mega Man has to remain on the offensive, as well as avoid incoming attacks. Playing well and ending battles with that gauge over 100% grants you certain rewards like Illegal Battle Cards. They’re much more powerful variants of their normal counterparts, and are well worth getting to strengthen your Folder’s firepower.

Upon reaching 200%, Mega Man can transform into his Finalized Noise form, either the hulking Red Joker or the speedy Black Ace (depending on your version) similar to Mega Man Battle Network 6’s Gregar and Falzar transformations. Like the Tribe King, he’s granted immeasurable power. I was only ever able to achieve this transformation during boss fights, which hammers the point home that it’s Mega Man’s trump card. As always, the Finalized Noise form’s Big Bang attack is utterly devastating and feels rewarding to execute, especially considering its narrow three-turn limit. Plus, it looks absolutely badass.

Retrofitting for the Future

As a remastered collection of Nintendo DS games, things that were originally displayed on the bottom touch screen of the handheld have now been relegated to a smaller screen off to the side, and you can swap between these two screens freely. It’s an elegant solution that works most of the time. There are a few awkward instances where certain minigames require completely different screen formatting, and touch controls have been replaced with cursors. However, these changes don’t have a negative impact in the grand scheme of things and the transition between different screens is handled smoothly.

Some very helpful quality of life features have been added as well, such as a much needed auto-save. It’s a feature that we take for granted in 2026. In the original DS games, if Mega Man got deleted in battle, you’d have to start from your last manual save – so if you forgot to save for a long period of time, well… you’re out of luck! There’s also a slider for random enemy encounters, solving Star Force 2’s atrociously high rate that contributed to the original’s sluggish pacing and obnoxious backtracking.

Mega Man’s running speed on the field can also be increased, which further alleviates backpedalling, and you can adjust different difficulty parameters such as increasing the amount of money earned after battle, fully restoring HP after battle, and guaranteeing escape from battle. This helps make the series more approachable than ever. Cut content from the original English versions has been restored in this collection, too. That includes the Boktai crossover event in Star Force, Wave Command Cards in Star Force 2, and Noise Cards in Star Force 3. Even if you’ve already played the originals, these reinstated features are more than enough to draw you back in, giving Mega Man even more ways to customize his Folders and abilities.

On top of all of these additions, bonus Battle Cards throughout all three entries that were only available through special in-person events or real-life toys and peripherals can now simply be downloaded into your Folder from the get-go. Many of these are hilariously overpowered, especially if you redeem them at the beginning of a playthrough, but their inclusion is a fitting bow that ties the entire collection together.

The War Within was the start of a whole new era for World of Warcraft, and at this point is probably my favorite expansion ever, so Midnight had big shoes to fill. Or maybe I should say a long shadow cast over it? It seems like Xal'atath still refuses to wear shoes. But when you factor in the flexible player housing system, stunning new zones, and an endgame that refines some of its predecessor's best ideas, the second chapter of this trilogy is shaping up to be heroic.

Midnight would be hard to beat in terms of sheer visual spectacle by WoW's standards. Riding into the reimagined elven capital of Silvermoon is one of those moments I'm not going to forget for a long time. Its gleaming ivory spires towered above me as an excellent new musical theme that references multiple previous ones filled me with awe. The level of detail is maybe the highest we've ever seen for an in-game city in WoW ever, with evocative interiors that interconnect in unexpected ways and invite exploration. My framerate has been less than stellar during peak times, though.

Expanding legacy areas like Murder Row into extensive subzones with a lot going on helps the city come alive. It's no secret that I'm a big "Thalassaboo," having been a fan of the elves of Quel'Thalas since Warcraft 2. And even the smaller, optional adventures in Silvermoon excellently immerse you in the decadence, pridefulness, and political maneuvering that characterize the city. As an Alliance player, I was also impressed with how much of it we get to explore – only about a quarter of it is off-limits to us.

Beyond the shining capital, Eversong Woods has also been reimagined gorgeously. It was already one of my favorite zones in the entire history of WoW, and to see it get such a glow-up, finally healed from the scars of Arthas' invasion all those years ago, is fantastic. I was delightfully surprised with the forest troll homeland of Zul'Aman as well, contrasting the storybook elven kingdom with a rugged, piney wilderness that I loved to get lost in. It says a lot about how enjoyable these areas are to exist in that even now, I prefer to cross them on foot or on a ground mount rather than in the air.

The remaining two zones are much more high concept and otherworldly, but just as visually exciting. Harandar, a tangled plane of primal elements overlooked by the empty cradle of a goddess, reminds me of Hallowfall in terms of its fantastical flair. And the Voidstorm where Xal'atath is marshalling her forces is bleak and uninviting, but uses strong primary colors to avoid the problems of Patch 11.2's K'aresh zone, which often felt like way too much grey.

The story isn't as evenly distributed as the art, though. We did finally get some more context on The story isn't as evenly distributed as the art. We did finally get some more context on Xal'atath's motivations, and the just-released Voidspire raid does end with some exciting plot beats that have me eager to see what's next. But Turalyon feels a bit like he's been reinvented as a completely different character with new flaws just so he can have an arc, and that's kind of lame. Arator's Journey, which was billed as a sort of epic quest that would take you across all of Azeroth, took me less than two hours to complete, which felt underwhelming. It did have some neat moments for us Warcraft 2 fans, though.

Once again, the side quest writing, at its best, proves decidedly superior to the main plot. All the family drama we get with Alleria, Arator, and Turalyon is outshone by one little story about two estranged troll siblings coming back together to deal with the complicated matter of mourning their abusive mother. This has been the case for four expansions now. Are these the same writers? If not, why not let some of these sidelined scribes write the main story for a whole expansion? It would be amazing to see this level of emotional nuance paired with high-quality CGI cutscenes featuring some big name heroes.

I'm also not totally in love with the new Haranir allied race. Their customizations are fantastic and they look cool as hell. But I'm not a huge fan of Blizzard's tendency to make up new kinds of humanoids all the time rather than making long-requested, existing favorites like the Amani playable. I think the Nightborne should have just been night elves with different clothes… this is a running pain point for me. I'd like to see a moratorium on completely new, previously undiscovered humanoids for a while.

I've played through both sides of this story with three characters so far, including the new Devourer Demon Hunter. And I have to say I'm not completely sold on it yet. I like the other Demon Hunter specs quite a bit, but the flavor of Devourer is a bit more caster-coded than the melee monsters Demon Hunters have always been in the lore. Baseline abilities like Consume don't feel kinetic enough to me, at least in terms of the animation. The theming is cool. It just isn't a fun button to press, especially without the talent that reduces the cooldown. I wish Reap, which I do really like, was our main filler. I think I'll probably go back to Annihilator long-term.

For my siblings of the Marksmanship Hunter discipline, we're still in a pretty good spot. It really took some getting used to losing Streamline, but with the apex talent that makes Aimed Shot a guaranteed crit, I overall like the change to make it a huge nuke that requires a lot of set-up. It fits the class fantasy and it feels great, especially during Trueshot. I don't really like the changes to Sentinel hero talents, though. Moonlight Chakram is underwhelming and Lunar Storm has just become a random proc that goes off without much player input. It feels kind of like an extra trinket at this point. There's no real tactical thinking involved.

I've also leveled to 90 as a Retribution paladin, and this spec really isn't doing it for me anymore. It has great area effect damage, but single-target feels super underwhelming and there's too much flash for my taste. I have Consecration, I'm shooting fire out of my sword, I have bells rotating around me. It just feels like a light-themed wacky gadget class. It makes me think of the "Random Bullshit Go!" meme. I just want to be a cool holy warrior who hits things with a giant hammer, you know?

Whatever spec I'm playing, the returning and new endgame activities have been satisfying since the start of the season, though. Delves are showing a definite evolution over their introduction in The War Within, with a particularly memorable one casting you as a wrestling heel to perform in a fighting pit for a crowd of rowdy mushroom people. Tier 11 delves in particular stand out in that they contain very few hard gear checks, and I felt I could navigate their one-shot mechanics using skill alone, which is fantastic.

Den of Nalorakk in Zul'Aman is the most interesting five-player dungeon, featuring an open area in which you have to race greedy predators for dwindling food supplies and can make up your own route to do so. It builds up to a gauntlet of howling winds that requires the party to take shelter in small safe zones as you fight your way forward, and an icy boss fight with a slippery floor that you can mitigate by getting them to basically throw snowballs at you that give you something crunchier to stand on. The boss design in dungeons and raids has definitely shifted based on the removal of a lot of add-on functionality, and I think we're better off for it so far.

Prey, a new feature that positions you as both hunter and hunted against increasingly deadly enemies in the outdoor world, is definitely interesting. I like the idea of making the main zones feel dangerous again. But like delves last expansion, this does feel like a first swing at the idea, and it could use some tweaking. The new zone-specific activities are an improvement over The War Within, too – particularly the tower defense Stormarion Assault. Saltheril's Soiree forcing you to pick favorites between Silvermoon's factions is an interesting twist. I'm not a big fan of Abundance, though, even if Dun Dun is a real one. It's one of Midnight's only features that ended up being a total miss for me.

Coffer Key Shards for Bountiful Delves are now handed out like candy, but there's a strict weekly cap that I was able to hit in under 90 minutes. I think I like that better overall. I'm also a big fan of ditching valorstones, and the fact that upgrading an item to the highest level you've obtained in the same slot previously only costs gold, not crests.

The banner feature for Midnight, though, is definitely player housing. It launched way back in December, and I've put well over 100 hours into it already. The expansion proper is full of awesome elf- and troll-themed decor. The decor editing tools are very powerful when you learn how to use them, and I'm astounded and inspired to see what some people have done with them.

At the same time, housing definitely shows that it's a first try in some places. The hotkeys to switch between editing your house and normal gameplay are kind of clunky and add too many steps to certain tasks. There are some common sense features missing, like being able to copy and paste a decoration or furniture item if I have another one in my storage. And it's neat that dyes can be made by other players, but currently I get frustrated previewing different colors on a piece, then having to make a shopping list and go all the way back to town to visit the auction house and buy the paints I want. I'd like for that process to be more seamless.

There's quite a bit of decor you can obtain from crafting, too. And while the devs talked a lot about simplifying crafting to cave to hundreds of wrong people on reddit who have been constantly expressing their wrong opinions, most of what I loved about Dragonflight and The War Within's detailed crafting system is still here. It's just been sanded down in a couple places I don't notice too much.My one other significant complaint is in the changes to Skyriding. Races seem to be gone from the new zones, which is a bummer. And while Midnight made many positive changes to the UI, it got rid of Skyriding's vigor bar, which is just bizarre to me. This was supposedly to make it less confusing for people who didn't play Dragonflight, but that doesn't really make sense. Why is turning my vigor charges into these tiny numbers at the very bottom of the screen less confusing than having a big, readable, bespoke UI? I don't buy it. I want the old vigor bar back. At least as an option.

Screamer isn’t subtle. Screamer is neon-soaked, maximum volume arcade racing that requires both the finesse of Wipeout and the tactics and aggression of Mario Kart, where dicing for position demands that you think offensively and defensively at all times. Requiring the use of both sticks to fling your car around corners – plus actively shifting the semi-automatic transmission at the perfect time to build crucial boost energy – it’s also a fascinatingly busy racing game. Confidently different, Screamer makes a good case for itself in a genre rarely recognised for a great deal of innovation, despite being let down on occasion by a few dud tracks that slow the pace too much, some unbalanced missions in its central tournament mode, and no clear characters to really care about in its story.

Screamer’s twin-stick racing mechanics see the right stick used to dictate drift angle by swinging out the rear. The pendulum-like effect is a little overly pronounced in a few of the cars – which makes me disinclined to drive those ones – but it remains a pretty approachable system in the majority of vehicles. You have to engage with it; you get mild steering force with the left stick – enough to navigate shallow bends – but if you try to take a sharp corner without using the right stick you’ll simply understeer like a whale on a rollerskate.

Beyond its unconventional steering, Screamer draws inspiration from fighting games with a power-up system driven by two linked meters. In simple terms, one is for boost, and the other is for combat – and you fill the combat meter by using the boost meter. In action, however, there’s a lot of granularity to the system. Each character, for instance, has meters split into different amounts of sections, and each has distinct strengths and weaknesses when it comes to boosts, attacking, and defending. It’s an interesting juggle, even if some of the characters have drawbacks that make them a poor choice for some of the tracks. For instance, one character – who will explode if he clips a wall while in the attacking ‘Strike’ state – is typically a deeply annoying choice for any particularly twisty tracks.

The twisty tracks are by far the weakest, as they take the pace of the racing down too much as you stab the brakes to cater for the constant switchbacks. As quick as Screamer seems at top speed, it’s surprisingly soggy at low speeds.

In contrast, the more open tracks – full of straights and sweeping, constant radius corners – are a hoot. These are definitely Screamer at its full potential – particularly the incredible-looking, neon-lit, rain-soaked urban circuits.

The cars, too, are fantastically designed – and each one looks like they’ve driven straight out of the frame of a ’90s anime. They’re characterised by colourful liveries, wild time attack-style aero, and imaginative flair. I particularly like the pop-up brake lights featured on one of the vehicles. Subtle flourishes like that suggest to me developer Milestone had a lot of fun bringing them to life, and it gives the cars real character.

You Gotta Keep ’Em Animated

Screamer invests heavily into its story mode, which follows five race team trios competing in an ostensibly illegal contest hosted by… a weird man in a mask. The bulk of the characters competing appear to be pop stars, astronauts, and private military contractors rather than actual racing drivers – and the whole thing seems to be managed by a single mechanic (who doesn’t know how shirt buttons work), and his apparently sentient dog (who can drive a car). This all feels a little odd and small-scale considering the prize is an eye-watering 100 billion dollars, but it does sync up with Screamer’s overt anime-inspired aspirations, nonetheless.

The sharply illustrated characters and accomplished cutscenes are very impressive, and the anime sheen Milestone has added here is not an afterthought. You can see the significant investment on the screen as you play, from its sizzling intro to its crisp and colourful cutscenes. It also boasts a lengthy script; seriously, some of these people won’t stop talking. It’s a nice touch having the characters speak in their native languages and yet still understand each other – a phenomenon that’s explained by some kind of universal translator chip. I did, however, miss the meaning of a bunch of early dialogue because I had subtitles turned off. I’d anticipated that, with the game language set to English, that would just turn off the English subtitles, but leave them on for languages other than English. However, that wasn’t the case. They were just off entirely.

Screamer does feel very much like a passionate adaptation of a hypothetical anime series, which is perhaps unsurprising considering the direct involvement of Japanese animation studio Polygon Pictures. The partnership has paid off in this regard, because you really can see it. Unfortunately, in many ways, it feels a lot like an adaptation of season four of that series. The story fills in some of the gaps later, but I otherwise found the opening stanza to be a non-stop salvo of character introductions, and a lot of overly dramatic huffing and puffing about things that happened in the past that we as the audience are completely in the dark on. Characters are either anxious and brooding or twee and extra, and I quickly found it pretty exhausting how much they moan at each other. The story also jumps across all five teams, which made it impossible for me to warm to anyone anyway, really.

Screamer leans into its story immediately – indeed, the first string of events you’ll play are the initial handful of story missions. Only after completing these will you finally be able to back out to the main menu. I’ll concede that funnelling us directly into the tournament has merit, as it does essentially function as an initial tutorial. And this complex brand of racing honestly makes a tutorial crucial. It does, however, temporarily obscure the impressive breadth of the overall package. Screamer boasts a lot of additional ways to play it beyond its curated, story-based tournament mode, but there’s a non-zero chance that some people will bounce off before they see the rest of what it has to offer. It will really depend on your level of patience for mashing through angst-riddled anime characters bickering, flirting, and pointing at each other.

Anime-zing Race

The uneven difficulty of tournament mode may emerge as a source of real grief for some players. On regular difficulty I found myself able to punch through most events in one effort, but there are some that I found noticeably trickier. For instance, one event required me to chase a dog through one of Screamer’s twistiest tracks. All I would have to do is land one successful attack on the dog’s car (yes, it’s driving) and it’d be mission over. However, the dog was annoyingly perfect at negotiating the bends, and was able to consistently maintain a gap no matter how well I drove. Bored of literally spinning my wheels I simply stopped on track briefly, and blasted the dog once he lapped me. Was this method anticipated? Or was it what I was actually supposed to do? Either way, that solution makes this mission feel like a waste of time for all parties involved.

Other events are simply too prescriptive with their objectives to remain enjoyable. One such race will require you to win it, but also take out two ‘Green Reaper’ team members as you do so. But you can't take anyone out while leading, so you’ll need to let them overtake you. However, they may not be in second place, either, so you’ll need to let other people overtake you, too. And you shouldn’t take them out, because you’ll need to save your finite takedown juice for the Green Reapers.

Oh, and also, in this race the Green Reapers team don’t have green icons. The Green Reapers are blue.

It’s a bit of a miss. I don’t mind a challenge, but I’m skeptical of arbitrary ones that don’t make a lot of sense.

The good news is that, as mentioned earlier, Screamer features a welcome stack of other modes if the tournament becomes too tedious. Arcade mode, for instance, features an excellent array of options and modifiers to create exciting custom races of your own. It goes well beyond simply adjusting the amount of laps; you can change the rate at which your power meters fill, force all cars into the explosive ‘Overdrive’ boost state, and even shut down offensive attacks for pure racing.

There are also a variety of challenge modes with global leaderboards, online racing, and even four-player splitscreen. Four-player splitscreen, in 2026. Somebody needs to send Milestone a fruit basket for that alone. It is true that Screamer’s idiosyncratic handling and character-specific power-ups make it a lot less instantly approachable than, say, a typical four-player splitscreen kart racer – but the depth of the game modifiers you can toggle and adjust does give you a lot of scope to ease new players into Screamer’s racing.

Screamer features a strong suite of accessibility features, too, from a variety of colourblindness filters, an offline game speed slider, and even the ability to totally remap the controls for one-handed use. The latter deserves particular praise considering how fundamental using both sticks is to playing as ‘intended.’ It’s admirable that Milestone still baked in a workaround. The one-handed controls apply an auto-throttle, leave the trigger for braking, and fuse steering and drifting to a single stick. It’s actually a really effective solution, and may well be worth experimenting with for inexperienced racing game players finding the drifting tricky.

Crimson Desert feels like it was designed in a lab by someone who wanted to combine elements of all their favorite big budget open-world games into the ultimate video game. It’s got the adventuring of The Witcher 3, the slow horseback conversations of Red Dead Redemption 2, the open-ended puzzle solving of Tears of the Kingdom, and the do-whatever-you-want dynamic world of something like Skyrim or Grand Theft Auto 5. And while it’s genuinely impressive that developer Pearl Abyss even attempts to smash all these things I love into a single package, the result ends up being a jack of all trades but a master of none. The exploration and combat fall far short of the best open-world adventure games, the dialogue, characters, and story are laughably bad, the puzzles are unintuitive and janky, and the reactivity of the world around you is underwhelming. But despite all the frustrations I’ve faced across the 130 hours it took me to complete the main story and do a good chunk of the side content, there were still many moments where I was left stunned by the sheer magnitude of the uneven world that’s been created here.

In its best moments, Crimson Desert has you wandering around arm wrestling, fishing, gambling, completing side quests, and just getting lost in an absolutely gorgeous open world where it feels like anything is possible. One moment I was playing a mini settlement builder, managing resources and sending my allies out to earn loot and resources on my behalf, and the next I was hunting wild animals and grilling them into a pile of meat to prepare for a big battle. But there were an equal number of occasions where I was absolutely dumbfounded by annoying choices, like how combat encounters almost always go on way too long, or how your paltry inventory space constantly fills up and forces you to part with items you’ve worked hard for. (That space was more than doubled during the review period due to an overwhelming amount of feedback and still doesn’t feel great.) Many of these issues get far worse the longer you play, as later on the size of enemy groups goes to ridiculous, Dynasty Warriors-levels, and a complete lack of storage chests to keep your hard-won loot in means you have to get rid of cool, unique gear when collecting fun items feels like a major part of the draw here. That’s right – if you can’t fit it on your person, there’s no way to keep it at all. Pearl Abyss has said it plans to add storage later, but it not being available at launch is a pretty wild miss.

[Update: A storage box has now been added in a post-launch patch!]

The world itself is definitely one of the most impressive aspects of Crimson Desert, as you can see people walking around town and actually living out their days in real time. For example, if you send a caravan of followers to go build something, you can drop by during work hours to see them toiling away before heading back to bunk at night. In another instance, you might see a bounty posted for a known pickpocket, then find them one day practicing their trade in a completely different town, and can then choose to bring them to justice or let it slide. Traveling around the massive regions, hunting for loot, solving puzzles, and liberating areas can make for some seriously good times, especially if you’re like me and try to do things it feels like you aren’t supposed to do, like wandering far off the beaten path before you’ve even explored the starting area. It’s a kind of freedom that only games this absurdly large can pull off, and makes for some really memorable moments.

While the world you’ll explore is full of fun stuff to do, the stories you’ll find in it are consistently bad. From the moment you’re introduced to the first of its three playable characters – Kliff, a viking-coded warrior who is on a low stakes revenge quest against another group of barbarians – there’s very little to become invested in, and it only gets worse from there. The story is aimless, the characters are forgettable across the board, the dialogue is often pretty hard to listen to, and there’s an entire multi-chapter arc in the main questline that’s centered on a character who dies offscreen before the story even begins – they continually try to make you care about this person through multiple funeral scenes separated by hours and hours of game time. It’s odd because, with long sequences of talking to your companions and a lot of time spent watching cutscenes as part of the main story, it does seem like Pearl Abyss wanted people to care about this stuff, but almost none of it is really worth paying attention to and much of it is actively cringe worthy. That said, there are also a lot of cutscenes full of cool, anime-style fights – those are pretty sick.

Crimson Desert’s world is also hindered at almost every turn by jankiness and puzzling design choices. Some of the biggest misses are the boss fights, which abruptly take you out of the fairly casual action game combat that surrounds them and drops you into straight up soulslike fights against multi-phase enemies that feel extremely out of sync with the rest of the adventure. In one of the earliest examples, you carve your way through scores of bandits with ease, before concluding with a super long, three-phase boss fight that includes some segments where you’re just mercilessly swarmed by the bad guy while you have to dash around destroying totems. The only reasonable way to get through it is to have a ton of healing items on hand to eat by the fistful as you whittle down the enemy’s health bar. I love soulslikes and consider myself a tryhard who enjoys mastering perfect parry mechanics, and even with my background I found the vast majority of these boss fights to be unfun, poorly balanced, and downright annoying. It’s kind of wild how out of place they feel, and they are common enough to regularly hurt the pacing. It’s worth noting that Pearl Abyss has already put out a patch that nerfed at least one of these encounters, and I suspect more will follow. I’m not sure patches alone will be able to make these numerous, sluggish fights feel all that good, but it’s at least a start that they seem to be aware of the issue.

Part of the reason I doubt boss fights will be fully salvageable is because combat is pretty uneven in general. A big part of that is in how Crimson Desert simply never knows when to end a fight! Most begin with a dozen or more enemies surrounding you, and then dozens more showing up as you take down the first wave, dragging things out for minutes on end. This is fine when you’re taking on some major quest, but when you’re just trying to cross a bridge and are expected to stop and fight 20 samey guards first, it really eats up your time. Even worse are the war scenarios that arrive in the middle and later stages of the adventure, where you’re asked to do ridiculous things like plant a flag in the ground while surrounded by dozens and dozens of enemies, completely unable to defend yourself while you slowly move a giant banner across the battlefield. It’s especially annoying that, although you can level up your weapons and armor to make all this combat easier, you’re constantly outnumbered by loads of dudes who can take you out with a few lucky shots. As you can imagine, starting an already-too-long fight over again feels especially bad.

Beyond combat, there’s tons of stuff Crimson Desert tries that just doesn’t work at all, from extremely ill-advised stealth sections (which are exactly as bad as you’re imagining) to puzzles that often feel like you’re brute forcing your way through them rather than coming up with a creative solution. In one section, I had to climb to a higher area to solve a puzzle, but couldn’t reach that high due to stamina limitations. After searching for the “correct” way to climb up to the next floor, I ended up just cheesing my way up by finding a ledge that let me take a breather in a way that seemed very much unintentional. When I got to the top and solved the puzzle, it felt like I’d done something wrong, but apparently that’s just what you’re supposed to do to get through that section. In trying so many things, this adventure often feels like it's bitten off more than it can chew, resulting in pockets of gameplay like this that feel very underdeveloped.

As you complete quests, earn loot, and level up abilities, you’ll at least gain access to some pretty neat abilities that change up the way you play. One branch of each playable character’s skill tree is dedicated to flying or gliding around to improve your mobility, while another unlocks new combat tricks, like the ability to bash enemies with your shield or dropkick foes and send them flying about 50 feet. Many of these unlockables are really interesting, like one that lets you grapple yourself across long distances and scale sheer walls in the blink of an eye. The other half of them are things I never really had any interest in buying, like basically all of the archery skills, which didn’t feel good no matter how much I invested in them. There are also a huge number of combat abilities that seem like they’re almost clones of one another, which would require me to memorize a whole new button combination to use them that I’d surely never remember.

Part of this has to do with the control mapping, which is completely insane by default, and requires you to remember various multi-step button combinations to access abilities you have to use all the time. It took me hours to remember that clicking the left thumbstick makes you crouch, holding down the left thumbstick brings out one of your special gadgets you’ll use frequently , and sprinting is, in fact, not on the left thumbstick at all, but instead asks you to tap the A button repeatedly to go faster than a run, which seems crazy to me. (What is this, Grand Theft Auto?) There are a whole bunch of little mapping things like this that took me at least a dozen hours to get used to, and which I still occasionally fumble since so many abilities make use of the same buttons and require multiple inputs in a specific order to do the things you want. One of the more amusing ones comes when you get a dragon mount much later on, but trying to summon it is an absolutely huge pain in the neck every single time – you have to press a button to mount it at just the right time, but it’s super finicky and most of the time you just tumble off the side and go plummeting to the ground. Truly infuriating stuff.

One thing that never stops being incredibly impressive, however, is how good Crimson Desert looks and performs. I played exclusively on my high-end PC (we weren’t sent console codes ahead of launch), so I expect it to look glorious there, but it runs quite nicely across all of the setups our team has tested as well, even lower-end ones. For an open world game of this scale, it’s simply wild how consistently it holds frames and looks beautiful doing it. That said, it tends to be another one of those games that looks better from afar. Environments and the massive number of enemies on screen are stunning to behold, but then you’ll get into a cutscene to talk to someone and their face will be a bit janky, with lip syncing that’s way off. Still, even when its frustrating design choices made me want to rage quit, it was hard to stay mad for long when I got back to running around the massive map and just taking in the wildly good looking views.

But just because its performance and graphics are awesome doesn’t mean Crimson Desert is free from bugs and technical issues, and the ones you sometimes get with open-world games of this size are exactly as bad as I feared here. I ran into all sorts of problems, from hard crashes to companions I was supposed to follow getting stuck in the environment until I reloaded. The worst bug came late in the main story, when a vital quest step didn’t register as I completed it, locking me out of progression entirely unless I reloaded a save file from seven hours earlier. I was able to proceed by copying a coworker’s save file (who was at roughly the same part of the story as me) and soldiering on that way instead – if I hadn’t, I would have likely thrown in the towel right then and there. Getting set back so far by a bug like that is devastating, and I know I wasn’t the only person to hit this one.

To its credit, Pearl Abyss says it has patched out that particular issue already, though it doesn’t seem to be the only one like it. For example, after finally completing the last main story quest (I’ll avoid any spoilers), I went to do an epilogue quest where you stop by to chat with all the friends you made along the way, only for some of them to simply… not be there initially. They did eventually show up a while later, but it meant I didn’t even get the proper send-off I was supposed to after 130 hours of playing (though there’s no “endgame” to speak of after that sequence anyway). Pearl Abyss is doing its best to address issues as they arise, and it’s also done things like add extra fast travel points compared to the review build, so the full version already has a few less frustrations across the board – but in a game this big, it’s hard to imagine it’ll be able to squash all these problems anytime soon.

From its gorgeous landscapes, gripping acting, and historically inspired combat animations, 1348 Ex Voto makes a strong first impression in its opening moments, seeming to promise something bold is about to follow. It doesn’t live up to that promise at all, however, quickly abandoning the interesting bits of its story and leaning most of its gameplay on shallow and shoddy combat and mission structures. Even it’s beauty is compromised by bugs and glitches that make playing through it a burdensome vow to keep.

The story of Aeta, the knight errant we pilot through this blood-soaked Black Plague-era hack-and-slash, and her charge Bianca is a bit of a mess. On the whole, it's pretty straightforward: Bianca is meant to be shipped off to a convent because her low-born parents can’t afford to raise her anymore – but before that happens, their village is sacked, Bianca is kidnapped, and Aeta pursues the bandits to get her back. It’s played like a standard damsel-saving endeavor for most of its brisk five-hour runtime, and the backdrop of the closest thing humans have to a real post-apocalypse makes for a promising setting for such a tried and true tale.

But its attempts to upend this classic trope, specifically through Aeta’s gender, land pretty flat. A woman as the gallant knight is certainly subversive, and she spends the first half of the story being identified by others as a boy and not correcting them. This is an interesting thread that’s left bare early on – and when it is eventually pulled around midway through, it immediately unravels before the concept is dropped completely. Same goes for the mild implications of a queer romance between the two leads. Aeta’s pining can be read as infatuation, but as the story progresses, there's less and less room to call what these two women have a romance. It's far easier to interpret her one-track minded mission to save Bianca as a desperate need to not lose the last person left in her life, as the rest of her high-born family have been killed by the ongoing pestilence. And look, I’m a cis, straight, not-Italian man – I am no expert here. But this feels more disappointingly platonic than anything else, unless you think Samwise Gamgee and Frodo Baggins’ relationship is romantic, in which case you know what? Fair, and I wish your AO3 account many blessings in the future.

It’s all at least very well acted, unsurprising considering the main pair is played by Alby Baldwin and Jennifer English, but even the sparse few minor characters that get more than one speaking line are delivered with gusto. The camera work and shot framing really speaks to how inspired by prestige film Ex Voto is, and while this is no A24 cinematic event, it does a great job filling the blanks in the story with palpable tension and tone. Some animation glitches really mar the affair though, specifically how mouths and eyes twist and bulge unnaturally during moments of heightened emotions. The way the lips curl on a certain sinister flagellant about a third of the way through was uncomfortable to the point of comedy in a scene thick with very not funny drama.

When you aren’t watching the story unfold, you can interact with Ex Voto in two very simple ways: Exploring its linear environments and killing everything that moves in them. Every chapter starts almost exactly the same way, zooming in on some distant point of interest unsubtly calling you towards it and then trudging your way to the finish line. The process through every leg of the journey plays out almost exactly the same way too – quieter sections of walking and climbing broken up by little skirmishes in areas that only exist for bad guys to materialize in them. It’s generations-old game design, but not in the way some contemporary games might use to invoke a sort of “simpler time” energy from the era. Instead, it plays how I imagine the loaves of bread used for healing in Aeta’s pack taste, cold and stale.

Most of the locations look good from mid range or farther, especially outdoor zones like the white rocks of the mountain side or the verdant emerald forests, though blobby textures and jagged edges betray the grandeur of it all while up close. These areas have lots of nooks and crannies where collectables can hide, but there's only one path to your main objectives, and without a map it can be hard to know when you’ve searched a side route or not as some of the poorly landmarked layouts start to blend together. I missed a lot of extra goodies my first playthrough, and during my second I found that quite a few of them were in places I definitely looked previously, but because I maybe didn’t stand close enough or at the right angle near them, no prompt appeared to grab them. This finicky responsiveness was my own personal plague relatively often. On the occasions where I needed to crouch under a log or hop down from a ledge, it would always take me several attempts to push the designated button to actually do the thing.

When it's time for Aeta to wield her blade, the proceedings are usually pretty drab. Mixing one-handed and two-handed attacks, you flail through four-hit combo strings in order to break enemy guard gauges and slice them up when they're vulnerable. Holding the attack button while in either stance charges up heavy attacks, which do more stagger and damage but are telegraphed and easy to avoid. There's no obvious difference between light attacks in either stance besides that some enemies are more keen to parry a specific kind more often, usually at a predictable point in a combo that you’ll be forced to attack around. I found no real benefit from switching between the light attacks in combos against most regular enemies unless forced to, but there can be some benefit to using light attacks to cover for your heavies, making them more likely to hit and break stagger bars down faster.

There's a short recovery time after a combo is finished, and enemies usually use that space to throw a string of their own attacks. These are easily blocked until you run out of your own stagger gauge, and less easily dodged thanks to how weird the timing for attacks can be, as they sometimes vacuum towards you to make up distances that seem unintuitive in action. The window of impact also seems off time from when an enemy looks like it will land a strike, which is frustrating during the sections of Ex Voto with enemies who cannot be blocked. Enemies attack one at a time, most of the time, but can be tempted to pile on if you venture too close to a passive one while actively engaging the main antagonist. Occasionally, they get feisty and try to jump you, but it always felt like the enemy logic confusing itself into becoming a problem rather than an intentional way to spice up difficulty.

This back and forth dance gets sort of rote pretty quickly, and isn’t saved much by the skills you can learn to elongate your combos, add a parry window to your block, or introduce a perfect dodge that slows down time. These upgrades are strong in a bubble, but don’t deepen the shallow combat at all, and don’t present any new ways to engage enemies besides mashing attacks in longer stanzas.

The same goes for trinkets and weapon parts, which can be found hidden in the world. These can have more dramatic effects on combat, like letting you regain health when you perfect dodge, but they just increase the rewards for playing the only way you can. That said, there is at least a little customization required with them, since you can only have a certain amount of trinkets equipped at once. Weapon pieces have passive effects that are noticeable when compounded – you can focus your pommel, grip, guard, and blade loadouts all to make two-handed attacks more powerful, for instance. But most enemy encounters are push overs, and rooting around to collect all of these boons isn't worth the effort when being a more patient masher can do the job just as well.

Project Hail Mary will be released in theaters on March 20.

When Phil Lord and Chris Miller departed Solo: A Star Wars Story mid-production in 2017 due to “creative differences,” it left a lot of people imagining just what a space epic from the directors of 21 Jump Street and The Lego Movie would have felt like, and whether the duo were up to the task of levelling up the scale of their filmmaking to that degree in the first place. In that sense, Project Hail Mary, their first live-action directing effort since 2014’s 22 Jump Street, feels like vindication for Lord and Miller. The pair and star Ryan Gosling prove perfectly suited to each other’s sensibilities, opening the door to an exciting interstellar adventure that, even through some occasional pacing hiccups, remains emotionally engaging throughout thanks to the crackling chemistry between Gosling and the most wonderful little rock person you’ve ever met.

Waking out of a coma in a plastic bag with a feeding tube down your gullet, a ZZ Top hairstyle, amnesia, surrounded by dead crewmates and also, you’re in space… it’s a tough way to start a day. Indeed, Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) gets off to an inauspicious start aboard the Hail Mary as he struggles to remember why he’s there in the first place. Project Hail Mary uses Grace’s amnesia to motivate flashbacks to Earth that explain how and why a middle school teacher gets recruited as humanity’s last hope on a mission to nearby star Tau Ceti to save not just our Sun, but every star in the galaxy from being snuffed out by an extraterrestrial microorganism called Astrophage. For the first hour of the movie or so, these breaks from the Hail Mary go a long way to shaking up Grace’s isolation as he gets his footing aboard the ship, while also introducing us to the project’s steely administrator Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller) and the rest of the ill-fated Hail Mary crew.

Even with the stakes as high as they are, it should come as no surprise with Phil Lord and Chris Miller at the helm that Project Hail Mary is hilarious. Drew Goddard’s script, based on the book by Andy Weir, maintains the affable snark of Weir’s writing well, and Lord and Miller delight in taking the air out of tense moments with a laugh - Grace’s discovery of what looks to be an alien ship may be terrifying for him, but the straight-up cartoonish sight gag that follows really sets Project Hail Mary apart from other similarly-budgeted sci-fi epics.

That tone works so well here thanks in no small part to Lord and Miller’s choice of leading man. Ryan Gosling’s mug may dominate the vast majority of Project Hail Mary’s screentime, but he’s a proven ego-free performer - some say his shrieks from the arm break scene of The Nice Guys ring out over the San Fernando Valley to this day - and Lord and Miller latch onto that sensibility and ride it to the stars. Things don’t always go right for Grace, and Lord and Miller go out of their way in how they shoot and cut Gosling’s performance to embellish Grace’s frustration to consistently funny effect. Gosling is just as strong in Grace’s low moments, whether that’s communicated through silent tears or anguish, like when he moans that he’s “wrong about everything, and everything’s wrong” after discovering the belief he staked his academic career on was completely off-base, or when he has to impart a eulogy to crewmmates he can’t remember based only on details gleaned from their personal effects. Not only does this double as a nice illustration of Grace’s problem-solving instincts but these shades of Grace are given equal weight in Gosling’s performance. They’re near to the surface throughout, so that when things go wrong (or right), all of Grace’s big reactions feel natural and easy to connect to.

Project Hail Mary’s plot may be focused on stopping every star in the galaxy from going out, but it’s also squarely about something that, for Grace, is just as daunting: making friends. Gosling’s Grace is only half of Project Hail Mary’s team of heroes, and he’s matched wonderfully at every turn by the other spacefarer he meets on his way to Tau Ceti: Rocky, voiced and principally performed by lead puppeteer James Ortiz. The Eridean mechanic mirrors Grace in being the surviving member of his own crew as well as the one least-suited to his plight, and likewise in his enthusiasm for creative problem-solving. Ortiz is an acclaimed puppeteer, and channels the magic of that art form into an expressive and dynamic performance that demonstrates the range of emotion puppet performers can evoke through even the most subtle movements.

Lord and Miller’s choice to maintain Ortiz’s voice for Rocky’s computer-translated vocalizations pays off, too, creating even more parity between Ortiz’s on-set work and the final performance. Grace and Rocky’s respect and affection for one another constantly reinforces the benefit of honoring the perspectives and abilities of others different than yourself, and Project Hail Mary is at its most joyous when building out their relationship, first through the trial-and-error early days of their partnership and later through how comfortable they are being blunt and cutting with each other… moreso on Rocky’s part. That little guy’s a hell of a trashmouth for not having a mouth.

The connection theme bears out all across Project Hail Mary, with Lord and Miller establishing it early on in the Earth storyline through Grace’s ability to befriend his surly government handler Carl (Lionel Boyce), leading to a pretty delightful montage of the two going to Home Depot to stock up for a DIY xenobiology experiment. But things are much more complicated between Grace and Stratt, whose inscrutable demeanor and seemingly infinite authority to marshal the world’s resources how she sees fit makes her a good foil to the comparatively hapless Grace. Sandra Hüller embodies the strength of someone capable of shouldering that responsibility and the weight of the resultant hard choices very well, but Project Hail Mary doesn’t invest quite enough in the character to make later moments like her melancholic karaoke performance of Harry Styles’ “Sign of the Times” resonate as clearly or feel as earned as moments where Grace is letting his guard down.

For most of its considerable 156-minute runtime, Project Hail Mary roars ahead, but the third act does suffer from some structural issues which keep it from ending as strong as it could’ve. On its own merits, the final leg of Grace and Rocky’s mission is a thrilling set piece which sees every aspect of the production at its most impressive… but by the time it’s tailed off, there’s still a lot of Project Hail Mary left to go, leaving the rest feeling a little anticlimactic, even if the film does land on its feet in how it pays off Grace and Rocky’s relationship.

These pacing problems are significantly compounded by the flashback structure, which remains consistent throughout Project Hail Mary and really starts to lose its luster by the end. The initial jumps back to Earth feel like they’re giving what’s to follow a thematic bedrock to pay off down the line, once Grace has to decide how to relate to the idea of self-sacrifice, but the late ones feel a little more focused on tying up plot threads which by that point have little relevance to the most critical part of Grace and Rocky’s mission. We do get some of the more interesting work between Gosling and Hüller in their later scenes, but similar to how Project Hail Mary rushes in some characterization for Yao (Ken Leung) and Ilyukniha (Milana Vayntrub), the final pieces of the puzzle falling into place for Grace feel a little less impactful when what’s going on in present day has such huge ramifications.

But even through third act sputters, Project Hail Mary looks incredible, boasting top-notch production design and some truly stunning cinematography from Greig Fraser, who brings the rich sense of texture from his Oscar-winning work in the Dune franchise to bear here with work that consistently elevates Lord and Miller’s film. With the outsized emphasis on light in the story - Astrophage is discovered on a beam of infrared light in space - Fraser finds all kinds of ways to refract and bend it to create incredible depth in the frame, highlighting dazzling spacescapes and engrossing human moments alike. Fraser’s work hits its spectacular apex when Grace and Rocky reach their destination, as both the planet itself and the swarming Astrophage as seen through the Hail Mary’s IR scopes create a majestic sense of beauty and terrible danger right when the movie needs it most.

The fact that Slay the Spire 2's Early Access debut plays so similarly to the groundbreaking original deckbuilding roguelike makes this one of the easiest recommendations I've ever given. If you never played it, you're missing out and should jump into its turn-based combat immediately if the concept is remotely appealing to you; if you've sunk 1,000-plus hours into the original like I have, the sequel's new character classes and extensive reworking of the founding trio make going up against its even tougher bosses feel refreshed and less predictable. On top of that, the novel co-op mode gives us a new way to play and share all the thrilling highs and tragic lows of a great run. It may not be the most ambitious sequel when it comes to reinvention, but this is an excellent reinvigoration of a brilliant game.

After a week of playing, I've now clocked a little over 43 hours of Slay the Spire 2 and have completed full, three-act runs as each of its five classes – but of course the ever-escalating Ascension difficulty modifiers and unlockable cards and relic upgrades mean I've only really scratched the surface of the challenges it offers. The Ironclad, the Silent, and the Defect (my personal favorite) all play similarly to their old incarnations, to the point where most of their established strategies will still work just fine, but now there are more options available that let you take them in different directions. The Silent, for instance, now has cards that include the Sly label; discarding these has the same effect as playing them (much like Monster Train's Offering cards), so you can use that to make a build that goes a lot farther on fewer energy points per turn. That's part of why Slay the Spire 2 seems much less dependent on upgrading your energy limit than the original, where if you didn't end up with a way to do so you were likely to have a bad run.

The new characters, as you'd expect, play completely differently. I'm a fan of the Necrobinder, a glowing skeleton with a giant hand as a sidekick. Its Doom mechanic effectively lets you attack both sides of an enemy’s health bar at once (they’ll die after the rising Doom level passes their falling HP), and your buddy Osty serves as both a second layer of defense that absorbs damage after your armor fails, and an attack that starts small but can be built up to devastating levels. There are also the Soul cards that can be extracted from enemies and then used to draw an all but endless number of cards from your deck to keep raining down attacks. After a few experimental runs I was finding satisfying success with those new tools.

What about the other new class, the Regent, you ask? Well, this starfish-faced royal riding around on a weird living throne with legs became my white whale. It took me nearly 40 tries over more than 15 hours to finally pull off a win thanks to lucking into an extremely powerful combo of cards and relic modifiers. When he clicks, he really clicks: by quickly building up his special Star currency at the start of a fight I was able to unleash some wildly powerful spells that hit as many times as I had Stars to fuel it. That was then boosted by one of the sequel’s new card upgrades that made it do 50% more damage at the cost of inflicting two damage on myself. Add in a few relics that inflicted the Vulnerable status on all enemies in the first turn and gave me Vigor for +8 damage on my first attack, and I ended up annihilating the third and final boss on the second turn – and it only took that long because this particular boss has a multi-stage mechanic that prevents you from killing it in one.

All of my prior attempts, though, ended much less spectacularly. I had limited luck with the Forge mechanic that summons and then builds up a floating sword (it's expensive to cast the attack and the sword has to be re-drawn before you can use it again) and I nearly succeeded on a run that looped an attack that places itself back on top of the draw pile. There are also some risky mechanics around filling your deck with junk debris so that you can then transform them into disposable minion attack or defense cards, or just use a card that does damage based on how many cards you’ve created. So the Regent has plenty of options and mechanics to play around with, I just found them trickier to use effectively than the other characters.

That said, I've seen other people say that he's their new favorite and their best character by far. I think that speaks to the way Slay the Spire 2 is currently balanced: it's tougher than the original, and perhaps a bit too tailored to an elite group of players with a very specific set of skills – the type who'd crawl over broken glass to playtest a sequel to Slay the Spire. But smoothing out that experience for everybody is what Early Access is all about, and it's not as though I wasn't having fun banging my head against that wall until it finally, cathartically crumbled.

It also took me a little while to realize that my playstyle had to change a bit when it came to choosing my path through each act's map. The approach I've used successfully in hundreds of Daily Climb challenges (which of course return in the sequel) is based primarily on going wherever I'd get to take on the most Elite miniboss battles, and then beat the loot out of them. Those extra relics can be the foundation of some incredible builds. However, that hasn’t served me well in the sequel because the risks of tackling these powerful enemies have outweighed the rewards. One of my least favorite to encounter when I'm at less than 100 percent strength can only take 20 damage per turn no matter what, so you're in for a drawn-out fight even if you lead with your big guns. Go up against too many like that in a run and you're in trouble: even if they don't kill you outright, since your health is persistent, the damage you take there could doom you in the next fight. So, I've had to rethink my strategy and pick my battles more carefully – which I must admit, I prefer to what had become an automatic process for me.

Instead, I’ve started to prioritize things like special events, some of which can give you a sort of quest that spans across acts (think a more formal version of the first game’s Red Mask interaction). I've gotten a map in Act 1 that led me to a huge treasure pile in Act 2, and a key in one act that opens a chest in the next. There's also a bird egg that must be hatched at a rest site (so it comes at the opportunity cost of not healing yourself or upgrading a card). Those are represented by unplayable cards until their quest is resolved and the reward handed out, so there's at least a minor consequence to carrying them with you because they take up space in your deck and hand that could've gone to something useful in the moment.

There's another notable change in that instead of just picking a modifier from the weird big whale thing Neow in the beginning of a run, each act begins with a similar choice between three rewards that often include significant downsides. These have probably been the biggest bellwethers for how a run will go for me – if I get a major one, like something that grants extra energy, I'm going to have a much better shot than something that grants me a normal card reward and a random potion. It's another roll of the dice, yes, but one that's thrilling to win big but doesn't take the legs out from under you if you don't.

Other than the new, more lively art style that includes a lot more combat and death animations, the big feature that truly sets Slay the Spire 2 apart from the original is the up-to-four-player co-op mode. It's a great test of how well you and your friends can work together and control your chaotic impulses. Within each turn of combat, it's a real-time free-for-all where everybody plays their cards at once, so if you're not coordinating your attacks over voice chat it gets crazy extremely quickly as the cards stack up and wait their turns for their animations to play out, and potential attacks are wasted on enemies that're already effectively dead. If you plan on getting anywhere as a team you'll definitely want to make sure you're taking a moment to think things through, because Slay the Spire 2 balances out the presence of multiple players by dramatically increasing enemy hitpoints (and their attacks hit your whole team at once), so you'll need to focus fire to take out priority targets quickly. Given there's no matchmaking to find random people to play with, though, it's safe to say you'll be in some form of communication with your teammates. (Sadly there's no local same-screen co-op.)

Things are made a little more forgiving in co-op in that downed players are automatically revived to 1HP after a battle (assuming at least one person survives) and you can use your rest site action to heal a teammate instead of yourself. You also get the same number of random artifacts as you have players each time they're handed out, which lets you choose the best fit for each of your builds (with any disputes settled randomly). That gives you a major leg up in how you want to build your character, compared to simply having to take whatever single item pops out of a chest. Each character also has multiplayer-specific cards that allow them to help out their teammates, such as giving them a random card to play in combat or summoning an Osty for everybody.

Of course, the difficulty ramps up pretty dramatically as well, and requires even more planning of your order of operations than you have to do alone. It's deliberately designed to make you and your teammates hash things out in conversation: You can't see a teammate's entire hand, but they can mouse over one card at a time and it'll be displayed over their character's head so you can see what they're talking about. I also love how you can draw on the map now, plotting out where you're going as a group or just doodling. (That works in single-player as well, if you want to leave yourself a note.)

I will say that it would be great if Mega Crit could find a better solution for what happens when someone in your party has to bail mid-run, because right now your options are to save and quit until they come back or that person's character just stops and you have to abandon your game with nothing to show for it. To be fair, a typical run isn't going to go more than an hour and everybody should know what they're getting into before setting out on a group adventure, but things happen.

Another reason it's so easy to recommend Slay the Spire 2 even in its Early Access state is that it at least appears to be largely "complete" in terms of how much content is here. Who knows how much bigger Mega Crit plans to make it before 1.0 (we can, I think, at least expect a fourth act to be tacked onto the end, and alternate versions of Acts 2 and 3 to match up with the two versions of Act 1 that are already available), but even if it were left as it is today it would be no slouch. Outside of the balance changes we've been told to expect, the only real indication that this is an Early Access game is the goofy MS Paint-style placeholder art you'll see on a handful of cards and in the progression tree that serves up bite-sized bits of lore (which, like the first game, is fairly nonsensical, vague, and silly) as you unlock new cards, potions, and relics. And the one significant bug I encountered that ended a multiplayer run because I'd gotten too many potion slots has been patched out already – other than that, it's performed pretty much flawlessly.

[Editor’s Note: Minishoot' Adventures was first released on PC in 2024, but we did not review it at that time, so we have taken its recent port to Nintendo Switch 2 as an opportunity to do so now.]

Minishoot’ Adventures answers a question I never would have thought to ask in a thousand years: What if you mixed classic Zelda with a twin-stick shooter? Developer SoulGame Studio’s take on that combination is an absolute delight. Between the silky smooth controls, your spaceship-shaped hero’s growing repertoire of abilities, and a top-down world that opens up at a satisfying pace, I loved all 10 hours it took me to roll credits. That felt like a perfect length, even though I would’ve gladly kept playing if it had offered more.

SoulGame Studio makes absolutely no effort to hide Minishoot’ Adventures’ Hyrulean inspiration. Just like Zelda, the overworld is populated with enemies, caves, trees, waterways, and areas you can see but can’t reach until you unlock a new ability. Your health is displayed as a row of hearts in the upper corner of the screen, and you can add more by finding heart pieces hidden around the world. If that’s not proof enough, just travel one screen down from your home base and you’ll find an exact replica of the starting screen from The Legend of Zelda on NES. While an uncharitable interpretation might consider this stealing from Nintendo, it all comes off as a loving homage. The developers have used familiar ingredients to create a new, twin-stick shooting-infused dish that’s different enough to stand on its own.

Instead of an elfin boy, you play as Minishoot’, a small beige ship that exhibits a surprising amount of personality thanks to the cartoonish art and animation. That odd apostrophe in the ship’s name is actually to abbreviate “Minimalist Shooter Adventure,” and that minimalism extends to the story, which gets maybe a minute of total screen time. Basically, you and your fellow sentient ships are enjoying your lives together when an invading force comes in with guns blazing to break up the party, flinging ships to all corners of the map and encasing them in crystals. Your job, once you break free of your own gemstone prison, is to find your Shipling friends and “restore balance to the Great Crystal,” whatever that means. It’s not Shakespeare, but it sets you off on a fun adventure.

If you’ve played top-down Zelda games before, then you know exactly what to expect here: You’ll poke around the overworld, delving into caves, fighting enemies, and solving light puzzles. This is all extremely pleasant, thanks in no small part to the controls. Minishoot’ glides along so smoothly that simply moving across the screen feels satisfying.

Some areas are blocked off by obstacles like pits and water, but you can explore these regions later, once you obtain the right equipment. For instance, you unlock a surf ability that lets you glide over water, and a boost that lets you use ramps to leap over pits. These upgrades are a joy, both because the controls are so good and because they let you explore further into the map. This is a tried-and-true formula, and it works particularly great in Minishoot’ because of how frequently the upgrades are handed out during the adventure. The pacing feels just right, so I never felt like my progress had stalled.

The only major aspect that’s not inspired by Zelda is the twin-stick combat, which (if you’re using a gamepad, as is highly recommended) has you move around with the left stick while firing bullets in any direction with the right. This addition is incorporated so seamlessly into the otherwise recognizable framework that you might wonder if Link should’ve been a little ship all along.

Your starting weapon is as weak as a peashooter, but as you take down enemies and blast through gemstones scattered throughout the world, you level up, earning points you can feed into 11 different enhancements — things like fire rate, damage, range, and bullet speed. Each of these enhancements can be upgraded numerous times, making any single upgrade feel a little too incremental, which is somewhat disappointing. Worse, the cost of the upgrades increases as your enhancements become stronger. That means, for instance, you need to spend three levels’ worth of currency to gain the second damage upgrade.

Thankfully, you’re also picking up new abilities as you bolster your damage output, so I always felt like I was making progress regardless. And your attack upgrades do eventually add up; by the time I confronted the final boss, I could unleash a bullet hell barrage of my own.

Unlike Zelda, the enemy designs are largely forgettable in Minishoot’ Adventures, at least when it comes to their looks. Like the Shipling protagonists, the bad guys you’re blowing up are all mechanical constructs. Most are beige ships that come in different geometric shapes – this one’s a circle! Here’s a triangle! Lynels and moblins these are not.

On the other hand, these enemies do have a nice variety of attack styles, and they’re strategically placed around the environment to pose different kinds of challenges, making them far more interesting to fight than they are to look at. For instance, stationary turrets might snipe at you from a distance while a cluster of small enemies swarms your way, giving you plenty to consider as you try to kill the cluster while avoiding the incoming bullets. Many rooms lock you inside while spawning increasingly difficult waves of enemies. (There are even a handful of races for you to compete in, complete with a starting block and finish line.)

Bosses are also mechanically interesting, big and challenging battles divided into phases – and it’s here that this twin-stick shooter veers into bullet hell territory. You usually have to thread your way through a maze of projectiles, all while directing your own stream of bullets at the boss. It’s a blast. I died a lot in these fights, but just like in top-down Zelda games, the dungeons are designed to give you a short route back to the boss room from your respawn point, so I was always excited to try again rather than getting frustrated.

Every inch of Minishoot’ Adventures is packed with smart little details, like hidden paths hinted at by gentle indents in the walls, or how enemies gradually turn redder as they take damage so you can tell when they’re about to die. There are plenty of collectables to seek out, from red coins and heart pieces to chunks of the overworld map. As you progress, various symbols start to appear in unexplored regions to point you toward new areas of interest, so I never felt aimless or lost.

It’s all set to a charming and engrossing electronic soundtrack. The sound effects are full of little bloops and plooks and ASMR-friendly tinkles, as well. Combine that soundscape with surprisingly cute animations (an especially impressive feat for a game about faceless ships) and you get a cozy vibe, even when you’re sweating through an onslaught of bullets.

If it’s Wrestlemania season, that means it’s also time for a new WWE 2K game. Over the last few years, this series has been on its most impressive run to date, and WWE 2K26 is a solid enough next chapter in that story. I don’t regret the time I've spent running the ropes in this year’s ring, but with another milquetoast Showcase mode and the growing tendrils of monetization wrapping itself around the experience like an anaconda vise, it’s starting to feel like the golden age for 2K wrestling games might be coming to an end.

2K26 hasn’t learned many new moves since last year, mostly just tweaking existing base mechanics. The biggest slam to the system is an adjustment to stamina, adding a condition called “winded” to superstars who run out. While winded, your stamina wheel turns from yellow to purple, and you can no longer run or use reversals until it empties and goes back to normal. This adds more risk-reward to all of the offensive and defensive actions you do in the ring that cost stamina.

It also creates a solution to the 2K series issue of how powerful the reversal system is (you are basically unstoppable if you’ve become the Tribal Chief of pressing one button on time, every time) by making it cost stamina to do and penalizing you for running your stamina into the red. However, it doesn’t address the problem of how the reversal prompts are unintuitive and sometimes at unpredictable points during a move’s animation, making picking the system up feel impossible without hours of ring time and muscle memory development. It also creates a new issue that penalizes players for getting good at the janky system in the first place. To play around this, you might opt to go for pins or submissions you normally wouldn't attempt in order to wait the debuff out. That is an interesting way to make matches mimic the real life pace of TV wrestling, but does feel like a violation of the aggressive spirit of a wrestling game. You win some, you lose some, I guess.

Other adjustments are nice to have but don’t change the flow or feel of matches significantly. Harkening back to the series’ pre-Visual Concepts days, collision physics have been changed slightly, so throws and bumps are less trapped in canned animation sequences and interact with objects around them. A body suplexed into the ropes will actually bounce off in a more appropriately reactive way instead of attempting to clip through them. Throw an opponent onto the ring stairs, and they’ll properly crunch around their hulking metal block. This doesn’t have any obvious mechanical advantages, you don’t do noticeably more damage to opponents if you drop them on a chair vs the mat. But it is entertaining and enhances the slapstick nature already inherent in any given match to sometimes Looney Tunes levels.

Another blast from the past are the additional match types added in 2K26: I Quit, Dumpster, Inferno, and Three Stages of Hell. That last one is essentially a gauntlet where you choose three different match stipulations and wrestle through them, two-out-of-three falls style. The Dumpster match is functionally no different than the Casket or Ambulance matches, where you have to weaken opponents enough to shove them in a box they don't want to be in. The Inferno match returns from the Smackdown vs Raw series with a more straight forward play path: Doing moves increases the temperature gauge, and once it's at max, you must expose the enemy to the flames to win. This was cool, but also isn’t that special once the new car smell has burned away.

I Quit is arguably the best of these new options, basically elaborating on the submission match, but instead of the normal mashing minigame, players that are being forced to say I Quit must pass a series of checks hitting the right spots on a gauge enough times to continue on. These spots get smaller as you take more damage, and opponents can add blockers to make the task that much harder, which they can earn the same way they earn finishers. This is a really clever idea, just complex enough to be engaging and tactical without being too much to deal with.

This year’s Showcase, themed around the highlights and lowlights of CM Punk’s two-pronged WWE career, was a disappointment. It suffers from most of the same problems that these modes always have, like the gaping holes in history that it has to ignore for corporate reasons, or the awkward ways it tries and fails to recreate major moments in real matches as gameplay moments. The former is a problem not just because of wrestler contract woes – Bryan Danielson won’t be on the playlist since he’s with a rival company these days – but also its wholesale refusal to engage at all with why CM Punk left WWE for over a decade. I'm sure it's a legal minefield and also a bit of a bummer to discuss some of those details for all parties involved, but they make no real attempt to address it at all, and it feels a little insulting to the intelligence after a while. There's also no mention of CM Punk’s most infamous/influential moment, when he went off script during the now legendary “Pipe Bomb” promo, which seems like the kind of oversight that’s punishable by going one on one with The Undertaker.

The 10+ year gap he’s had in his career is already a spectre that really haunts this mode, as it makes the pickings for memorable moments to relive slim. They try to address this with a little kayfabe, Punk engaging in a metanarrative between matches to use the “Slingshot Technology” that Showcase employs to meld matches and real footage as a sort of time machine. That allows him to both undo some losses in his own career, embody Bret Hart to prevent the Montreal Screwjob, and indulge himself in a bunch of “what if” dream matches. These make up half of the Showcase and definitely feel more like busy work than cool experiences, even though they are right in line with the toybox nature of wrestling games to begin with.

This year’s MyRise follows The Archetype, a former top star returning from a long layoff to try to get their groove back. It’s an more streamlined story overall, with fewer big beats across its six chapters but some more consequential decisions to make in each, usually to change your alignment from heroic fan favorite to callous villain (and possibly back again). The plot of The Archetype’s journey has the kinds of twists and turns you might expect from a main character on any given stretch of episodes of the TV shows, filled with overcoming impossible odds, having victory snatched from you though dastardly betrayals, and so on. The writing and voice acting throughout is consistent for the series, which is to say largely mediocre but not offensively so.

Though it’s shorter than past MyRise’s, grinding largely meaningless matches to get from plot point to plot point still feels like wasted time. The process is more transparent than last year, now instead of just doing a bunch of matches until they say you can move on, you have a goal to earn 12 stars in however many matches it takes you to do so (you can earn up to five per match). These help build your attribute points to make your superstar stronger, but no good story-based attempt is made to make these matches feel like anything other than homework. Speaking of story, the adherence to the regular WWE storytelling formula is nice but I really missed the weird and silly stuff I often associated with this mode. Last year's game featured resident wrestling jester R-Truth unlocking the secrets of traveling the multiverse. In games passed, your wrestler might have a whole side quest based around finding a cursed amulet that gave you wrestling demon powers.

These sorts of things seem relegated to The Island, the weird, Street Fighter World Tour-esque multiplayer hub world that lets players create their own wrestlers and participate in open world RPG-style quests while also competing with each other on leaderboards, which is at least a more coherent game mode out of the gate this time. It embraces and builds on the fantastical nature of last year’s version, leaning into mysterious powers of The Island of Relevancy, now being divided up by three different factions all fighting to gain its magical powers. This sort of pro wrestling RPG nonsense is something that I would be all over on paper, but the original Island’s poor writing and janky pacing put me off.

This year makes an attempt to address that. Having a better map to navigate and being fully voiced are steps in the right direction, but the stories being told are just as bad and boring. Your characters start with minimal cosmetic options and way more stats to manage than in any other mode, all because of the profit incentive inherent in this mode, which requires you to spend a lot of time grinding in-game experience to unlock options or level up while also enticing you to tap out and just buy yourself a shortcut with real money. You could ignore the cosmetics, sure, but if you want to get anywhere on the multiplayer leaderboards without spending hours grinding, I don’t see how it's possible without opening your wallet. This dawned on me pretty early, and I haven’t been back since.

Battle Passes make their debut in 2K26, and they leave a lot to be desired. There is a lot to earn split between free and premium pass tracks. Many of the free rewards are arenas, superstars, championships, and cosmetics you would have usually bought from an in-game store with free currency in previous games (or would have just been available out of the gate), while the premium track features a lot of MyFaction related goodies and a handful of extra wrestlers, with this first season themed around the stars of AAA. These replace the wrestler DLC drops of old, and I can see them being a frustrating replacement – not simply because it means you’ll need to grind matches in order to unlock things you’d just buy previously, but also because unlocking new tiers seems to take a lot of work. I spent around 25 hours between random exhibition matches, finishing Showcase mode, one full playthrough of MyRise, and a couple of hours on The Island, and I’ve only made it to tier 14 of 40. At the end of the track are unlockables, like what would have been the late Bray Wyatt’s last costume and a really cool move that I would have loved to give to a custom wrestler, but I fear I simply don’t have the endurance for that grind, or the patience to accept that I even have to.

Some of the more niche modes like Universe and MyGm are still good, with small improvements that don’t shake things up too dramatically but are certainly nice to have. You can now draft rosters against a computer controlled GM in Universe mode, and can do so really whenever you want, adding a dynamic way to shake up your rosters if things are starting to get stale. MyGM expands seasons to 50 weeks (and adds more PLEs to compensate), more match types, etc. The key change I found really spiced all this up the most was that you could book intergender matches and feuds, as well as book wrestlers in matches and promos on the same card. That means nothing to people who don’t care about this, but GM heads know that it opens up a lot of new options for promoting matches and maximizing your potential for fan and money gains from week to week. Great little shining additions to modes that are hiding away in corners.

Since the earliest cave paintings, human beings have used art to recreate the world around us. But while the painter’s limit is imagination, the photographer can only capture what actually exists. They can use their tools to increase exposure, change framing, or apply filters, but they cannot create something entirely new; only preserve a moment in time. It’s telling that Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly is getting its moment now. A game about twin sisters haunted by the past with a camera as their only salvation, Crimson Butterfly Remake is similarly bound to its predecessor while also being charged with modernizing it. In many ways, it succeeds. I cannot deny that I enjoyed revisiting Minakami Village, but I also fear that constantly bending a knee to the modern and adding more complex mechanics has added an artificiality that is at odds with the captivating story it tells. By the time I reached the end of my 20-hour journey, I was deeply satisfied with and impressed by this remake, as well as incredibly conflicted about that feeling.

Before I continue, let me say this: I consider the original Crimson Butterfly – not Silent Hill 2, not Eternal Darkness, not pick-your-Resident-Evil, not any modern horror game – to be both the greatest and most terrifying horror game ever made. But any artist, no matter how skilled, risks tarnishing a great work by revisiting it. This is especially true in video games, where remakes seek to supplant and replace the original, trading increased visual fidelity and “modern” (read: Better. Always better. No one has ever used this term when speaking about a game and meant “worse”) design tropes for a piece of the original’s soul. We’ve seen this story countless times, from a Mass Effect remaster that dilutes the impact of Sovereign’s arrival on Eden Prime to a remake of Demon’s Souls that is visually remarkable but butchers the atmosphere of the original. I would like to tell you that Crimson Butterfly Remake does not fall prey to these traps, that it skirts them effortlessly. But I can’t – though that doesn’t mean what’s here isn’t an admirable attempt.

Crimson Butterfly Remake follows the same setup as the original. Twin sisters Mio and Mayu are visiting a stream where they used to play as children because the entire area will soon be flooded by the construction of a dam. As they reminisce, Mayu catches sight of a crimson butterfly that draws her deeper into the forest. Mio pursues, quickly gets lost, and the two eventually reunite on a hill overlooking a lost village said to have disappeared during a festival. The path they took is gone. There is no way back. With no other options, they descend into a village where the ghosts of the past still linger. Mio and Mayu’s only defense is a strange camera – the Camera Obscura – that seems to be able to exorcise them. Their goal is simple: escape. But that will mean learning Minakami Village’s secrets, and why they were called here to begin with.

I don’t want to say more because Crimson Butterfly’s story is remarkable, and developer Team Ninja has done an excellent job of expanding it. As you venture deeper into the village, you learn about the dark nature of the festival and the unique role twins, often twin girls, played in it. Crimson Butterfly is, to its credit, a quiet game. Cutscenes are fairly rare and Mio does not incessantly chatter about what’s happening to her or about the items she picks up. Instead, you’ll learn about the story through diaries, watching ghosts follow the paths they traveled in life, and by listening to their voices, preserved in the stones their spirits left behind. You’ll learn about the people who lived here, what happened during that festival, and the fates that befell those who, like Mio and Mayu, were called to Minakami Village. Most of the expansion comes in the form of new locations and side stories that trace the paths of supporting characters, and it’s all integrated seamlessly. If I didn’t know these things weren't in the original, I would not have guessed, and they add a great deal to Crimson Butterfly’s story.

Minakami Village itself is a marvel of design, dripping with atmosphere. It’s a small place with few roads and fewer houses. But it’s dense, and it changes. You’ll revisit these roads, these houses, and each time, the experience will be different. When I first entered Osaka House, I was afraid and wary; later, it was like seeing an old friend. I became intimately familiar with those rooms, but I could never let my guard down while walking them. Kurosawa House, on the other hand, was terrifying no matter how many times I walked its sprawling halls. Whenever I passed through its doors, I felt myself tense up.

What I admire most about Crimson Butterfly Remake is how little it holds your hand. While there are objective markers to guide you around the village between story beats and crimson butterflies sometimes light the way forward, once you enter a house, all bets are off. If you need to go to a room with an altar, for instance, it is up to you to find that room. If you’re following a specter, you must use the camera to trace their path. If you are completing a side story, it is up to you to read the diary left behind and figure out where to go next. Crimson Butterfly Remake will give you the clues you need, but you’ll still have to make the journey yourself.

The Fatal Frame series is terrifying, but its horror is subtle – less an exercise in jump scares, and more one in unrelenting tension. When you pick up an item, Mio will crouch and extend her hand slowly. Oftentimes, nothing will happen. But sometimes, a ghost will appear and grab you. Each time she slides open a door, an angry spirit might be on the other side. Walk down a road, and you might stumble across a ghost or run into a roving patrol searching for twins who escaped on the night of the ritual. Sometimes, the spirits will be there, visible. Sometimes, they will simply appear.

Combat in Crimson Butterfly Remake isn’t rare, per se, but it’s also not frequent. You’ll spend much of your time exploring the village, navigating houses, snapping photos of lingering spirits and twin dolls scattered throughout the village, and solving puzzles. But every time you open a door or reach for an item, you are vulnerable. You may pull your hand away or slam a door shut in time, but they will still be there, and it won’t ease how you feel the next time. Often, those spirits are specters, condemned to retrace the paths they walked in life, only visible long enough to snap a picture if you’re quick and ready. (Change film, and you might miss them.) But sometimes, they are hostile. In the village, you can often avoid ghosts by crouching, hiding, or simply running away, which is useful against groups or when you’re not looking for a fight. But when you’re locked in a house and the doors are sealed shut, you’ll have to defend yourself with the Camera Obscura.

Your camera can exorcise ghosts. The better the picture, the more damage the shot will do. A shot that is in focus and captures a spirit’s face will be far more effective than one that captures its back. But the most effective shots are Fatal Frames, which require you to wait until a spirit attacks and the light atop the Camera Obscure flashes red. Time it right, and you’ll stagger the wraith, deal heavy damage, and replenish Mio’s Willpower, a new addition that allows her to use Special Shots (some stun, some slow, and so on) and is lost when Mio runs or a ghost strikes her. Lose all of it and Mio will be knocked to the ground and vulnerable. If a ghost attacks you while you’re down, you’ll have to use the camera to get it off. Miss your shot, and you’ll take a large amount of damage. I’m mixed on Willpower as a concept – I didn’t use Special Shots often, instead saving Willpower for when I needed to sprint – but I did appreciate it as an additional obstacle to navigate during combat.

Then there are Shutter Chances, which occur when a wraith’s health is depleted past a certain point. Snap a picture during one, and a ghost will be left defenseless for a single, high damage shot. Time a Fatal Frame with a Shutter Chance, and you’ll enter Fatal Time, allowing you to take multiple shots at once. Better pictures also reward you with points that can be spent on items and charms at save points, so there’s an additional reason to aim well.

It’s a lot to remember, but when it clicks, Crimson Butterfly’s combat is compelling. Often, you’ll only fight one wraith at a time, but even that is challenging. Success is a matter of sidestepping attacks, managing your health and Willpower, and waiting for a ghost to attack so Mio can capture that elusive Fatal Frame. Choosing the right film matters, too. Will you stick with the infinite but weak and slow-to-reload Type-07 or upgrade to the slightly stronger but still slow and limited Type-14? The Type-61 is powerful, but reloading film still takes a while and you can’t carry much of it, while the rarer Type-90 is fast, powerful, and can be carried in bulk. And then there is the incredibly slow, but powerful, Type-00, which deals massive damage even to the most frightening wraiths. There just isn’t much of it. Crimson Butterfly Remake’s combat is about timing and choice, and unlike most horror games, requires you to leave yourself open and literally face your fears to succeed. You are always vulnerable; Mio always has reason to be afraid.

Each ghost presents its own challenges. You might be tempted to use Type-07 film for more standard spirits, but others will quickly push you into loading more precious film into your camera, and each time you miss a shot with a more valuable film, it hurts. You will never forget the first time you encounter the woman in the box, nor the first time you’re locked in a room fighting two ghosts at once. My favorite encounter was against a drowned woman on a bridge who moved through the air like she was floating in water, and who seemed to transport Mio underwater as the fight progressed. Even though you’ll fight most ghosts multiple times, they never get old. Even protecting Mayu from ghosts, something you’ll have to do off and on as the sisters are separated and reunited over the course of the story, is less frustrating and simply an additional challenge.

It’s here that I must talk about Crimson Butterfly Remake’s status as a remake. In many ways, it is an unqualified success. It is visually stunning while capturing and thoughtfully updating the character designs, environments, art, and sound of the 2003 original, and there are images here that will stay with me forever. The change from fixed camera angles to the over-the-shoulder view popularized by Resident Evil 4 is admittedly mixed; it dilutes some of the horror and unease, but it means Crimson Butterfly plays better and is more responsive than any other Fatal Frame. The additions Team Ninja made to the village and the new side stories are wonderful. Even smaller choices, like the ability to hold Mayu’s hand and guide her through the village, which restores both Willpower and both sisters’ health at the expense of slower movement, is a thoughtful change that emphasizes their bond through gameplay. I also appreciate that Crimson Butterfly Remake doesn’t force you to fight everything. Sometimes, sneaking past or running away is the best (or only) option.

What bothers me are the additions to the Camera Obscura. You can equip charms to boost your damage, reduce the health or Willpower you lose when a wraith hits you, and so on. That’s fine. Finding prayer beads in the village enables you to increase how quickly the camera focuses, to focus it or zoom in and out manually, and so on, which were not options before or were unlocked after completing the original game. These are good changes. I largely relied on the automatic focus so I could concentrate on keeping wraiths in frame as I moved around, but made liberal use of the zoom feature.

Where Crimson Butterfly Remake fails is in the addition of filters that you can switch between, each of which comes with its own Special Shot ability, many of which recall the original’s various lenses. The Standard filter is an all-arounder that recovers more willpower with each snap and a Special Shot that can stun; the Paraceptual Filter allows you to see ghosts through walls, has additional range, and it’s Special Shot blinds; the Exposure filter is great for dealing with aggravated wraiths, and the Radiant filter is short ranged but deals absolutely massive damage. Each has additional uses outside of combat: the Paraceptual filter allows you to track traces of spirits, the Exposure filter can reveal hidden areas and ghosts, and the Radiant filter can open doors and objects sealed by blood. In combat, however, they become one note.

Part of this is because of the aggravated wraiths. Each time you snap a picture of a wraith, you risk aggravating it. Basically, they turn red, recover health, take much less damage, attack more frequently, and hit harder. Initially, this is incredibly frustrating, especially if you’ve been using higher quality film or if you’re fighting multiple ghosts at once in a small room. The Exposure filter is great for dealing with aggravated wraiths, though you only get it after you’ve started seeing wraiths get real mad, and you’ll have to spend high quality film to return them to normal via a Shutter Chance (which also automatically triggers Fatal Time). The issue isn’t that there isn’t an answer, it’s that there’s only one answer, at least for a while: Exposure filter and good film. It becomes a grating game of Simon Says, and I often used better film against weaker ghosts to try to end their afterlife before they became aggravated, which works great until it doesn't.

This problem carries over to the other filters, with options like the Paraceptual filter becoming my go-to for all far away ghosts. But the Radiant filter is what really breaks Crimson Butterfly Remake, especially if you upgrade the charms that boost it. Yes, the shorter range means it’s harder to hit things, but if you upgrade it, you’ll do so much damage (especially if you’re using anything other than Type-07 film) that it trivializes everything, even aggravated wraiths and boss fights. By the end, I wasn’t locked in rooms with the ghosts of Minakami Village: They were locked in rooms with me. Well, me, my fully upgraded Radiant filter, and my fully upgraded Radiant filter charm. Combine that with any decent film and they had no chance.

Yes, blasting through ghosts that I previously feared was a thrill, even if I wasn’t taking Pulitzer-worthy shots to do it (though I was still rewarded for quality), and I was never truly unafraid because Mio was still vulnerable. But as I traipsed around the village gathering prayer beads, upgrading my camera, photographing twin dolls, and checking off side stories, I realized how “gamey” some of these new additions were. I was supposed to be figuring out how to escape a haunted village, and while I could argue that completing the side stories gave me a better understanding of what happened here, what I was hoping to accomplish, and what I was up against, the rest felt… artificial. Pick up this film so I always have enough. Photograph those dolls because they're there and doing so unlocks more things at the save point. Grab that prayer bead to get a step closer to another upgrade. Pieces of candy scattered along the ground, and I acquired them because this is a video game and that’s what you do, whether they are out of place or not. Does the removal of the fixed camera angles really help, or does it just ease a little friction? Is it a good design choice, or simply the modern one that will make me more comfortable? Removing film grain makes an image clearer, but it removes detail, too.

Once you start seeing these things, you can’t stop. Case in point: the filters. An inventor making a camera that exorcises ghosts is cool and makes sense in the context of Crimson Butterfly’s story. Filters that do more damage to ghosts, or let you see through walls, or open doors sealed by bloody handprints, on the other hand, only exist to solve gameplay problems. They feel less appropriate for Crimson Butterfly’s world and undermine its otherwise very effective horrors. I went from saying things like “man, I hope there’s not a ghost in that well” to “Get out here, lady. I dare you. I double-dog dare you. I have a Radiant filter and enough Type-90 film to make you wish you’d stayed down there.”

That’s fun as a video game power fantasy, as a way to make my dopamine-seeking lizard brain go brrrr. It’s stuff that would make a lot of sense in Resident Evil, but it goes against what Fatal Frame is. The strength of Crimson Butterfly is that Mio and Mayu are ordinary girls thrust into a terrifying, supernatural situation. As powerful as the Camera Obscura is, Mio is always vulnerable while using it. She always has to look the things that haunt her in the eye, to open herself to harm and not blink. It makes sense that she is afraid when she enters the Kurosawa House and her flashlight fails, or for her to hide from large numbers of ghosts, and Crimson Butterfly is most effective when you share her fear.

Mio’s not a grizzled combat veteran or a superhero masquerading as a civilian the way most video game characters are. She’s a young woman trapped in a haunted village; she’s trying to survive and protect her sister, and she’s scared out of her mind. Her weapon is a camera, not a gun. She cannot physically overpower what threatens her. These are things she can barely comprehend, much less fight. But she continues in spite of that. She keeps raising that camera, facing her fears, and that’s what makes her brave. In creating a more seamless version of Crimson Butterfly that offers plentiful combat options, and allows you to be more powerful as a result, Team Ninja has unintentionally diluted it thematically.

It’s one of my only significant complaints about a remake that otherwise both respects and enhances the art it’s attempting to recreate, a smudge on an otherwise immaculately restored photograph, and something that I have been grappling with the impact of as I’ve thought about this review. I don’t think that this disharmony between thematic intent and modern convenience ruins Crimson Butterfly Remake, or even deeply damages it, and I doubt most people will even care. But it does make Crimson Butterfly feel more like an action game that you can optimize much of the horror out of if you wish to, and I think that does diminish it somewhat as a result.