In my eyes, Happy’s Humble Burger Farm is a genius game. A horror game tied to the drudgeries of life isn’t a new concept. Even the idea of avoiding the wrath of cute mascots has been done before. However, Happy’s Humble Burger Farm does it with such dreamlike depth and panache that I can’t help but be impressed. I doubt this will be the last time I dawn the ugly apron and sling fattening food, and I just know there are more pieces of the mystery waiting to be scraped off the grill.

Solar Ash offers a collection of promising concepts that don’t quite hit realization. While undoubtedly a visually striking experience, Rei’s journey into the Ultravoid suffers due to a disengaging narrative and repetitious gameplay. Solar Ash’s attractive world struggles to provide the player with captivating experiences. Elements do occasionally come together, however, in the form of fun traversal, unsettling creature design, and dazzling vistas, ensuring that while Solar Ash isn’t quite the release it might have been, it successfully retains an unmistakable Heart Machine charm.

For 10 bucks, you're getting a personality-driven rhythm romp with the hindsight of a decade plus of genre experience.

It’s a fun time if you know what you’re getting into. It’s Date Night Bowling, and it does what it says on the box. There’s bowling and there’s dating. It’s a fun time if you can wrangle a partner, romantic or otherwise, but it doesn’t really have lasting appeal. A few times through, then you can take your balls elsewhere.

If you haven’t experienced Pokemon Diamond or Pearl yet and don’t have access to Platinum, then the Gen 4 remakes on Switch might be worth exploring. Sinnoh has its own charm to it, and completionists will likely enjoy the endgame that is Grand Underground collecting. I just hope that when the time comes to remake Black and White, whatever team handles it is a lot less conservative.

If you haven’t experienced Pokemon Diamond or Pearl yet and don’t have access to Platinum, then the Gen 4 remakes on Switch might be worth exploring. Sinnoh has its own charm to it, and completionists will likely enjoy the endgame that is Grand Underground collecting. I just hope that when the time comes to remake Black and White, whatever team handles it is a lot less conservative.

Stick to your original copies if you still have them. If you need to see this mess in action for yourself, either wait until developer Grove Street Games heavily patches this collection or wait for a deeply discounted sale.

I’m not sure I’ll go back to beat it on all five Mind Level difficulty tiers (twice is enough for now), especially with more DLC packs on the way. But I am pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed Vaas: Insanity, and I hope I feel the same about Far Cry 6‘s next two villain stories. I’d give it a nod even if you don’t always mesh well with roguelites. Because it doesn’t outstay its welcome, the format works well for Far Cry. A lack of true variety hurts the long-term appeal after the first successful run, but that first win is exciting.

Tunche is a spirited jungle jaunt. A charming action-adventure that wears its Peruvian heritage with the utmost pride. While the marriage of roguelite to brawler is definitely a solid fit — particularly in multiplayer — it cannot be denied that the repetitious trappings of both genres are readily apparent, which will be enough to turn off some players. Those well-versed in the grind and willing to put in the effort, however, will be rewarded with a very agreeable bout of forest fisticuffs. Now, about that animated series...

There is nothing I like more in Animal Crossing than fidgeting around my house and changing the layout on a whim. That’s all you’re going to do in Happy Home Paradise, and for me, that’s more than enough to keep me logging in every single day.

Battlefield 2042 feels like it could become a cool game, but it’s tantalizingly out of reach today. There’s enough promise with the satisfying-when-it-works gunplay, large-scale chaos (that’s starting to feel more controlled over time), and fantastic legacy Battlefield content in Portal that I’ll stick around for a bit. It didn’t have to be this way, though.

Jurassic World Evolution 2 is a much better game than its predecessor was at launch. That said, I can’t shake the feeling that much like the original, it’s only going to get better and more content-rich in the next coming year or so. It’s a beautiful trend from Frontier Developments that I think will make an already great game all the more excellent.

In the long history of the CoD series, it’s fitting that Vanguard stayed true to form with the World War II setting, because when all is said and done, I think it’ll be considered among the greats. If it’s already this fun to play now, I can’t wait to see how it evolves in the coming months with any updates Sledgehammer has planned.

Bright Memory Infinite gets in its own way, and occasionally takes the focus off of its strongest quality.

While Mario Party Superstars doesn’t necessarily break massively new ground, it’s so good at replaying the classics that it will probably be my new go-to for Mario Party fun moving forward. It isn’t just the Nintendo 64 nostalgia talking here; this is a good collection of minigames, a smart board selection, a nice-looking game, and it’s got tons of settings, dials, and options to fiddle with for repeat play sessions. It might not be filled with new ideas, but Mario Party Superstars plays the hits, and plays them as well as it did the first time around.

The seemingly endless possibilities of Shin Megami Tensei V directly fueled my desire to play it from the moment I got my copy.

It would be foolish of me to say that Forza Horizon 5 is the best game in the series given my very limited knowledge of its history. However, I can say with confidence this is the most fun I’ve had with a racing game that doesn’t involve a plumber and a princess. There is just so much to do and so much to see that I can easily lose hours of my day exploring all it has to offer. And with continued support from the developers and community, I’ll have no reason to stop playing anytime soon.

It’s not a soulless game or one without a spark, there’s definitely a lot of love in the final product. It just seriously needed a few more sets of eyes on it to draw out its flaws. A lot of the things that vexed me most severely could be fixed with a few more passes of the floor buffer. Yet here we are, and Demon Turf doesn’t strike me as territory worth conquering.

With all that said, I can clearly see why Corpse Party is a cult classic. It’s a dismal, oppressive horror game that sinks you into the hell it has constructed. It presents a thick, sticky mystery to wade through and presents it with panache. It’s maybe not the most essential remaster of a game, but the same spooky tale of hopelessness is still present. I just wish it would keep its obvious fascination with human excrement to itself.

It’s not every day that we get an extreme sports game, particularly one on this scale.

If you’re looking for an enjoyable RPG with some novel ideas and strong presentation behind it, Voice of Cards can easily eat up a weekend or two. It’s sweet and doesn’t overstay its welcome, even when I wished it would. While those factors aren’t enough for it to match up against the best-in-class competitors, there are many worse ways to spend a cozy fall evening than curled up with Voice of Cards.

Dungeon Encounters is one of the best games I’ve played this year. I get that may be kind of hard to believe given its stripped-down presentation. After all, this isn’t exactly the type of game we expect to come from Square Enix, a developer that is no stranger to extravagant graphics and battle systems. But if you’re judging it on looks alone, you’re really not going to be able to see the rewarding dungeon crawler found within. Give it a shot, and once you get into it, you might see it the way I do: as a gripping, strategic adventure that is not only a game but a celebration of one of the great innovations of the turn-based RPG genre.

Six years later, in that timeframe, Capcom did the opposite with Resident Evil 7 — which has now sold over 10 million copies, making it one of the most popular games in the franchise. I think if Koei Tecmo still has an interest in reviving the Fatal Frame franchise, they need to go back to the drawing board or give newcomers a good collection of games that made this survival horror series great in the first place.

Guardians of the Galaxy coasts by quite a bit on personality, and that's definitely going to make it divisive.

For your $30, you essentially get a touched-up Toy Soldiers. I loved Toy Soldiers, I think it’s a fantastic game. I’m happy that they took the time to make the battlefields look a little more modern, but if I hadn’t gone back to check the original game, I might not have realized that anything had been done at all. So, the real value to me is just being able to re-experience the game on new platforms, or on PC without the Games for Windows Live nonsense.

As much as I feel like this series is stuck in the shadow of Until Dawn for a large part of the audience, collectively, The Dark Pictures Anthology is becoming something memorable in its own right. I'll keep enjoying these games as long as I can, House of Ashes included.

Whether I’m laughing out loud over a brilliant strategy gone awry or just barely getting onto an escape vehicle with Ridden right on my heels, Back 4 Blood has the right formula for a good few weekends of co-op fun. If it gets even more support and updates down the line, I could see this taking up a spot as a go-to social game for quite a while to come. Really, it just feels good to have this sort of game back again.

I was deeply absorbed until the game flipped for the first time, then I fell out of love. I reconciled before the end, but I was still left feeling like I played a few similar games of different quality. Maybe it was a good idea to change things up before it had the chance to grow stale, it’s just nothing gripped me as firmly as the first chapter.