The First Cases is a good tribute to one of the classic characters of fiction, and anyone who likes to curl up with a good mystery should find this to be to their liking as well.

Severed Steel doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It exists in a world where Neon White (to say nothing of Max Payne and Superhot) not only also exist, but are much, much better options if you want this kind of gameplay. With competition like that, Severed Steel doesn’t quite match up.

Cursed to Golf is designed to challenge you, frustrate you, and punish you – and even if real golf does that, this game takes it to a whole other level. If you’re the kind of person who doesn’t usually give sports games a second glance but loves difficulty ramped up to an insane degree, this should be the one sports game you make an exception for.

Digimon Survive is a talk-heavy game that expects you to spend a lot of time reading, and a little bit of time fighting. That may not be the most enjoyable thing if you just want a Pokémon substitute, but as visual novels go, it’s one of the better ones.

Basically, it’s an odd game about fishing that looks like a leftover from another generation, so if that’s what you’re after, you may be pleasantly surprised by what you find here.

Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered is a grade-A game through and through, and as long as this release hasn’t changed anything (it hasn’t), it will remain that way.

When you get down to it, it’s still a lot of basic hack and slash fights broken up by lots of endless cutscenes, with extra side quests there to pad out the length even further. I don’t foresee Sword and Fairy: Together Forever garnering the kind of following here in the west that it has in China, but if you just want to kill lots of monsters and watch lots of dialogue, it may be worth your time.

Summertime Madness doesn’t last long, and it can easily be finished in under two hours. But it’s also not the sort of game that needs to go on forever, either. It’s a challenging, engaging puzzle with enough plot to last through its runtime, and that’s enough to make it well worth a look.

There’s a lot of potential there, but unfortunately Hazel Sky never really gets into any of that. Instead, you get Shane and Erin talking about what they want to do in the future. While I’ve always had a soft spot for stories about characters on the peripheries of something bigger – only so many main characters can be The Chosen One, after all – in this case, it’s hard to care about any of it. Or maybe it’s just hard to care because the game is so poorly designed and so frustrating. Whether you’re falling through the world, or having a needed object vanish out of your hands (which happened to me with alarming regularity), or merely just fighting with the camera, Hazel Sky is chock full of terrible decisions.

Fobia – St. Dinfna Hotel provides some pretty solid chills. It’s not the sort of game that will wow you unless you’re already a fan of survival horror, but if you are a fan, it serves as a pretty solid reminder of the good things the genre has to offer.

So while Avenging Spirit might not be my top 90’s arcade game by any stretch, I do think the low price point and attention to detail on this release make it worth picking up. Its unique possession hook makes it stand out amongst other classic action games, and it can certainly be fun to run through with another player a time or two in order to see everything Avenging Spirit has to offer. So check it out when you get a chance, it’s a neat addition to your classic arcade game library.

If all you want is lots of content, then Dual Brain Complete Edition will deliver. But if you want the content to be fun or engaging, then it feels a little lacking.

Ultimately, the Wonder Boy Collection is a mediocre release. While the titles included are all decent games, it seems lackluster in options and presentation. There is a very small “gallery” of art included which is made up of Master System covers and instruction book pages as well as a small amount of promotional art from magazines. Again, seeing Master System related screens in this collection while not offering the ability to actually play those versions demonstrates how phoned-in this collection really is. While the price isn’t terrible at $29.99, I feel it should offer more in the way of playable games, options and extras. If you are interested in picking this one up, I would say wait for a sale or price drop before diving in. Decent games in an overall disappointing package.

XEL isn’t a great game. It’s not even a mediocre game. It’s a half-finished mess that shouldn’t have been released in this state.

To be sure, if you want something original – or even a unique spin on Pokémon – Coromon isn’t it. But if you just want that kind of game done exceedingly well, you need to check it out.

On the whole, though, Blackberry Honey is pretty harmless and inoffensive. It doesn’t ask anything of players and it probably won’t stick with you for very long after you finish it, but if you’re in the mood for reading something long and unobjectionable, you could probably do worse.

Bright Memory: Infinite will also leave you wanting a lot more if you’re the kind of person who likes lengthy video games. I was able to finish it in just over two hours, and that was with me running into some challenges in the boss fights, which means a more competent player will be able to finish it in under two. Even as someone who liked the game, that’s a pretty tough value proposition. But if you’re just looking at it from the perspective of how much fun you’ll get out of those two hours, then Bright Memory: Infinite becomes a lot harder to beat. It crams everything it can think of into that short runtime and is dripping with style for every second of it. I can see why it may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it certainly is mine.

Stray didn’t want to tell an epic tale spanning oceans, it didn’t need towering bosses with glowing weak points to create the greatest tension. What it did do was weave a tale that the smallest creature can make the biggest difference and that despite our seat as the apex species, that perch is ever precarious, there’s always something ready to take the spot and life will continue. It’s certainly something that we need to be reminded of periodically.

It’s clearly a game worth investigating if you’re fond of farming sims that ask you to keep lots of plates spinning at any given moment. But truthfully, it doesn’t do anything for me.

All in all, though, the two games are highly enjoyable. I don’t know if KLONOA Phantasy Reverie Series is going to be the game that finally gives Klonoa the audience it deserves. But if there’s any justice in the world, it will be.

It feels as if the developers wanted to make a different, more interesting game, but couldn’t figure out what they wanted to do with it, so instead they turned it into a sequel for a game that wasn’t particularly good or memorable in the first place. You’re left with the feeling that they didn’t really care about Freddy Spaghetti 2 – and really, neither should you.

The three games here are tried, tested, and proven, and if you want the best the Jackbox series has to offer, you’d be hard-pressed to come up with anything better.

Overall, I thought Escape Academy was a great game, and does what it wants to serve you very well. The puzzle design is excellent and the wide array of environments keeps things fresh. The only complaint I could give is saying I wish there we more, but the quality of what is here makes it hard to complain.

Matchpoint – Tennis Championships is great if you want tennis, and nothing but tennis. It’ll give you ample opportunity to play match after match, and it never bogs you down in the extraneous nonsense that seems to plague most sports games. But if you want to do literally anything more than that, you might find your attention wavers long before you come close to finishing your career.

Unless you really enjoy half-finished stories, Paratopic never really builds on its great aesthetic to be a game worth playing. It may aspire to bring you back to the late ‘90s, but given how disjointed it all feels, it never achieves its goal.

At the very least, if you’re into simulating menial blue collar jobs, you could certainly do a lot worse than this.

The real draw in Neon White is the action – the pure, unfiltered, adrenaline-pumping action that feels like it brings together the best thing about games like Devil May Cry or Ghostrunner or Mirror’s Edge or Sonic or whatever else you play when you want to go as fast as possible while slicing and shooting through every single enemy in your way. It’s a pretty exceptional game, and it’s unlike anything else out there.

I found myself fairly engrossed with Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes, and would argue it’s the best of the Omega Force/Nintendo collaborations so far. It runs really well in both handheld and TV mode (certainly far better than Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity) and the combat is propelled to another, more interesting level when you start utilizing the ability to command your various units as objectives appear. So even if you’ve not played through a single musou game before, I think Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes would make a pretty great impression for brand new players, while also breathing some fresh air into the formula for returning fans.