The fact that it’s a casual game allows Iconoclasts’ story to unfold at a good pace. It is without a doubt a story-driven action-adventure game, and as such you should take your time thinking about what it all means as you go along. For those who experienced Super Nintendo games in their prime, this game may be reminiscent of some of your best childhood memories.

With a large and beautiful open world, swollen hordes of infected freakers, and over 30 hours of story, Days Gone is a well-polished game on the surface. However, the game does not offer anything truly remarkable, and maintaining your bike can be annoying. That said, its strengths lie in exploring its open world by bike, and the qualities of its biker protagonist, Deacon.

Devil Engine throws a lot of bullets at you despite being a side-scroller, and often kills you without any warning. However, once you get used to its trial-and-error gameplay, it’s actually a pretty welcoming game, which is testament to how well made it is. However, its conservative design does little to appeal to players new to shmups, making this a title mostly for die-hard fans of the genre.

Dead or Alive 6 looks even better than its already stunning predecessor, and it succeeds in being more accessible for newcomers while keeping the fundamentals that fans have come to love intact. The tutorial and story modes do their job, but an online mode that only has ranked matches ultimately renders it unwelcoming to many players.

Metal Gear Survive's greatest strength is that it offers many ways to play. Its survival gameplay creates a lot of freedom and variety, but sadly the unsteady co-op experience greatly limits the game's appeal. The story is underwhelming, and the game's overall balance has some problems.

Tetsuya Mizuguchi's signature synesthesia approach turns Tetris – a game based on pure mathematics – into a moving tale about the Earth. However, the nature of Tetris demands constant focus, which sometimes makes it difficult to enjoy the game's spectacular artistic effects along the way.

Hyakki Castle comes with quite a few flaws -- including its UI -- but eliminating ghosts in a haunted castle makes for a great deal of fun, and the exploration that has you split up your party is well utilized. If you enter this castle with the expectation that you will die a lot, a game full of excitement awaits.

From “moe” characters and hip-hop to cyberpunk and yakuza, Orangeblood is a 2D sprite-based RPG that provides interesting cultural juxtapositions. The battle system, which includes hack-and-slash elements, provides enough options for strategic combat. However, after the credits had rolled, I felt that both the story and combat needed a bit more volume.

Just like Ginga Force and Eschatos, Natsuki Chronicles is a side-scrolling shmup true to the DNA of developer Qute. While it caters towards a wide audience ranging from newcomers to veterans of the genre, the balance between the story-heavy chronicle mode and the more traditional arcade mode isn’t great. There’s some great level design to enjoy here, but Natsuki Chronicles fails to exceed the developer’s previous titles.

Yakuza: Like a Dragon’s turn-based battle system has a serious lack of depth and pacing issues so crucial that it’s dangerously close to simply falling apart. However, RPG-like elements such as a wide array of equipable items, charisma parameters and interesting job classes do create a customizability that is new to the series. In addition, bizarre side quests and well-crafted mini games make this an experience that is still unmistakably Yakuza. The story of new protagonist Ichiban Kasuga and his friends is simply one of the best in the series, and the communication between those characters is a breath of fresh air. While Yakuza 7 is pretty much a disastrous RPG in terms of its battle system, everything else is nothing short of amazing, which makes it a hard game to score.

Blasphemous is a high-difficulty metroidvania-like side-scroller. Its gory violence is not for everyone, but together with its grim yet beautiful background scenery, it delivers a well-crafted ominous world. Just like a splatter movie, this is the kind of game you might want to dive into if you’re looking for serious thrills.

Gato Roboto is a metroidvania with lots of references to the games it was inspired by, but at times it also feels just as unfriendly and inconvenient as some of those classics do today. It’s also much more difficult than you would expect from a game that stars a cute cat in mech armor, but it’s well worth it if you’re up for the challenge.

VR enhancement makes the 3D cutscenes and exploration all the richer in this remake. However, the rhythm gameplay has issues that weren’t present in the original, even when not playing in VR, and it doesn’t feel like you are playing the piano yourself like in the original. That said, this is still an interesting new way to experience Deemo, especially for fans.

Before setting on an adventure in the woods together with my dog, I didn’t really understand the link between this game and Blair Witch, the movie it is based on. However, it didn’t take long for me to understand that this inspiration source is exactly what makes this a unique horror game. Overcoming this bewitched forest together with your partner results in a stellar gameplay experience. However, the horror tropes are used a bit too often.

Bringing a Dead Space-style SF horror atmosphere to a Dark Souls-inspired action game makes things interesting, and the speedy battle system, which includes cutting off body parts and crafting elements, is a success. However, the somewhat dull pace of the game results in the player dying a bit too often, leaving plenty of room for improvement when it comes to the game’s overall balance.

Obviously inspired by Vanillaware’s games such as Dragon’s Crown, The Vagrant’s graphics are impressive, and the game comes with a ton of replay value, making it well worth your money. However, while its game mechanics are interesting, The Vagrant struggles in finding its own identity.

While the more story-driven experience of the new Volta mode definitely makes for an ambitious soccer game, it’s too bad that the story itself is so monotonous.

An adventure game that, instead of holding your hand, gives you the freedom to figure things out yourself. Unraveling mysteries through information you’ve gathered by yourself brings a unique type of satisfaction.

What makes The Sinking City unique is that it really feels like you’re investigating while struggling with hallucinations and madness as you step foot inside the world of Cthulhu mythos. If that sounds like your cup of tea, definitely give it a chance. However, after you get used to the gameplay you will notice that as a game, The Sinking City feels like too much of the same. An open-world design was not the ideal direction to take for this developer specialized in a specific genre.

While it may have the Fire Emblem name in its title, the character roster leans a lot towards more recent entries of the franchise, and since the story lacks any significant depth, it is not for all Fire Emblem fans. However, the polished system does a good job at combining action and strategy elements, resulting in a game true to the Warriors series.

Fallout 76 feels like a single-player experience that was forced into an online game. Still, if you stick with it, trying to survive in Appalachia indeed delivers a different kind of appeal from previous iterations.

As the first single-player Star Wars action game to be released in a number of years, Jedi: Fallen Order provides a novel opportunity to visit a variety of planets and explore them in depth. However, it fails to build upon innovations from earlier Star Wars action games such as implementation of Force abilities and ease of navigation, with the result that part of its design feels stuck in a previous era.

This is a game for the Arcana fans, by the Arcana fans. The game doesn't explain itself well, but the strong fan community will surely keep introducing new fighting game fanatics to the series.

Trials Risings’s fail-and-retry gameplay is as fun and addictive as ever. However, the tutorials aren’t as user friendly as they could have been, and the tandem mode and edit mode aren’t that appealing either.

The Friends of Ringo Ishikawa might look like an old-fashioned belt-scroller, but it is actually an open-world game full of life and… well, philosophy! There’s plenty of dialogue, and the way the story is told through everyday life events at school and in your neighborhood feels like real life. The game’s systems aren’t well explained, which will catch many gamers off-guard at first, but its climax has a lasting impact that is worth experiencing.

As a successor of Her Story, Telling Lies succeeds in delivering a deep and varied story with what is essentially the same system. However, whether that story is full of surprises or not, depends hugely on the player’s reasoning powers.

Exploring the game's main town, which is full of monsters, new weapons and items, is a blast. New discoveries will immerse you into the gameplay, and make you forget about that daughter you have to save.

Wattam is unlike any other game when Keita Takahashi's unique sense of humor and world building come together, but don't expect everything to click all the time.