I consider The Callisto Protocol one of the most ambitious games I played this year, maybe even the most next to Elden Ring (though I think Elden Ring is in a league of its own—I don’t know if anything will be able to approach its depth and sophistication for a long time). Its thoughtful attention to environment, sound, and touch is what, I think, next-gen gaming should be like: an experiment with the senses and with story. The game has its issues, too, which can’t be ignored. But at least it feels human.

Scarlet and Violet’s story is also not going to blow you away. As usual, it’s just a means of motivating you into traveling the land to battle and collect every Pokémon out there. Allowing players to complete quests in whichever order they chose is unique to the Pokémon games, but it’s not innovative in the wider RPG genre. But Scarlet’s story is nonetheless an improvement over several previous titles because it focuses on the relationships between people, rather than people and their Pokémon.

I really hope that the performance issues don’t ultimately define how we talk about this generation of games. This isn’t just a game that needed more time in production—Paldea is fundamentally not designed to be pleasant to explore. The open-world mechanics might have felt more novel if I hadn’t also fallen off Pokémon Legends: Arceus earlier this year for similar issues with samey world design and unremarkable graphics. Scarlet needed to clear that low bar, and it did not. Maybe by the time the next generation comes along, the series will be able to recapture what makes Pokémon so thrilling in the first place.

For me, Evil West is the kind of game I miss these days. I’ll fully admit, I love games like Destiny and Fortnite, games that never end and are filled with battle passes, crafting, loot, etc. Those games can provide hours of fun and are great to play while chilling with friends or listening to a podcast. But I don’t want everything to be a complex, all-encompassing, time-monopolizing social experience that continues to grow and evolve as time goes on. And Evil West is a wonderful example of the kind of games I want more of moving forward. Not everything needs an endgame or a crafting table. Sometimes, I just want to move forward, hear some bad banter and punch some monsters in the face for a few hours. And Evil West gave me exactly that. No more. No less.

If you’re looking for a clever murder mystery with interactive narrative decisions, beautiful 2D art, and a wonderful historical fiction treatment, you owe it to yourself to check out Pentiment. [Review impressions]

Yes, the axe is cool. Sure, the fights are tons of fun. And I definitely enjoyed exploring every nook and cranny of the large worlds you get to visit. But what kept me glued to my PS5 for nearly 40 hours was the story of a son becoming a man and a father trying to figure out how he feels about that. I probably could have enjoyed this story a tad more with about half as many puzzles and skill menus, but even so, I found myself smiling, feeling satisfied, as the credits rolled. As I said at the start, God of War Ragnarök is very good.

After finishing the campaign, I found myself itching for more of the game’s combat. But sadly, all I was left with was a boring-as-hell opening set of levels that are only loosely made up for with level structures lifted from other AAA games later on. And I have little desire to play through the sequences where I’m shooting people who don’t feel like a threat. I guess there’s the multiplayer to look forward to, but this campaign is a wildly missed opportunity for those who enjoy military-themed first-person shooters. [Campaign Impressions]

Even the world itself is a bummer. Victoria 3's map is beautiful, even more than Crusader King 3's, a globe bristling with colour and variety and an ever-changing landscape as cities and railroads expand over the decades. But you rarely, if ever, actually use it. This enormous 3D recreation of the entire planet is sitting in the middle of your screen for almost the entire time you play the game, taking up huge amounts of real estate, and you almost never (there are a few exceptions) have to click on it, since the game’s primary interactions are all more quickly and easily handled via sidebars and buttons. It’s a real shame!

Marvel Snap, a new digital card game available today for everyone on iOS and Android, has kept me up far too many nights over the last few weeks. The game has a fantastic mix of fast action, short matches, cool cards, and smart ideas that help make every round feel different.

Valkyrie Elysium feels much more like a spin-off entry in the Valkyrie Profile franchise than a full-fledged new main title. Its smaller scope, budget, and design lend it a “PlayStation 2 game” feel. The game’s combat is its saving grace, alongside some fun character interactions. Without the Valkyrie name and branding, Elysium could’ve very well been written off as a somewhat generic action game.

This is a splendid creation, superbly written, with spellbinding art, and a unique approach to telling a story. It’s also a fascinating exploration of grief, loss, and more than anything else, how we react to change. That and secret underground organizations and their evil plans to control towns through fertilizer production.

If you’re happy with the shakedown, or are happy paying full price for the half a game that’s unaffected, then by all means keep buying it. But if you’re tired of this game’s preoccupation with hustling you, and you want something to change, you’re going to need to stop buying it, and you’re going to need lots of other people to stop buying it along with you.

If you are a diehard Miayazaki fan who doesn’t have time for imitators, Steelrising isn’t likely to grab your attention. Despite an imaginative premise and some great character design with digestible RPG mechanics, there’s just something missing here.

Immortality, the latest from Her Story creator Sam Barlow, is a game that functions like a movie. Its excitement lies within clever or opulent shots, lines delivered with pleasurable believability, and an alluring plot. But it has a real bad attitude about art.

Because that’s the real message at the game’s conclusion. Life blows up sometimes, especially if you’re trying to make a living as a creative. Art is extremely volatile under capitalism. But through support systems that uplift us, whether that’s pushing us to do better or joining our indie pop band, we come to find out that we are o-fucking-kay.

You’ll need a powerful enough rig to get the best of the best visually speaking—4K 60fps with ray tracing set to max will have to wait for a patch—but even at lower tiers the game looks amazing. [Impressions]

Digimon Survive, the new video game made in celebration of the anime’s 25th anniversary, attempts to juggle being both a visual novel and a tactical role-playing game. The result is a slog of a game that’s 70 percent visual novel, 20 percent tactical role-playing game, and 10 percent horror; totalling out as a 100 percent waste of my time. [Impressions]

And without giving anything away, Live A Live culminates towards a powerful conclusion that will have its time-spanning heroes living on in your memory long after its credits roll…for the ninth time.

It’s hard to get too mad about Aspyr’s just-released Nintendo Switch port for being a buggy mess.

I went into Stray expecting a platformer about a cat. I did not expect a deeply profound meditation on what it means to be alive. Stray adroitly points out how blurry the line is between artificial and natural intelligence, and then runs with that thought experiment all the way to the horizon. Are humans defined by flesh and bones? Thoughts and feelings? The ability to use thumbs and solve problems? It’s gotta be love, right? Can a computer feel love? But wait, what is the human brain if not a series of electronic signals and computations firing away at all times?

From its rapture beginnings to its M. Night Shyamalan-like twist ending, Kirby and the Forgotten Land is a shining example that Kirby warrants his lion’s share of open-world treatment alongside other Nintendo properties like Legend of Zelda and Mario.

I can’t think of another Star Wars game that’s included so much of the franchise, in such a brilliant and well-made package, and does it all without becoming boring, or bogged down in canon details and retcons. Star Wars is silly. Star Wars is epic. Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga knows this and embraces both aspects, while being a lot of fun and very funny. It’s one of my favorite games of 2022, and while some hardcore Star Wars fans may be loathe to admit it, yes, this is probably the best Star Wars game yet made.

With the game’s ending hinting at a possible sequel, Mutationem stands as a messy first draft. If a follow-up does come, I hope ThinkingStars’ will have the confidence to boldly stand and tell its own unique story rather than remain so shackled to its inspirations.

Like most great works, Elden Ring is magnificently flawed, equal parts beautiful and ostentatious. In this age of cookie-cutter, paint-by-numbers, triple-A development, what more can you ask for than something wholly confident in its bullshit? Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m only about one-third of the way through the game and would love to see at least one of its multiple endings sometime this year.

I feel that Rune Factory 5 gave up a lot of creative maneuverability by shifting from an overhead-view farming sim into a 3D, open-world game. Rigbarth doesn’t have the same intimate fantasy charm, the characters are forgettable, and the world feels emptier than Rune Factory has ever felt. Rune Factory 5 needed a focused creative direction, not open-world freedom. [Impressions]

In so many ways this is the best Total War game ever made, the latest example of a series that has spent the last 3-4 big releases (we don’t talk about the Saga games here) successfully refining a decades-old formula to keep it fresh and interesting. It’s a shame, then, that having come so far in so many respects this time around, Warhammer III stumbles right where it matters most: at the end.

I thoroughly enjoyed Horizon Forbidden West, and I suspect anyone who loves open-world RPGs will thoroughly enjoy it as well. But despite getting a kick out of fighting robot dinos, despite the enthralling time sink of “Machine Strike,” despite finding myself ravenous to return to this rich, inspired open world, I can’t shake how plainly Forbidden West misses the one philosophical throughline that helped its predecessor ascend to greatness: Sometimes, the question is more interesting than the answer.

Maybe the world doesn’t need another zombie game in 2022, but I’m happy we got one, and I’m happy it’s the wickedly fun sandbox of Dying Light 2.

The word “unfinished” gets thrown around a lot these days, often simply to refer to a game that is lacking in a bit of polish, or is missing a feature or two that fans wanted. But Battlefield 2042 truly feels unfinished, as though every menu screen and transition to a new map is a placeholder for something more final yet to come.

I do know this: As a longtime Halo devotee, it is so, so good to be back to a Halo that genuinely feels like a Halo. I’ve been playing these games for, f.ck, man, two decades now. Time was, somewhere in the era before (and momentarily after) Halo 5, I could picture myself hitting a point where I was take-it-or-leave-it on the series. Now? Absolutely not.

Ultimately, Solar Ash left me in similar standing as the protagonist: a little awed, a little confused, a little satisfied, a little frustrated, wishing I fully understood this thing that doesn’t want to be fully understood, that so badly wants to go where few have gone before, yet backs away moments before taking the leap.

In Shin Megami Tensei, gods and demons alike are created by humanity’s belief in them. They are the products of the stories we tell. Gods, built by our own hands, shape our lives.

It’s a charming little game with just the right amount of “what the fuck?” to keep me on my toes for hours on end.

I try not to go into games of DLC with high expectations, lest those hopes be dashed. And Happy Home Designer, the spiritual predecessor to this expansion that also inspired many of the design mechanics that came with New Horizons at launch, seemed well-enough received. But the Nintendo 3DS side game seemed largely ignored. But Happy Home Paradise rose to the occasion, especially for a design-loving player like me.

By the end of Unpacking, I felt like I’d been told an intimate story of the most important stages of a woman’s life, with all the ups and downs she had experienced along the way. The friends she made, the lovers who had come and gone, what had become of all her dreams and achievements. Yet what I’d actually been shown were just fragments. Trash dumped on my desktop. I’d put those pieces together and built my own story without even realising it, once again having been tricked into making educated guesses. Only here, there were no wrong answers, only different stories. As the credits rolled, that was one of the nicest realisations I’d had at the end of a video game in years.

If all this sounds a lot like Forza Horizon 4 and Forza Horizon 3 and so on, yeah, okay. So what? Sure, Forza Horizon 5 doesn’t reinvent the wheel. It doesn’t need to. Forza Horizon 5 is constant rise. It’s 138 bpm. It’s uncut MDMA (or so I’ve heard). There are few true thrills in gaming that come without a catch, and Forza’s core is still, all these years later, one of them: It feels genuinely fantastic to be on the open road, zooming toward the horizon with nothing on your mind other than the pulsing beat of a killer song, and the unburdened knowledge that you can keep going as long as you want, with no one and nothing around to tell you otherwise.

These many, anxiety-inducing time limits elevate a lot of the backtracking and exploration to something really interesting. Learning the fastest routes through each area isn’t just for your personal convenience; it’s a matter of life or death for the many automatons under your care.

Tonally, it feels more like the kind of rah-rah, imperialist propaganda that was so common in the early 2000s than a work that’s trying to leverage its concept and setting to speak to the true nature of the horrors of the Iraq War. While Iraq isn’t stockpiling warheads in House of Ashes, what they’ve got are functionally WMDs: a colony of murderous vampire spawn. The vampire nest is a feel-good justification for horror movie violence, one that undermines the game’s half-hearted suggestions of war remorse.

Just like the titular scrappy band of underdogs, Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy defied all of my expectations. What I expected to be an awkward mishandling of one of Marvel’s most unlikely superhero teams turned out to be one of the most faithful and entertaining depictions of the Guardians since their 2014 movie debut, and one of my favorite games of 2021.

While I wish Back 4 Blood had a classic, stripped-down mode and wasn’t so annoying on harder levels, I’m still craving it. I still want to play it. I actually stopped writing this draft to load it up and play a few levels. You have to climb some hills to reach the fun summit of Back 4 Blood, but I think it’s worth it.

What can I say? I’m just a sucker for the big maps, checklists, and pretty islands of Far Cry. I had a blast taking down yet another dictator and his army of warriors. I also get why, for so many, this formula has started to wear thin, and why they are tired of repeating history over and over. Perhaps I’m just out of my mind, damned to keep playing Far Cry games for the rest of my life. As someone once said, “Insanity is doing the exact...same fucking thing...over and over again.”

I’m glad that Dread really goes for it, that it wants to make you feel hunted and disadvantaged and that it’s willing to feel hostile in order to accomplish that. The result is a feeling that survival itself is a reward more meaningful than all the upgrades in the world, a feeling I rarely get from games anymore. But ZDR never captivated me the way previous Metroid settings have, and as a conclusion to the story arc, Dread seems to misunderstand what made the early chapters resonate. Samus is wonderful, a survivor, an icon, and she endures. But when I think back on my time with her over the past several decades, Dread will forever dwell in the shadows of my favorite Metroid memories.

The biggest compliment that I can pay it is how sad I was when the breezy trip down memory lane ended so soon. Now I’m ready for Steel Assault II. Hopefully it’s not another six years away.

Sable imagines identity and growth as playful, joyous, and nearly impossible to fail. It promises you that changing your mind is okay. You wanted to be an Innkeeper, and now you don’t. It encourages you to become something else then, without rejecting or hating the person you’re leaving behind.

For a game that loves strangeness, it only extends that love to a certain kind of strange person who is harmless and normative, who looks and acts the right kind of weird. Sure, it has a big heart. I just wish it was bigger, and that its teeth were sharper.

I don’t want to have to work just to enjoy a game of basketball. I just...want to enjoy a game of basketball. In 2K22 the only place I can do that in peace is the meaningless collection of one-off “play now” modes.

As a story, Kena: Bridge of Spirits is a warning about grief and the damage it can do to ourselves, our loved ones and the world around us. It’s a message about letting go and respecting the need for change, something I’m deeply keen to see from Ember Lab. Kena shows enough promise and reverence for some of the biggest third-person games. But what will be truly special is when the studio moves past that to craft more of their own identity. The studio has an abundance of promise and talent. The fascinating part is which publisher will channel that first.

When I finished Lost in Random, I wanted to talk about it. I wanted to not just praise it, but really dig into the world and its combat system. It’s that kind of game that makes you wish you had a few people around you who also played it and who want to spend a few hours just going on and on about it. Sure, I wish there were bigger decks in the game, but that’s less a complaint and more an admittance that I just wanted more of Lost in Random.

Beneath its stylish mid-century modern decor and abandoned military installation intrigue, however, Deathloop can be a grindy and all too familiar affair. Its constituent parts are mostly excellent, but never cohere into something more than just a good shooter with a clever premise. This doesn’t stop it from being a good game, but it could have been a much more surprising one.

If you’re simply seeking a solid if slightly overlong action-RPG about flawed people looking to sand down their rough edges, Tales of Arise is exactly that. Just know that it comes with some rough edges of its own.

The Artful Escape began as a fantasy of what a teenage Johnny Galvatron thought the rockstar life could look like. Instead, it serves as a psychedelic reminder. Francis needs some help from flying turtles and transdimensional brainstems, but eventually he gains freedom from his Bob Dylan-esque uncle through his own intergalactic persona. And while we can’t all just step into the cosmos to escape our troubles, one way or another, we all need to be ourselves someday, free of shadow.

Playing WarioWare reminds me how, and why, I became a critic. It was by playing hundreds of games for two hours each, regardless of tone or genre. My grandmother, and her parallel love of movies, let me touch an entire Family Video’s worth of weird and messy art. My colleague John Walker recently asked if there’s any kind of video game I don’t play, and I told him no, there isn’t. Games I don’t like are still interesting, and still worth my time and energy.

The destination is...interesting, which is why I consider The Forgotten City in the category of odd B games I’ll think about for several years.

Deck Nine got a chance to prove itself with Life Is Strange: Before the Storm, but if there were any lingering doubts about where the developer can take the franchise, they’re surely cleared away with True Colors.

It’s making the right points—that people will so easily believe what they want to hear without a hint of scrutiny, that they’ll dismiss any dissent with a smarmy phrase, that the widespread tendency to do so has serious and very visible ramifications on how a modern society can function. But the reductiveness of it all is so on the nose that any statements are functionally toothless. The things Road 96 wants to say might have been profound several years ago, when the game was presumably gestating in pre-production.

More than establishing a core meaning or truth to cut through the absurdity of reality, No More Heroes 3 is all about imparting a feeling. Those emotions, by design, will be different for everyone who takes the Jodorowsky-like pill Grasshopper has manufactured into the form of a video game.

After 10 hours with the game’s campaign and a few more hours messing around with bots on various difficulty settings, I was happy to move on. Some soldiers may love the look and potential challenge enough to stay on the Endeavor a little longer. But for most, Aliens: Fireteam Elite doesn’t bring enough new ideas to the genre to warrant the $59 entry price.

Psychonauts 2 isn’t about gunning down the big boss at the end and cheering over their dead body. It’s about understanding that even the biggest asshole is still a person, and deep down they may just need some help. We all need some help sometimes. The key is asking for it. Today, in 2021, it’s easy to look around and see people who seem cruel and evil, and to assume they are lost souls, not worth saving. Psychonauts 2 says otherwise. It says that everyone can change. I’m not sure I fully believe that, but I’ll be damned if that’s not one hell of a hopeful message.

The three protagonists of Last Stop spend much of their respective lives in various states of loneliness, from John’s friendlessness to Donna’s teenage angst to Meena’s “screw everyone” career blinders. By the time the credits roll, no matter what ending you chose, it’s clear these three individuals—who otherwise would have nothing in common and have no reason to interact—have cemented an inextricable bond. You too might’ve felt alone, once or twice or thrice. You might feel that way right now. You don’t need to. You just need to turn the page.

Iki island is just more Ghost of Tsushima. I wish it had done more to differentiate its action, or tell a bolder story. There are definitely good reasons to visit Iki. I won’t soon forget that moonlight filling the cloudy sky. But it’s too conventional an expansion to be the bid for greatness that this game’s vivid world deserves.

For now, though, all I’ve got to talk about is this original vision for Humankind, a game that promised to be revolutionary but ended up as a very good evolution instead.

And yet, painful as some aspects of No Longer Home are, there’s a poignant comfort to it as well. Ao and Bo may be bidding farewell to their apartment and to living together, but they’ll still be in each other’s lives. I may be leaving the Bay Area soon, saying goodbye to my favorite coffee stands and parks and movie theaters, and I won’t be able to meet those dear friends of mine for drinks at my favorite bars soon, either. But it’s okay. There’s something else No Longer Home understands about those rare, special connections in our lives. Those people who truly know us and see us? We carry their love with us when we go.

Within five minutes of starting Death’s Door I knew I was going to love it. The combat was basic but weighty. The visual presentation was sparse but bespoke. Its music, sometimes pastoral and serene, sometimes grim and despairing, made no secret that something special was going on, and my love for the indie action-RPG only continues to grow.

In fact, that’s what Neo: The World Ends With You has been for me in the 30 or so hours I’ve put into it so far: just a constant barrage of good feelings, glowing on my monitor screen and blasting out of my speakers. It’s an endlessly cool and controllable sort of chaos that I don’t want to ever end.

For all the flaws, the regular stutters, quirks with the UI, the bug in co-op where you can’t mute your microphone and occasional restarts to get a quest door to open, The Ascent is astonishingly good fun. I’d be stunned if it didn’t end up on many game of the year lists; I’m absolutely certain it’ll be on mine.

If The Great Ace Attorney: Adventures is your first Ace Attorney game, welcome! This is a wonderful place to start your Ace Attorney journey. If it’s not, you may get frustrated by the hours of exposition as you eagerly button-mash your way to your next courtroom appearance.

So yeah, there are still too many Warhammer games, but this is exactly why that’s a problem, because if you start to ignore them and let them wash over you, you risk missing out on the good ones. Like Battlesector.

But what I really like—what I love, even—is grabbing a character and a set of clubs and taking on a course on my own terms. Mario Golf: Super Rush might make many players feel the need for speed, but its chill, regular old golf game is pretty super in its own right. [Impressions]

Though I thought I knew what it was all about, Scarlet Nexus has consistently surprised me at every turn. Even though I played the demo—which showcased some of the various powers you could activate in combat—I did not expect combat to be as deep and varied as it is. No spoilers, but I’ve even found myself caught completely off-guard by plot twists at points. If the game keeps up the surprises, I’d be confident defending it as one of the greats. If it doesn’t, well, it’s been fun. [Impressions]

The game also made a hard tonal and genre shift after the big climax. It was a bold choice, but some players might find the drastic change too jarring. I was ultimately unsatisfied with Backbone’s lack of resolution. I enjoy cliffhangers, but the story concluded with so many questions that I felt like I had only played through half of a game. Though the epilogue resolved one big plot point and fleshed out a major character, everything else, from the conspiracy to the true history of the Kind and Vancouver, was left lingering in the air.

Rift Apart is, beyond doubt, a fabulous game. It took me 18 hours to reach the credits, because I hunted down every scrap of Raritarium, looked for every secret I could find, and just bathed in its visually astonishing art. I had the best time doing it. Yet, the further I got, the more it nagged at me just how little this series has advanced in 19 years. If having the dimensional conceit and the extraordinary tech wasn’t enough to inspire something new, then what will? If there’s another Ratchet & Clank to come, it’s going to have to make some significant changes, because this might be the last time it can be repeated through its charisma alone.

I never thought I’d say this about Guilty Gear, but Strive’s visuals are just too much to handle sometimes. [Impressions]

It’s a shame that Biomutant isn’t a better put-together piece of software. Its world feels unique, the way it blends different combat styles is fun and it’s a visual treat to look at on a big 4K TV. But countless bugs, performance issues, overly talkative NPCs, boring quest design, and a sense of overall jank makes it hard to excitedly share this game with people. If you can put up with the rough edges and don’t mind an annoying narrator, you might have a good time with Biomutant. There is certainly a lot to do. But if you prefer more stable games, I’d advise waiting.

Village may not live up to the potential of its immediate predecessor, but it’s a safe new entry in the series that induces the same entertaining anxiety as my favorite Resident Evil games and provides a few interesting wrinkles for where the franchise might go next.

The game is freakin’ gorgeous. You get the standard next-gen fidelity benchmarks—4K resolution and a framerate of 60 frames per second—but the beauty of Returnal is more than mere numbers. It’s how moonlight peeks through the forest canopy, or how blue-tendril fauna arcs toward Selene in moments of respite. It’s the way snow shuffles in the wind. It’s the way fog parts as you stroll through buried tombs. Returnal moves at a brisk pace, but I’ve spent long moments just standing still, drinking in the sights.

New Pokémon Snap is pretty magical as well. It takes the unique formula of the 1999 original and expands on it just enough to feel like a completely new adventure, without diluting the simple joy of riding and snapping photos of impossible creatures.

Nier Replicant ver.1.22474487139…, with the handsome younger hero originally exclusive to Japan, looks, plays, and feels better overall, save the unfortunate inclusion of an achievement for players who peek at the underwear of an intersex supporting character. [Impressions]

Outriders is a strange beast that won’t work for everyone, especially when the servers are down. But it mostly clicked with me. The use of looter shooter mechanics in a single-player experience with a solid narrative filled with fun, self-aware dialogue kept me playing even when fights got a bit annoying or missions were too long. Outriders isn’t a new Destiny or Warframe, and that’s fine. I’m happy that Outriders tries to be something different and more self-contained. It might limit its longevity, but it was nice to play something that was an adventure and not a treadmill covered in bad loot and battle passes.

I love Monster Hunter Rise’s style. The music is lovely. The characters and creatures are gorgeous, and there’s something about all the oranges and purples in the game’s color palette that just do it for me. The visuals are a little fuzzy, as the Switch is working extra-hard to make the game look good. Really makes me wonder what the eventual PC version is going to look like. For now, I’m content that my character looks damn great. [Impressions]

While I’ve had a wonderful adventuring in Bravely Default II’s familiar but streamlined JRPG world, it is not of the faint of heart, or those who aren’t ready to get deep into the details of stat math and build synergies. And even then there are more than a few rough edges to catch a frustrating splinter on while playing, something I also did literally when grinding battles in-between doing demolition on my kitchen pantry. Also the game’s sidequests are mostly terrible, but more on that in my full review. [Impressions]

With Persona 5 Strikers Koei Tecmo took a chance, deviating from its regular approach to these kinds of crossovers, creating something greater than the sum of its parts.

Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury is essentially the same game on Switch that some of you may have experienced on Wii U. While there’s no denying that the new hardware can’t keep up with the game’s ambitions at times, this bundle is at its core another fantastic Mario experience. Sure, it pales in comparison to the franchise’s best installments, with a limited moveset and janky camera angles often spoiling the imaginative stages and power-ups, but just like pizza, “bad” Mario is still pretty damn good.

Destruction AllStars left me with feelings of hope and promise, and some uncertainty. Lucid Games didn’t make advance copies of the game available to Kotaku. Nearly everyone you see playing this game is experiencing it in the same way at the same time. Could it take off the way Fall Guys—which itself received a boost from showing up on PS Plus for a month—did last summer? Or will it sputter out like, say, Bleeding Edge? I don’t know what to make of the game yet. No one does, not really. Luckily, it currently doesn’t cost much to find out. [Impressions]

If you can get over having to rebuy the game again and not being able to transfer over old saves, Ultimate Edition on next-gen consoles is the best way to play Control outside of a solidly powerful PC. If you didn’t like Control back when it first came out, because it was too hard or you didn’t find the world engaging, this new port won’t change your mind. But if you bounced off the old game due to long load times or performance problems, this might be the best time to jump back in.

If you can get over having to rebuy the game again and not being able to transfer over old saves, Ultimate Edition on next-gen consoles is the best way to play Control outside of a solidly powerful PC. If you didn’t like Control back when it first came out, because it was too hard or you didn’t find the world engaging, this new port won’t change your mind. But if you bounced off the old game due to long load times or performance problems, this might be the best time to jump back in.

Sadly, I never felt like the game truly took advantage of its two-reality system. There’s no big final level that tests all your spirit world knowledge and skills. And that might be because outside of a few instances where you use your spirit self to shoot some energy or burn some moths, there’s not much else to do in the game. You walk around, you pick up stuff, you read some notes and in a few small instances, you get some cutscenes through the eyes of someone else. This simplicity, coupled with a lack of combat, one enemy who is fairly easy to avoid and areas that look good but are filled with the same puzzles over and over made me lose interest.

Even when I was on familiar ground—”safe” in my disguise, surrounded by pretentious and gullible targets, armed with all my secret gadgets and intel—I felt aware of who 47 actually is: lonely and out of place, with few friends and little control over his life. Whatever humanity he might have is twisted up in the machinations of power and capital that he’s both part of and fights against. “Who will you be without a score to settle?” Lucas Grey asks him early in the game, and it’s a question I often turned over as Hitman 3 played out. Essentially, he’d be no one—but then he’s always been that, really; all the rest of his identity is just make believe. Narratively and structurally, Hitman 3 strips its own make believe away, leaving the series’ core darkness on display.

Despite those missteps, though, I still absolutely loved my time with Like a Dragon. Ichiban was just too charming, Isezaki Ijincho too interesting and its story too irresistible (in its own pulpy way), proving once again that the strength of Yakuza’s heart can easily overcome any of its gameplay shortcomings. Every time I got mad at its RPG failings, I couldn’t stay mad, because every time I got frustrated at the grind Ichiban would do something beautiful, or I’d fight a man holding a giant smoked turkey leg.

On my PC, beefed up specifically for the game, Cyberpunk performs OK. I can work around the technical failings and laugh at or even admire the bugs. It’s only crashed once, hilariously, when another car hit me so hard the whole game mysteriously shut down. So I’m not playing the broken mess we’re all talking about. Instead, I’m playing a game whose various pieces don’t fit together, where busyness and choices feel like illusions to cover up its emptiness, where key features like driving and gunplay are a chore. I leave each play session a little befuddled and dissatisfied, but then I read about a quest or see a video of an unfamiliar area and boot the game up again. I can’t quite say if I like it, even though saying things like that is part of my job. I’m still playing it, but I’m not always sure why.

Immortals impressed me. It’s an unexpected success, blending comedy and condensed open-world gameplay into one of the most entertaining games I’ve played this year. Even if the combat lacks some variety and the main quests are a bit stale, the rest of Immortals is fantastic. It takes the modern open-world game and compresses it into something easier to enjoy, covering the whole thing in colorful art, great humor, and a ton of puzzles. If, over the years, you’ve found yourself getting bored of big open-world games that strive to look hyper-realistic and feature 200 hours of quests, Immortals might just be the perfect alternative.

Destiny 2 is a game about thriving inside the space between new discoveries and big moments. It asks you to patrol the same stretch of post-apocalyptic ramble, defeat the same swarm of strange aliens, and collect the same guns over and over again until you’re tired and fed up, and then asks you to log on the next day and undertake this long, familiar hike toward spiritual exhaustion all over again. And we do. I can’t speak to the reason why millions of others return but for me it’s always been the game’s bold and prolific art direction, super-satisfying kinetics, and granular, romantic world building that’s kept me coming back. Beyond Light nails each of those one again, which is why I haven’t stopped playing it since its release.

For those with cleaner children than mine, Sackboy: A Big Adventure is exactly the sort of non-threatening video game that’s perfect for family game night. It’s charming, with a kid-friendly story and forgiving gameplay that won’t result in ugly tears. It might even inspire someone to one day work at a Michael’s or Joanne’s.

Fans primarily looking for a meaningful addition to Breath of the Wild’s canon can skip this game. It wastes the opportunity to establish the deep connections present in Breath of the Wild, instead serving only as a vehicle for beating up bokoblins as your Breath of the Wild fave. In the absence of other payoffs—for example, I’d forgive every sin named here if, as is typical for the Dynasty Warriors franchise, each character got their own story mode—not even my ardent love for these characters was enough to sustain my interest over the entire, artificially padded game. Again, you can play as Lady Urbosa. That’s it. That’s the game.

Cold War takes all those positives from Modern Warfare, and now we’re one step further with pretty much cross-everything. The multiplayer and Zombies matches are crossplay and cross-generation, meaning no one gets left behind if they couldn’t score a new PS5 or Xbox. There’s also cross-progression, so you can switch platforms without losing your progress.

Demon’s Souls on PlayStation 5 is very much the Demon’s Souls you remember from PlayStation 3. It doesn’t miss a beat, nailing the same melancholy atmosphere and compelling gameplay that would eventually spawn fellow instant-classics like Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Sekiro. While there were bound to be a few aspects that could have been more faithful to the original, PlayStation 5’s Demon’s Souls remake stands out as an incredibly fun way to revisit the cursed land of Boletaria. It’s creepy. It’s gloomy. You’ll get invaded by laggy assholes near the end of a long level and have to do the whole thing over again. It feels like coming home.

The changes Valhalla brings to the franchise feel as great as a warm hearthfire during a cold winter night. The game’s developers have crafted a world that is wonderful to explore, that soaked up hours and hours of my day before I noticed It. The changes to how the game handles loot and questing, for example, make it a nicer experience to play. Overall, it feels a lot of care and thought went into making Valahalla feel less like a checklist of things to do and more like a world to organically experience.

Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales is a beautiful game with a big heart, weighed down by the obligation inherent to all the names in its title. In its absolute best and most joyfully surprising moments, it reminds us that cities are shared spaces with overlapping stories. It shows us that the opposite of web-swinging through Manhattan isn’t stealth setpieces and fight scenes with dozens of enemies, but chatting with your deaf/hard-of-hearing neighbor using sign language. It plays, looks, and feels like the game it evolved from, but it has aims that are both bigger in theme and smaller in scope.

This game is really for my 12-year-old nephew. He loves Lego and Minecraft and is a natural tinkerer, and would rise to the challenge of creating different courses in a limited, largely immutable space. That’s not to say an adult couldn’t also experiment, and I expect social media at Christmastime will be flooded with images of truly wacky course design. If you have a suitable space for it, and can tap into the latent power of your imagination, then Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit will enjoy a decently long life in your household. Or, if you’re like me, someone whose creativity has been worn thin by the realities of being a bill-paying adult, the kart alone will deliver plenty of fun just from chasing around your pets.