When a piece of media as earnest as Octopath Traveler 0 comes along—packed with wandering swordsmen, villains ascending to the Heavens, and more—it’s hard not to end up smitten. There is a belief that so long as you tell a story with your head held high and love for your audience, everything else will work out. And the damndest thing about that is that belief is correct. Meet this game with your own child-like sense of earnestness, and you will have an experience that you’ll not forget anytime soon.

Planet Coaster is best when treated as a giant LEGO set. A sunny, cheery tabula rasa, lying there waiting for you to go nuts in a never-ending quest to make yourself as happy as the grinning faces of the people lining up to take your rides for a spin.

The creative team for this series has changed a lot since its beginnings. The world around Gears has changed, too. Gears 5 seems like a reflection of those changes. It’s a game that further complicates its world and stars a more complex hero. It’s still a game with a chainsaw gun, but now, those chainsaw guns can have a grenade launcher attached. Sometimes, change is good.

Reviving Dark Souls means embracing these imperfections and leaving the majority of them intact. Save for a few glitches like the ability to gain infinite souls, Dark Souls Remastered keeps most of the original game’s flaws rather than significantly revamping or fixing issues with the original.

Mortal Kombat 1 is truly a fighting game that anyone can enjoy, even if you just button-mash endlessly. And while I wish it did more to reinvent the blood-soaked wheel, MK1 is still a worthwhile package that will please most fighting game fans, pros and casuals alike.

Most every task the game has set before me has been entertaining, challenging, and rewarding. Yet I feel my former student’s weariness mixing in with my usual optimism. There’s always something else to go do, but on the other hand, there’s always something else to go do.

I’m left wondering what a true metamorphosis of Gears could look like, how this series could go about defining a new generation of video games. It’s a lot to ask. Gears of War might continue as on as it has, a single revolution followed by a lifetime of refinement. It’s enough.

It’s a realistic depiction of depression, but it’s as tiring to play as it is to live.

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.

Wargroove takes some of the best elements of all those games and creates something of its own. It’s not a hollow imitation, but a spirited homage, characterful and generous. Even when I didn’t love it, I still couldn’t help but like it.

While Oxenfree II: Lost Signals isn’t an overhaul compared to its predecessor, it didn’t need to be. It tells an excellent story with a cast of well-developed characters, and the smaller changes are what help define the sequel. Better pacing, smoother controls, and more interesting gameplay ideas make it a worthy follow-up to the supernatural coming-of-age story that first graced our hearts seven years ago.

Streets of Rage 4 feels more like a celebration of that history inside of a new and updated world. I will continue to play an absurd amount of this game in the years to come, and I’m glad to fit it into rotation when deciding which in the series I want to dive into with friends.

For all that I hope Naughty Dog refines their next game, I can’t say I regret taking another scenic spin down Uncharted lane. Lost Legacy tells a winning tale of friendship set against a backdrop of gorgeous mayhem, and it might even teach you a thing or two about Indian history along the way.

Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound captures virtually everything that made 2D action games of yesteryear awesome while ironing out all the rough edges synonymous with that era of gaming. It looks spectacular, controls like a dream, and boasts levels that are worth experiencing over and over again. It does end too soon for its own good, and its short runtime may throw some people off. Aside from that, however, the developers at The Game Kitchen have proven themselves to be masters of their retro-inspired craft with this one. Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound is a worthy successor to its NES predecessors, without a boomerang bird in sight.

It’s impossible to predict what Magic Arena will mean for the paper card game’s future. That said, it’s easy to look around and see hype for the game snowballing alongside Arena’s release and the launch of Magic’s new esports league. For my part, Magic Arena’s pitch has finally gotten me hooked on a game I’ve been playing on and off for seven years. Its ease of play makes the average Magic game more of a ballet than a stop-and-start football match. As most of its clunkier aspects game melt away, the heart of a card game that has nearly three decades’ worth of staying power shines through.

Hatsune Miku: Project Diva Future Tone doesn’t miss many beats. Though a couple of my more recent favorite Miku tunes didn’t make the cut (notably “Love Song,” featured in last year’s Project Diva X), I am overwhelmed by what Sega’s latest vocaloid rhythm game has to offer.

Hatsune Miku: Project Diva Future Tone doesn’t miss many beats. Though a couple of my more recent favorite Miku tunes didn’t make the cut (notably “Love Song,” featured in last year’s Project Diva X), I am overwhelmed by what Sega’s latest vocaloid rhythm game has to offer.

In one delightful moment, my historical knowledge was used to mislead me, as the game both conformed to and subverted my expectations of what I expected a character to do based on her actions in actual history. Games often reward players for knowing their lore, and it was exhilarating to be punished for it. I’m not saying that you need to have a dozen Japanese history tabs open like I currently do. But playing the game while knowing the history gives you a unique experience.

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.

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 is simultaneously a joke about pixel hunting, a joke about adventure games, and a joke about the dumb things that players will do in video games. Did you ever think you’d want to hunt for pixels again? And did you ever think that the act of hunting pixels might be fun? Thimbleweed Park somehow both subverts pixel-hunting and makes you want to hunt pixels, which is just about all you can ask for in an adventure game.

It’s undeniably cool, and if it’s not your thing, then Sayonara Wild Hearts is like, whatever. It wants to take whoever does love it and ride off into the neon sunset with them.

The way Crow Country deploys these mechanics leaves it feeling like a shadow of its inspirations. While it has all the signifiers of classic survival horror it’s all lacking depth. The visual style, the most unique aspect of the game in how it merges and plays with its inspirations, is the star of the show here. Sadly that can’t make up for the game’s mechanics, which present the survival horror genre’s core pillars without executing them properly. That being the game offers a peculiar experience for fans of the genre, who are the most likely people to pick up Crow Country. It won’t live up to its inspirations but it will still trigger that nostalgic response just enough to make it an enjoyable ride through a simplified—even theme park-ified—version of survival horror.

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.

Genshin Impact is a solid action-RPG with an open world on the scale of something you’d expect from a full-price game rather than something that’s available for free. It spices up formulaic combat with creative ideas. Even the derivative parts are, for what it’s worth, well-executed. At the very least, the game is worth checking out. Just don’t expect it to be Breath of the Wild 1.5. [Impressions]

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.

Bloodstained is tethered to video game relevance by its influential creator’s desire to continue doing what he has done. Clearly, that’s something fans want, and it’s something Igarashi and the team at his studio, ArtPlay, do well. Bloodstained is fun to play. It’s also fun to take in, full of amusing touches like the demon that doesn’t attack you with claws or axes or swords, but by standing in a red dress and playing guitar riffs so sick flames come out to torch you. Or the haunted portraits that assault you, bearing the faces of Kickstarter backers.

Ghost of Tsushima is pretty as heck—sporadic capturing left me with almost 50 GB worth of screenshots and short video clips to sift through—but at its core, it’s just another open-world game. I found myself audibly sighing every time I crested a hill towards a mystery objective only to find another fox to follow or another haiku to compose. These diversions, while unique at first glance, proved to just be busy work as time wore on.