But there is a pulse pumping through this techno-artistic marvel. This game has heart; the kind of heart that is difficult to pin down but impossible to deny. It is a wonderful story about terrible people, and a vivacious, tremendously sad tribute to nature itself. There is so much beauty and joy in this expensive, exhausting thing. Somehow that makes it even more perfect—a breathtaking eulogy for a ruined world, created by, about, and for a society that ruined it.

Odyssey is a playground of action game types, an endless buffet at the good kind of Sizzler, the one with the chicken wings and the cheese toast. It doesn’t allow you to get too reliant on any one set of moves, as another one is often available nearby.

Nothing can ever truly recapture the freedom that imagination brings to a tabletop game. But Baldur’s Gate 3 is proof that Larian Studios knows how to capture that spirit and develop in pursuit of that feeling.

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.

There’s meaning in Tears of the Kingdom giving us a world that’s so full of life, where everyone’s and everything’s fate is interlinked, where you’re encouraged to play in the childlike sense, to use your imagination, to create and experiment and just see what happens.

Astro Bot is a mighty game and so is its eponymous hero, but I don’t think either is likely to save the world or this industry. For what it is, though, Astro Bot is incredible, and that is worth celebrating here and now. I just can’t help walking away from the experience with a bittersweet taste in my mouth and a hope that someday soon, we don’t have to look to gaming’s past for the best bits of it all.

It feels like more of a trend follower than a trendsetter, a pastiche of ideas. But they are good ideas, done well enough to bring a once-stale series back up from the depths of Helheim.

Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree is nothing short of magnificent. It is both an expansion to and a distillation of what makes the original game so special, offering you a chance to try out new weapons and builds while learning far more about the Lands Between than you might have expected. It will delight you in one breath and devastate you the next, forcing you to question your approach, to fortify your spirit.

Supergiant’s core design philosophy is still kinetic enough to cut through the noise, and unpredictable enough that I want to see where it goes. This is still Hades we’re talking about, II or otherwise.

Remastered’s graphics look great, and while the game continues to, for the most part, translate well as an expansive, engaging shooter, I’m most struck by how the game allows Samus to be a person. Not a woman with her baggage, sexualized and discarded like a Grand Theft Auto: Vice City sex worker from the same year, and not relegated to the background the way 2023’s Dead Space does to its female characters.

Metaphor does a succinct job of illustrating that progress is slow but still demands we take action, but the struggle for a better world still feels insurmountable to me some days in the face of what feels like never-ending systemic failure. Reading fiction that believes in the possibility of a better world is not the same as fighting for one. Posting isn’t activism. Imagining a world where everything is different, with no consideration for how to actually get there, is meaningless. Metaphor knows that fiction can change the world, but it also knows that inspiring people isn’t enough if they don’t follow through. And if despite my deteriorating hope I’m thinking this way, maybe that’s a sign that even if Metaphor isn’t exactly revolutionary in its politics or worldview, it still must have done something right.

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.

The first game’s story was polarizing; this one’s will clearly be as well. So many people worked on this game for so long, and at such cost, that I want The Last Of Us II to be more than the experience I had. It’s a visually beautiful game that feels distinct to play, and the story it tells and how it tells it, at the most basic level, certainly pushes the edges of what games have done before. None of those accomplishments elevated or redeemed it for me. Like the nature consuming Seattle, or the outbreak consuming humanity, its ugliness overshadowed everything else.

Dwarf Fortress is a brilliant game, but it will make you work to find that out.

Half-Life: Alyx reaches some astoundingly high heights while also managing to be both too ambitious and too conservative for its own good.

It is, on so many levels, an incredible achievement, packed with enough heart, intelligence, and confidence to sustain ten lesser games. It’s a testament to its form, even as it’s held back by it in places. It still feels premature to declare Original Sin 2 an all-time classic, as some have, but I imagine plenty of future games will borrow ideas from it. It’ll be a crying shame if they don’t.

This game will take many, many hours of your time. In exchange, you’ll get a terrific, pulpy story told with style to spare. Persona 5 took nearly 100 hours of my time, and I gave it gladly.

It is so large and generous that it’s going to leave many different people with many different takeaways based on which characters and ideas they latch onto first or last or in the middle. Some will be longer-winded than mine, others will be as simple as “dash good” (and oh man, the dash is so, so good). This is not all to say that Hades tries to wriggle out of saying anything definitive. It says plenty no matter how you slice it. But a good story is in the telling, and Hades tells its story a little differently to everybody. It’s like a good myth, in that regard. Or a hydra, in that it has a lot of heads, but nobody can quite agree on exactly how many.

Uncharted 4 may have problems at its edges, but its middle is phenomenal. It is a sufficiently wonderful finale for a studio that has made its own case that its next great step should be somewhere new.

It’s difficult to imagine the type of gamer for whom Smash Ultimate has no appeal. This is a big game, and with the fat skimmed off, a remarkable one. Its core attraction—fighting on a platform—is as polished and brilliant and sharp as ever, its fighters the most unique and deep.

Sandfall Interactive is made up of a lot of veteran talent, but as a unit, it’s still finding its footing, so it makes sense that despite all Clair Obscur’s polish and vision that there would be a few oversights that frustrate. But if the team’s debut project is this impressive, I can’t wait to see what the future holds.

Rebirth is sure to be a more divisive and debated game than Remake was. But in this deep sea of an RPG, I was thrilled by the action and the tactics, brought to emotional highs and lows through its characters, and found myself with an even greater love of FF7, the original and this return, than I thought was possible.

Wonder is a gorgeous, cartoonish jolt of creativity and silliness that makes me smile each time I play it. I genuinely felt better after a few hours of Super Mario Bros. Wonder. It made me feel like a little kid again. Anything was possible in each of its courses, and by the end I had seen things I never expected to see in a Mario game. The feeling of playing Wonder didn’t cure my illness, but if I could bottle it and save it for a rainy day, I’d do it in a heartbeat.

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.

If you’re the type who loves a grind and enjoys the prospect of wailing on a bunch of civilians to make numbers go up, this mode has that. If you want to play through some really fun stories featuring your favorite Street Fighter heroes and villains, that’s one of World Tour’s biggest draws. But if you’re interested in a tight, satisfying fighting game experience, World Tour isn’t quite that, and it sucks because a mode geared toward people who don’t want to be FGC experts shouldn’t so often feel frustrating and insurmountable for reasons that go beyond how fighting games typically play. I wonder if World Tour will put more casual fans off at least as much as it draws them in.

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 driving is as good as ever; it looks incredible, and Japan is a perfect choice for the series. Some half-baked new ideas and a formula that is starting to feel stale aren’t big enough problems to ruin the experience, even if Horizon 6 sometimes seems overly focused on fun over anything else, like a satisfying progression towards supercars and fame. None of that matters as I’m blasting across Japan in a hot pink Acura RSX from the 90s with a big grin on my face.

Part of the original Mario Kart 8 was broken, and Nintendo fixed it in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, giving an already spectacular game substantial new legs...As for those of you new to Mario Kart 8, you’re showing up to the party at exactly the right time.