Nioh 3 also does something that established franchises, especially today, sometimes seem allergic to: it takes risky swings to switch up a beloved formula. In the moments where everything aligns and the shift to a more expansive, exploration-focused experience fires on all cylinders—creating surprising stories and unique victories—it’s not hard to imagine how successive games could build on these changes and continue to offer further excitement.

Dragon Quest VII Reimagined is a wonderful remake of Dragon Quest VII 2000, but as I said earlier, all Dragon Quest VII can be is itself with its small islands, portals, and a lot of walking back and forth to fix specific problems like appeasing an active volcano or helping a kingdom fight against rampaging robots. I’d more easily recommend Dragon Quest XI, which is a great entry point for anyone curious about 3D Dragon Quest. And of course, there’s the trio of HD-2D games that lay out the origin of everything Dragon Quest is about. There’s nothing wrong with choosing Dragon Quest VII Reimagined as your first Dragon Quest, but remember what I said before? We Dragon Quest fans are spoiled for choice now. And with that last thought, celebrate and revel in our good fortune.

Code Vein II doesn’t just take a superficial anime aesthetic and use it as window dressing on a popular genre. Its story and charming cast elevate it to create a unique middle ground that will appeal to JRPG and Soulslike fans alike. It’s got its fair share of issues, such as the performance woes and boring enemy fodder design. Still, if you’re looking to ease into the Soulslike genre before hitting the big leagues, Code Vein II is worth spilling blood over.

Climbing requires you to be aware of everything from your toes to fingertips. The game’s attempt to replicate that is an admirable one, but the gap it tries to bridge between how the human body moves and how a video game character does feels like it doesn’t quite meet in the middle. What’s left is something that rewards a level of patience I don’t think I have anymore. I’ll just keep my feet firmly planted on the ground for now. [Impressions]

Don’t Stop GirlyPop is an example of a shooter that oozes style and has some cool ideas, like using a flip phone to communicate with your handler, a woman who appears in live-action video clips on your phone’s screen. But its visuals get in the way, and its combat is too focused on chaotic speed and screen-obscuring effects. Perhaps I could still enjoy all of this if the guns were satisfying to use and the enemies fun to kill, but more often than not, I wasn’t sure if I was doing well in a fight or if my guns were even hitting anything. So I’m sorry to say I stopped playing GirlyPop before the game ended. But hey, at least I’ll have the music to jam out, too.

It is perhaps about time we stopped being surprised by just how brilliant each new game from Inkle is capable of being, but I’m still delighted by how different TR-49 feels from, say, Sorcery!, Heaven’s Vault, and Overboard! Each game is an extraordinary demonstration of a mastery of language, and TR-49 is no different. Except it’s very different, not least in its paranoia over the power of language, its potential dangers, and indeed the explicit dangers of its exploitation and censorship. 2026 is a chillingly perfect time to release a game about a machine that learns the atomistic contents of books, destroying them in the process.

Mio is stylish and elegant to boot, but that and a decent grasp of the fundamentals are not enough to deepen my appreciation of what’s ultimately a pretty by-the-numbers Metroidvania. It’s an adherent to the form, but I rarely like the tune it sings, and don’t quite love it despite my efforts to.

In 1991, a great opportunity was missed: the opportunity to make an action game for home consoles that captured the immense potential offered by the Terminator 2 license. But at long last, Bitmap Bureau has rectified this wrong with a game that almost feels like a classic of that bygone era. If only we could send it back in time so we all could have enjoyed it back in 1991.

Too Kyo Games easily could have set its niche obsessions of killing games, branching narratives, and mind-bending twists aside and created something that aimed for the widest personal audience in hopes that it would save the studio. Instead, it committed to what it knows, leaning into what has always made its leads’ work so memorable. Where others might have pumped the brakes on their ambitions, Too Kyo slammed its foot on the gas and hoped there would still be another route to follow when it reached the end. The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy may not be for everyone, but anyone can see what it’s done and know that it’s earned their respect.

Horses is fine. It’s not particularly trailblazing, but it knows what it’s trying to convey, and it uses a pretty concise visual metaphor to get it across. It is gross to look at, but I only really mind that when its jittery framerate makes me queasy. I don’t believe it is as distasteful as Epic or Steam does, and I still am surprised that something that feels mostly tame and along the lines of an A24 horror film has caused such controversy. If Horses didn’t expose anything we didn’t already know about the dangers of a sheltered, puritanical lifestyle, it at least unmasked Steam and Epic as cowardly companies that can’t be bothered to actually vet the work they’re barring from entry. I wish we could’ve had the conversation those bans sparked about a better game, but Horses, at the very least, is fine enough to have deserved better than being locked out in the rain.

Kirby Air Riders is not deep. It’s not substantial. It’s never going to become the hearty dinner its curated clips or indulgent Nintendo Directs want you to believe it might be. Kirby, the godly creature that he is, can inhale an entire match and waddle straight into the next challenge without once wondering what he just ate. I can enjoy the rush, but I can’t live inside it like him. After an hour or two, the buzz wears off, the repetition settles in, and I’m left wanting something that lets skill accumulate or understanding compound instead of just teaching me to parse the screen more efficiently. After enough hours with it, I’ve learned to stop waiting for the game to transform into a meal and to simply enjoy the carbonated geyser it actually is.

Metroid Prime 4: Beyond is a good game made worse by some really bad choices. It features annoying characters who ruin the isolated and haunting vibes that this latest sequel strives so hard to create, and forces Samus to drive across a boring desert over and over and over again for no good reason other than forcing you to do some extra busy work to extend Prime 4’s runtime to around 11 hours for most people.

It’s over too soon and just one extra mode shy of what might feel like a more complete experience. If it follows the mold of Shredder’s Revenge, we’ll get a steady cadence of free updates and a paid DLC at some point. But for now, it does exactly what it needs to: add fresh tricks to a classic genre that makes it feel like you’re a ’90s Marvel action figure rampaging through a Saturday morning cartoon.

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.

Routine was announced over a decade ago at this point. So was it worth the wait? Hard to say, as I wasn’t waiting for it, but I can confirm that a decade after it was first revealed, Routine is a damn fine horror game that stands toe to toe with other heavy hitters of the genre.

In a vacuum, this year’s Call of Duty is a weird, really big, and mostly bad misfire that I doubt hurts the franchise all that much in the long run. But if we look beyond Black Ops 7 and consider the larger context, this might be the worst version of Call of Duty for Activision to have launched in 2025, as it’s going up against the super popular, grounded, and back-to-basics Battlefield 6.

In the end, I had a fine time with Dispatch. I liked it when I was playing it, looked forward to its next episodes when I wasn’t, and most of my biggest complaints with it I express with a shrug. Sometimes your experience with something is not that serious, and it’s nice to be able to leave something behind knowing you’d pick it up again if another pair of episodes dropped next week. And if no future episodes come, that would be okay, too.

Arc Raiders rarely eases up the pressure it puts on you. For some, that’s likely to be a dealbreaker. But if you’re game for something thrilling and you’re willing to tolerate loss, Arc Raiders is one of the most approachable and engaging examples of the extraction shooter yet.

Silksong still yields so much to see, and there are inarguably more nooks and crannies than ever to explore in Pharloom, but Hallownest’s elegant and understated mystique is absent here, and it is instead replaced by a labyrinthine behemoth–complete with many proverbial Minotaurs–though one that instills in you the pressure of obligatory completionism rather than the liberating sense of adventure.

The Outer Worlds 2 promises flexibility in storytelling, but when that flexibility comes from interacting with one-dimensional characters who inhabit such an unconvincing world, there isn’t much of a point to it.

Z-A is a game of trying new things and hoping for the best. Not everyone agrees on what the best course of action is, but nevertheless, Lumiose City has to move forward and carve out a future for itself, much like the Pokémon franchise has been trying to do in recent years. It has started abandoning long-held traditions, both in the games and elsewhere, in the hopes that it can be something greater than the corporate machine has forced it to be for so long. Maybe not every change is going to work for everyone, and it will take time for a series that was stuck in its ways for so long to find its footing.

Keeper isn’t a mechanically deep game or a complicated thing to play. Instead, Double Fine wants you to just vibe out with it for like three hours. Enjoy all the pretty colors, the weird shit, and hopefully, by the end, feel something. And to Keeper’s credit, by the time credits rolled, I did indeed feel something. It’s wild to think that a story about a lighthouse and a bird with no dialogue could make me tear up a bit at the very end, but that’s exactly what happened. I didn’t expect it, but the conclusion was a wonderful way to end this epic journey.

Battlefield 6’s campaign is too unevenly executed to make its vision as compelling as it ought to be, but it still works well enough to inflect the entire game with a healthy cynicism unusual for the genre. Though every multiplayer military shooter feels at least slightly callous when viewed from a distance, unending war modeled with a twinned desire for both realism and the rendering down of martial violence into sport, Battlefield 6 manages to make a natural home for its design ethos in that discordance. It finds the road to global ruin pretty exciting, and believes that you will, too. For the most part, it’s right.

I’m still chipping away at runs and cracking the foundations of Absolum’s world, but my short few hours or so with it have been more than enough to keep me banging my head against its stone gates. It is one of the most rewarding spins on both the beat-em-up and roguelike genres I’ve played all year. [Impressions]

Time Stranger sometimes awkwardly fumbles its way to the point it’s trying to make, but every time it shows its hand, it proves it’s willing to punch above its weight.

The Ivalice Chronicles isn’t the perfect version of Final Fantasy Tactics I can imagine in my head, but it’s unquestionably the best version of the one that actually exists. The Ivalice Chronicles, like its protagonist Ramza Beoulve, stands athwart history a flawed but uncompromising messenger with one simple plea: “Go back and play one of the best games ever made.”

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.

Silent Hill f is ambitious in its desires. It asks for permission to deviate from the series’ traditional setting while offering up quicker, more action-focused combat. It leaves behind its titular setting in favor of a new horizon. It succeeds on all these fronts as a spin-off that explores Silent Hill’s classic gloom and internal psychological struggle, toying with themes of friendship, gendered expectations, commitment, and individual worth like a cat, or a fox, playing with its prey. It is a horrorscape I was terrified of and yet unable to look away from, one that’s resonated with me long after the credits rolled, and that quickly pulled me back in for another trip down the miserable foggy alleyways of this strange mountainside village.