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.