Engage continues the series trend of mashing up tactics and RPG elements, but while the latter falls flat and feels out of place, it excels in the former. And if my biggest qualms are with the game’s least Fire Emblem-y parts, I consider that a solid entry in the series.

Dwarf Fortress is a storytelling engine as much as it is a game, spitting out associations and facts and details that you can shape into a coherent and specific narrative. This is also what we do to our own lives, personifying random events so that they feel significant rather than a matter of chance. Life isn’t usually a satisfying narrative. It isn’t so much that “Dwarf Fortress” is a perfect simulacrum of life, but that it shines a bright light on the human tendency to look for meaning in everything. I care about my dwarves because the stories I make up about their lives are also the ones I make up about my own.

Need for Speed Unbound handily straddles the line between realism and fun, making it one of the best racing experiences of the year.

Aside from the perspiration provided by an initial landing at a crowded point of interest, or the jaw-clenching moments of the final circle, the pace of play is deliberate, allowing players to think, look around and take advantage of the battleground in clever and effective ways.

Somerville reminded me of the qualities that I cherish in adventure games, particularly their ability to plunge one into the unexpected. I appreciated how its mechanics sidestep the usual weaponry that goes along with science-fiction games. (A gun-toting, super-soldier shows up at one point, but things don’t end well for them.) “Somerville” effortlessly pulled me in from moment to moment because I was eager to discover the next audiovisual flourish around the corner. There is a sequence toward the end where the man revisits places that is particularly captivating for the way in which it makes the familiar strange. That said, I was a little disappointed with the final scene in the game, which struck me as an overly familiar allusion to the ending of Tarkovsky’s film “Solaris.” But that aside, “Somerville” is the best adventure game I’ve played since “Little Nightmares 2.”

The core mechanics and the gameplay loop are satisfying enough to keep you coming back. The Pokémon designs of the ones you can get in the Paldea region are great and varied...But the pacing and graphical disappointments keep “Scarlet” and “Violet” from being the best open-world games we know the series is capable of producing. One thing that Game Freak really needs to correct before they take another stab at the next major Pokémon game is this graphical stuff, like the frame rate issues and the draw distance and just basic things that you need for players to actively engage with the world you’ve created.

I think this is a really good step forward for the series and I love how much the series has been growing, how they’ve been incorporating more modern features and becoming more accessible for players. I still had a ton of fun playing. Really, the biggest knocks against it would be the repetitiveness of some challenges and the graphical issues.

There’s something dedicated Sonic fans see in “Frontiers” that others simply don’t, and it’s not just nostalgia.

The game’s name refers to the reappearance of an element in a painting that an artist had painted over. As much as characters in “Pentiment” might fight to maintain the status quo or to turn away from history and heartbreak, they’re no match for the forces that send humanity hurtling forward. While I initially started “Pentiment” hoping for a riveting distraction, what I ended up with was a game about uncovering history and past trauma. In many ways, it is more admirable, brutal and perhaps healing to just face these problems head on.

Popular entertainment these days is obsessed with lore to a fault. Disney’s Marvel and Star Wars franchises have entire councils of people devoted to keeping lore straight across these stories. Even 2022′s biggest game, “Elden Ring,” was essentially a story all about lore. Despite tapping into well-mined Norse mythology, “Ragnarok” is focused squarely on seeing and hearing its characters. Like Kratos, you will actually like spending time with them. The memories of these people will stay with you long after the credits roll. By the end, you will believe that even a god of war can earn himself some peace.

For some players, Signalis will summon to mind the halcyon days of playing the original PS1 version of “Resident Evil 2” in the late ’90s, or even its miraculously faithful replica on the Nintendo 64. Signalis is itself something of a faithful replica, an acolyte in thrall to an old — and supposedly antiquated — master. But the game finds the classic survival horror genre in fine health.

New Tales from the Borderlands” takes a lot of what made Telltale’s gameplay unique and either keeps it the same or improves on it.

Though pandemic fiction may seem like the last thing audiences need right now, the catharsis “Requiem” provides is a valuable salve. It reminds us that others, today and in the past, feel or have felt our same confusion, fear and grief. In this, it makes an argument not for hiding the toll of so much pain away in the shadows, secreting bodies in dark passageways, but of bringing everything out into the light of day so we can try to hear what notes of hope sing through the darkness.

Modestly priced at $40, Nier: Automata offers dozens of hours of content in a port that sees sensible compromise (blurrier textures, a capped framerate) while retaining what makes the experience an opera of spectacle and mood. Its launch this week further strengthens the deep quality of the Nintendo Switch’s growing library, and it is immediately one of the best titles you could own on the platform.

In a way, it’s the FPS genre that grants players a kind of agency that rhythm games haven’t — the freedom and exhilaration of performance. You can execute kills to the beat of your internal pulse, with the act of shooting bodies and popping heads forming a pleasing rhythm. That’s why playing “Metal: Hellsinger” can almost feel like you’re holding the drumsticks yourself, as you blaze through demon hordes with a percussive flow of your own.

[“Return to Monkey Island” is] a wonderful, heartfelt adventure game that made me laugh all the way through.

Some writers have described “Immortality” as being about burnout or auteurism (the final few scenes can be read as evidence for that theory). But that’s not quite right, akin to saying Star Wars is about space. Artistry does not grant privileged access to decency or good nature. That is what the game is, not what it is about. It’s text, not subtext. For so long as “Immortality” uses that as a starting point to probe further, it is a high water mark for gaming in 2022. When the characters are allowed to be people — not vampires nor aliens nor angels but people who are tired, embarrassed, horny, funny, naive, voyeuristic, creepy and more — each frame’s richness is its own reward.

What Temtem has achieved is remarkable. After two years of being dubbed a copycat, its long-awaited launch may yet inspire copycats of its own.

Splatoon 3 doesn’t drastically change the formula because it really doesn’t need to. Its modes are varied and offer truly different experiences that would shine on their own. If you’re a newcomer looking to break into the series, you may be a little lost at first, but stick with it. It’s an inky mess well worth your time.

Revisiting it now really is like watching an old favorite movie again. Its earnestness ensures a timelessness to the story that too many other games miss when they try to seize a moment in time. The written dialogue still shines, and the performances still sing.

The races themselves are a blast. I found the majority of the races to be completely absorbing and, to my surprise, even more exciting than most actual racing games. But the massive scope of the game is both a blessing and a curse: Hardcore Formula 1 fans will lose themselves in the seemingly limitless options of team management, while newcomers to the sport may be turned off by the steep learning curve.

If a rollerskating John Wick in a 70s synth bar sounds like a good time, then I have just the game for you.

Endling isn’t the sort of game you might settle down to play after a long day of doomscrolling through social media; it’s the sort that forces you to confront the monstrous scale and toll of human activity on the ecosystem and the planet. And yet, even as a deeply apocalyptic look at what feels like the imminent end of our world, the game’s profound pessimism doesn’t stray too far from the truth. Scientists have already warned that we are in danger of losing 20 to 50 percent of all species by the end of this century; the bulk of this is due to human activity.

It doesn’t try to make grand statements about mankind’s hubris or shortsighted innovation. Instead, it walks you through a living, breathing city where robots have molded their own society from the ashes of another, and lets players make of humanity’s self-destruction what they will. And that impression will stick with you long after the game ends.

Puzzle games have to manage a delicate balancing act: If solutions are too simple, players lose interest; too difficult, and they feel cheated, like the answer was never decipherable to begin with. “Escape Academy” was opaque at times, but the answer always felt like it was within my grasp, if I just tried out this one idea, or thought about the puzzle from this other angle. Giving players that sense of empowerment is hard, and games don’t always get it right. But “Escape Academy” walks that tightrope with finesse, joining the pantheon of frantic-but-fun co-op greats.

Studio MDHR’s Cuphead: The Delicious Last Course provides players with a five-star meal. As I picked my teeth, let out a final sigh of relief and felt full from my experience, I can only hope that the DLC’s name was just a play on words — and that there’s still room left for dessert.

Shredder’s Revenge achieves everything it set out to do, and will go down as an instant classic for its genre. No matter what era, whether it’s 1987, 1989 or 2022, it would be one of the finest, most exciting video game experiences of the year, honing an arcade formula as ageless as Turtles in time.

Supermassive Games does its best work when it embraces these kinds of callbacks, committing to the camp and cheesiness of the slasher films that inspired its games. Despite its stumbles, “The Quarry” is a testament to that, and while it doesn’t quite stack up to the original, it’s a compelling tribute that I’ll be playing again and again.