A choppy start leads to a compelling survival experience in Raft.

There's a decent space sim buried within Dual Universe, but you'll need to do a lot of digging to find it.

Roller Drama is charming but undermined by technical issues and obtuse puzzles.

Industries of Titan starts strong and has some bold ideas, but they just don't really go anywhere.

Mask of the Rose's writing and characters shine, but the game underneath them never fully gels together.

Lakeburg Legacies is an awkward, goalless mix of contradictions and impersonal systems.

A family-friendly adventure that captures the essence of the show, despite rough edges and a steep price.

While light on visuals and variety, Natsu-Mon's comforting world makes it a delightful summer escape.

Blowing out Factorio’s scale and reinventing its factory systems multiple times over, Space Age is an immediate contender for the best expansion ever made.

Repo is a fantastic co-op horror game that can hold its own against big shots like Lethal Company. It's also only in early access right now, and with plans to introduce more player customisation, story elements, equipment, levels, and enemies, all I can say is that I'm really looking forward to seeing where the devs take this co-op horror game. [Early Access Impressions]

Honestly, I would have preferred Krafton give this game even more time to cook. It almost feels like I'm playing pretend at playing pretend right now—engaging with a variety of set pieces I can do a cute peace sign in front of before moving onto the next thing. In an attempt to offer something different to The Sims, Inzoi has failed to establish any sort of identity of its own. I'm not even sure Krafton knows what direction it wants to take right now, but it needs to figure that out quickly, otherwise I fear it'll be another casualty of the genre. [Impressions]

It's so mundane that I expected Schedule 1 to get boring by the fifteenth time I'd lugged a bulk order of plastic baggies to my crappy apartment, but like my latest strand of weed called "Wedding Ass," the drug-dealing sim dominating Steam right now is undeniably habit-forming...Chalk up that success to a lot of smart design choices from developer TVGS—its constant sense of progression, clockwork open world, expressive characters, gratifying supply/demand loop, day one co-op support—but I reckon Schedule 1's secret sauce is a crafting system that doesn't suck. [Early Access Impressions]

Labyrinth of the Demon King offers familiar first-person retro dungeon crawling, but distinguishes itself with its overpowering—almost unbearable—mood of dread.

Pretty much just an ebook, but its form means you can gamify your progress and listen to some bangers while you read it.

Mycopunk shows a ton of promise, but that doesn't mean it's infallible. The progression can become a bit of a slog, and it can take a while to level up or collect enough resources to upgrade your kit. There's also definitely a cap as to how many missions you can do in a row before it all just blends into a violent blur. The variety in mission types only keeps things fresh for so long. There are also some glitches, many of which the devs are aware of, but that doesn't make them any less annoying. I've been lasered by an Abomination through a wall more than once now—you're never safe, even when you think you are. But none of this ruins the fun, it's just something to bear in mind: The fungal growths of Early Access. [Early Access Provisional Score = 79]

Caput Mortem is a little insubstantial, but reasonably priced for its short runtime and full of so many surprises and great moments, I can't help but love it.

Hyperbeat is brief and a little twee at times, but its lively musical flights are one-of-a-kind.

Speedy, stylish, and effortlessly flexible, Tokyo Xtreme Racer captures the raw spirit of street racing.

A high-concept, fascinating strategy RPG that can start to buckle under its own ambitions.

Prizing immersion and effort above all, this is a demanding, but very rewarding, RPG.

I haven't been too blown away by what I've seen of it so far, but if Masters of Albion could help revive the god game genre, at least a little? That'd be fine by me. [Early Access Impressions]

On the surface, Bond might seem a natural fit for IO: all glitz and gadgets that make it feel like barely a skip away from the world of Hitman. But what I saw had me feeling that the studio has not leaned into its strengths, trading the absurd clockwork worlds of Agent 47 for a more tightly choreographed, linear, and "cinematic" game that IO has never been all that good at. The last time it tried was Hitman: Absolution. We know how that worked out. [3-Hour Hands-On Impressions]

But as I should've guessed from developer Traveller's Tales' modern Lego run, Legacy of the Dark Knight is just too darn delightful to sustain a stormy mood. It took all of five minutes for the brick-based brawler to put a smile on my face, and it didn't go away for two hours of play. [2-Hour Hands-On Impressions]