As fascinated as I am by the main story unfolding across Ishin’s cutscenes, I’m doubtful this is a game I will or should stick with. I don’t really want to play more of this game, I just want to know what is going to happen in the next set of cutscenes.

All of this contributes to what may be Wild Hearts’ greatest achievement over Monster Hunter, its ability to resolve the narrative tension of the hunt. Wild Hearts is set in Minato, a small, forgotten corner of an otherwise war-torn world. Rival clans battle over territory and succession rights, brutalizing both each other and the very ground upon which they walk. This has, in time, led to an abundance of refugees and those who refuse to participate in the war machine. Your hunter is one of those people. In a brief conversation with another character, they ask why you left your home to hunt kemono, and you are offered two options: “I don’t want to talk about it,” or “Because they asked me to hunt people instead.”

Dead Space kicked ass in 2008, and this version kicks ass in 2023. It’s spooky, and it feels good to tear apart ugly dudes. What else is there to say? I hope the same team gets a chance to apply this same treatment for Dead Space 2, though perhaps with the confidence to put more of their own bloody stamp on it. And if that’s a problem, screw it—just let them make their own Dead Space, pull some elements from the sequels, and chart a new path.

Fire Emblem Engage is obsessed with the series’ past. It builds itself around the protagonists of previous games, re-uses those game’s most memorable maps, and builds its narrative around referencing the beats of older, better told stories. If the next Fire Emblem game is like this, it will be a disappointment. Engage’s tactics, however, set a new standard for the series. IntelligentSystems managed to perfectly meld mechanics and tone, but the tone they picked was fun, but ultimately empty. If they could manage to apply these same principles to more interesting narrative ends, the next Fire Emblem game would be the series’ best.

Frankly, I didn’t much like the balance Midnight Suns strikes at first. I wanted “Marvel XCOM” and could not help but be disappointed in how emphatically Midnight Suns is not that. Over the holiday weekend, however, I really came around to what Firaxis hashave done here. It’s a much more relaxing and less demanding game than XCOM. It’s not easy, to be clear: it does not fall into the Fire Emblem: Three Houses trap of making combat so trivial that it mostly interrupts the socializing you’re there to do. But it is forgiving. If you win a battle, even if you win it in an ugly and inefficient fashion, everyone will be okay and the game will go on. Everyone will get back to the Abbey and, once they’re there, they’ll go right back to their friendly and not-so-friendly bickering at the end of the world.

It is unlike any game I have ever played, even its predecessor Devil Daggers isn’t…like this. Other score and time attack games don’t do this to me. They do not make me keep coming back over and over again. They do not make me wish I could open my eyes wider and wider until I can eat the world. I am terrified of it.

Shovel Knight Dig doesn’t strike me as a game that’ll demand dozens of hours to see it through, but in a way, that’s part of the appeal. The game isn’t a pushover, but it’s not full of crap-your-pants moments that result in immediate and hair-pulling deaths like a Spelunky. It’s a lil’ gentler. But four hours or 40 hours, I’ll get there, because I need to see what’s at the bottom.

Rather than getting annoyed, as is often the case in games I play where I try to collect things until suddenly I don’t, I left every stage of Tinykin feeling like a certified explorer. It was nice.

Regardless of how one feels about charging $70 for an update to a game from 2013, The Last of Us remains an utterly compelling ride.

For as charming of a game as ‘Stray’ is, it undercuts its thematic core by imagining a post-human future in decidedly human ways.

The presentation of this game is what makes its gameplay feel so sharp, including the way it tells its story and characterizes the other Neons that compete with you and tease you shamelessly. Once you get the hang of Neon White’s fast-paced gameplay, it feels incredibly natural—as natural as the witty, sexy banter between the characters therein. It’s sweet as sin itself, and goes down just as easy.

Citizen Sleeper stands out as one of the best games of the year, with great writing that avoids easy outs.

There are likely dozens if not hundreds of games that came this close to greatness, and quite a few great ones that came just as close to irrelevance. Games journalists all have their lists of games that disappeared after an amazing E3 presentation or demo, or games that proved to be inexplicable disappointments on release. A lot of career developers end up working on an amazing project that never sees the light of day, and only exist on hard drives full of unused assets and documentation. What makes Abermore so unusual is that it so clearly embodies the intangible qualities that separate greatness from mediocrity. I can't recommend it, but it still has value as a collection of almost-beautiful fragments that, in a kinder world, might have been more.

The strangest curveballs make sense here, and these moments of utter plain future hellscape are punctuated by strange moments of beauty.

Importantly, picking a difficulty is not a binary and permanent choice. You can swap between these modes at any time, for any reason, within the same save. Nothing changes except how the game handles health and currency distribution. (You get plenty of coins. It’s fine.) When you finish a stage on the easier mode, the game doesn’t brand it with an “easy” tag, like a badge of shame that you need to overcome another time. You beat the level! Hooray! This is fantastic, because it means my daughter and I can make progress in different ways.

Maybe it’s not shocking that Tunic took me away from Elden Ring. One has you running around as a cute fox trying to save the world, even if you don’t know why. The other has you running around, potentially with a cute fox mask on, trying to save the world, even if you don’t know why. What they have in common is rewarding players for curiosity. Each game goes about it in a different way, but the conclusion is the same: the reward is worth the effort.

Twenty-five hours in, I still have no idea what I’ll see next. It's a testament to Elden Ring that I'm so excited at the possibilities that remain, but it's also a problem that after all this time, I feel like it needs to show me more than it has so far.

It’s an exhausting, often repetitive, experience just barely held up by a good story, incredible visuals, and competent game design that lifts the best bits from other video games made in the past 10 years...If you’re looking for a revolutionary experience that teaches you what open world games can be, Forbidden West isn’t it. But if you’re looking for a competent distraction that soothes and smooths the brain by repeating what open world games have been doing for years, Forbidden West does the job.

So far, it’s a game whose core element—exploration—is often engaging, but because much around it is boring, I need the exploration to be more engaging, and the game’s feature gating hinders that. Again, maybe that changes by the end. But it sounds like it’ll take a long time to get there. Supposedly that's a selling point.

I can’t help but feel that the Pearl and Diamond clans already have Jubilife Village’s “how do we coexist with Pokémon?” problem figured out and have for some time: respect their autonomy to be wild animals. The urge to catch them all and the question of “is catching them all really a good idea?” lives both in this game and in myself as a series fan. Game Freak’s answers haven't been great, but asking the question is at least a big step towards a more nuanced Pokémon world.

Halo Infinite didn’t really do it for me. The repetition of stakes and open world activities made the final 15 hours of gameplay something I was actively dreading. At the same time, the first 10 hours or so were exciting and engaging, and I imagine that someone not trying to power through the game in a week to make a review embargo deadline of Sunday night might have a better way of spacing things out. The open world sandbox is truly fun, especially once you have access to flying vehicles late in the game, but there’s only so many hijinks to get up to (at least until the co-op campaign releases). For a game about new possibilities, and titled Infinite, the game’s universe ends up feeling pretty constrained.

It was wise of EA to end the press event with Portal and specifically with throwback games, because that's exactly how Portal seemed to function for me and the people I was playing with: it was an escape from the mediocrity of Battlefield 2042 into the greatest moments of the series' past. Next to that, Battlefield 2042’s may never have stood a chance, but without Portal, I'm not sure Battlefield could survive its latest entry. As it is, both have a long way to go before either leads to a good Battlefield experience, much less a classic one.

So many video games frustratingly outstay their welcome, dragging out once-novel ideas in service of hitting an arbitrary amount of gameplay time, because the too-ravenous gaming audience frequently correlates game length with quality. It's refreshing, then, when a game is careful and deliberate about its ideas, and exits stage left when it's exhausted them, leaving you simultaneously desperate for more but buzzing over the limited time spent in that world.

For the most part it’s a game which understands its weaknesses (depth, polish, uniqueness) while being pretty good at foregrounding its strengths (variety, storytelling, visual splendor). It’s here to sell us that awkward smile, it’s Quill posing in front of a mirror in his corny leather jacket. Easy spectacle without too much crunchy, frustrating friction in the way.

Age of Empires IV is content being a familiar and affable RTS companion, but it's not a complacent one. It's not making the kind of flashy, noisy challenge to convention that Relic made with the Homeworld, Dawn of War, and Company of Heroes games. It very consciously returns to an old genre formula, but finds enough places to add new touches and twists that it feels less conservative than its forerunners did. Perhaps more importantly, this kind of RTS went from being the default to being a rarity, and in that context it's become easier to appreciate its craft and to concede that our parents and normie nemeses may have been onto something.

Metroid Dread sharply refines (but doesn't reinvent) Nintendo's 35-year-old ideas in a gorgeous and slick new package.

This experimentation, from place to place and zone to zone, is what Sable is about at its core: doing things and obtaining proof that you have taken their experience in; that you have contemplated them. In a world where games signal their value to you through in-game advertisements and a bombardment of prompts to keep playing, this laconic approach stands out starkly. But any game whose direct mission is to think about the world, and to think about it deeply, should probably have a special place in our heart.

It is undeniable that this is more dynamic and specific and operable than a Civ game, but in my time with the game I have remained unconvinced that this level of fiddly knob control gives me anything unique or better than the more abstracted or zoomed out systems of a Civ. My experience of Humankind was one of seeing occasional glimmers of something special while having to fight to keep a lot of numbers and pressures in my head at once. I know that there are strategy and 4x players for whom this is where the action is. Those players love the system mastery of it all, and it's clear that the developers’ desire here was to create an abundance of complex systems that interlock beautifully. I think they accomplished that, but for me there is a point where that reaches diminishing returns, and Humankind is over that line.