Batman: Arkham VR is quite a short game. You step into the Batsuit for just a little over an hour. In that span of time, it can be quite a frightening experience. But it’s definitely worth playing if you’re an early adopter of PlayStation VR.

Titanfall 2‘s campaign is fast, it’s responsive, and it lets you move like John Woo’s most violent dreams of the future. If you’ve played Mirror’s Edge and wished more games would learn from it, this is what you’ve been looking for.

Prey doesn’t understand itself, and it obliviously gets in its own way. It’s ultimately too broad and too undefined to achieve its own grand ambitions. Instead of proudly stating its own identity, Prey feels adrift, the way I was during that one sublime moment in space. Unmoored of itself, it asks questions that are worth pondering but doesn’t have any answers. Absent of those rejoinders, it loses its own shape, getting stuck in patterns it can’t break out of, drifting further and further away from land until the credits roll.

It bakes a string of unnerving themes into its gameplay that stand wholly apart from the bevy of shooters it’s competing with.

It’s a paranoid nightmare vision of my own cell phone, and I can’t look away.

Prospekt doesn’t quite match the brilliance of the official games.

Gameplay and narrative are inextricably intertwined, and ought to reinforce and point toward one another. In Song of the Deep, they feel at odds in a way that’s made even more grating by the loving, attentive eye Insomniac casts on the world it created. These people care about Merryn and her journey, and they do so much to make you care, too. Now they just need to get out of her way.

What Remains of Edith Finch is, above all, sincere, trying through even its most fantastical and gimmicky moments to tell a story about home, grief, and growing up.

Its best moments crackle with creativity and skill. It feels like a successor to some of the best games of its type, a game in the mold of Thief and Deus Ex in an era where even the people who make new Deus Ex games don’t make them like this anymore. This is a game that should be played, and all I want to do now is go back in. I know it’s waiting for me, to see what I try next.

Yes, it is quite a bit more fun to run down Federation Force‘s hallways and headshot its Space Pirates when you have a group. But a lot of that, it seems to me, is because the game is designed to be much easier when you have a team and very challenging, even inhospitable, to a solo player.

The fourth installment of Gears of War tells a lighter, more personal tale, but it always returns to the defiant thrill of survival. The silence of the music cutting out and the guns going quiet after the end of a terrible battle. The deep breath. It’s what the old character here is getting at, I think. In a place like Sera, where everything wants to kill you, the opportunity to fight—and win—is a blessing. I missed it, too.

As a fighting game, it’s responsive, easy to learn with thick layers of complexity buried underneath. It’s a brilliant exercise in taking out your action figures and ramming them into each other until one of them breaks.

It feels like I stepped through a time warp and am reviewing the original Mirror’s Edge again. It recreates the original game’s strengths—and, more importantly, its fundamental errors—as if no time had passed.

While Mirror’s Edge Catalyst opens up the city rather than confining you to discrete levels, its design woes feel precisely like the original. The odds of me clearing a mission on the first try were approximately zero. Not because my reflexes weren’t up to snuff—I swear it!—but simply because the missions are so tightly timed, the positioning so precise, that there really isn’t any time to figure out what the plan’s going to be: you simply have to do. And while that may (I can only assume) genuinely recreate the sorts of fast decisions you’d have to make if you were really trying to outrun the cops on foot, it doesn’t make for a game experience that feels fair.

Infinite Warfare is not a bad Call of Duty. I’ve played nearly every game in the series, and as someone who sees the merits of the systems that make up the moment-to-moment experience of playing a shooter like it, I enjoyed myself, sometimes a good deal. But Infinite Warfare stalls out in the terrestrial shadow of itself and the political context it’s trying to run from. It wants to be a lot of things, but ultimately it’s a lesson: We can go as far into the cosmos as we want, but we can’t go alone. Our problems are stowed away in the cargo hold, and they’re coming with us.

That’s not to say that Ratchet and Clank is a lifeless cash-in. It’s replete with care and vitality, and it feels like an honest return to a world the creators love. But as a utilization of its own past, it’s dull and safe. A game that so directly recreates a relic of gaming’s past needs to justify its own existence—to use the past in an interesting way, to imbue it with creative vitality. 2016’s Ratchet and Clank doesn’t. Nothing here surprises. Nothing here transforms.

Frankly, I think I might hate The Witness. Even after hours of playtime, I don’t know enough to tell.

To be clear, I’m not advocating real-life violence here. But I do suspect that games like this, tied up in gore and cruelty though they are, serve a social purpose. In creating an outlet to resist fascism in its most archetypal form, Sniper Elite 4—and the legacy of World War II media that informs it—reminds us that fascism is real, and needs to be resisted. The game’s power isn’t intelligence or insight, it’s the refusal to forget: By allowing players to fight and win against the ghosts of villains, it offers a quiet reminder that their villainy is real.

Everybody—Nintendo, players—knows that this is a stopgap in a barren release schedule, but if you’re going to have a stopgap, you might as well give an excellent game the graphical overhaul it lost when Nintendo decided to skip over high-definition.

Inside, like the studio’s freshman effort, is again a monochromatic, tense, haunting, side-scrolling puzzle game, but with six years of effort under its belt, Playdead now delivers a masterclass in its form.

It manages to keep the core gameplay of battling and trading magical monsters intact, while weaving in ideas that were vital to the television show and to the idea of Pokémon in general.

Helping and being helped, working together, and loving everyone, regardless of where they’re coming from, is a lesson that we can all forget at times. And I’m overjoyed to know that children picking up these games today might just walk away better, more empathetic people even though at the end of the day they’re still teaching digital animals to tear each other apart.

1979 Revolution forges something gripping and personal in the fires of a murky history...Khonsari hopes it does something even more powerful: Define a new genre of games, one his studio will lead.

If you resent games walling the player off or insisting on where they go next, you will hate Yakuza 0. But it uses its distinctly un-Western sense of constraint and mise–en–scène to tell a story more intelligent and subtle than anything you’d find in its foreign counterparts.

If you’re willing to devote some of your leisure energy into Tumbleseed, I imagine you’ll be rewarded. But I can’t guarantee it. I might just be the world’s worst Tumbleseed player.

There are so many reasons this game shouldn’t exist, but I’m thrilled that it does.

Firewatch may leave you before you’re ready to be done with it; like Gone Home, Oxenfree et cetera it’s a six-hour experience that you can easily start after lunch and finish before bed. But it’s an emotional gut-punch all the way through, for many reasons, and largely a pleasure to explore and find yourself lost in—mentally, if not geographically. This is your next must-play story, another voyage to a place games don’t often take us.

For all this, for all of its pretentiousness, for all of its own flaws, No Man’s Sky rightly deserves a place in a modern art museum. Like a home with doors that may never open, begging us to ponder what lies beyond, No Man’s Sky is an unanswerable question, but one I’m glad I asked.

Most games don’t try to break you, don’t ask you to band together and conquer something that seems impossible. Still, Miyazaki says, Dark Souls is made to beaten: “When [we] set the difficulty level… our objective was to make the game possible to accomplish.” It takes time, and it takes effort, but no matter who you are, or how you want to play, Dark Souls wants to see you succeed.

O’Reilly told me that Everything is designed to run forever. He described it to me as an “organism that keeps going.” Left its own devices, it will, in fact, play itself, running in an autoplay mode based on settings that you can calibrate to your own whims. Strangely, this might be the most remarkable showcase of Everything‘s power: watching the perspective tumble through O’Reilly’s pocket dimension like a sort of high-tech nature documentary, moving from thing to thing until you discover something you’ve never seen, an object whose life you need to learn more about, and you’re moved to pick up the controller all over again and take it for a spin.

The Witness is a sterile, lifeless videogame. It revels in the idea of knowledge, fascinated by how it’s earned and what it signifies. But it seems uninterested in players and their accomplishments, and with that lack of interest comes a lack of the human touch necessary to make sense of the knowledge it offers...The Witness is like the island on which it takes place: a machine, to the core. Anything within it that seems lifelike is superficial.

The Molasses Flood’s debut is a brilliant tone piece, drawing skillfully on an established well of symbolism and cultural preoccupations that rarely get showcased in games. The Flame in the Flood is a journey toward hope at the end of a long river, a journey worth taking.

To get the most out of a game like Tumbleseed, as with the brutal puzzle-platformers that inform it, you must do more than play. You must be willing to wrestle with it and, if not master it, at least develop some degree of proficiency. You must also accept that, despite your best efforts, you might not be able to. If you’re willing to devote some of your leisure energy into Tumbleseed, I imagine you’ll be rewarded. But I can’t guarantee it. I might just be the world’s worst Tumbleseed player.

If you enjoy Hell’s Kitchen or Master Chef, having Ramsay’s constant banter in the game really does enhance the experience.

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order looks and often feels like a generic Star Wars adventure, but Respawn elevates it nearly every step of the way. One doesn't necessarily expect a story about space wizards and evil empires to feel resonant, but this does, and it does so in a way that not many pieces of big-budget media do. Fallen Order is a game about confronting your past and fighting for the future when you don't know if that future is ever going to get better. That feels timely, and wrapped around that idea, the rest of the game just sings. If Fallen Order was connected to the Force, it would radiate power.

The game lives most brightly in its quiet moments of melancholy: in the silence after Mae’s shitty teen band lets the last chord fall silent; in the second when they reflect on how honest the music they just sang was; in the quiet conversations where they admit to themselves and each other that it’s not even a specific future that they want. They just want to die somewhere else. Somewhere theirs.

Obduction succeeds as a follow-up to Myst not because it invokes nostalgia for 1993, but because it builds realities like Myst did. A new world, one that feels true, one that breathes.

You may find that you race through PinOut! real fast, especially if you put up for those sweet, sweet two-buck continues. But if you’re like me, you’ll look back on your neon-soaked journey with fondness.

It occupies that role of a wronged young person immaculately, giving you control of a group of teenagers who see the cruelties of adults around them with severe clarity. Then it opens a door to a supernatural world of magic and treasure, and it gives you the one thing none of us had at that age: the means to fight back.

Unravel isn’t a bad videogame. It has some mild charm, and it’s one of the most visually stunning things I’ve seen in a long time. It’s just unremarkable. Which is a pity, because with the clear passion that went into its development, it’s easy to picture it being so much more.

The miracle of The Last Guardian is not that it escaped development hell, but that it did so with an unwavering vision as clear and uncompromised as it was on its first day. Not only is there a game available this week called The Last Guardian, that game is The Last Guardian.

Magikarp Jump, as a result, takes what could be a mean joke about one of Pokémon Company’s sillier creations and turns it into a pleasant, engaging little game about companionship and raising a school of beautiful baby fish. When your first Magikarp reaches maturity, you gain experience as a trainer and can catch another Magikarp that grows even larger and jumpier. Let them swim around your pond, feed them, and train them with a variety of exercises to help them reach their full (albeit limited) potential. As with most mobile games, you can pay for bonuses that help your Magikarp grow up faster, but they’re unobtrusive and don’t break the game.

From its opening unhinged riff on Texas Chainsaw Massacre to the more traditional bulk of its gameplay, it’s an eerie, consistently entertaining puzzle box drenched in Southern gothic dread. And the videotapes are the stroke of genius that turn that puzzle box into a tesseract.

That commitment to the time period and dedication to an earnest presentation of what war was really like can’t help but clash with the raucous fun we’re expected to have when we dip into the multiplayer modes with friends, however. Battlefield 1 uses the same language of play for both sections, and in so doing shows that this dichotomy can’t last. For a game to do war right, it’d have to be about the struggle to exist. It’d have to be about the starvation, the panic, and the agony of it all. Battlefield 1 comes tantalizingly close to this.

If you’re looking for novel virtual reality experiences, I do think you should check out Eagle Flight to get a sense of how much fun it can be to soar in VR. After playing it, though, I feel like I’d really enjoy a game with these precise mechanics, but without constraints: a more free-form, less demanding play style that would accentuate the freedom of flight—not detract from it.

The smartest design choice in Duskers is also the one most likely to put players off, initially: the command-line interface.

If you’re willing to step away from the idea of goal-oriented achievement, Vignettes achieves something almost transcendent. Like its name implies, it feels like a series of short stories about objects, meditations on the secret lives of stuff. What do you really know about a lamp, anyway? Have you ever really looked at it? Isn’t it weird, how pear-shaped they usually are? Hey, who first came up with the lamp shade?

The original Doom transcended videogame to become cultural icon, the inspiration for a hundred imitations, ports on virtually every digital medium imaginable including airplanes, and even a terrible movie starring The Rock. The new Doom succeeds by taking that legacy seriously, rendering it as a religion of sorts: the cult of Doom Guy writ through generations. To play is to enact a mass-media ritual, to go where a million other players have gone before you and will go again...The legions of hell should be quaking in their boots: Doom has been reborn.

The lighting, the detail, the mocap and animation of the characters, the delivery of the dialogue are all so near-flawless that I forgot I was watching computer people. It just felt like a movie. The transitions between cinematic scenes and gameplay are seamless. The load times are non-existent (unless you jump around from chapter to chapter or reset from a previous point).

By attempting to push the cynicism out of competitive gaming, Overwatch is working towards the seemingly impossible. Out of all the internet’s dark places, competitive shooters are among the worst. They’re the home of teabaggers and trolls, brimming with toxicity and vitriol. Blizzard is trying to make a place where people can enjoy themselves and relax without the fear that so often accompanies these types of games. I can’t say yet where it’ll succeed in the long run, but this is the first time I’ve had hope.

That gripe aside, Splatoon 2 subtly refines its predecessor, glossing it with a fresh coat of ink and adapting it to the flexibility of the Switch.

My first session with the game lasted roughly half an hour longer than I meant it to. While there are puzzle packs available for in-app purchase, Typeshift is free, with a large bevy of puzzles to play immediately and a free daily puzzle. You can also shell out for hints if you get really stumped. By the time you get through the initial offering, two bucks for another set of puzzles will probably be a no-brainer if you’re still enjoying yourself. And you probably will be. Typeshift is more than a smart, fun word puzzler. It’s just good game design.

Far Cry Primal is best played through subtraction. First thing, go into the options menu and turn off the mini-map. Takkar certainly doesn’t have a map, and using one is distraction that detracts from the beauty and horror of Oros. Ignore the extraneous missions, the ones that rely on formula and filler by, say, having you kill the same two warriors to save the same kidnapped Wenja. Seek out the upgrades you find most useful and skip the rest. Ignore the completion percentages. Take it slow.

I truly believe that Deus Ex: Mankind Divided wants to be a political tentpole videogame. It just won’t let itself. It’s a metonym for big-budget gaming as a whole. These games, after all, are changing. In an increasingly broad and complex marketplace, they’re going to have to. And with those changes, there are going to be teams who want to use their platforms to tell authentically complex stories, to create games that aren’t afraid to believe things...Mankind Divided is a messy and ultimate broken step in that direction. But I sincerely doubt it’ll be the last.

There’s a buttload of money to be made here, and Nintendo has done the exact minimum amount of work necessary to make that very buttload, just in time for what’s probably going to be 3DS’ last big holiday season. Too bad it couldn’t be bothered to make this the definitive version of the game that it could have been.

What saves this radical concept from total disaster is the fact that the live-action segments are well-acted and tightly paced. They look and feel exactly like… well, like a mid-season replacement on the USA Network, if we’re being honest. But the action is just intriguing enough that you won’t mind being asked to watch a 20-minute cut scene before beginning the next level...Once you get over the novelty, Quantum Break shakes out as a mediocre shooter with a lavish budget. It will be remembered for blending game and live-action in a formula that actually kinda worked, not for its gameplay, which feels unambitious, half-baked.

It sounds confusing. It is confusing. It’s also not optional. This is how you play Star Fox Zero. It’s the shooter equivalent of rubbing your stomach while patting your head and also keeping a hacky-sack in the air with your foot.

The difference with Star Fox Guard is that, for me at least, it clicked automatically, and I was having a blast from the first moment.

Let it Die is certainly addictive. There’s something there, in its madcap core, that is good and possibly great. I’m just not entirely sure what it is.

Like its subjects, Blendo Games’ new PC puzzler Quadrilateral Cowboy is unafraid to be messy. It’s a puzzle game that doesn’t feel like one, a narrative game without a single speaking role. Taking place in a William Gibson-esque dreamscape, it puts you in the role of a slick hacker armed with clunky tech.

Hitman, the franchise, has always been known for elaborate assassinations and long missions that flow beautifully from one moment to the next. And it’s wonderful to see the subtitle-free sequel keep to that tradition. This is only the first of several planned episodes, but one with an emotional rollercoaster with enough depth and challenge to last some time.

I don’t expect to ever beat Stephen’s Sausage Roll, but that won’t stop me from recommending it. Unlike The Witness, which muddled its message with pretentious framing and unfriendly design, Increpare’s latest is smart and welcoming. It’s a loving ode to puzzles and the people who love them. If you check it out, be sure to eat something first.

It’s scale is unprecedented for a Zelda game, and it encourages you to move slowly. I want to honor that. And while I fear that the sheer breadth of the experience might ultimately push some players away, I’m relishing my time spent in this hushed, half-dead Hyrule. After thirty years of The Legend of Zelda, I’m delighted that the series has finally lost its way again.

The game is magical. As test of your ability to think strategically, Civilization VI is almost unparalleled.

A final excursion into the world of Dark Souls—the developers have said that this will be the final game in the main series, at least for the foreseeable future—to try to understand its pleasures. I’ve loved all these games. But here, at the very end, I’m asking the same questions I asked at the very start: Is this journey worth taking? I want to see the Ringed City, uncover its secrets, and try to figure out what it’s doing here. I’m prepared to die; not because I want to die, but because it seems worth it. Sword and shield raised, I charge in.

Dragon Ball is ultimately a story about transformation, about the idea that people can change to become more than they are.

Amidst these odd, singular moments lies a nexus of something fascinating and powerful, a new almost dadaist landscape emerging from the confluence of bad aesthetic decisions and largely pointless gameplay conceits. I could imagine another game that takes advantage of the distinctive strangeness the developers have created here, that harbors it and shores it up into something worth spending time with. Unfortunately, we didn’t get that. We got The Tomorrow Children instead.

If you can bear the frustration of that early grind, there’s a reward waiting for you. The thrill of pushing your thrusters to full burn, looping around the asteroids near Karahdor Outpost, the Prince Ol in your sights, his fighter dancing in evasion. Vulcan cannons blazing. The stars watching, an entire universe built for for one exhilarating fight after another.

Starseed is all over pretty quickly, maybe a couple of hours at best. And I don’t think it’s going to age very well, truth be told—we’re going to expect more complexity out of our VR sojourns, soon enough. But right now, at this moment, if you’re looking for something cool to show you what it’s going to be like to go adventuring in VR, this is a great place to start.

Besides its unique approach to game storyline delivery, which I think will be studied and copied in the future, Oxenfree shows some smart thinking about the relationship between games and players. It’s a unique mix that should make Night School’s future productions ones to watch, and this an auspicious debut.

All of Genshin Impact’s influences conspire to make the player feel very good, with or without microtransactions. Breath of the Waifu or a free, serotonin-packed RPG, Genshin Impact hits all the right buttons if you can get over the guilt. [Impressions]

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is certainly not for everyone. For a certain type of player, it will undoubtedly feel like the most difficult game From Software has ever produced. But it's also enthrallingly atmospheric, its combat and setting contributing to a palpable, engaging sense of mood. It's a game of powerful imagery, of swords crossed in the morning mist. The challenge of Sekiro exists to create that mood and to answer a design problem in From's earlier games. That's not the point, exactly. But to enjoy Sekiro, you have to accept it anyway.

After spending a few hours with Ubisoft’s Tom Clancy’s The Division, one thing I can say with certainty is that it has a powerful sense of drama. For a game based largely around shooting bad guys online with friends, it has a remarkable sense of pacing and mood. It’s dynamic, in the musical sense: loud, tense gunfights, separated by periods of exploring a ruined New York City in overwhelming silence.