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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Darkest Dungeon is a mean, capricious game. Success is a gambler’s thrill, addictive and illicit. It comes rarely.

If you can master the foreign language of its combat, you’ll find Hyper Light Drifter screaming with life and unfamiliar menace, waiting for you to awaken its technological giants.