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And it all leads to a new available ending for the entire game that’s both a more subtle, sad ending for V than some players may be willing to run with and a strong final statement on the game that was Cyberpunk 2077. It’s an ending with more depth than expected, about the nature of the power that this type of open world grants—both to V and the player controlling them—and the immense, soul-crushing work involved in wielding it responsibly. CD Projekt RED knows that better than any developer would now. Like all of Night City’s heroes, Cyberpunk 2077 had to be torn apart and rebuilt before it could become legendary.
The story twists and turns, and the company Grace keeps over time is a joy to spend a few hours with. Given that Stray Gods is the child of some of the folks behind Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and the Dragon Age series, the game’s strengths shouldn’t come as a surprise, but it’s hard not to be disappointed at how much it fails to teach the old gods some new tricks.
There’s not as much control over that as one might like. While the dialogue is good, the choices regularly given to the player during the course of that dialogue don’t really come to bear until the last chapter of the game. But the journey is still a unique, effortlessly charming one that proudly wears its heart on its sleeve. It treats its numerous marginalized characters with such love, warmth, and care, and the music they make even more so. In Goodbye Volcano High, the world end not with a bang or a whimper, but an eye roll and a middle finger.
The result is an interesting and impressive game that ultimately feels more than a bit academic, where solving intricate puzzles to uncover the hidden inner workings of a strange world mostly feels like an interactive and particularly creative linguistic anthropology lesson. Which is to say, Chants of Sennaar ought to be an exciting game for fans of, well, linguistic anthropology. But if you aren’t one already, chances are that it isn’t likely to make a fan out of you.
But, even then, there’s this overwhelming sense that the tricks don’t really serve much purpose until the game tells you that points and graffiti tags matter, basically driving a wedge between the best thing about the game and the activities that actually progress the story. Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is resuscitating what made Jet Set Radio so great back in the day, and it’s far from being a disgrace to the name. But it’s off-kilter in every way that the original games felt cohesive.
But the non-linear nature of The Cursed Crew does have its virtues. There are some magnificent moments of discovery where you feel as though you’ve circumvented the level design by maneuvering the right character into the right position to bypass certain guard setups or parts of the terrain. Simply by spending so much time with the characters, you’ll hit upon certain combinations of abilities independently, fine-tuning new strategies all the way up to the end. It’s in these moments that you see what the developers are aiming for, and they suggest that The Cursed Crew could be a tentative step in an exciting new direction for the studio, even if those elements are more notable for how they might be refined in a subsequent release.
The game, at present, isn’t without its issues, such as framerate stuttering and network dropouts, all of which will hopefully be addressed in future updates. Something, though, that isn’t likely to be addressed is the lack of variety, as there are only three maps—the Sawyer residence, the slaughterhouse, and the derelict gas station—each with a day/night variant. But don’t expect locations from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, like the abandoned carnival ground and radio station, to be added, as the makers of the game only have interactive rights to the original film. At least in terms of content, this Texas Chain Saw Massacre proves that, even as it pays rock-solid tribute to a film classic, fidelity has its limitations.
The chaotic adaptability in the face of whatever weird mash-up of things that Moving Out 2 throws at you is what makes it more than just a delivery machine for so many puns. The silliness of being a F.A.R.T. is predicated on enjoyable, rock-solid gameplay. If you want to see everything the game has to offer, your moving techniques will have to change right along with the dimensions themselves. That is, after all, what moving’s all about: never sitting still.
Atlas Fallen only falters when it feels as if it’s slowing down its flow, as with an ill-considered sidequest that requires you to carefully follow wildlife to their buried treasures. The faster the game moves, the better it plays, whether that’s in combat or as you traverse a sunken city, occupied swamp, or desert ruin. Stick around past the sluggish first act and both the gameplay and plot get the hint, speeding ahead with the most enjoyable kind of recklessness.
It doesn’t help just how stubbornly Illusion Island’s gameplay traffics in the familiar. It’s not until the last level that it takes off the training wheels and offers much of a challenge for older audiences, but it’s disappointing that it’s game over just as the campaign is getting a head of steam up. Illusion Island, then, has enough magic to make you wish there was more of it.
Only toward the end does Venba hit upon a cohesive solution for both its story and its puzzles. The perspective shifts from Venba to Kavin, whose complicated relationship with his parents’ culture reframes the friction inherent to the game’s cooking segments: He has difficulty because he hasn’t prepared these dishes before and hasn’t cared to pay attention. Furthermore, his grasp on the Tamil language is rusty, so while he can refer to instructions at the top of the screen, they’ll be inaccurately translated and require the player to experiment while surmising their true meaning. This late change allows the game to finish strong, though the irritation of its earliest puzzles never quite dissipates, like a lingering taste from a dish whose flavors don’t fully cohere.
If the Pikmin series has one thing that it wants you to take away from each game, it’s to see the world with the same naïve wonder as its various exploring protagonists. Before now, this message felt somewhat distant, like something you could miss if you didn’t reach out and grab it. But this series’s commitment to realism is better served on the Switch, and its message—that you should approach your surroundings with the intentionality, curiosity, and joy of someone seeing them for the first time—punches you straight in the gut whether you want it to or not.
The background music that plays in each of the hub worlds is jazz, and it’s just as intentional as any of the photographs. Jazz is filled with spontaneous moments of harmony, which turns out to be the main ingredient and lure of Viewfinder. This is a game that, as you retrace the steps of four disparate people who did their best to save humanity, lets you riff along the way.
As for the MFN offices, they’re full of detailed memorabilia like posters, props, and episode scripts, to the point where simply taking it all in is perhaps the game’s main appeal. There’s a tangible love and care that has gone into making the game’s equivalent of Sesame Street studios feel plausible, as well as a clear delight in warping our memory of a show that opened up a world of imagination for generations of children into something darker.
That is, as mentioned, a bit of a paradigm shift for how “young adult” the original game skewed, but an important one, creating an engrossing, if more casual, experience. Oxenfree II, seven years separated from its predecessor, is all grown up, and while it’s not quite yelling at clouds yet, it’s rather pointedly a game that’s quite literally about getting the kids off its lawn.
You’ll also feel like you’ve helped write one. Ghost Trick is a story about stories, about how the invisible machinations of a guiding hand can create something whole and beautiful. It could only ever be a video game. At the risk of embellishment, it might be one of the video games. That it’s found a home on modern hardware is encouraging, and that Capcom saw fit to leave it more or less untouched is a small miracle. This is Ghost Trick as it always was: pristine, unassuming, and inimitable. And this remaster will make you glad that it’s been resurrected.
Other UI irritations abound, serving only to further complicate an experience at odds with itself for how much information it wants to communicate at a given moment. On the whole, Jagged Alliance 3 lays some strong groundwork for the franchise’s resurgence, but it often feels like a series of individual victories that fail to work in concert for something greater.
The most fundamental flaw of Final Fantasy XVI is its inability or unwillingness to delve too deeply into the machinations of inequality, but its greatest strength is how the story details the way that people march forward toward freedom. There’s absolutely no doubt that Clive believes in his home, and while he may be one of only a few to swing a sword, bringing houses and bridges and feeding those with empty stomachs is the work of many. Watching Clive’s work come to fruition and build the world for future generations may be the most powerful summoning spell ever cast in the entirety of Final Fantasy.
Yuke’s has managed to deliver an accessible, breezy rendition of their trademark product, without sacrificing the things that make watching an AEW show unique, pulse-raising, and hard-hitting. And more than this, it feels like a foundation waiting to be built upon. This is a game designed to have a long tail, with a steady stream of DLC on the way and the in-game store already (as of pre-launch) offering a smattering of fun add-ons (ironically, Cody Rhodes, who left AEW in 2021, is a bonus character, meaning he’s in both of this year’s major AAA wrestling games). As such, Fight Forever could live up to the name, and while it may not be the place to go for strict realism, it’s still better than you, and it knows it.
In all, the game has everything you’d expect of a Meat Boy title, right down to the narrative—a playful, unobtrusive shaggy dog story that builds to a predictably but no less hilariously crass punchline. Turns out that Dr. Fetus building this entire game just to flip Meat Boy the bird is, yes, frivolous and excessive but also, like Mean Meat Machine itself, perfectly fitting.