Iron Gate Studio’s Valheim is the best multiplayer survival crafting game since Minecraft. Its mastery over texture, lighting, audio, and mood on display here elevates it into a painted vision of the Norse afterlife. This and the game’s meticulously designed systems meld together to create a romanticized survival experience.
Mortal Shell II is a 'fun-forward' souls-like, one that values flexibility and variety over sheer difficulty. It grabs you and plies you with a plethora of options for tackling its monsters, dungeons, and bosses, handing you shiny toys and trusts you to work out what to do with them.
Zero Parades: For Dead Spies is weird, beautiful, and dense with characters that I wanted to understand. It plays with its choices and narrative threads with confidence, allowing foundational elements to rot and die in service of the paths the player is willing to take.
Mouse: P.I. For Hire shows a deep love for animation of the era, but the gameplay and script lack the same level of care. A Gouda attempt, but nothing bleu me away. Cheesy in all the wrong ways.
I wanted this to be the triumphant return of Kain, Raziel, and the dark, strange world of Nosgoth, but what arrived was something draped in the series’ skin - not an evolution, but an uninspired reinvention.
BIG HOPS succeeds because of the developers’ understanding of momentum, accessibility, and expression through movement: its systems constantly invite wacky experimentation with generous restarts, rather than punishing the player for failing, all of which reinforces a core philosophy of playful improvisation.