That’s something that the Prototype games got right 15 years ago, in the exact era of gaming Slitterhead shares most of its design ethos with. Even when Slitterhead gets to its wilder stretches, and time travel enters the mix, the fundamentals fail its ideas early and often, making the relatively reasonable length of the thing feel so much longer and more arduous as a result. Slitterhead would have felt lackluster on the PS3, but it feels downright draconian now.
It’s with all that in mind that it’s fairly easy to forgive just how little has been done to bring Shadows of the Damned up to code in 2024. Especially by contrast to the botched remaster of Suda51’s Lollipop Chainsaw, it’s almost a relief that the worst that can be said for this release is that it’s indistinguishable from the original, aside from a mild spitshine of the textures and it running at 4K60. Without trying to run an expensive graphical arms race, Shadows of the Damned is forced to stand on charm. Given just how many unique experiences exist outside the AAA bubble right now, the fact that Garcia Hotspur’s wild profane trash-sploitation adventure still does is a timely reminder of what can happen in the arena of AA games.
There’s a unique thrill to playing as Zelda: Sorcerer Supreme, but some hours into Echoes of Wisdom, especially the more that Zelda conjures bigger and badder creatures to smite her enemies, it still leaves the player wondering when, exactly, we get to play as Zelda: The Hero of Time. Nintendo remains a market leader in giving players what they didn’t know they needed rather than what they adamantly wanted, and Echoes of Wisdom is an excellent showcase for why that is, but it’s hard to shake just how many of Zelda’s problems could be solved just by letting her have a sword and an ocarina in the first place.
Silent Hill 2 has been reborn by a series of smart, subtle, and elegant choices, including an expanded take on the original’s haunting soundtrack by Yamaoka Akira himself. Bloober Team haven’t made a game to replace the original so much as it’s made one that honors it, giving a uniquely and distressing tale a way to retain its power in a modern gaming landscape.
It’s more than just a big, beautiful celebration of PlayStation gaming over the last 30 years or so, but an absolute triumph of just straight-up, uncompromised, guileless fun in video games in general.
That leaves the character work to build up a compelling story, Frank Stone’s core cast of kids is incredibly likable. All of them have big dreams of leaving their hometown for various reasons, but only one—uncanny Chloë Sevigny doppelganger Linda—ever gets to realize them, and her dreams come with a terrifying caveat. As for the ancillary adult characters, they vary in terms of likability, but they all coalesce into an oddball ensemble worth fretting about as they take on unknowable horrors. Maybe the greatest, simplest compliment that can be paid to Supermassive’s work here is that after years of only watching and reading about the game from the sidelines, Frank Stone made me want to start playing more Dead by Daylight.
Everyone can easily hop on a grind rail and travel around, but seasoned gamers will have endless opportunities and reasons to kill and look cool doing it. Even still, it’s not hard at all to button mash one’s way to glory, as long as one remembers where the shield button is from time to time. Expert gamers might be disappointed at how little the higher difficulties add to the mix, but it’s hard to be mad when the base experience is such a sick and sanguine little delight.
By the end, when there are half a dozen paths for the demonic horde to get to Yoshiro and end her life in three hits, the fact that it all seems manageable is a triumph of good, accessible game design. Kunitsu-Gami’s rural Japan is a place of natural beauty, of dance, of light and revelry in the face of darkness. There are very few games that have dared to convey this very culturally specific magic in such a distinctive and compelling way.
When looking for reasons to continue in Flintlock, most of them have to do with seeing another gorgeous vista, going off the beaten path for resources, and finding more fights to play around with new magic skills and combinations. More of that could and should come from the narrative, but what Flintlock does right, it does well, and in a way that welcomes more players into the fold. That, apparently, is something A44 can do that FromSoftware won’t.
It’s due to all those narrative and mechanical successes that the big blowout climax of The Final Shape’s campaign hits as effectively as it does. Accessing the final mission of that campaign was a community effort—which was unlocked for the entire player base back on June 8 by the first team in the world to beat the new Raid—and it’s wonderful for the way it makes high-level players feel just as much a part of the universe as its lowest level scrubs. But beyond being the final beat of a decade-long story, the final mission is a bombastic technical marvel—an astonishing 12-player fireworks display of a boss fight on par with the climactic, all-encompassing war at the end of Avengers: Endgame. It’s a victory lap, and Bungie knows it. More importantly, over the course of 10 long years, Bungie has earned it.
It’s an extended encore and a haunting final bow for Miyazaki Hidetaka’s magnum opus.
The newest chapter in Senua’s story is powerfully told but feels like it’s missing a few pages.
Had Eve been a character with agency and personality, who actually responded to the drooling and leering that she’s meant to embody, well, she’d be Bayonetta. If her emptiness was hiding deep existential secrets that the game revealed with patience and empathy, she’d be 2B. Instead, Eve is a busty, long-legged cipher of a doll who has no idea just how far up her hind quarters the game’s camera is designed to go, and seems somehow quite comfortable wearing sci-fi heels that make her feet look like horse hooves. Perhaps it’s unfair for this to be the sole focus for some players, but, unfortunately, there isn’t a whole lot else going on to draw their gaze away from it.
One gets the sense that adding that little bit of extra context might’ve made Neurodiver feel more Phoenix Wright than the folks at MiniBoss intended. But that wouldn’t have necessarily been a bad thing given that the game always feels as if wants for, well, more context. It’s a testament to the work that was done by MidBoss that the game’s characters, their history with the various conflicts of the world, and the specific psychic damage being done to the Golden Butterfly’s victims that Neurodiver will leave players wanting more. There are just far too many moments where wanting to know more crosses the line into “the game isn’t providing enough.”
Rise of the Ronin’s story is still good enough to keep players hooked, effectively luring them into the gameplay loop, which does have plenty of its own merits. But it’s dubious whether the various iniquities of the game are good enough to justify where it goes, especially knowing that all that effort can’t change which way the wind is blowing for Japan by the end.
That narrative undercurrent makes Tales of Kenzera: Zau’s mechanics and direction less about lack of ambition than accessibility. At a mere 10 hours, this is a game whose brevity is by design. After all, its story is, ultimately, about letting go, about accepting life’s harsh limits, and finding meaning in the time you have. Even as short as Tales of Kenzera is, it speaks in meaningful ways about things that audiences have needed to hear for a long time.
Throughout, Cloud and his motley troupe of friends are given the space and opportunity to be more than just heroes, even more than just friends, or potentially lovers, but human beings who are rightfully unsure of what power they have to stop the inevitable. These are still the familiar heroes on the same journey they were on in 1997, unsure of their roles as eco-terrorists turned fugitives on a nebulous quest against a force of unfathomable, alien evil, but more than just the size and scale of Rebirth as an RPG, there’s so much more catharsis in the telling.
Infinite Wealth’s greatest accomplishment is how much of that work still involves a deep, eclectic sense of play.
Frontiers of Pandora is, in essence, just another Far Cry experience—one with breathtaking art direction and a thoughtful portrayal of an alien culture, but a Far Cry experience nonetheless. It’s a tired formula applied to a property that’s capable of showing us much more. This game’s Pandora is a beautiful place to visit, but living there makes for a boring existence.
Still, at the center of it all remains Kazuma Kiryu, a genuinely good man caught in the throes of a vicious career. Even with the series ready to move on without him as protagonist—no disrespect to everybody’s new favorite himbo, Ichiban Kasuga, who’s positioned to be our hero going forward—Gaiden makes a stronger than expected case for why and how he’s endured so much, and deserves a better ending than the old life has been willing to give him.