Katana ZERO, a time-warping samurai escapade, boasts stunning visuals, music, mechanics, and writing. It's one of 2019's best games thus far.
Travis Strikes Again marks a glorious return for Suda51's No More Heroes series, melding myriad genres to create a totally wild arcade experience.
SteamWorld Quest, a card-based RPG, is an all-around pleasure: challenging but not too complicated, accessible but not too simple, fun at every point.
The compellingly unresolved ending caps a run that, like even a half-decent crack at Nightreign’s challenges, is a story unique to itself: a journey of close calls and triumphs too fortuitous to be replicated.
Melinoë, however, can make it to the top of Olympus. But when she does, unease gnaws at her triumph. The gods commend her bravery and skill. They deny having ever doubted her. Then, with their young relative’s purpose fulfilled, if only temporarily, they nudge her back to her home between planes, where she diligently returns to her labors. Would that Melinoë, at some point in her long quest to fell Chronos, stopped to wonder: What comes after time and death?
Even in the menu-filled, occasionally tedious realm of party management, Final Fantasy Tactics asserts its core belief: that the course of history is molded not just by generational events of upheaval, but by the choices we make in every passing second. We define the future with every moment we spend tending to the needs of our allies and spurning our oppressors, every insistence on the promise of something better.
When I had finally solved the mystery of the tea shop, an epilogue allowed me to meander and tie up loose ends in relative leisure. There the Cleric remains, singular in his imperfections, basking in the rest he’s earned.
“This hill smells of crisp apples and fresh figs,” said my otherwise stoic frontman, as we approached a knolly patch of land. What a transportive world Banquet for Fools crafts, where, after countless memorable feats of daring—after saving entire communities, slaying mythical creatures, and awakening old gods—the scent of fruit yet lingers.
Thomson’s game proves to be an anti-roguelite. It begs you to leave the castle, to return to the realm of the living and dying, to let things be finished. And you will depart, ruefully but willingly, without turning back for one last look at the mess you’ve made.
The surreality of Control Resonant serves to amplify its pathos.
Below Unexplored: Unlocked Edition's tricky surface lies a mesmerizing experience that manages to be frustrating, relaxing, and exciting, all at once.
Your might proves substantial enough to bend even clichés to your will. When, during a cutscene, a monster in the background looks like it’s about to get the jump on Titus, one of your buddies casually blasts it from out of the frame. The bait and switch feels like a winking admission by Space Marine 2: This is an unabashedly over-the-top ride, but it won’t stoop to boring contrivance. Your strength is too profound, your time too important, to abide that.
More than once, as I repeatedly threw myself against Kill Knight’s considerable challenges, I suddenly felt a tear running down my face and realized that I hadn’t blinked in what felt like an eternity. It was as though I had returned to my body from some unknowable elsewhere.
This atmospheric Metroidvania is mechanically, emotionally, and philosophically electrifying.
The main story’s baseline difficulty is quite measured, but each stage offers optional challenges for you to complete—say, slay a certain number of spectral samurai, or avoid every pit of spikes along the way.
Saros is a perfectly tuned bullet hell of astonishing kineticism.
Mortal Shell II posed a bracing challenge at the time of review, toeing the line between a character-action game and Elden Ring.
Darksiders: Warmastered Edition's new Switch release suffers from technical issues, but the action-adventure game at its core has held up.
The game’s quirky sensibility lends amusing irony to its critique of modern industry’s environmental destruction. Where item descriptions in the Dark Souls series and its ilk flesh out the esoteric lore of their settings, here they offer a crab’s-eye view of life on the surface. “Residue of a painful venom lines the outside of this armor,” reads the blurb about the nozzle of a hot sauce bottle that Kril can equip as a shell. As Another Crab’s Treasure conjures a universe in which the vast horde of trash sunk carelessly into the sea might have its benefits, the game pokes countless holes in its fantasy, letting reality flood in: No amount of make-believe can render humankind’s impact on the Earth anything but poisonous.
But while the game at times demands a level of execution that its design doesn’t always facilitate, its frustrations are fleeting. They resemble the towering skeleton that stomps through its world—revealing themselves in bursts but largely sticking to the darkness, denting but not fully cracking the beauty, coziness, and wondrous sense of atmosphere that surround them.