Chicory: A Colorful Tale is bound to the template set forth by The Legend of Zelda, but, rather than offering reflexive glibness, or inking the affair with irony, its critique wraps warmly around its subject, like a scarf.
More than felling each Visionary, however, and piecing together the history of Blackreef, I relished uncovering more about Colt.
Where the studio succeeds—and where Metroid Dread elevates from noble and flawed effort to inspired riff—is in its embrace of the unreachable.
It may well be more of the same, but Mexico beckons, ravishing the eye and devouring up the miles.
But it is, right now, where 343 has succeeded with Halo Infinite—where it has taken us full circle and where it is looking ahead. I will leave you with the words of Cortana: “This isn’t an end. It’s a chance to make amends. To rectify mistakes. And it starts here.”
Where Solar Ash goes from an intriguing ambient platformer to one of the year’s most fascinating releases is in its fixation on living as an act of being stuck.
The coup of Sifu is that this process mirrors that of the hero; I was continually tempted to ditch my progress and start afresh, furnished with new knowledge at the expense of a little more life.
With Horizon Forbidden West, Guerilla is armed with the grunt of the PlayStation 5, and we get not just a catalogue of alluring tones but a richer palette of ideas.
And yet, despite its obvious muses, Tunic manages to rise above mere flattery, by paying deeper homage to the medium itself.
You can sense, in Weird West, a developer both returning to his obsessions and toiling on a fresh frontier.
What saves Norco is that the visions on offer belong as much to the imagined as the troublingly real.
This is where Stray succeeds. It offers us delectable opportunities to act out the behaviour that so bewilders us, in very celebration of that bewilderment.
Taking inspiration from Bloodborne and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, Lies of P leads the pack of FromSoftware imitators. It has an intriguing and arresting world and some brutal, assured combat. With a hollow hero in the middle.
Sam Barlow's Immortality switches digital footage for celluloid film, and it's a better fit. His fixation with scrambled narratives has found its natural home, not in the realm of computers, those ghost-free machines, but here, on coils of vulnerable tape.
In a medium preoccupied with guns and bombs and violent, power-fantasy notions of heroism, Gerda: A Flame in Winter treads a quieter path through its World War II setting, and is perhaps all the more powerful for it.
Bayonetta 3 is an awful lot more, but it's also an awful lot more of the same. It's a game that revels in its spirited too-muchness.
If Ragnarök spells the end of God of War, as both its themes and talk from Santa Monica Studio suggest, then it will serve as a fitting end for Kratos. Not just because it would make an impressive swansong for the God of War, but because that level of weariness and relief that Kratos feels from completing his lengthy endeavours is, by its end, projected onto the player, completing theirs.
This XCOM meets X-Men effort from Firaxis isn't flawless, but its a fantasy dinner party of superheroes elevates the experience above its formulaic story and forgettable hero.
Shifting perspectives, changing abilities, and an expanded open world playground make this sequel into a bona fide blockbuster.
Nintendo rather threw the kitchen sink (full of thousands of Post-it notes) at Super Mario Bros. Wonder, so it's unsurprising that not every element is as successful as the game's – and the genre's – best. But when you think about it, it's remarkable that, after nearly four decades, there are still new ideas left to try. The real wonder is how good Mario's latest 2-D romp turned out.