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Then there are the long walks where silence slowly builds, as the lack of UI and thoughtfully envisioned setting come together to create an alarmingly thin separation between the player and their beleaguered avatar. It’s in these too fleeting moments where the unease of isolation gives way to a particularly terrifying thought: what if we’re not alone?
Melinoë and her travails are narratively rich, and the basic combat (whose debt to Supergiant’s first game Bastion remains unmistakable) is still strong enough, to ensure that Hades II is an excellent game that nails a precarious equity between story and action—and that should be enough to convince anybody to play it.
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With its one-of-a-kind charm and narrative chops, The Séance of Blake Manor is a master class in the detective genre and a delicious supernatural treat for the exact kind of freak I am.
While Possessor(s) doesn’t fully break from a crowded field of search-action games, its compelling characters and pointed commentary give it some personality of its own. If you’re eager to explore man-made horrors, this flaming wreck of a company town will provide.
Absolum was developed by Dotemu, Guard Crush Games, Supamonks, and published by Dotemu and Gamirror Games. Our review is based on the PC version. It is also available for the Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation 5.
Consume Me was developed by Jenny Jiao Hsia, AP Thomson, Jie En Lee, Violet W-P, and Ken “coda” Snyder, and was published by Hexecutable. It is available on Steam.
Through its unsettling atmosphere and total commitment to digital misery, this is an effective experiment that taps into how many of us are feeling about our increasingly tech-company-driven future: that is, very badly.
So yeah, I think I’ll go to that rage room. Maybe I’ll blast Bloom and Rage’s “See You In Hell” (as played by Nora Kelly Band in real life) while I cause some destruction. The world doesn’t hold back with the destruction it delivers unto women, so fuck it. Fuck the fear and the harassment and the harm. Thank you especially to all the women who made this game what it is—see you in hell not alongside our enemies, but as the queens Bloom and Rage sang that we are.
UFO 50 is, in other words, a game that trusts you, the player, to find the fun—with the promise that there is a lot of fun to be found in this odd, massive toy chest. We should note that the game does have a few curation tools—if you scroll down to the bottom of the collection, you can filter games by whether they’re meant to be more reflex based, or cerebral, for instance, or focus in on the title’s large number of same-screen multiplayer games. (Breaking free of the chronology is a good idea in any case; although UFO 50 doesn’t pay as much attention to the “complexity increases as fictional time passes” conceit that powered Retro Game Challenge, you’ll still tend to find more robust experiences closer to the end of UFOSoft’s fictional lifespan.) We’re sure we’ll soon see a cottage industry of guides and wider critiques pointing out hidden gems buried in its library. But honestly, we recommend just doing what the game itself advises: Scroll through until you find a title that sounds cool, blow off the fictional dust, and take a gamble on the chance you’ll hit something that’ll be one of your favorite games of 2024.
The end result is one of the most satisfying puzzle games in recent years, a pure expression of the form, to ends both frustrating, and divine.
I’m happy it exists, because nobody else is making games so fearlessly at this scale. In the moment, while playing, I often find myself thinking, “Wow, I love this.” But do I like it? I still have no damn clue.
The fighting game community tends to be much more particular about minor mechanical tweaks than fans of other genres, and it remains to be seen how Street Fighter 6 will fare under that kind of scrutiny. But, if nothing else, this is an easy entrypoint for newcomers and a fun way to dip back in for people who still fondly remember seeing those two boring guys punching each other three decades ago.
Immortality gets under your skin; flickers subliminally in your head. It becomes a part of you, whether you want it to, or not.
As we said up top, there is a good mystery story at the core here, even if its complications aren’t quite as compelling as those of the first game’s. (And if you have a taste for the meta, Uchikoshi has you covered, as always.) And those Somnium sequences really are a major step up from the original. But if Uchikoshi’s work has always involved digging through the less savory or interesting elements to get to the treasure buried underneath, then Nirvana Initiative may be the biggest such pile of his career.
The key factor in whether Elden Ring connects for you isn’t going to be its combat. (There are lot of Souls games and Souls-likes that can fill that purpose these days, if that’s what you’re after.) No, Elden Ring will get under your skin depending on how well the inherent promise of the game, one that From has been pursuing for years now, lands for you: Here is a vast world, full of mystery, danger, beauty, and humor. (Humor! Eagles with knives strapped to their feet are just the start of some of the wonderfully goofy monster designs on display.) It will not give up its secrets easily. It will frustrate and daunt you when it can.
Because at its core, Horizon Forbidden West is a game about saving the world—both in the sense of preservation, and in the doomsday-averting action that involves shooting supervillains with pointy sticks. It’s about asking ourselves what we’re willing to pay, and lose, to ensure some part of our legacy persists. And it’s about what you can do in a world where the rich and powerful have murdered your future, while greedily ensuring their own lives on. It’s not a masterpiece—masterpieces rarely come this big. But it’s a world worth keeping, nevertheless.
Is it worth the effort? Like we said: The highs here are very high, the sense of potential mastery potent. (Game looks great, too, with a fluid, slightly cartoonish style.) But progress will take a certain bloody-minded persistence—and a willingness to overlook the game’s various crimes against authenticity. (To be clear: This is a team of French developers making a video game about what they think an Asian martial arts movie looks like; it’s so divorced from anything resembling a story about real people or cultures as to land somewhere at the intersection of stereotype and cliché.) With those caveats in mind, though, Sifu remains the kind of game it’s hard to stay away from for very long—for no other reason than a desire to take vengeance on it for what it did to you the last time you played.
The only real question, then—and it’s one that haunts so many games operating in the endlessly ascending “games as service” space these days—is whether Extraction has legs beyond the initial thrill of disintegrating a Parasite with a well-placed headshot. Said staying power, though, might end up coming from the aggressive nature of the game’s difficulty. It’s still early days, but that sense of running, desperate and hunted, for an exit in the face of an overwhelming force helps Extraction feel as much like survival horror as the polished military shooter it’s taking so many of its cues from. The end result is thrilling and engaging in a way that a simple power fantasy can’t really match.