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Incredible visual presentation, an arresting atmosphere, and a charming travel partner make it worth taking a trip down The Midnight Walk.
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.
But when the experience tries to be a copy of everything but itself, and not one of its limbs seems designed to stand out and leave a lasting impression, does any of this matter?
Who wants to go through all of that in hopes of maybe getting some weird sci-fi reference to Mappy? There needs to be something more than an Easter egg at the end of that labyrinth—especially when there’s a regular stream of Easter eggs on the way there.
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.
Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector fleshes out its predecessor’s RPG systems, develops a convincing cast of characters, and gives you the tools to be the space captain of your dreams, but its greatest accomplishment is how it makes you feel the full force of that quote in each fleeting moment.
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.