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But on the off chance you don't touch the things, are reading this, and have ever uttered or read the word "cottagecore" earnestly: this game is for you. Find the nearest friend, family member, or partner who is always talking about what a great deal Game Pass is and force them to download it for you. If you're already acquainted with interactive media, The Good Life is an unpredictable yet satisfying experience that seems to always be throwing the player some new curveball to keep things fresh-much like life itself.
Its superb soundtrack and visuals are an everlasting treat. Playing it handheld on Switch is how it should be played, in reminiscence of playing SRPGs on a Nintendo DS. When its issues are fixed, I really hope to recommend this game to others because it has been one of my favorites of this year. I'm still waiting to ascend to whichever goddess or whatever fate awaits me on its final floors, feeling the despair of a warrior's spirit, but not in the way I or Evertried had hoped.
I kept chugging along through its story and its battles without either ever feeling like much of a chore. Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy doesn't have the ingenuity or spark of James Gunn's movies, but it should do just enough to keep you interested on a lazy afternoon when you don't have anything else to do. That's a perfectly fine role for a game to fill, and this game is perfectly fine with filling it.
But for what it is, Back 4 Blood proves that what made Left 4 Dead good is still a lot of fun, even if this new iteration doesn't make use of every innovative convention to spring up since the series' original release. And there's something to be said for aging gracefully and not shoehorning in everything at once. As the old plastic surgery adage goes, sometimes it's best not to remake but maintain.
There's a new Far Cry out. There's always a new Far Cry out. Maybe it's time for that to stop?
There's a kind of meditative quality about hiking to a quest kilometers away, cutting a tree or two, hitting a couple of rocks and soaking in the scenery. Few games have made walking to objectives a worthwhile experience. But when these walks are more interesting than the objectives, there's a problem.
She has an immediate chemistry with Eastward's cavalcade of supporting characters, which are numerous and varied in their importance. I wish the game paid more mind to letting her character breathe, and allowing her to engage with the plot on her own terms. Instead, I'm left feeling like Eastward is a bunch of beautiful puzzle pieces that fail to come together.
What pleasures Kena provides are intrinsic to most videogames: clicking buttons and finding trinkets. Eventually I did fall into that groove, but it was distracting, not compelling. When all the game's darkness dissipates into bright green, when all wounds can be healed with determination and kindness, when death itself is a collectible friend, it is difficult to feel that distraction was worth it.
Sable may dwell in the ruins, but she is alive. She is well. I take great comfort in that.
undefined.But as is often the case, if someone's biggest complaints are that they just wish there was more of a game, that usually means they enjoyed their time with it. And I adored my time in Random. It's pretty remarkable how a game that's likely considered a "AA" title, somewhere between indie and "AAA" in scope, manages to create an experience parallel to full "AAA" games from just five or 10 years ago. There's a lot to be cynical and skeptical about in the gaming industry, from continuing abuse within its studios, to a seeming lack of original ideas in its biggest titles, to so much more. But games like Lost in Random remind me that there's still magic and joy to be found in videogames, even from a company that can be as cold and calculated as EA.
Tying Judgment to a combat system that even the original franchise has left behind feels like a decision to hobble the imagination this studio has demonstrated time and time again. We've spent over a decade and seven games learning what a Yakuza game feels like, and 2019's first step into the spinoff series Judgment impressed the hell out of me, but now it's time for the franchise to figure out what it wants to be. And I hope it can do that by standing on its own.
While I can nitpick about Deathloop's shortcomings, I'd rather just point you to a game that's a joy to play, confident in itself, touts two wonderful Black leads, looks wonderful, and rewards you for thinking outside the box. While it doesn' quite feel like an evolution of the formula, it's almost assuredly Arkane's most feature-complete and refined take on it. Like I said at the top of this review, Deathloop is countless things, and most of them are great.
undefined.If you missed the original Sonic Colors, you missed the introduction of worlds and elements that became the backbone to future Sonic games such as Sonic & All Stars Racing Transformed, Sonic Lost World and more. Sonic Colors: Ultimate will help you fill in that background, while also offering a futuristic, colorful way for newcomers to break into the world of Sonic. For younger players looking to discover the classics, remasters such as Sonic Colors: Ultimate are vital to letting games be enjoyed across generations.
It's all cozy but rote, which is a shame because the series has been bolder in the past. Walking away from it, I'm impressed at how much I cared for the cast, for example, and am also keenly aware of the fact that while I liked them, I will largely forget who they are because I've done this before and will likely do it again somewhere else in a few years. Life is Strange may sell itself on comfort, and True Colors may be the one most emblematic of this, but I wonder if the series itself has become too comfortable for its own good.
Too many of these games fall into that witless trap of thinking something "serious" and "important" must also be humorless and dark, unrelentingly grim and fatalistic. Psychonauts 2 reveals that for the nonsense that it is, showing that you can more powerfully and realistically depict emotion when you use warmth, humor, humanity-the whole scope of emotions that make us who we are. Psychonauts 2 asks "how does it feel to feel?", and then shows the answer to us-and the games industry at large-in brilliant colors.
What it does, it does well, and it leaves open a path forward where complex narrative structures are explored (The Vale has some branching, but like early D&D adventure modules, it's fairly on the rails), or the simple puzzle forms are complicated and expanded. There's plenty of overhead to play with new forms of audio puzzles entirely. And while I wished some of that was in this game itself, perhaps leaving space for the next game is crucial-experimentation should never be final or definitive. But for now, Falling Squirrel has crafted a brilliant next step with The Vale.
Whether it'll be worth it to you depends on how much you'd need to end up spending and how much you enjoyed your first time in Tsushima. If you've never played it, though, Director's Cut is the obvious choice whether you're on PS4 or PS5. It might be the filler of games, but it's some of the best filler I've ever played. Slap that on the back of the box, Sucker Punch.
I have nothing against those games, but it is wonderful to see something play with their vocabulary to make something fresh. While many games of its ilk rely on the broad strokes of fantasy, Black Book dares to be particular. It is all the richer for it.
It doesn't skimp on challenging action or a satisfying story, but it also doesn't expect us to devote dozens of hours to it. You can reach the end of the story in less than eight hours-roughly as long as the original Legend of Zelda. Its end is neither sudden and unexpected, nor long and drawn-out. If only we can all embrace our own end as gracefully as Death's Door does.
The way characters move and express in combat never gets old, even as everything around it quickly does. I can see the massive amount of love and care put into one element of the game, which conveniently is the most visible one for observers. But once I pick up the controller, it becomes clear that level of detail is only surface deep.