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Level after level, Hi-Fi Rush introduces something new, whether it be a mechanic, scenario, character, or implementation of a song, that deepens my appreciation for it. It's relentless in its pursuit of being a phenomenal game and unendingly proves itself time and time again. At the end of every mission, I couldn't help but think of how games this expressive and big and bright seem a growing rarity, but if Hi-Fi Rush is any indication, they've got a bright and bold future ahead.
Wild Hearts is a great success that takes the template laid out by its competition and strikes out on its own with the addition of an invaluable new tool in the form of the karakuri. That magical string not only holds the game together, but lets it stand tall at the end of the day. Sure, you can boil it down to Monster Hunter meets Fortnite, but also if you stop and think about that for a second, that idea kind of rules, and so does Wild Hearts. All the while, it makes smart tweaks and skews heavier into style rather than simulation, allowing Wild Hearts to step out of the shadow of giants and carve out a space for its own.
I've rarely played a game with a more satisfying and simple loop in an intriguing and dubious world I just wish I could've seen more of. Between the cults (yep, this game has got those too) and the sort of unexplained nature of Why This Stretch Of Sea Is Like This™, I think it's actually a world ripe for even more exploration. But even if nothing more should come out of it, Dredge is a wonderful experience in smooth sailing over choppy (maybe even supernaturally charged) waters.
Street Fighter 6 should be on your fight card. It’s the new standard in fighting game excellence.
No genuinely good game has ever been hurt by being too easy, though. With El Paso, Elsewhere Strange Scaffold has given us one of 2023’s great games—one that’s in constant conversation with the medium’s past, while simultaneously brushing against the emotional and intellectual boundaries of games. And it does it all with one hell of a sense of a style. El Paso, Elsewhere’s greatness lies not in the excellence of any one of its single components, but in the consistently high level of quality found across all of them. It does everything it tries to do exceedingly well, with sound, image, story, and interaction combining into a uniformly great package. Game designers can learn a lot from El Paso, Elsewhere, and perhaps even act on that knowledge, if their publishers let them.
In spite of it all though, CD Projekt Red has struck it out of the park. Cyberpunk 2077 finally shines the way it was always meant to. I hate talking in anything that resembles platitudes, but Phantom Liberty is an honest-to-goodness triumph. It’s not just the narrative I hoped for out of the original game, it’s everything it ought to have been. It properly sands away the rough and occasionally raw elements and designs of the base game and sharpens its best parts into a weapon like little else. It doubles down and makes it clear this is a world worth telling stories in. It more prominently and earnestly wears its heart on its sleeve, all the while delivering characters and consequences that hopefully ripple outwards in brilliant and bold new ways. It’s everything I could’ve wanted Cyberpunk 2077 to be.
It is rare that I finish a game, especially one that's more than 6 hours, and immediately want to restart and play through it all again. Bloodborne is a deeply challenging game set in a fantastically realized gothic nightmare, an adventure of the highest quality for those willing to undergo the game's trial by fire and push past the technical hiccups.
DMC: Definitive Edition puts a decent game back in the limelight with some additional content that launches it up above decent and into great. Also there's a moment where a demon yells "fuck you" and Dante yells "fuck you!" and then the demon yells "FUCK YOUUUU!!!" and now you get to experience that in glorious HD resolution at sixty frames per second in the year of our Lord two thousand and fifteen.
The quest to bind together stories of science and love isn't always an easy one to take on, but ultimately Gravity Ghost gets the job done. Drifting through space and learning the subtleties of planetary movement is fun and relaxing, and the story's charm works well enough to suggest larger meaning to a ghost's journey through the cosmos.
Once you play either [Nidhogg or Samurai Gunn] for two minutes, you're going to want as wide a library as possible of games in a similar style, and you can believe that's the sincerest compliment my brain contains.
Dark Souls III would be a fitting end to a videogame series, and we don't get many of those. I enjoyed almost all of my time with it, but I'm not sure if I'd want another game like this to come by for a long time. As a comprehensive second draft of the best moments from the series, it left me with fond memories of everything I love
A Link Between Worlds addresses that history head-on, but somehow creates an identity that’s more fulfilling and surprising than any Zelda since Wind Waker. It might have the same map as A Link to the Past, the same overhead perspective, and the same weapons and archetypes that appear in every Zelda. It’s not the same as any Zelda you’ve played before, though, because even this reliably good series is rarely as elegantly designed as A Link Between Worlds.
Despite the comparisons it might draw to Shadow of the Colossus, Jet Set Radio or Hyper Light Drifter, Solar Ash delivers a wholly unique experience that combines a smooth, unparalleled sense of speed, incredible level design, and a gorgeous art style. Even if the same can't be said about its narrative or controls, Solar Ash skates in at the last minute to become one of the year's most interesting games.
This game is more than just trying to cater to nostalgia. It is one of my favorite games of the year, and if you do have $30 to spend, I assuredly recommend Disney Dreamlight Valley.
Tekken 8 may not be a sea-change sequel, but it hones what came before, reducing pain points for newcomers without reducing the complexity that makes this series special.
Altogether though, Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is a game with vision. It wraps intriguing puzzles in a digital gothic framic. It makes the most of its chosen medium as it forces us to navigate the tenuous details of this backdrop. Just about every layer of the experience is creatively risky, from its fragmented narrative to its uncompromising barrage of challenges, but these gambles largely pay off to deliver something with purpose and direction. Crafting this kind of maze isn’t easy; it takes a combination of subtle guidance and faith in your audience. But despite these challenges, Simogo never loses sight of how to stoke curiosity about what’s lurking around the next corner, whether it’s a treasure you’ve been seeking or, conversely, something horrible lurking in the dark.
Nostalgia is similarly addictive, but Verge's confidence sees it through the challenge of invoking Metroid better than just about anyone who's tried before it. It copies more than aesthetic and ambiguous notions about variety, and the specificity is what matters. It's not a perfect match, and the absence of a powerful lead leaves an indelible mark on the experience.
Guild of Dungeoneering might be my new thirty-minute game, unseating Spelunky as the game I play while waiting for dinner to finish cooking or while I'm listening to an album. It keeps me playing without bleeding me dry, and I think about lost fights and incomplete dungeons for longer than I should while not playing the game.
What’s so impressive about this latest Paper Mario game is that, for all intents and purposes, it could have been just as grinningly dumb. This is an adventure revolving around the antics of paper-thin varietals of cartoons. No one expects Tolstoy. But the writing is smarter than most serious videogames attempting to evoke actual emotions. And that attention to detail—and a restraint diametrically opposed to its surface lunacy—is what makes the experience so humorous.
Helldivers 2 is the rare game that honestly benefits from being live-service. Just within a week we’ve already seen new missions being added with new objectives for the community to work towards that will allow all players to reap the benefits. Arrowhead’s dedication and constant communication to enhance the experience for players deserves to be commended. Alongside those rewards, there’s also compensation for players who didn’t get proper rewards for their missions and XP bonuses to make up for time lost under server maintenance. Under the right conditions (working servers and your misfit group of friends), Helldivers 2 is simply one of the greatest co-op games to come out in recent memory. The feeling of fighting for my life waiting for extraction while the orchestra is blaring away is the greatest movie I’ve ever had the pleasure of taking part in. Unfortunately, it’s not always going to be available due to factors outside the game. Yet when it all comes together, democracy has never felt so good.