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Like SteamWorld Heist, only more so, this is an eminently playable game—fun, well-paced, and finely tuned. It may be somewhat safe and at times predictable, but it avoids anything resembling a major misstep, making it an easy recommendation for fans of this genre of game.
When looking for reasons to continue in Flintlock, most of them have to do with seeing another gorgeous vista, going off the beaten path for resources, and finding more fights to play around with new magic skills and combinations. More of that could and should come from the narrative, but what Flintlock does right, it does well, and in a way that welcomes more players into the fold. That, apparently, is something A44 can do that FromSoftware won’t.
There’s also the odd choice to render some solutions on the mystery board as cutscenes with NPCs acting out past events. These are usually a bit stiff and awkward, with characters rendered inexplicably in highlighter yellow. They seem like an effort to heighten the drama of the game’s most important moments. But in leaving less to the imagination, they instead have the opposite effect—shining too bright a light on a story that thrives in its moments of murky mystery.
Nobody Wants to Die struggles to reach a satisfying conclusion, which is, perhaps fittingly, indicated by its very title. There’s a serial killer, conspiracy theory, James’s traumatic past, his current partner’s illicit body-rental surrogacy, and a class riot. The game’s body-swapping shenanigans mashes several of those plots into a confusing showdown that may leave you unsure as to who you’re even confronting. The ending that my choices led to—the point at which you’d most want to do a reconstruction—was abrupt and disappointing, leaving the fate of many characters in question. How unfortunate, then, that out of all the places in which the game allows you to rewind time and relive past events, your save file isn’t one of them.
To its credit, Conscript maintains a high level of intensity regardless and doesn’t cheapen the experience by adding unnecessary supernatural elements or moments of levity. Similar to its survival horror brethren, it features multiple endings, and while some are more impactful than others, all boast the same dedication to authenticity and the anti-war themes that put it in the same conversation as other Australian anti-war classics like Peter Weir’s Gallipoli.
But while the game at times demands a level of execution that its design doesn’t always facilitate, its frustrations are fleeting. They resemble the towering skeleton that stomps through its world—revealing themselves in bursts but largely sticking to the darkness, denting but not fully cracking the beauty, coziness, and wondrous sense of atmosphere that surround them.
Where it most matters, though, Linkito delivers engaging puzzles. The final area, Albatross Tech’s Control Center, creatively incorporates elements from each of the previous divisions, with elaborate, multi-panel contraptions that will have you programming robots to carry data that can be used to unlock the path to a bomb. A promising level editor all but ensures there will be even more challenging post-launch devices to solve, for while the story is about a budding revolution, it’s by no means revolutionary. The puzzles, though? They’re electric.
Aletheia also gradually attains a suite of powers that allow you to reach previously inaccessible areas, but backtracking grows tedious due to the barebones map and the limitations of fast travel. You can only teleport to and from a handful of locations, meaning that you often need to embark on odysseys to use warp spots to get elsewhere. This tedium leads the game’s Metroidvania elements to feel shoehorned in rather than integral to its design. Though it has the bones of a winning action platformer, Gestalt: Steam & Cinder contorts them in submission to generic norms and expectations. The adventure becomes a chore, the fire stamped out.
The visuals are a standout in this regard too. For one, the graphic a friend makes in honor of a “date” you went on with a new classmate is so overblown (complete with doves) that it would look right at home memorializing someone’s tragically premature death. These jokes are funny, but they’re also emblematic of the way in which these kids—all of whom have their own deeply felt emotional baggage—ultimately lift each other up. It reflects a genuine and kind-hearted rejection of the kind of cynicism that’s far too often romanticized in other teen dramas.
It’s due to all those narrative and mechanical successes that the big blowout climax of The Final Shape’s campaign hits as effectively as it does. Accessing the final mission of that campaign was a community effort—which was unlocked for the entire player base back on June 8 by the first team in the world to beat the new Raid—and it’s wonderful for the way it makes high-level players feel just as much a part of the universe as its lowest level scrubs. But beyond being the final beat of a decade-long story, the final mission is a bombastic technical marvel—an astonishing 12-player fireworks display of a boss fight on par with the climactic, all-encompassing war at the end of Avengers: Endgame. It’s a victory lap, and Bungie knows it. More importantly, over the course of 10 long years, Bungie has earned it.
It’s an extended encore and a haunting final bow for Miyazaki Hidetaka’s magnum opus.
Yet even these rough edges work in concert toward something singular and idiosyncratic. Indeed, the story becomes hard to pin down in the lead-up to a truly audacious ending, and the occasional abandonment of combat fortifies the horror undertones far more effectively than simply killing everything in your way. Skald may be easy to distill to its overt influences, but its best moments use those touchstones to build something new.
The newest chapter in Senua’s story is powerfully told but feels like it’s missing a few pages.
But it’s a credit to the Simogo team’s incredibly sharp writing that however obtuse the game’s puzzles may seem at times, they never feel unsolvable. As noted in one of the many bits of sumptuous flavor text scattered about the Hotel Letztes Jahr: “Getting stuck is one of the key parts of the process.” And in holding true to the manifestos of the artists at the heart of the story, Lorelei and the Laser Eyes manifests puzzles as art, requiring the proper interpretations of mixed-media sculptures, paintings, and more. It’s all one unexpected thrill after another as you go deeper and deeper into a maze of memories, metaphors, and magic.
Despite its litany of tricks, though, Animal Well is a relatively simple game at its core, with little in the way of an overarching mystery or narrative to push you along. And while the lack of long-term hooks sometimes makes the game feel a bit slight, the single-minded attention to the in-the-moment pleasure of the gameplay creates a focus that is meditative rather than expansive. Animal Well isn’t some grand adventure or sweeping artistic statement. It’s just a boatload of tiny interconnected puzzles, woven together to form an almost unimaginably intricate web.
Had Eve been a character with agency and personality, who actually responded to the drooling and leering that she’s meant to embody, well, she’d be Bayonetta. If her emptiness was hiding deep existential secrets that the game revealed with patience and empathy, she’d be 2B. Instead, Eve is a busty, long-legged cipher of a doll who has no idea just how far up her hind quarters the game’s camera is designed to go, and seems somehow quite comfortable wearing sci-fi heels that make her feet look like horse hooves. Perhaps it’s unfair for this to be the sole focus for some players, but, unfortunately, there isn’t a whole lot else going on to draw their gaze away from it.
One gets the sense that adding that little bit of extra context might’ve made Neurodiver feel more Phoenix Wright than the folks at MiniBoss intended. But that wouldn’t have necessarily been a bad thing given that the game always feels as if wants for, well, more context. It’s a testament to the work that was done by MidBoss that the game’s characters, their history with the various conflicts of the world, and the specific psychic damage being done to the Golden Butterfly’s victims that Neurodiver will leave players wanting more. There are just far too many moments where wanting to know more crosses the line into “the game isn’t providing enough.”
Above all, Cryptmaster suffers from you having too many words to learn and there being far too few chapters in which to do so. Even if players are Wheel of Fortune savants, unlocking every word for each character requires hours of retyping the same combat commands. Even an actual zombie would beg off after piecing together words like PARADIDDLE and AMBERGRIS for such meager rewards as another scrap of backstory. This is especially so in the last level, a straightforward corridor that strips away the illusion of exploration provided by the more elaborate mazes and NPC quests that preceded them. By then, you’ll have long come to the realization that this game designed around words should have chosen them more carefully.
The game does include a functional and robust multiplayer mode, where groups of up to 30 online players can dive together, but to what end? As the gameplay itself is so simplistic and the sessions poorly emulate real diving, the cooperative experience is fairly inane. Outside of enlisting others to hasten the progress of unlocks, there’s very little to this mode, and the same can be said of most everything that Luminous has to offer.
Given the sheer amount of hints and instructional text plastered all over its environments, Crow Country is tuned to be approachable and readily digestible. You’ll never find yourself desperate for resources or racking your brain over a fiendish puzzle. Even the old-school tank controls are optional, mapped to the D-pad just in case any players feel compelled to experiment before going back to the analog stick. These decisions are hardly out of step with the pleasantly nostalgic presentation, but they also ensure that the game succeeds far more as a puzzle object than as a horror freak-out. For better and for worse, Crow Country goes down smoothly.