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That narrative strength is bolstered by a far less tin-eared script than that of the original, a graphical upgrade that goes hard on gothic atmosphere and dread, a well-implemented upgrade system with a new-and-improved ornery British merchant (though the recently introduced optional microtransactions are a black mark against him), and creatures that still have a few unforeseen surprises up their sleeves. While this world is familiar to veterans of the original game, Capcom knows exactly when to subvert expectations to ratchet up tension.
The game doesn’t feel particularly focused on or interested in the mystery at hand so much as in better establishing the world of TRON for a future sequel, which may or may not come to fruition. Identity is beautiful and brilliant in spots, but more times than not, there’s no weight to the derezzing or freeing of the various suspects, no emotional connection between these digital creatures and their world. That and more leaves the game feeling too much like reading a rulebook—and one that stops just short of letting you actually take it for a hell of a ride.
There’s a decent amount of strategy that’s required in order to accomplish any of the investigation’s objectives in a limited amount of turns, but these end up constituting such a low amount of the game’s playtime that you’re left wishing for a better balance between Process of Elimination’s non-interactive sections and the far too scarce interactive segments. The game is an absurdist lark, with a few potent howlers and some delirious plotting, but also one that never quite compensates for the overwhelming amount of text that it forces you to read.
Curse of the Sea Rats is ultimately a perfectly average game marred by some poor design choices, like instant-death chasms and repetitive forest and cave areas. The trap-filled final dungeon finds the game at its best and most inventive, and is a joy to fight through and navigate, but it also emphasizes what’s missing everywhere else. Rats!
Even the game’s most effectively bleak ending, in which Jüngle’s founder, Josef Jüngle, is revealed to have been dead and automated for quite some time, is undercut by him still being very much alive in the other two endings. The Last Worker’s conclusions should feel earned—that is, a consequence of the protagonist’s decisions. Instead, they’re as easy and largely frivolous as just adding something to an online shopping cart.
It’s indicative of just how important a game’s moment-to-moment hooks are that even with its shortcomings, Dredge is by and large an enjoyable experience. There are games with bigger problems, but for Dredge, a few missteps and an eldritch twist that never goes anywhere make a solid foundation feel a little like a wasted opportunity.
But for as pleasant and intermittently clever as it is, Storyteller’s breezy style comes at the cost of any real complexity. Because the game’s variables and statuses are meant to remain hidden in order to avoid overcrowding the screen with information, none of the puzzles can ask very much of the player. It avoids providing too many illustrations to experiment with and too much information to keep straight in your head. A few of the later puzzles demonstrate how easily this spareness can devolve into tedium, with several that require you to establish the family ties between dwarves. Though Storyteller has its share of clever moments, the game never quite finds the depth beyond the cozy archetypes that make up its exterior.
While Trails to Azure’s barrier to entry is quite high for those who’ve never played a Trails game—and even if you’ve played Trails from Zero, there’s still a mind-numbing amount of new lore here to keep up with—the game’s still worth the plunge. You’ll be lost in the dark for a few hours, and probably for several more after that, but few JRPGs in recent memory can boast gameplay mechanics this dynamic or storytelling abilities as accomplished.
Have a Nice Death has been steadily cranking out content for just over a year in Early Access, and there are some nice combat-related surprises in store for players, like the rare alternative bosses that sometimes pop up in departments you’d long since thought you had mastered. But there still seems to be barely enough variety here to compel players to find the secret ending, let alone to keep replaying on increasingly harder “breakdowns” (the game’s version of difficulties). Turns out, the game’s comic perversion of R.I.P. is truer than it knows. There’s no peace to be found in this endless depiction of Death’s toil, only (paper)work.
Maybe it’s just folly to even expect a developer to capture a moment in wrestling history that doesn’t change within weeks with a game, where playing it in stronger narrative times doesn’t feel like regression—good luck, then, to AEW’s perpetually delayed Fight Forever game—but there’s the distinct hope that WWE 2K23 ends up being a snapshot of a turning point for the company, where the characters being portrayed and people you can embody have become steady, reliable presences, still being rendered with this level of slavish respect. At the very least, if they’re still making these in 20 years, there’s gonna be a hell of a Showcase mode about it.
Octopath Traveler II’s ultimate triumph may be the tightness of its design and how it wards off repetition. It presents itself with the confidence and experience of a deluxe guided tour, marking all the key spots for you to visit but also encouraging you to wander off the beaten path. It’s utterly engrossing without ever feeling overwhelming—the bite-sized narrative chunks help in that regard—and every system feels fine-tuned for maximal enjoyment. And with so many different experiences in one package, it’s a great game to get lost in eight times over.
More than any other Destiny expansion since Bungie split from Activision, you can feel the developers pulling the reins a bit on Lightfall. All the right elements are in play, and the way that Destiny feels so sleek and streamlined compared to not just other live service games but its own cumbersome past remains impressive. But first impressions are everything, and Lightfall pays so much attention to the gleaming horizon that it trips over its feet trying to get there.
With Mask of the Lunar Eclipse, you must take the good it offers along with its regressive design in order to even begin to ride its eerie wavelength. Which, for what it’s worth, is an exceptionally uncanny ride that never puts on the breaks long enough for boredom to ever set in, as even its wildest swings result in some considerably discomforting set pieces (the funeral-themed room inhabited by the hostile spirit Kageri Sendou and her maleficent doll Watashi, while a tad on the nose in its design, is a disturbing highlight). This may not be a game that was made for these modern times, but for those willing to put up with its old-school frustrations, it’s also one that will certainly keep you up at night and stick in your subconscious for weeks to come.
And that delight is the core appeal of a game like Kirby’s Dream Land—that is, one that overflows with joy and happiness via relatively calm and easygoing gameplay that’s matched by bright and colorful graphics. Dream Land has never looked better than it does on the Nintendo Switch with this release, which updates the relatively plain 3D characters of the Wii version with gorgeous cel-shaded renderings that look like a cartoon come to life.
Wild Hearts is ultimately a monster-hunting game, and just as in Monster Hunter, the core flaw of just how arduous it can be to take down prey, even with a little help from your friends, is present here. The story, though, at least provides a bit of motivation in hard times. Namely, the game’s main hub world, a fishing village powered by magic, provides some surprisingly poignant little tales worth seeing through to the end, and which home in on the important role that you play in helping to provide for that community. The results of your good work are tangible when those tales are said and done, which in the end makes the monster hunting at the center of Wild Hearts feel, if not less like work, then at least purposeful.
Thankfully, these systems can largely be ignored at your discretion. There’s even a Music Player (and an Auto mode) for those who just want to listen to the songs instead of tapping along to them. The game doesn’t do anything to demonstrate a sense of history or growth between its 385 songs, but it doesn’t need to. No matter how much Final Bar Line may flatten its inspirations down to a single two-dimensional chibi art style, the music sings for itself.
At the start of Wanted: Dead, players are given the chance to enter a training simulator that walks them through the basic functionality of combat against holographic foes. It’s revealing when one of the levels in the game is set inside the drab and boxy corridors of that simulator. Apart from your foes now being flesh and blood, there’s functionally no difference in killing them. But, then, nearly every level of Wanted: Dead is practically the same, and no amount of stolen memes, nostalgic riffs, and non sequiturs can hide that depressing fact.
It’s almost miraculous how such wild tonal swings don’t break the immersion of the game. Instead, they provide much-needed respite from the ins and outs of a bloody, morally charged tale about family, betrayal, colonialism, democracy, and revolution unlike anything that’s ever been released on Western shores. Baked right into the mechanics is the fact that keeping Ryoma away from living something resembling a normal, honorable life will damage him over time. Some of the best perks and armor in the game are hidden behind Ryoma literally keeping his house in order. It’s highly impressive that all that lives in perfect balance in Ishin, where taking up the sword to seek justice is as wonderfully intricate and as it is here.
Blanc abounds in beautifully layered textures, with sharp distinctions between foreground and background planes. Which makes it all the more frustrating that such intricacy isn’t present in the text-free story, which at times devolves into bland obstacle courses that seem to exist only to disguise the monotony of the game’s mechanics. Except perhaps for the lack of sustenance in this world that goes undiscussed, there’s no element of surprise here, as the cub and fawn set out to find their families and accomplish just that. The humans are missing, and nobody cares, not even the domesticated sheep left behind in the stables that are somehow still alive.
The only real sour note now comes from the final boss, the Hive Mind, but at the very least, Dead Space is far from the only survival horror game to think bigger is better when it comes to monstrosities, even though it’s spent so many hours proving the opposite. Still, it’s a long, terrifying road before you get there, and by then, Dead Space has already done the devil’s work so many times over, giving us some new nightmares in the cold black of space, and proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that this series should have never died in the first place.