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You’ll occasionally come across signs bearing dreamlike musings: “the sea shells form a bridge between us,” “there is a dark shape on the horizon,” and so on. As you travel further, the wind changes direction and the evening sky shifts from orange to purple. Platforms get sparser and require leaps of faith or hope. And when you inevitably miss and Waldorf falls into the sea, he wakes up on an ice floe, surrounded by sleeping walruses, waiting to dream again. It’s the clearest example of UFO 50’s willingness to experiment paying off in something as fun to play as it is interesting conceptually, but in a crowded field, it’s far from the only one.
When it isn’t tipping its hat to Yars’ Revenge, the game offers only simplistic platforming.
Whatever dissonance hovers in the air at the start of I Am Your Beast will have dissipated by the time you reach the final level. “You’re creating a no-win scenario for yourself,” screams Burkin as he throws the full force of the government at you. In response, Harding simply, satisfyingly, and coolly rejects those terms. As the lyrics to that final level’s original track kick in, you’ll come to know what he knows: that there will always be another level, and that you will always be someone else’s beast—unless you find a way, however bloody, to be your own man.
Your might proves substantial enough to bend even clichés to your will. When, during a cutscene, a monster in the background looks like it’s about to get the jump on Titus, one of your buddies casually blasts it from out of the frame. The bait and switch feels like a winking admission by Space Marine 2: This is an unabashedly over-the-top ride, but it won’t stoop to boring contrivance. Your strength is too profound, your time too important, to abide that.
That leaves the character work to build up a compelling story, Frank Stone’s core cast of kids is incredibly likable. All of them have big dreams of leaving their hometown for various reasons, but only one—uncanny Chloë Sevigny doppelganger Linda—ever gets to realize them, and her dreams come with a terrifying caveat. As for the ancillary adult characters, they vary in terms of likability, but they all coalesce into an oddball ensemble worth fretting about as they take on unknowable horrors. Maybe the greatest, simplest compliment that can be paid to Supermassive’s work here is that after years of only watching and reading about the game from the sidelines, Frank Stone made me want to start playing more Dead by Daylight.
This continuity also deepens your connection to the world in interesting ways. Since every step Jemma takes affects everything around her, it means that she’s always moving other people in ways they find helpful or annoying. Sometimes she solves problems and other times she just breaks things. The resulting consistency and believability suggests an actual world with real problems that need solving, fulfilling the promise of Arranger’s subtitle by turning a smart, winsome puzzler into something that also feels like an adventure.
Everyone can easily hop on a grind rail and travel around, but seasoned gamers will have endless opportunities and reasons to kill and look cool doing it. Even still, it’s not hard at all to button mash one’s way to glory, as long as one remembers where the shield button is from time to time. Expert gamers might be disappointed at how little the higher difficulties add to the mix, but it’s hard to be mad when the base experience is such a sick and sanguine little delight.
Over the course of Bloodless, Tomoe leads dozens, if not hundreds, of challengers to flee from her in fear. Their apparent lack of conviction—their willingness to take flight rather than die fighting—suggests a commentary on violence that the game fails to flesh out. Tomoe’s exchanges with new and old acquaintances, which transpire in sluggish scenes filled with trite dialogue, are similarly devoid of depth, texture, and specificity. Bloodless clearly has something to say about the cataclysmic potential of power and the cycles of suffering it locks people into, but by making its world feel universal—like it could be anywhere—it ends up nowhere at all.
There are kinks in the game’s armor, like skittish enemy AI and a bunch of absolutely gratuitous cameos (you’ve been warned Solo haters). For all of its efforts to stretch out to forge its own identity, Outlaws can’t resist occasionally returning to the nostalgia well. But such grievances are likely to run off you like water off a duck’s back. In the end, everything here, down to the scaleable difficulty, clever upgrade system that bypasses usual RPG-levelling mechanics where skills and upgrades are tied into missions, and the surprisingly fun minigames, is so well executed that you’ll always feel like your wildest galactic scoundrel fantasy has been realized.
While the plot is occasionally predictable and the voice acting is a bit of a letdown, none of this takes away from the overall charm and mystery of Eden Genesis. Even when the final area, Node Zero, strips away all of the glamor of Eden’s districts, reducing things to a wireframe orange, it’s never anything less than exhilarating to find ways around obstacles, running along the safe underbelly of a fiery platform in order to double-jump up and slash through an enemy on the other side of it before finding another safe ceiling. If this is mental degeneration, then Disturbed had it right back in 2000: “Get up, come on get down with the sickness.”
Luckily, though, you’ll spend much of Tactical Breach Wizards in the heat of battle, and that’s where it functions best. Few of the scenarios are difficult, and intentionally so; the game is less about raw challenge than having you experiment in pursuit of efficiency and style. Many of the optional, more difficult objectives encourage you to squeeze 15 actions into a single turn or complete a map without letting the enemy ever fire a shot, which means constantly refreshing your actions and movements several times per turn. Even when the characters are patiently waiting their turn, there’s always a remarkable sense of speed to Tactical Breach Wizards.
Wukong excels at allowing players to feel increasingly like the Monkey King himself. This is an action RPG whose focus is less on punishing, labyrinthine environments and more on delivering precise, melee-based combat encounters that put the Destined One’s agility to the test.
By the end, when there are half a dozen paths for the demonic horde to get to Yoshiro and end her life in three hits, the fact that it all seems manageable is a triumph of good, accessible game design. Kunitsu-Gami’s rural Japan is a place of natural beauty, of dance, of light and revelry in the face of darkness. There are very few games that have dared to convey this very culturally specific magic in such a distinctive and compelling way.
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.