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However commendable Nightdive’s efforts to preserve the spirit of the original may be, it doesn’t take much frustrated wandering before questioning whether their modernization efforts have gone far enough.
Gollum just feels so shockingly old hat—a disheartening collection of mechanics that, at best, bring to mind one of the lesser pre-2013 Tomb Raider games and, at worst, suggest leftovers from the N64 bargain bin. Every success involves wrestling the loose controls, unhelpful camera, and iffy collision detection into submission against an ever-increasing wave of bugs and glitches, only some of which have been fixed by the game’s Day One patch.
Conversely, Lego 2K Drive has multiple currencies, and playing through the campaign unlocks frustratingly little. As such, players are artificially restrained while frequently being prodding toward spending real money. And the unfortunate result of that is that Lego 2K Drive is, at best, a competent arcade racing game let down by its difficulty and microtransactions.
The more fantastical elements of Redfall fail to impress, but the everyday detail of its setting manages to shine through, surfacing little stories left in the wreckage. The problem is that, even if you’re willing to dig for those moments, they’re still overshadowed by the glimpses of another, larger story: the one that explains how Redfall came to be released in such a state as this.
While Darkest Dungeon II’s emphasis on the interpersonal is apt for a game that’s more road trip than dungeon crawl, it also makes it a decidedly more hopeful experience than the first game, as it leaves the door open for your adventuring party to face seemingly insurmountable odds and come out the other side stronger. There’s also more comedy and just plain joy in knowing that as intimidating as all those monsters may seem, your biggest challenge is getting your ragtag band of rascals to stop bickering and get along.
Jedi: Survivor is a strong entry in the modern Star Wars canon, part of a new subsect of adventures in this universe finding ways to be sci-fi fantasy without ignoring the innate horror and banal evils inherent in the premise. The story paints an impressively dire picture of the new status quo in the galaxy, and it weaves in elegantly with the interactivity of the game, tying it directly into the fact that Cal is still powerful but only one Jedi in a galaxy that fell even when there was an entire army of them.
Strayed Lights admirably tries its best to serve two masters, attempting to be a loving interpretive dance of a narrative held together with ruthless, tricky, defensive combat. The yin and yang of the game may not fit together perfectly, unbalanced as they are, but both sides are executed with enough forethought, joy, and panache to make the experience worthwhile.
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.