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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.
What makes Fire Emblem Engage especially frustrating is that, even for all of its glaring issues, there’s an undeniable joy in successfully conquering a difficult battalion through a mixture of skill, luck, and good timing. That, or spamming a series of well-placed special moves and calling it a day. But since the infrastructure around these battles is so lacking, this latest entry in Intelligent Systems’s long-standing series amounts to not much more than a glorified chess match, albeit one with a few more fire-spewing dragons running around to spice things up.
SEASON is a poetic, meditative game, but it often bluntly calls too much attention to its intentions, especially with fussy dialogue like “I feel a dulcet tension in the air.” Then again, it does capture the soothing sensation that comes from immersing oneself in another world and learning about it, and with the exception of the game’s final encounter, it’s nothing if not consistent. In the end, SEASON isn’t about answers so much as it is about coping with loss. As one character puts it, repeating one word like a mantra, time always moves on: flow, flow, flow.
A Space for the Unbound triumphs in capturing what’s between the lines of the story: the life-and-death emotions of Raya. The game’s not afraid to peer at her faults right alongside everyone else’s, and if, as one character puts it, “The most perfect world is one with imperfection,” then, emotionally speaking, this is a pretty perfect game.
Perhaps Colossal Cave’s unthinking fealty to the original, and its seeming dismissal of so many of the innovations that might have improved it, could be forgiven if it featured any puzzles or mechanics that would be tough to replicate in a modern design context. But no such innovations are apparent, and new touches like the first-person camera create new problems like making it easy to miss important items in the cave. Colossal Cave, then, can hardly be called a “modernization,” because it would have felt antiquated even if it came out 20 years ago.
Midnight Suns’s biggest payoff comes in its final mission, which ties together all of your efforts at The Abbey and in previous combats. Forcing players to utilize their least played characters is particularly telling of the game’s design philosophy, for the success of your multipart battle proves that Midnight Suns is only as strong as its weakest links—and, consequently, so long as you’ve been paying attention, there are no weak links when it comes to the game’s combat.
But, then, this Reunion clearly didn’t set out to push the Remake universe forward so much as remind us of what Remake rebelled against. FFVII and Crisis Core were ultimately stories of inevitability and tragedy, while Remake was about defiance. Even with some much-welcome extra polish, Reunion still feels like a game of the past, but it’s also a strong reminder of why FFVII fans are so immensely excited about the future, and what defying the fates might bring.
The game’s dedication to graphical fidelity feels like a blinder to thinking outside the box in every other regard. It can’t help but feel like intensive overcompensation for inconsistent, tension-less stealth, one-note combat, level design that doesn’t reward exploration, generically fleshy enemies, upgrades that don’t reward experimentation, and ineffective jump scares, from enemies that get cheap hits in on Jacob every single time, regardless of how well-prepared the player is. Much has been made of the fact that this was meant as the heir apparent to beloved survival horror series Dead Space, a game that, 12 years later, can still induce goosebumps just from its terrifying attract sequence. By contrast, if not for its graphics, The Callisto Protocol feels like a relic from 1998, undone creatively even by the decaying likes of Shadow Man.
Somerville does at least stick the landing with a third act that largely pushes the puzzles to the side in favor of an alien mind game that plays with one’s perception of what came before, and some surprisingly effective emotional payoff in the multiple endings. These moments represent the game at its best: scary, strange, wondrous, and enthralling. Thankfully, there are just enough of those riveting moments to forgive the ones where Somerville feels more than a little rote.