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If the Pikmin series has one thing that it wants you to take away from each game, it’s to see the world with the same naïve wonder as its various exploring protagonists. Before now, this message felt somewhat distant, like something you could miss if you didn’t reach out and grab it. But this series’s commitment to realism is better served on the Switch, and its message—that you should approach your surroundings with the intentionality, curiosity, and joy of someone seeing them for the first time—punches you straight in the gut whether you want it to or not.
The background music that plays in each of the hub worlds is jazz, and it’s just as intentional as any of the photographs. Jazz is filled with spontaneous moments of harmony, which turns out to be the main ingredient and lure of Viewfinder. This is a game that, as you retrace the steps of four disparate people who did their best to save humanity, lets you riff along the way.
As for the MFN offices, they’re full of detailed memorabilia like posters, props, and episode scripts, to the point where simply taking it all in is perhaps the game’s main appeal. There’s a tangible love and care that has gone into making the game’s equivalent of Sesame Street studios feel plausible, as well as a clear delight in warping our memory of a show that opened up a world of imagination for generations of children into something darker.
That is, as mentioned, a bit of a paradigm shift for how “young adult” the original game skewed, but an important one, creating an engrossing, if more casual, experience. Oxenfree II, seven years separated from its predecessor, is all grown up, and while it’s not quite yelling at clouds yet, it’s rather pointedly a game that’s quite literally about getting the kids off its lawn.
You’ll also feel like you’ve helped write one. Ghost Trick is a story about stories, about how the invisible machinations of a guiding hand can create something whole and beautiful. It could only ever be a video game. At the risk of embellishment, it might be one of the video games. That it’s found a home on modern hardware is encouraging, and that Capcom saw fit to leave it more or less untouched is a small miracle. This is Ghost Trick as it always was: pristine, unassuming, and inimitable. And this remaster will make you glad that it’s been resurrected.
Other UI irritations abound, serving only to further complicate an experience at odds with itself for how much information it wants to communicate at a given moment. On the whole, Jagged Alliance 3 lays some strong groundwork for the franchise’s resurgence, but it often feels like a series of individual victories that fail to work in concert for something greater.
The most fundamental flaw of Final Fantasy XVI is its inability or unwillingness to delve too deeply into the machinations of inequality, but its greatest strength is how the story details the way that people march forward toward freedom. There’s absolutely no doubt that Clive believes in his home, and while he may be one of only a few to swing a sword, bringing houses and bridges and feeding those with empty stomachs is the work of many. Watching Clive’s work come to fruition and build the world for future generations may be the most powerful summoning spell ever cast in the entirety of Final Fantasy.
Yuke’s has managed to deliver an accessible, breezy rendition of their trademark product, without sacrificing the things that make watching an AEW show unique, pulse-raising, and hard-hitting. And more than this, it feels like a foundation waiting to be built upon. This is a game designed to have a long tail, with a steady stream of DLC on the way and the in-game store already (as of pre-launch) offering a smattering of fun add-ons (ironically, Cody Rhodes, who left AEW in 2021, is a bonus character, meaning he’s in both of this year’s major AAA wrestling games). As such, Fight Forever could live up to the name, and while it may not be the place to go for strict realism, it’s still better than you, and it knows it.
In all, the game has everything you’d expect of a Meat Boy title, right down to the narrative—a playful, unobtrusive shaggy dog story that builds to a predictably but no less hilariously crass punchline. Turns out that Dr. Fetus building this entire game just to flip Meat Boy the bird is, yes, frivolous and excessive but also, like Mean Meat Machine itself, perfectly fitting.
It only helps that Dark Descent so ably captures the look and tone of the Alien films. While the characters here aren’t as immediately memorable as the motley crew of marines from Aliens, the voice actors humanize them with impressive details, thus sealing our investment in their fates. The environments are appropriately menacing, with clever fog effects that make each excursion into the “hived” areas an intense experience. And the familiar tick, tick, tick of the iconic motion tracker adds to the stress of every mission. It really wouldn’t be an Aliens game without it.
And that’s just scratching the surface of the game’s pleasures. There’s the professional match commentary, the surprising character details and bond system in World Tour, the fabulously nonbinary tournament emcee Eternity, the return of bonus stages, the battle-rap style intros for Versus matches, the create-a-character’s intricacies actually affecting gameplay, the character-specific voice lines during the Arcade mode’s final boss fights. Which is to say, Street Fighter 6 is the most feature-rich, welcoming, and inclusive package ever crafted for a fighting game—a stylish reassertion of creative dominance for the series that started it all, and an endlessly rewarding new foundation for its future. The next generation of fighting games starts right here.
It’s tempting to call it a shame—a waste, even—that a game that looks so unlike any other doesn’t have much going for it in the way of dialogue or character study. But, then, stories aren’t just limited to the things people say. And, of course, a story centered on the tenuous nature of human memory would be messier than that—rendered in imprecise arrays, interrupted by blank space, and framed in rough edges. Which is to say, a bit like watercolor.
The most delightfully surprising thing about Harmony is that using the Augural board never feels clinical, given that the choices you make throughout attest to the game’s belief that logic and empathy aren’t mutually exclusive. You almost always know what the rewards are for each of your choices, so picking an option that, say, doesn’t yield egregore, the crystalized energy that fuels each Aspiration and serves as a sort of skill check for certain nodes, demonstrates a real commitment to helping others, not for one’s own sake, but for the sake of others.
While the plethora of ugly scandals hanging over Activision Blizzard has been frustratingly overlooked by the gaming public, it will be difficult for most to overlook the aggressive monetization of Diablo IV. In addition to different (and expensive) editions of the game that allowed earlier play and a shop that sells cosmetic items, Diablo IV has three different Battle Passes and two expansions in the works. It’s unnecessary, and taken alongside major updates that have already dramatically changed how some of the classes function, Diablo IV stands on unsteady ground despite possessing a strong foundation, far above its series forebearers.
Experimenting will more often reveal methods that do not work rather than validating the loading screen’s impossibly lofty claim to player freedom. Further, the resource scarcity that drives the game is hardly conducive to experimentation, doing more to keep you strictly on the path of least resistance. What motive is there to waste a precious gas can on some hare-brained scheme when you know for sure that it will work just fine in the generator? Certainly the more restrictive means of progression in The Bunker has its own pleasures even within a more open framework, but the game insists on calling a shot that it has no hope of making.
It’s easy to wonder if this game’s sequel will be even more grandiose, if it will have Link go the cosmic route of Nintendo’s plumber mascot Mario and end up in outer space. Maybe we’ll get to see him jump off of the moon before gradually descending upon Hyrule yet again. If so, one can only hope that more than just the path back down to Zelda’s kingdom will be littered with truly novel, go-for-broke creative highs of the sort that not just Super Mario Galaxy and its sequel rode, but earlier Legend of Zelda games as well. Because balancing tradition with innovation doesn’t make a game like Tears of the Kingdom, or any other for that matter, soar if the most transparent thing about it is how it chooses to ride in on another’s coattails.
Most radio shows have a clear and compelling sense of identity—some sort of distinguishing characteristic that they commit to. That certainly applies to Killer Frequency itself, as it’s a stylishly campy ode to ’80s slashers that’s as unpredictable as it is breezily entertaining. Which isn’t to say that it’s a featherweight experience. The game, after all, touches on the almost sycophantic relationship between a killer who wouldn’t be as feared without news coverage and a show which would have far fewer listeners without relaying said coverage. In all, Killer Frequency is an accessible, relatable adventure that won’t leave you wanting to touch that dial.
Nothing we see here matters because it’s all been made up for puzzle-solving. As such, the weirdness of the game’s mystery and its visuals is practically obliterated. It’s good, then, that The Tartarus Key squeaks by on the strength of its puzzles alone, because the connective tissue between them seems determined to strip the game of narrative intrigue before our very eyes.
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.