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Forbidden Solitaire is at its best when it’s being a new old game, perfectly capturing the look and feel of a spooky, experimental FMV horror game made for PCs in the 1990s.
Yoshi and the Mysterious Book is a charming and welcome return for one of Nintendo’s most iconic characters. Mario fans looking for a new 2D platformer to chew on may bounce off quickly, but those who buy into the game’s concept will surely be delighted by Yoshi and the Mysterious Book.
LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight is a great experience overall, and will likely find a passionate audience among those who love this series, but it also won’t do much to convert people who simply don’t enjoy the silly simplicity of the genre.
Forza Horizon 6 isn’t trying to revolutionize the series. The game modes, customization, and even UI have a close resemblance to the franchise’s recent entries. Instead, Playground Games finds freshness in its Japanese setting, which paves the way for stunning new regions, dope cars, and an overall slickness to everything you do.
Perfect Tides: Station to Station is more somber than wistful, more grounded than nostalgic, and more realistic than fanciful. The 2003 setting feels circumstantial rather than deliberate as a storytelling device, and the autobiographical piece of it bleeds from every word of text.
Directive 8020 feels like Supermassive’s response to growing criticism around the Dark Pictures series.
Memories of Celceta isn’t my favorite Ys game, but if you have a Switch 2, Ys Memoire: Revelations in Celceta is probably the best way to play it. It’s a Vita game very much of its time, with some growing pains as a Ys entry, but the extra juice you get from Nintendo’s new platform helps realize the original vision as a 3D Ys delivering a higher fidelity experience on a handheld.
When I rolled credits on Mixtape, I was sad that it was over so soon. But then, I was immediately excited at the prospect of multiple future playthroughs where I could toy with all of the quirky minigames and their outcomes en route to seeing everything the game had to offer. It’s how I knew that I truly love a video game.
Last Flag has some cool ideas, many of which feel like a tribute to a bygone era.
Kiln is the latest example of one of gaming’s most creative studios executing well on a fresh idea. There may be a couple of aspects that could’ve used more time in the oven, but Double Fine’s Kiln is a cool and quirky addition to Xbox’s 2026 lineup.
Invincible VS is a great start. Quarter Up brought the characters, the mechanics, and an overall presentation that just might make Mortal Kombat fans blush. I really dig how many niches and specialties are represented in this pool, and it ends up making for a satisfying experience in both offline and online play, with solid netcode and crossplay systems to keep the fun going. I wish the story cutscenes weren’t jarring compared to the rest of the game’s animation, and that things like Sudden Death and Assist Break didn’t leave me feeling grumpy after a sweaty match, but I can’t deny I had a blast assembling teams and seeing how they matched up against the rest of the game. I found it hard not to read this as an opening chapter for Quarter Up and Invincible VS, and it's a good one.
Aphelion is far from the next classic Don’t Nod game, but fans of the studio will likely have a good enough time with it. The concept and narrative execution are strong here, but so much of it is bogged down by gameplay segments that made me wish I could skip like a cutscene.
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Where it hits is all in how its trademark style and systems translate, the snappy card combat, and of course the banging soundtrack I’m only just mentioning because I’m not great at talking about music. So a thumbs-up from me, but one that comes with an acute sadness at how much more Vampire Crawlers could have been if it had true blobber bona fides.
Yunyun Syndrome!? Rhythm Psychosis is a heck of an experience that, depending on how much you know about this stuff going in, can be a window into an unfamiliar world, a push down a rabbit hole you had no previous plans to enter.
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I suspect some speedrunner will weave wizardry in their mastery of Super Meat Boy 3D and its levels. That said, this feels like a game in which you have to have more patience that ever to put up with the shenanigans that a fast-paced 3D Meat Boy game presents.
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