I've been conflicted about Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced since it was announced. The original 2013 pirate action-adventure is one of my favorite games ever, so my immediate reaction to hearing it was getting a remake for current-era consoles was excitement. In that very first announcement video, Ubisoft said that Resynced would not reinvent protagonist Edward Kenway's tale, but that there would be large changes to combat, parkour, stealth, and the structure of the overall story. And while changes like that fall within the framework of what a remake is, I couldn't tell if these adjustments would mean Resynced still felt faithful to the original game. And regardless of whether or not it was, there was also the bigger question of if this remake would be better than Black Flag. Having now played Resynced, I don't think it is better. That still means Resynced is pretty good. Black Flag is one of the best games in the Assassin's Creed series, and Resynced doesn't change so much that that's no longer the case. The issue is that for every positive change that Resynced makes to Black Flag, it stumbles into creating a new problem. 
If you asked me what Black Flag is, I'd tell you it was a treasure hunt. You play as a normal employee of an entertainment company in the 21st century who is scrubbing through the memories of Edward Kenway, a Welsh privateer-turned-pirate trying to make his fortune in the 18th century, via a machine called an Animus. Your mission is initially just to capture footage of Edward's life to make a new media project. However, your research into Edward's memories draws the attention of your bosses. Turns out, Edward stumbled across someone who knew of a site called the Observatory during this period of his life, and your bosses want to know whether Edward ever found it himself. They task you with spending more and more time reliving Edward's life in hopes of finding where it's hidden in the past, so that they can rediscover it for themselves in the modern day. You don't know what the Observatory really is or why you're looking for it, and your efforts slowly pull you into a shadow war between freedom-protecting Assassins and order-oriented Templars--and at the same time, you see Edward similarly get pulled into that same conflict 300 years earlier. Mirroring your character's life to Edward's is straightforward but effective narrative framing, and it adds this incredible science-fiction flavoring to what's an already terrific historical fantasy adventure. To date, it's one of the best intertwined present-and-past stories in the series--only the first two Assassin's Creed games do it better. 
Resynced gets rid of pretty much all of that. The intro does establish that you're experiencing a simulation of Edward's life via the Animus but doesn't provide any reasoning up front as to why you're doing it. The original game's modern-day missions have been completely stripped away, reframing the entire adventure. It no longer feels like a sci-fi treasure hunt. Instead, Resynced is a sci-fi rebellion. But you won't get this framing if you just play Resynced's story, as the modern-day missions that provide this framing are all optional. Resynced is actually a sequel to Assassin's Creed Shadows, not Assassin's Creed III like the original Black Flag. It continues the story of Animus users who have awakened as Travelers to fight against Ego, an artificial intelligence created by the Templars that is now training itself to become the perfect overlord of the human race. If you go out of your way to find them (like really out of your way--the game does not make it easy for you), you can find rifts that allow you to temporarily enter what I can only surmise is the Black Room, where Ego shows you how it would use details of Edward, Blackbeard, and Mary Read's lives to generate what it thinks is a better version of historical events. 
Ego theorizes that if these three pirates' stories were that of a man who returned to his wife, a pirate captain who took the king's pardon, and an Assassin who left the Brotherhood, and all three were ultimately rewarded with wealth and happiness for choosing to live as good little sheep, then perhaps more Animus users like you would be inspired to fall in line rather than embrace a chaotic life and seek out personal fame, fortune, and freedom. In Ego's eyes, the best way to guide humanity into a better future is if the ugliness of the past is erased and replaced with something that is safe and sober, but robbed of all reason and sapped of all spirit. This. Is. Fascinating! However, this weird-as-hell (in a cool way) sci-fi story is frustratingly tucked away in optional side content that's not easy to find because it's not even marked on the in-game map. You just have to know where to look for these four rifts or spend hours scouring every corner of the Caribbean. And hopefully you've also done all the rifts in Shadows so that you have the context for who Ego is, why the Guide and Eagle are fighting Ego, who the Guide and Eagle even are (it is a whole thing, let me tell you), and what it means for you to be one of the Travelers. 
This bizarre mishandling of the framing device for Resynced's story encapsulates the remake's failings. It does a lot of cool stuff, but it also doesn't use that cool stuff very effectively. It's so bewildering to play this game and see moments of brilliance continuously mishandled. I adore what Resynced does for Anne Bonny, for example, a character who takes on an important role in the final chapters of Black Flag but is largely absent for most of the story. Resynced has Anne introduced as soon as Edward returns to Nassau at the very beginning of the game, and she regularly pops up in the story after that in reimagined cutscenes and brand-new missions that further flesh out her importance to Edward. It makes all of the already-great scenes involving her in the later chapters hit even harder. The same is true for Ed Thatch and Stede Bonnet, both of whom also get more screen time and brand-new missions that continue their storylines after their departure from Black Flag's story and give them a more fulfilling end. 
So why then does Resynced bother to add brand-new characters who have very little screentime and unrewarding finales to their arcs that leaves them feeling separated from Edward's tale? The remake is fixing the problem of Black Flag's old characters and then adding new characters who have the flaws that were just fixed in the original characters, preserving one of the original problems of Black Flag. Resynced's other issues aren't nearly as severe, but they all add up and needle at you throughout the experience. Most are a result of trying to fit Black Flag into a new game engine. What the various teams across Ubisoft have been able to accomplish with Ubisoft Anvil is to be commended (Mirage and Resynced feel so much better to play than Origins), but it's still clearly an engine designed for an action-RPG, not a stealth-driven action-adventure. Edward's freerunning is better than the likes of Origins' Bayek or Odyssey's Kassandra, but both the mechanical depth and the feeling of his freerunning still fall behind Unity's Arno and the protagonists who preceded him. 
And while combat does at times feel like a modern take on the counter-heavy combat of Black Flag, the use of pistols, the rope dart, the sweeping kick, and the forward kick is clearly just a cleverly hidden version of the battle abilities from the RPG-style Assassin's Creed games--there's a bit more strategy to using these equipment and skills in Resynced, but not enough to keep combat exciting across a 30-hour story given the poor enemy variety. The new animations and voicelines are hit-or-miss too. Many of Edward's new lines add excellent insight to his character during scenes where there previously was none, while some of the new lines--especially his extremely pro-Assassin, anti-Templar one-liners that he spouts with every Assassin Contract--feel like a mischaracterization that makes him oddly heroic during a portion of the game where he has to be a scumbag for the story to work. Brand-new cutscenes add more story, but at the cost of poor facial animations that look like wooden puppets talking to each other. Some of the cutscenes that were in the original game are also somehow worse, with strange facial hiccups (at least on Xbox Series X) distorting the longing glances, winks, smirks, scowls, and contemplative sighs that carried so much narrative weight in the original Black Flag. 
Resynced also gives Edward the ability to quietly crouch walk and slink behind cover anywhere, not just stalker zones, and incorporates some of Shadows' uses of weather and darkness to add new considerations to stealth, but the remake's outright removal of all tailing missions (which, admittedly were a pain point in the original game) means these improvements don't have much use. Social stealth is also back in Resynced (great!) but almost every mission that relied on those mechanics has been removed or changed, meaning there's little chance to engage with it (bad!). In fact, when it comes to the mass deletion of all mandatory tailing missions and changing almost every social stealth mission so that they no longer rely on stealth mechanics, Resynced feels like too big of a swing in the other direction, recreating Black Flag into a game like the action-packed adventures of Kassandra or Eivor. And that makes sense--all of these games are made in the same engine. 
The issue is that, unlike those games, Resynced isn't an RPG--there are no ways for Edward to talk his way through problems, disguise himself, or create clever opportunities. He can only engage through the action part of the action-RPG formula. So instead of having missions with a wide variety and breadth of structure, you're still mostly doing the same thing over and over. Resynced might have been a stronger experience if only half of the social stealth-driven tailing missions were removed, as changing pretty much all of them and moving Edward's story in a more action-oriented direction simply shifts one problem into another. Weird camera cuts and dramatic perspective shifts during assassination takedowns and chain kills also make it irritatingly tricky to keep track of enemies in enclosed spaces, like caves or the decks of smaller ships--it's totally fine to have this in the wide-open locales of Origins' Egypt or Odyssey's Greece, but it clashes with Black Flag's structure. The game hasn't changed enough to fit the new game engine, which leads me to wonder why this wasn't just a brand-new pirate adventure during this time period that followed a new protagonist. Edward meets so many other Assassins! We didn't need to stick to the rigidity of his story again if it doesn't really fit the mechanics of this new game engine. 
I could go on but the point remains: There are plenty of great changes in Resynced, but equally a ton of pain points in trying to force the Black Flag structure to fit into an engine designed for a very different type of Assassin's Creed. This makes Resynced less of a new gold standard for Edward's adventure, and more of a bizzaro-world variation of the original Black Flag. If you haven't played Black Flag (or at least don't revisit it often), you should play Resynced, because even though it doesn't feel like a faithful remake to me, it is still remaking a game that's already critically acclaimed. But if you have played Black Flag, I'm not sure if Resynced will hit you as hard emotionally as you're hoping for. All said, I regard Resynced with the exact same sentiments as Mass Effect Legendary Edition. Resynced goes beyond the scope of a traditional remaster and adjusts the content of Black Flag to make improvements to the experience (what you'd expect for a remake). But the downside to these fixes is that it highlights problems that weren't fixed or, even worse, new problems that didn't even exist in the original game. Resynced is a half-step toward something truly fantastic. If you play it, you will see the strengths of Black Flag. You will see why the original game was the de facto pirate video game for years. But you will also find a remake that doesn't manage to take the crown from the very game that it's remaking...
Somewhere in the back of my mind, I must have known that Rhythm Heaven was a close cousin to WarioWare, but it never stood out to me as strongly as it did while playing Rhythm Heaven Groove. The sheer unapologetic weirdness of it intertwined with the strict timing-based minigames made this feel like WarioWare, but as a rhythm game. And I feel like a fool for just now discovering that these are two great tastes that go great together. The influences from WarioWare will be obvious to anyone who has played that long-running gonzo microgame series, but unlike those, the individual games in Rhythm Heaven Groove last much longer than a few seconds. After a short practice round to learn the rhythm and button prompts, you go into the actual performance that mixes together commands to the rhythm of a song. Almost all of your commands are mapped to the A button, but more complicated arrangements add one of the D-pad buttons for a different command. In an early game where you're driving a stunt car for a commercial, for example, the A button accelerates while the D-pad Down hits the brakes, so you need to alternate between them on command to stay aligned with the other stunt cars. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdMwqKiSeEE The WarioWare spirit shines through in both the art style--an eclectic blend of crude simplicity, chunky cartoonism, and occasional hyper-realism--and also in the gonzo spirit of the games themselves. The stunt car example is one of the more normal ones, but many of the games are downright bizarre. Across the breadth of Rhythm Heaven, you'll have to jump and roll as a cat doll, bounce fruits off your muscles as a bodybuilder, sort delicious pudding from tainted living pudding cups as a factory robot, and jump over windshield wipers during a rainstorm. The game frequently surprises you with new creative applications that all feel different, even if they're mechanically very similar. That sense of surprise meant that even when I didn't like a game as much, I loved seeing the creativity. In addition to adapting to each game's rhythm, you also often have to contend with distractions in the background. The kitty-hopping game--Hop, Stop, N Roll--transforms the background from a simple wood-paneled design to a kaleidoscopic beach scene, so part of the challenge is keeping your concentration and the beat going while the world changes around you. When you learn to "read" the games, you also start to notice little signs about your performance, like your fellow performer in the umbrella-folding game shooting you a dirty look if your timing was just slightly off. 
Rhythm Heaven Groove While the WarioWare influence is obvious, my time with Rhythm Heaven Groove also reminded me of another long-lost rhythm game: Elite Beat Agents. While no game has quite substituted for EBA's charm, mixing storytelling with pop songs and rhythmic touch screen taps, Rhythm Heaven Groove is similarly focused on nailing your percussive beats. The sound design has excellent feedback with a sharp, snappy snare that punctuates even harder when you nail a beat perfectly. Sometimes I would simply close my eyes to feel my way through the rhythm, and it worked just as well as watching on-screen. Everything has a sound cue, so this is one game you actually can play blindfolded. My absolute favorite aspect of Rhythm Heaven Groove, though, were the Remix stages. Each column consists of four stages, and they all feel varied as you're playing them and climbing the tower. When you reach the top, all four get remixed into one game, sometimes set to a real, credited J-pop song. At this point, all those games that seemed so different feel like different parts of the same whole, and you get to see them coming together. Sometimes a game will even fade into another mid-beat, showing you that you're actually keeping the same rhythm across both. It's a very cool magic trick. That said, the mapping of commands onto the D-pad would occasionally trip me up, because it wasn't always the same D-pad button across each game. Since the Remix stages start without any warm-up time, I would sometimes finish a set of stages and come back to do the Remix later, only to discover I had completely forgotten which D-pad button to use. Aside from trial and error, the only solution is to quit out and find the individual minigames, and then redo their practice modes as a reminder. It's not terribly intuitive, and there's not any particular reason the D-pad prompt couldn't just be consistent throughout all of the minigames. Yes it's a little more elegant that D-Pad Left triggers a crab claw and D-Pad Down hits the car brakes, but would it really matter if they were the same? On that one point, the game became less about rhythm and more about memorization, which undermined the fun. 
Rhythm Heaven Groove And as much fun as it was in handheld, I struggled with playing Rhythm Heaven Groove on my TV. To its credit, the game recognizes when you've hooked it up to your TV for the first time and conducts a quick calibration game in an effort to reduce the effects of lag. But even after going through that, I struggled to hit my marks across several games playing on my TV with a Pro Controller, even in games I had already mastered in handheld mode. The game does note that some TVs just behave differently than others, so your mileage may vary. Those same struggles with TV lag may have impacted my multiplayer experience, but not enough to detract from the fun. I dabbled in all the games with my two kids of varying ages, and after some early struggles, we found a handful of favorites that created the kind of raucous party atmosphere that Rhythm Heaven is obviously going for. There's a great mix of competitive and cooperative game types, and unlike the single-player columns that offer different games as you climb, these offer new twists on the games you've already mastered. We were only playing with two players at a time, but it fills in the extra spots with bots regardless of your player count for a total of four. As long as you have at least one buddy, you can play all of the multiplayer games. So many of the multiplayer games are strong that it's hard to pick favorites, but a few stand out. A virus-busting game shoots a disease through tubes, so you have to pin them with precise timing as they come, and your position in the four quadrants of protection rotates each turn. A tennis game imitates an RPG as you lob balls to defeat approaching enemies and save a prince. Cake Wait revolves around waiting until exactly 3 o'clock to grab the single slice of cake on the table, testing your ability to count down on-tempo. An Arkanoid-like arrow-shooting game has you break bricks protecting a bomb as you race to be the first to hit and detonate it. There is even a card-flipping memory game, but instead of pictures, you're matching particular drum rhythms as displayed by toe-tapping chickens. All of these are delivered with the same goofball spirit as the rest of the game, which makes it disarmingly funny. 
Rhythm Heaven Groove Still, multiplayer lends itself to the big-screen experience of a TV, and we did occasionally find it hard to master the timing in some minigames. One of the first, in which you pluck hairs from an onion, consistently tripped us up, even after going back to it once we had performed much better on some of the other games. It's hard to say if this was due to TV lag or if that particular game is just surprisingly strict, but it was a noticeable change from the kooky fun of the others to consistently failing out of that one. Nintendo is one of the biggest and oldest game publishers in the world, so it feels strange to say that something it made carries itself with indie sensibilities. But that's always been true of WarioWare, and by extension, it's true of Rhythm Heaven Groove. It's such a strange, low-fi game that it comes off as if the team is getting away with something while the boss isn't looking. But it's also a genuinely welcome addition to my Switch collection, because it's such an oddity. Whenever I feel the need to tap my toes while feeling the beat of a tadpole march, or invite my friends to compete in a foot race as lucha libre across giant bouncy balls, I'll return to Rhythm Heaven...
There's a reason Nintendo keeps remaking Star Fox 64. The N64 iteration of the rail shooter--at the time, the second Star Fox release--remains the apex of the franchise: a genuinely fantastic game that still holds up and stands the test of time. Subsequent sequels that have attempted to recapture the magic have floundered by comparison. This latest iteration, simply titled "Star Fox" for what I can only assume is meant to be a soft reboot, plays just as great as you remember and looks even better. But if you've already played Star Fox 64 in any iteration, it will be hard to shake the feeling of deja vu. For the uninitiated, or perhaps those who just learned about ultra-cool guy Fox McCloud from his spotlight-stealing cameo in the Mario Galaxy movie, Star Fox takes place in a galaxy called the Lylat system, composed of anthropomorphic animals with futuristic space-travel technology. Star Fox is a group of well-funded fighter-jock mercenaries who are regularly called upon by a military general, a dog named Pepper, to assist their space-combat operations. As established in an opening cutscene, some years ago Fox's father, James McCloud, was en route to investigate questionable activity on a planet named Venom, when his wingmate Pigma betrayed him to the mad scientist Andross. James was lost, his trusty wingman Peppy escaped, and Andross kept quietly assembling his army for an invasion of the rest of the Lylat system. That sequence establishes one of the major new features of this remake: fully animated cutscenes. And to their credit, these are very well-made sequences. The aerial stunts look cool while staying true to the original spirit where needed, and the voice acting has been updated to facilitate the expanded scope. The more realistic character designs were divisive when shown off earlier this year, but I felt fine with them from the beginning, and after spending some time seeing them animated in cutscenes, I've come to really appreciate the look. Their faces are nicely expressive and textures like fur give them a sense of realism, while still staying in the fantastical world of space animals. The vast majority of the cutscenes take place aboard their docking ship, the Great Fox, as they discuss strategy, but the characters are still given lots of characterization in their movements and gestures to express their perspectives and personalities. For example, Falco rolls his eyes a lot, because he is above all kind of a jerk. A similarly heightened level of visual fidelity is present in the stages themselves, which look recognizable to their N64 counterparts without feeling too beholden to their jagged edges and geometry. While all of the stages look great, the upgraded style is most impressive when it shows off new flourishes that weren't available in the original, like the lighting effects of your lasers reflecting off of surfaces and illuminating dark caves. Star Fox 64 always excelled at stage variety, but this remake accentuates it by making each stage appear vastly different than the rest. I especially loved revisiting the stages that are major departures from the others, like the water world Aquas, the surface of the sun on Solar, or the wacky and kaleidoscopic Meteos wormhole. 
Star Fox Revisiting all the areas takes at least a few runs because of how the stage layout has worked since the original. One of the coolest aspects of Star Fox 64, and again here, is the ability to carve your way from one side of the galaxy to another in a relatively freeform fashion, completing optional objectives. In broad terms, you can see the three paths as Easy, Medium, and Hard, but you aren't limited to one track. If you know how to find your way, you can easily hop between paths throughout, so you aren't committed to only staying on one difficulty track. Completing a hidden objective that opens the harder path will always let you switch to the easier one, but if you only complete the easier objective, you can't switch to the harder path. In the original Star Fox 64, this was presented rather plainly, with a blue, yellow, or red line showing where you can go. In this version, it's given a good deal more panache, thanks again to the new extended cutscenes. Rather than simply present you with a choice of locations for your next mission, each mission starts with General Pepper debriefing from the last mission and explaining the strategic importance of both next possible locations. One might have a suspected bioweapon while the other is an outpost under attack. In each case Pepper outlines why Star Fox is the best or perhaps only available force to complete this mission. And since there's some overlap, as you could approach a planet from different directions, it's particularly impressive how these cutscenes stitch different pieces together without feeling noticeably disjointed. These all lead to the same outcome, of course. You're ultimately headed toward Venom no matter what, and it doesn't make a difference in the end whether you went to Sector X or Solar, but it does a good job of tying the journey together and giving each mission an appropriate amount of weight. Sometimes I even felt bad abandoning one planet in need for another, even knowing that it doesn't have any impact. 
Star Fox The extended cutscenes also help define the characters' relationships with each other and with General Pepper. Falco has always been portrayed as a cocky hotshot, but here we get to see him slowly warming to Fox's leadership. Peppy is the assured veteran who trusts Fox will come into his own as a leader. We even get some insight about why the team keeps Slippy around, as the cutscenes sell him as a machinist wunderkind who's always two steps ahead in anticipating their equipment needs. And Fox, for his part, is played as the cool Han Solo type--a mercenary needling General Pepper to pay for their valuable services, even if he's obviously going to do the heroic thing regardless. Wayfinding to new paths is a little easier this time around too. Dialogue will drop hints about what to do to open new paths, without being overly on the nose or spelling it out for you. If you miss an optional objective, it's easier to restart a stage from the beginning or from your most recent checkpoint, and doing so doesn't even cost you a life or eliminate your laser upgrades or bombs. You can even entirely complete a stage, see where it leads, and then go back and do it again immediately to try for another way. That said, I was surprised that each run through the Lylat system is treated as its own distinct game progression, just like the original. That means that once you finish the game, you'll need to start anew on Corneria and cut your path through from the beginning. This is true to the original, and I don't mind the faithfulness, to a point. But for returning fans who already know their way around, it would have been nice to have the option to track which paths you've already opened and let you jump back to planets, eventually creating a fully filled-out star map. And while the updated visuals are often gorgeous, they do come with some trade-offs that take getting used to. For one thing, your targets are a lot less obvious with much more happening on-screen, visually, so it's easier to miss a flyer who gets away. In boss battles, weak points are less obvious than the glowing vulnerabilities of the original, and they don't flash as brightly when you land a successful hit to let you know that you're doing damage. And with the higher fidelity making everything look much more like it has weight and bulk, it's a little strange when a capital warship in Area 6 explodes like an empty cardboard box. 
Star Fox The other marquee feature of this release is multiplayer, which adds online play and GameChat camera integration for animalistic avatars. I tried a few hours of multiplayer, and it's a well-made diversion from the main adventure, but still feels like a test pilot for something greater. When you group into a multiplayer lobby, you get sorted into either Star Fox or Star Wolf for a team-based 4v4 dogfight, and each player picks their pilot from among those characters. The distinction doesn't really matter, either between pilots or teams, because the Star Wolf ship, the Wolfen, seems to control identically to the Arwing. The match-start screen gives you a quick overview of your objectives, and the battle begins. This mode borrows heavily from the Battle Mode of Star Fox 64 3D. Like the 3DS version, you're restricted to your Arwing (or Wolfen)for these matches, but unlike those, these objective-based modes give you more to do than simply dogfight. Instead, you accrue points for successfully taking down enemy ships as well as roaming mobs, but the bigger point payouts come from completing objectives. Those could include stealing pirate cargo and towing it back to your home base, snagging the most glowing meteorites from a dangerous meteor shower, or holding a control point. In essence, all of these serve to push players together into conflicts, forcing close-quarters dogfights while also juggling the tension of managing your other objectives. 
Star Fox The fundamental arcade mechanics of Star Fox's flight really shine here, with a simple elegance that feels natural to anyone who has played an All-Range Mode mission in the regular campaign. That said, once you've finished a match, you simply get some medals for your accomplishments, and there's no continuous progression or greater meta-layer to strive for, other than some simple cosmetic banner flourishes. That makes this mode feel neat, but like it's just scratching the surface of what could be done with these components. Star Fox is a remake, but it also appears to be an attempt at a reset. The franchise has never really found its footing, despite clearly having a lot of love from Nintendo. This story has always felt like a starting point, establishing the characters and hinting at their backstory. So altogether, this remake may be the best possible way to give the series a fresh start. At the same time, the original still holds up very well, and if you have Switch Online with the Expansion Pass, you can already play it. That makes this hard to recommend, which is a shame. If Nintendo means this to be a new beginning for Star Fox, retreading familiar ground undermines the effort...
In a relatively short time, Team Asano at Square Enix has made a name for itself. Between the Bravely and Octopath series, it has become known for taking a fresh look at retro RPGs by experimenting with new ideas and visual styles, creating games that feel both familiar and new. The developer takes a similar approach when it comes to The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales, an action-adventure RPG that emulates the feel of a top-down Legend of Zelda or Mana game but uses the studio's signature HD-2D visual style. But while the action and adventuring are well-crafted, a dull story and verbose characters have the unfortunate tendency of deadening the momentum. The Adventures of Elliot takes place in the fictional kingdom of Philabieldia (try the cheesesteaks!), ruled by a kindly king and under the magical protection of his daughter. The area surrounding the castle grounds is beset by deadly beastmen and the princess' presence carries a passive spell of safety that keeps them at bay. Elliot is an Adventurer, an actual job title that appears to be some mixture of mercenary and wandering odd-job doer, and only Adventurers are known to travel outside the castle walls and brave the beasts. After a sinister duke discovers a method to go back in time to claim a powerful relic, Elliot follows him and thus begins hopping between different eras, going further and further back in his kingdom's history. In terms of sheer mechanics, The Adventures of Elliot is a modest but welcome step forward for the genre. This HD-2D visual style works so well for a top-down Zelda-style adventure game that you would never know it had been created for turn-based RPGs. The combat is sharp and responsive, and the diorama-like presentation gives you a very clear idea of where the enemy threats are coming from. Elliot gets a wide variety of weapons, ranging from his basic sword to a heavy hammer, boomerang, and consumables like arrows and bombs, along with some less conventional weaponry like a spear or chain scythe. Each weapon has its own advantages and disadvantages in combat and as you find upgraded versions of each, they get stronger, charged effects that can have a big impact on the battlefield. Elliot also has a shield for blocking and parrying enemy attacks, adding a little more defensive nuance, and a dedicated jump, which is used for traversal and light platforming, especially within dungeons, but can also be used offensively depending on your build. True to its classic inspirations, Elliot only features a relatively small pool of enemies, with palette swaps representing stronger variants with new abilities. But it manages to offer a good variety of fast-paced combat encounters as these enemy types are mixed together. Combat scenarios are quick and snappy so even though I could run past them when I was in a rush, I would usually stop to fight just for the fun of taking down some monsters. That's the mark of a strong combat system. Shortly after beginning on his quest, Elliot is joined by Faie, a squeaky-voiced little fairy that only he can see and hear. She's his constant companion throughout the rest of the game, offering her own commentary and being a sounding-board for Elliot to think through his next steps. She also gains a number of magical powers, letting her light torches, teleport Elliot across gaps, and more. You can freely move Faie around within a certain radius of Elliot with the right stick, which makes her feel like a natural extension of Elliot's, and thus your, power set. Most of her powers aren't necessary to complete dungeons, but it's so much fun to "cheat" through puzzles with them, incentivizing you to explore the specially marked ruins that upgrade her powers. During the mirror dungeon, for example, I pulled a mirror to reflect a laser in a way necessary to solve a puzzle, only to discover that I trapped myself in a corner with a gap. However, thanks to Faie, I was able to teleport my way out of the problem. That may not have been the way I was meant to solve the puzzle, but it was nice that I had the opportunity to find my own way. 
The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales The dungeon design throughout the game is well-crafted, even if most of them don't feel particularly distinct. This whole game is homage to classics like the 2D Zelda games, and you can particularly sense that in the dungeons. They iterate with ideas like the aforementioned laser-mirror reflection dungeon, or a dungeon in which I had to raise and lower water levels. In each of these dungeons, the addition of Faie's ability set gives you more room for creative experimentation and finding clever solutions that may not have been exactly intended. Elliot can also enhance his abilities with Magicite, a very flexible upgrade system. Equipped Magicite can enhance your attack power, give passive bonuses (like increased hammer knockback), or change weapon properties (like giving you piercing arrows or a second boomerang to throw while the first one is still out). Each piece of equipment has its own Magicite box with a certain amount of slots, and you can both find pieces of Magicite in the world or turn in fragments to get random ones, gacha-style. After you've upgraded enough, your total level goes up and you get even better Magicite, so it's always worth it to be on the lookout for fragments. You can really get into the nitty-gritty of managing Magicite to optimize your build, but if you don't want to worry about it, there's also a quick-command option to let Faie create a build for you, which she does decently well to make a balanced set. There are also accessory slots, which can change your style in even more meaningful ways. Accessories can provide several different perks, such as preventing you from getting stunned, creating a shockwave that stuns enemies whenever you land from a jump, or turning every tossable object into a bomb. I found one that gave Elliot a hovering effect on his regular jump and kept it equipped for the entire game because it was so helpful to the dungeon platforming. And then there are just thoughtful convenience features that help modernize and sand off the rough edges. Sidequests are clearly marked with a visual indicator and a dedicated menu showing the character it centers around, and you're given ample warning if the next step in a story quest chain will nullify an ongoing sidequest. As you discover more eras, you'll often have to jump back and forth between them, which is easy because there are guideposts littered throughout the map in every era. And while waypointing can be a little difficult due to winding pathways, the overall map layout remains relatively similar in each era, which helps you to keep your bearings. 
The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales As I've been playing The Adventures of Elliot, though, I've been thinking a lot about the trope of the silent protagonist. Classics like The Legend of Zelda have been known for their hero being remarkably quiet while the action occurs around them. Much has been said about this particular odd remnant of early video games, but in Elliot we can see an example of what it's like to have that type of character written with a voice. Elliot is remarkably earnest, even hokey, and everyone who knows or encounters him comes away feeling that he's just a swell guy. His personality often borders on feeling cloying and treacly. But at the same time, a character like this almost has to be written this way, because how else do you justify his status as a wandering do-gooder? Sometimes other characters hint at Elliot being a mercenary and taking payments, but it's clear that he does most of his work pro bono, or accepts whatever people can offer. So instead of a Link-like character who accepts his fated quest with quiet dignity--onto which we as the player can map whatever internal motivations we want--we have to stop and listen to exhaustive explanations that don't add much interesting shading or texture to the character. What does Elliot want? To be a helpful, great guy. What does everyone think of him? That he's a helpful, great guy. This type of character is mostly a cipher, so they make him utterly good-natured and well-liked and wise, instead of simply silent. But it's not just Elliot. Faie is equally chatty and her tone is even more sickly sweet than Elliot, though you can toggle an option to make her chime in less during your exploration. And almost every quest-giver you encounter explains their motivations and their own stories in exhaustive detail. The classics that inspired Adventures of Elliot were forced into an economy of language and would get their points across with a few sentences or a paragraph at most. Without those limiters in place, these cutscenes feel overlong and overexplained. They also often stop to slowly pan over to show a point-of-interest nearby. Checking in to advance the story between dungeons just slows the pace to a crawl. Adventures of Elliot also struggles to really capitalize on its time-hopping premise, largely because its different time periods are so nebulous. The concept appears visually and thematically inspired by Chrono Trigger. But one element that made Chrono Trigger's era-spanning story work so well is that it mapped more-or-less recognizably onto actual historical periods. You begin in a pastiche of rural modernism with burgeoning machines, travel back to something like the Dark Ages, and forward into the archetypal post-apocalyptic future. Those were marked with years to give us a sense of space and change--only 400 years passed between the dark ages and the modern era, but 1,300 years between the modern era and the apocalyptic future. When you travel to the age of primal humans and dinosaurs, it's millions of years instead of hundreds. The variance helped to establish the profound differences in time periods. 
The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales Adventures of Elliot's time periods are more vague. We explore four time periods in total that help us understand the essential sequence of historical events in this world as we travel further backward. There was a great magical society that collapsed into ruination. The modern (default) era from which Elliot hails has recovered largely due to the influence of a great king, but none of the periods map cleanly onto real-world history, and they aren't separated by clearly defined spans of time. The map remains largely the same, which is helpful for navigation, but it also makes it feel like not much has changed in this world over long stretches of time. There are moments where the idea of an adventure spanning generations shines through. One side quest showed a bar owner treating his employees poorly until I went back in time and accidentally taught his ancestor about basic kindness, and then I got to see that lesson passed down through the generations and impact the future. Moments like that, and occasional story beats that I won't spoil, did remind me of how you could see your actions echo through time in video games like Chrono Trigger. The Adventures of Elliot just doesn't reach quite the same heights. The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales is a surprisingly strong first attempt at reaching into this genre from a studio not known for it. The combat is snappy and fun, with loads of build customization and ability tailoring to your style. The dungeon designs are well-crafted homages that allow room for creative problem solving, and the HD-2D visual style is lovely for this type of game. I was left wanting for a story I cared more about, with characters that were more three-dimensional, in a world that felt alive and took better advantage of its time-travel concept. Those factors make the game fall short, but it creates a foundation that I hope Square Enix builds upon...
If you're going to take on a juggernaut like NBA 2K, you'd better have a strong gameplan. Built from the cherished streetball memories of yesteryear and the charismatic vibes of today, NBA The Run is Play by Play Studios' debut effort and the team's attempt to squeeze into basketball fandom's gaming timeshare. As soon as you see it, it's clear this is a very different take on the sport than the true-to-life simulation that is NBA 2K, but doing something different isn't enough on its own. The team has to do it well, too. Thankfully, NBA The Run scores on most of its attempts, earning it a place in the rotation. NBA The Run is essentially a modern take on NBA Street and the colorful, exaggerated arcade sports games we don't often see anymore. The team at Play by Play includes some former EA Sports developers, and they've brought their experience to this new endeavor: rekindling the magic of streetball games from decades past while modernizing the experience in clever ways. The Run is played in games of 3v3, whether you're playing in solo mode, teaming up with friends, or matchmaking with other players online. No game is played as a standalone exhibition. Instead, you're always chasing championships in its tournament structure. Inspired by Fall Guys, The Run pits you and your teammates in a tourney that can be won by coming out on top in four consecutive games. Like March Madness, these are one-game, survive-and-advance showdowns, not series like in the NBA playoffs. Lose, and you're sent back to the start of a new tourney the next time you play. Win, and you're one step closer to glory. This tournament structure is so simple yet so effective. Games are quick, at about two to five minutes per matchup, meaning winning a trophy takes only 15-20 minutes, or roughly as long as winning a round of Fortnite. Each round, a spinner randomly lands on a new rule set. In one round, you might be playing first to 18, with dunks counting as three-pointers, while other shots net you just one point each. In the next round, you might be playing for speed, with unlimited stamina and a first-to-11 scoring cap. Each round is unpredictable, making each tournament as a whole feel fresh. The swiftness with which you move through tourneys also feels like a secret weapon working in The Run's favor. Title wins feel prestigious, with a trophy presentation and stats summary that cements your championship as hard-fought--you can even emote and show off your total number of trophies--but losing before you get to the championship podium doesn't sting too much, because matchmaking is fast, your time investment is never steep, and the next tourney is just seconds away if you want it to be. This PvP structure respects your time, both by not asking you for much of it in the first place and by giving you a fun game to play when you do decide to sit down and play it. It's a smart way to bring arcade basketball into the present, but The Run doesn't want to merely port those older games into 2026. Things like NBA Street and NBA Jam always felt heavily skewed toward offense. Excitingly, everyone in The Run is overpowered, but that's true on defense as much as on offense. Shooting is done by simply timing the release at the height of your jump shot, and with an open look, it's likely to go in--provided your chosen player is skilled from the given range. But getting in the player's face can be enough to disrupt the shot's timing, and if you go for a steal or a block while using a player skilled in those areas, you may just wind up with the ball, saving your team the trouble of fighting for a rebound. 
Unlocking new dunk animations means finding new ways to express yourself and stand out on the court. Possessing the ball feels forever threatened, because steals or straight-up shoves into the asphalt are as reliable as a Curry three-pointer in The Run. You'll need to work with your teammates and use the whole control scheme to dish the ball around, find the open looks, and keep pace with your opponent--or even leave them trailing behind, if you can lock down on D. Once I felt like I had a grasp on the game's speed and strategic elements, I found I could unleash especially flashy moves, like alley-oops to my teammate, passes to myself off the backboard, or even bouncing the ball off my opponent's head. There are levels to just how cool you can look on the court in The Run. By default, everyone is cool to start, but for those who want to go deeper, you can really show off like the players in an And 1 tournament you may have seen on ESPN 2 back in the day. The roster of players stands just shy of 40 at launch, with the game handpicking the best of the best from the NBA, plus a few original characters and real-life streetball legend, DJ, and former NBA Street commentator, Bobbito Garcia. If your favorite NBA player is arguably in the top 30 of current stars, it's likely he's in The Run. That includes shoo-ins like LeBron James and Kevin Durant, as well as slightly deeper cuts like Scottie Barnes and Devin Booker. It's been a ton of fun in my time with the game to get to grips with each athlete and find my favorites--it's Giannis, by the way. The best thing about The Run's on-court foundation is how attributes clearly matter. Wemby's blocking skills are among the best in the game, so he feels like a constant roadblock if his user is playing him correctly. Speedy players, like Damien Lillard, can hustle to a loose ball or race ahead on a fast break for a clean look from wherever he wants--probably from the arc, given his abilities there. Each player is a monster, yes, but the differences in their skills do matter, and you can see these deltas influence every game you play. Some players are just noticeably more monstrous than others in certain contexts. This varied roster mixes well with the tournament structure because team composition tends to matter so much. If you and your friends take three bigs into the tourney, only to be faced with a rule set in round one that doles out extra points for buckets from long range, you may be sent back to the menus quickly. It pays to consider a team that can cover weaknesses and fortify strengths, because you won't know until you get there what each round will have in store for you, or what team is waiting on the other side. No one player can do everything perfectly, so it becomes a game that bestows upon all players these tremendous, even superheroic talents, but then demands you have the self-discipline to not step too far out of your lane. Wemby can shoot, sure, but he's not Curry. Jayson Tatum is a playmaker, but he's not a big-bodied bully like Nikola Jokic. Knowing what you bring to the team is a principle that's emphasized without the game ever saying it so plainly. You'll learn it soon enough on the court. 
The Run wisely leans into an art style that looks very different from 2K, but also one that will age well over the years. The brightly colored, comic-book stylings of the game look awesome, with each character resembling a somewhat exaggerated version of themselves, yet their likenesses match very well, even in this pen-and-ink aesthetic. Courts are similarly stylish, with the game taking players on a world tour of courts inspired by real-life locations, such as Venice Beach, a Philly schoolyard, and tenements in the Philippines. All the while, the commentator provides additional flavor as the league's hype man, often sounding like he's leaping out of his chair when you do something cool. While some sports games still feel very "fellow kids," despite years of trying to capture the right vibe, NBA The Run enjoys an air of authenticity from the moment you step onto the court. While The Run is doing a lot right, it's not without weaknesses. Foremost among them is how you can't practice with your co-op partners. There's an option called Shootaround that acts as a practice mode, but it's a purely solo experience, which makes it very hard to gel with your teammates before the games start. And because every single game is part of a tournament, the games always matter. It's surely a hard problem to solve, but your experience in The Run can vary greatly based on who you get as teammates in matchmaking. If you're randomly assigned a ballhog, or a player who's gone AFK, or someone who hasn't yet learned how vulnerable the offense is to having the ball stolen, it's going to be a headache and a quick exit from the tournament for you. Getting matched with such players can and will happen in The Run, at least some of the time. I once played with a person who used Steph Curry and ran to the basket for layups whenever he had the ball, only to get blocked each time. Confoundingly, he never took a single shot from behind the arc. If ever a teammate leaves, they're replaced with a lousy CPU bot that will, in all likelihood, leave you feeling hopeless. They just can't keep up with the human players--though I think a bot might have been better than that stubborn Curry user. The other gripe I have with The Run is how slow progression is. Right now, there are 50 levels to climb through, each with cosmetic rewards, and playing games also gives you Cred--in-game currency to spend on things like playercard banners, new dunks, and alternate jerseys for your players. Both Cred and XP feel too slow to come by, with the game hardly giving you anything unless you get to the third round or better. Winning a championship gives a decent chunk, but the lesser runs your team goes on should feel better rewarded, too. These issues are all somewhat softened with the panacea of playing with friends, though. Like perhaps all co-op games, NBA The Run is very obviously better with friends. If you hop into games with random players, you'll have fun at least some of the time, because the core basketball gameplay is enjoyable, the world is full of style, and you'll occasionally be able to rely on your teammates. But jumping in with two buddies and chasing championships is much more fun, likely to result in deeper, more rewarding runs, and allows you to establish a cohesive team composition and strategy. While anything less than that is more prone to headaches and heartaches, if you've got the squad for the optimal setup, NBA The Run is an obvious winner...
Two things can be said of Diablo IV leading up to the release of Lord of Hatred: First and foremost, as a series, Diablo has never been in a better or more promising place. Secondly, the game's first expansion, Vessel of Hatred, was a bit of a letdown following a tremendous first act. With those things in mind, it's safe to say that there are very high expectations for the game's forthcoming expansion. And, if the stakes weren't high enough, Lord of Hatred also carries with it two promises: a first look at the long-teased and highly-awaited land of Skovos, and an epic conclusion to the game's ongoing Hatred Saga--one featuring a major showdown with the Lord of Hatred himself. Oftentimes, expectations and promises only pave the way for disappointment. Fortunately, that's not the case with Lord of Hatred. Diablo IV's latest expansion triumphs at maintaining the series' momentum while also delivering a powerful gut punch of a third act--one that weaves together years of events and lore to create the series' most-compelling narrative to date. Lord of Hatred offers both a spectacular conclusion to the Hatred Saga and plenty of changes that grant it greater longevity than ever before, including two powerhouse classes, plenty of improvements, and strong endgame content. .png)
Lord of Hatred picks up not long after the events of Vessel of Hatred, which ultimately saw Mephisto take over the body of Akarat--a messiah-like figure in the Diablo universe. Through using Akarat's kindly visage, his own manipulative tactics, and performing "miracles," Mephisto has quickly managed to convince much of Sanctuary's population that he is a force for good--one who possesses the power to not only purify their lands, but their very souls as well. Even the most cunning of warriors find themselves in his thrall, their desperation for a better world ultimately contorting them into gullible disciples. As such, you, The Wanderer, and your faithful companions, Lorath and Neyrelle, come to be viewed as dissenting pariahs. And the fact that a demon's blood flows through your veins certainly doesn't help your case against the fraudulent prophet. With stakes this high and a literal hour of darkness--or rather, a massive eclipse--rapidly approaching, your party takes to the ancient islands of Skovos in search of aid and a weapon that might strike down Mephisto. As the birthplace of mankind and home to both the Amazons and the divine order of oracles, Skovos is a monumental location in the Diablo universe--one that has been teased since Diablo II and comes with sky-high expectations. Fortunately, Skovos lives up to them and provides a stunning backdrop for Lord of Hatred's events. The Mediterranean-inspired archipelago, with its clear waters, crumbling cliffsides, volcanoes, and massive temples, feels truly sacred, making its ongoing desecration all the more startling. .png)
Mephisto's corruption extends to the environment and the enemies you'll face off against in Skovos. The reanimated Drowned trudge from the sea to throw themselves against the Amazonian guardians in wave after wave of devastation, while blighted creatures and golems ambush you in the forests. This all offers a nice break from your run-of-the-mill demons, though you'll certainly get plenty of those as well. Combat in Lord of Hatred feels more or less unchanged, but this isn't unexpected or a bad thing, of course. Diablo IV's combat is already immensely satisfying and just the right level of overwhelming, so more of the same is high praise. Playing on Hard, I faced a bit of initial friction but then quickly acclimated and got my build up to a point where even the largest of waves became a relative breeze. However, all my crowd-control techniques and sheer ability to pump out damage meant naught to some of the expansion's brutal bosses. Lord of Hatred's boss fights are among the most strategic and demanding in Diablo history. This is largely due to an increasing emphasis on what I'd describe as raid-like encounters; just like in the notoriously challenging Uber Lilith battle, simply where you're standing can mean the difference between life and death. One boss boasted lightning-quick reflexes, making placing down stationary abilities superfluous; a few bosses repeatedly went invincible, requiring me to navigate a chaotic battlefield and interact with the right items or areas to progress; another left me feeling utterly powerless, though that's all I can share without giving away too much. However, I wish I could share even more on what lies ahead--I'm certain a few of these bosses will be remembered as all-timers. .png)
You'll find that wishing I could share more is a common theme in this review. It's both a blessing and a curse that I am unable to discuss the latter half of the expansion's story; a blessing, as it would be rude to ruin the twists and sheer spectacle of the experience, and a curse because I want nothing more than to describe in detail all the ways this story is the best the team has ever crafted. Though it takes a bit for things to really heat up and a couple plot points are slightly underbaked, the payoff is tremendous. Despite its sinister-sounding name and abundance of tragic moments, Lord of Hatred places great emphasis on love, sacrifice, and, above all else, the power of enduring hope. Though that might sound a bit quaint for Diablo, rest assured that all of these are explored through dark means, which ultimately makes their presence more impactful. After all, it takes darkness to appreciate the light. Suffice to say, Lord of Hatred takes that idea to heart, weaving both light and darkness to create an unforgettable experience. This expansion transforms Diablo IV into a cohesive and shockingly timely celebration of the human spirit--a reminder that even against unfathomable odds, our compassion and grit make humans a force to be reckoned with. And though hatred and misinformation might be unrelenting, so are we. Lord of Hatred's focus on the duality of light and darkness is further exemplified by its two new classes: the Paladin and the Warlock. As the Paladin class has been playable for the past four months for those who preordered Lord of Hatred (and we've already written up some of our thoughts), my focus here will be on the Warlock. However, it's worth noting that I've sunk a lot of time into the Paladin as well, and find the class to be a familiar take on the fan-favorite class that succeeds in delivering the holy knight power fantasy Diablo fans have come to love. .png)
Though Warlocks have traditionally been depicted as magic-wielders who gain their powers through entering a pact with a dark entity or demon, Diablo IV redefines the class in the most Diablo way possible. Instead of bargaining with demons, which would arguably feel wildly out of place in Diablo, Warlocks hunt and bind the hellish creatures, forcing them to bend to their will and serve them. The Warlock class is then divided into four archetypes based on what type of demons the player controls: the Legion, the Vanguard, the Mastermind, and the Ritualist. Initially, I built my Warlock up to be a bit of a Ritualist-Legion hybrid, focusing more on hanging back, summoning demons, and flooding the battlefield with hellfire. This was immensely fun, but I felt myself longing to be a bit more active and, perhaps counterintuitively, eager to lean away from the class's summoning. Though the Warlock feels different from the Necromancer or Spiritborn, I felt my itch to summon was properly scratched by those classes for me. I decided to pivot to something more dark and dexterous, with less emphasis on summoning minions and more emphasis on shadows and stealth. Though I gave myself the ability to summon Beholder-esque creatures and swarms of dark, leech-like creatures from the abyss, I focused on boosting my more direct attacks, debuffs, and trapping enemies with thick chains and an ability called Dark Prison. .png)
In experimenting with my build, I found that--while the archetypes Blizzard suggests are a good starting point--the updates to the game's skill tree and increased level cap (70 instead of 60) make the process of building a tailor-made character far more fun and viable. Those who grind out endgame content and keep up with Diablo IV's seasonal content are probably well aware that there is a meta to the game; plenty of sites and creators focus intensely on nailing down and meticulously outlining very specific endgame builds, and I've appreciated and utilized them over the past few years. But while I'm confident there will still be a meta and folks out there doing the work to create the most effective builds possible, the greater amount of versatility and ability to invest up to 15 skill points in a single ability make things far more interesting. Perhaps the most significant adjustment is that most abilities can actually change their affinity or typing once you reach a certain level. Previously, once I had committed to a set build, I largely ignored branches of the skill tree that did nothing to amplify it. But thanks to the capability to transform a hellfire-based ability into an abyss-based ability, for example, I was suddenly way more attentive to every pathway and every option. Somehow, this slightly more condensed skill tree feels far more unlimited, and that's an exciting prospect. Though I didn't get the chance to dig into the other classes, I am thrilled by what kind of builds await me and how this will reshape Diablo IV's meta. As for the expansion's endgame content, War Plans--a new feature that allows players to create a playlist of up to five endgame activities, such as nightmare dungeons or pit dives--is an extremely satisfying addition that helps demystify running high-level content by making it more seamless and easier for those playing solo. The Horadric Cube upgrade system solves some issues folks have with Diablo IV's emphasis on equipment quantity over quality, allowing you to better shape your gear to your needs--even if the interface is a bit confusing initially. With all that said, Lord of Hatred is a must-play expansion. The final chapter of the Hatred Saga triumphs in amplifying all of Diablo IV's best qualities while also introducing fantastic quality-of-life updates, breathing life into the game, and providing players with the best narrative arc in Diablo history. All that plus the addition of two fantastic new classes, and you have a truly meaningful expansion that elevates Diablo IV as a whole. Though Blizzard thankfully seems to be keeping things open-ended, leaving me hopeful this isn't the end of Diablo IV, Lord of Hatred offers a satisfying conclusion to a truly great saga...
With Mina the Hollower, Yacht Club Games has cemented itself as one of the premiere independent studios in the industry today. Its breakout hit, Shovel Knight, was a retro-throwback platformer that merged classic 8-bit-style action with some modern touches. Mina the Hollower looked similarly old-school, with a look and feel that obviously pays tribute to the Zelda Game Boy spin-offs. But this time, the fusion of newer souls-like design sensibilities makes it more than a freshened-up homage. It resembles those Zelda games, but it's so densely packed with secrets and intertwining cause-and-effect outcomes that at times it feels more like Elden Ring than Link's Awakening. The comparisons to Link's Awakening, and Game Boy Color games Oracle of Seasons and Oracle of Ages, are visually obvious. Mina has a similar color palette, the sprite artwork is familiar, and it uses an overhead camera. But whereas those games were relatively simple iterations on the template set by the classic Legend of Zelda and Link to the Past, Mina the Hollower is much darker, much denser, and much more difficult. The challenge level can be brutal and unforgiving, and there are elements of gothic horror, body horror, and gruesome violence--at least, as expressed through cute pixelated animals. The story starts when Mina gets a letter from Baron Lionel, the leader of Tenebrous Isle, who requests her help with the island's power generators. Mina is a Hollower, which in this world essentially means a sort of structural engineer and earth scientist. Mina is the best of them, having invented the spark technology that powers the generators, which in turn makes all of the modern technological wonders of Tenebrous possible. But the generators have been breaking down, so Mina is asked to come see to the problem. After her boat to Tenebrous is attacked by a monster, Mina chooses her weapon. You're presented with just three at the start, and already, this feels like a statement of intent. Link's trusty sword has always seen him through, and Mina's twin daggers, Whisper and Vesper, offer a very similar play-feel. But this time you could also select the Nightstar, a whip-like morningstar with longer reach, or the Blaststrike Maul, a massive bludgeoning hammer. The message, which becomes even clearer as you play, is that this is a game that wants you to take combat seriously. And you'll need to. Once you make landfall and enter the city of Ossex, you start to gain a better idea of what's going on. The generators have been sabotaged by an eco-terrorist named Thorne. Lionel tasks Mina with going to repair the six main generators surrounding the city, and you're vaguely pointed in a handful of directions to pursue. Immediately as you head out, though, you realize that this world does not spoonfeed its structure to you. It's not immediately clear where to go. The city itself is massive and bustling, loaded with named characters who all drop meaningful bits of information, though the game doesn't log these for you. What you do with that information is up to you--whether you commit it to memory, write it down, or chase a lead immediately. Like the open world of Elden Ring, the freedom initially feels overwhelming. A city newspaper points you in the direction of a dungeon, but the fact is that you can do them in almost any order. 
Mina the Hollower's overworld of Tenebrous Isle. The dungeons themselves are unique--not only as compared to a game in this template, but in relation to each other. Rather than enter into a bespoke dungeon area, they are built into the structure of the world itself. You might weave your way through crypts or caves or swamps while exploring, but there is no clear delineation between the open world and a dungeon. It's all part of the same cohesive, connected reality. There are often shortcuts and secret passageways connecting pieces of the world together, making it feel even more part of a whole. Even so, the parts of the world have their own distinct personalities that each feel inventive and fresh. My first quest was to Queensbury Crypt to the east, a creepy graveyard full of tombs and statues, complete with a macabre meta-puzzle that led to a boss battle with an implied tragic story at its core. Next I headed to Nox's Bayou, a poisonous swamp that tested my ability to make tricky leaps across waterways. Then I went to Septemburg, a personal favorite, a harvest-themed farm town being terrorized by a spooky monster that the local youth call the Carving Man. The Carving Man ends up stalking you, introducing a surprising survival-horror element akin to Resident Evil's Mr. X or Nemesis. Every dungeon is just packed with these kinds of surprising touches that make them feel distinct. Unlike a traditional Zelda game, though, you aren't obtaining new items in each dungeon that help you solve puzzles. At first I missed this element, but I found that Mina the Hollower didn't need it. Items in Zelda games help to facilitate new types of puzzle or platforming challenges, but Mina manages to maintain such a constant pace of fresh reinvention without items. The world and dungeon design itself kept the same pacing by themselves. Progress isn't gated behind keys, but rather, behind skill. If you can reach from one end of a room to the other, you can proceed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Fx0aJCRRpE That is made all the more impressive by how absolutely dense the world is. Every screen is packed with interconnected secrets and things to uncover, many of which you may not even realize are there the first time you trod past them. I've completed the game and I still don't feel like I've even scratched the surface. Playing alongside others on staff, we would frequently find ourselves surprising each other with small details we found and character interactions we uncovered. There are moments that I triggered that other players didn't, and vice-versa, and we still have no clear idea why. The world is so complex and intertwining that I suspect players will be experimenting and discovering new things for some time. Combat is similarly nuanced. In addition to the three starter weapons, you have access to more that can be found or bought. Each one can be upgraded, and all of them have their own intricacies. I preferred the twin daggers because it felt most familiar to me with its quick short-ranged strikes, but I also had to adjust to its rhythm of two quick stabs in succession. The Nightstar has reach and flexibility, but it also means you have to commit to an attack. A gun-like weapon gives you long range but with very limited ammo. You won't need to master all of them, but they each feel precise enough to accommodate someone's playstyle. In addition to your main weapon, you'll find Sidearms, which deplete a mana pool upon use. Those could be a heavy axe that you can toss a la Castlevania, an umbrella that blocks enemy attacks and then can be thrown, a boomerang-like throwing disc, a pet beast that follows you around on a leash, and more. There are tons of Sidearms, and it's always exciting to find a new one and see how it mixes up gameplay and adds to your combat options. 
The Underlab is Mina's base of operations. Combat is one area, and the only one, where Mina the Hollower's ambition mildly exceeds its grasp. This game admirably iterates on the form and function of classic Game Boy Zelda games, but those were never built for complex combat. Mina succeeds in giving this structure style a much higher skill ceiling, but it isn't flawless. With a flattened 2D perspective, it's not always clear when enemies are in the air, requiring a jump-attack to make contact. Many enemies charge directly at you, which makes the lack of a dodge or backstep command stand out. Instead, you can jump, or jump into a burrow and dig underground. Both of those do in a pinch--and you'll need to master their timing to withstand the combat challenges--but it does feel like combat is just slightly straining against the limitations of its homage. On that note, Mina the Hollower is brutally difficult at times. Boss battles can be especially tricky, but even a handful of regular enemies can take you down if you're not careful. Mina is just a vulnerable little mouse, after all. Your safe spot is the Underlab, an underground base you burrow into where you can heal and swap equipment. Sometimes Underlabs are spread very thin, and you'll be desperate to find the next one because you're on the verge of death. Runbacks between Underlabs and bosses can be unforgiving and require several tries. You can crack a vial to restore your health, but you need to defeat enemies to extend the amount it will restore, and you have a limited number of uses. Dying means losing your spark, after which you have one chance (by default) to regain it before you lose all your currency. The difficulty is certainly an intentional choice, and slight reservations about the combat's limitations aside, it does feel great to have your skills tested and slowly feel yourself improving. Like any other game in the souls-like genre, you do actually need to get good. Unlike a souls-like game, though, you actually can make the game easier on yourself. Mina the Hollower has loads of optional modifiers--reducing damage, adding more Underlab save points, adjusting the world speed, and so on. It's generous enough to let you turn on as many or as few as you'd like, tweaking the game difficulty to your liking. You can even make it harder if you're looking for additional challenge after mastering the mechanics. And even more are added after game completion, giving you a massive array of different things to try that will either add limitations or even more freedom. 
Mina faces off against Thorne in Mina the Hollower. Bones (which are their money) accrue by defeating enemies and exploring. After you've gathered enough, you can buy stacking upgrades to strength, defense, or Sidearm mana, or you can convert your pool into Bonestone, which is kept safe in your Underlab and therefore can't be lost when you die. Bones can also be used to buy a variety of permanent upgrades for Mina, or weapons, upgrades, various items, or Trinkets. Trinkets are one of the most important aspects to customizing Mina to your playstyle. These have strong effects like extending your burrow time, letting you carry extra health vials, or even giving you a one-time emergency revive. None of these are strictly necessary for completion like items in a Zelda game, but many of them are extremely useful, and combining them as you find new ones is part of the joy of learning and earning your own safe path through this dangerous world. And again, this world feels dangerous and unstable. Even in areas where you'd ordinarily feel safe, like wandering through the streets of the central city, you may be surprised to find yourself violently grabbed by a giant shopkeeper who pulls you into his store and orders you to buy his wares. I once wandered into a boss fight in the city without even realizing it, thinking I was in a safe space, and had to fight my way out by the skin of my teeth or risk losing my precious bones. Everything about the world accentuates the feeling that it is treacherous and unpredictable. As impressed as I was throughout, Mina the Hollower finishes especially strong with a pair of final dungeons that are somehow even more bursting with creativity. Whereas every dungeon up to that point had its own distinct flavor and personality, the last few hours packed multiple ideas and puzzle types into single dungeons, making them a feast of creative level design that honestly, at some points, felt like Yacht Club was just showing off. Each time you finish a dungeon, you play an extended platforming sequence with a neat effect that reminded me of Mode 7 on the Super NES. The generator towers themselves are cylindrical, and you can fully run around them while climbing upward, all while avoiding a trail of electrical current coming after you. It's an exciting way to cap off the dungeon after fighting a memorable boss, and like the environments themselves, each one has its own distinct flavor that matches the dungeon's themes. 
Upon restoring each generator, you find a letter--most of them from Thorne, the eco-terrorist who is always one step ahead of you in sabotaging the generators. Thorne describes his reasoning and implores you to rethink helping Lionel. For a generation raised by eco-tainment like Fern Gully and Captain Planet (RIP Ted Turner), it was clear from the start where all of this was going. However, the execution found room for surprising turns. This is a fable about environmentalism, but it's not clean or preachy. Fixing the generators has positive effects on the world, but Thorne's destruction of them does too. It seems like this world is stuck in a devil's bargain where they've become too reliant on technology to stop now without incurring heavy costs, but they can't safely continue either. Any path leads to pain. It certainly resonates. I am awed by what Yacht Club Games has created here. Mina the Hollower is so ambitious and dense and sprawling that it is hard to believe that it is contained in such a modest presentation. It surpasses the boundaries of mere homage or retro throwback to become something new, fresh, inventive, and exciting. Shovel Knight was a well-deserved successful debut for Yacht Club. Mina the Hollower may be its masterpiece...
When IO Interactive was first announced as developing a James Bond game, people connected the obvious dots: James Bond inspired Hitman, the series IO is best known for, so the studio seemed like a great fit to take on a proper 007 game. But it's where those two experiences would need to be different that had me most intrigued. A 007 game can't just be a Hitman game with different hair. Thankfully, IO's first foray into the James Bond world proves the team knows this and leans into it, delivering a thrilling Bond experience worthy of the character, while also applying lessons learned from the studio's own international man of mystery. Though it isn't the first to tell an original story, 007 First Light is IO's very own take on Ian Fleming's iconic spy himself. With a new leading man in Patrick Gibson, and a story that takes Bond back to the age of 26, when he's still serving in the military sans any ties to MI6, it's a natural on-ramp for people who may not be familiar with Bond or who have been waiting since 2021's No Time to Die for the next reboot. This is a fresh start, and the team makes it their own. In First Light, the Bond we meet is younger than ever, and this invites a more stubborn, mistake-prone version of the character, whom I quickly found myself interested in. Recruited to MI6's soon-to-be-rebooted 00 program, Bond can't catch a break, making enemies of his fellow recruits and his irritable supervisor, John Greenway, played by The Walking Dead's Lennie James, who shines in his newfound role in the Bond universe. In the movies, I loved how Daniel Craig's take on the hero often saw him receive his fair share of beatings. I strongly prefer that to an untouchable good guy who can do no wrong. That aspect of Bond feels ramped up even more in First Light, with a version of the spy who is hardly out of the figurative cradle at the intelligence agency. James Bond is a headstrong young man, and his tendency to ask for forgiveness rather than permission is both his best and worst attribute in the eyes of his superiors. Before long, Bond is on assignment, using his tricks of social engineering and stealth to infiltrate a lavish hotel, where the agency believes a disgruntled ex-00 agent is plotting something. While this plot thread initially sounds a bit too much like Skyfall, it quickly finds its own path forward, eventually erasing my concerns that the 20-hour story would lean too much on things I've already seen. It's also during this early mission that First Light starts to reveal its familial ties to Hitman, so to speak. Like IO's flagship game, you'll be dropped into a massive gala full of NPCs, some of whom are guardians of certain areas of the hotel. And like IO's bald assassin, Bond will need to trick, sneak past, or otherwise dispatch the security to get where he needs to be. While the game rightly doesn't have the same level of dark humor as Hitman, many of the ways you'll move about the world feel plucked right out of it. You can distract guards, then sneak from cover to cover when they look away, shimmy across hand-holds and pipes outside the building, eavesdrop on conversations to get crucial information, and lie to people to get what you need--be it a keycard, the whereabouts of a particular person, or for them to simply step aside and let you pass, which First Light gamifies as the Bluff mechanic. It won't work on everyone, but some enemies will simply take you at your word, as Bond is a charming young man good at acting like he belongs somewhere he doesn't. Once in a while, you'll even don a disguise. In these moments, First Light and Hitman share a lot in common. 
Hello 47--err, I mean 007. When things break down--maybe your cover has been blown, or you were spotted by enemies who don't fall for your charms--the game's very best attribute kicks into high gear. Combat in First Light is incredibly fun, especially the melee combat. Some of its systems are tried and true, like enemy attacks that must be blocked or dodged with good timing, but the things First Light does best are those that feel the most Bond-like. For example, you can slide over surfaces to stagger enemies, kicking their guns from their hands, catching them, then shooting your foe in the leg to cause them to kneel for a quick finisher. Alternatively, you can rush them and toss them into a computer desk, where things like a monitor and keyboard fly into the air as you buy some time with a handful of other armed villains behind you. Environments are awesomely reactive. If you throw a guy into a railing, you can then toss him over it. If you throw him into an electrical board, you'll see him get zapped and take heavy damage. Weaving in and out of combos against a group of enemies looks and feels awesome, whether you're perfectly nailing every hit and dodging every attack or you're just scraping by in fist fights that feel like trying to win an eye-gouging contest. Gunplay is fun too, and though I preferred to use my fists because I felt it fit the character better at times, I love how First Light's guns never have much ammo in them, demanding you frequently change what you're armed with by taking them off defeated enemies--you can even chuck your gun at their heads when it's out of ammo. Combined with a slow-motion focus-aim mechanic, enemies who effectively flank you, and lots of destructibility, the end result makes for frenetic shootouts of precision headshots and creative explosions every time you've been given the license to kill. The exciting setpieces, once starring Connery, Brosnan, Craig, and the others, are faithfully captured in First Light, but what makes them even better is how often these moments aren't scripted. They're a result of my own improvisational input, navigating a complex battlefield and using every tool at my disposal to capture the specific biorhythms of a Bond movie. 
Your options for stealth and social engineering are numerous in 007 First Light. Speaking of tools, it's funny how well a Bond story maps onto video games. Not only do you trot around the globe in a way that suits distinct missions, but Bond is always aided by Q and his Q-Lab spy gadgets. With his nearly ever-present Q-Watch, Bond can scan an area for enemies and interaction points, even through walls, using the sort of "detective vision" mechanic that Arkham Asylum popularized in 2009. Bond can also hack electronics with that same watch; he can make people feel queasy and move them off their spot using a fake phone that shoots poison darts, and he can blow stuff up with a fake pen, among several other gadgets at his disposal. On many missions, you'll pick which two or more of these you want, leaving you with many answers to the same question: how to get from A to B when the space between is littered with villains. I found it hard to pick which gadgets I wanted on any mission because they all had their uses. It was very common for me to get into a mission, thankful I had a particular gadget but also longing for another I had left behind, depending on the situation. A few late-game changes to how gadgets are used also shake up this system in two distinctly different but enjoyable ways. These gadgets ensure the spirit of the Bond character is alive, and the game is rich with other true-to-form touches, like a well-rounded cast of characters, such as MI6 boss M, workplace ally Moneypenny, and a memorable villain whose quest is an interesting dark reflection of Bond himself. He's also the type of bad guy who feels plucked right out of the headlines. A Bond story is essentially a superhero story, but the best of them ground themselves in reality by speaking to the social and political context in which they've arrived, and First Light shines in this regard. Watching the Bond movies recently for the first time, my wife jokingly wondered if the "Bond Girl" is always going to betray him, given how often it happens. I was glad to see First Light toy with this expectation a lot during its runtime. As for 007 himself, Patrick Gibson did so well to become the hero in my mind that, while I used to think of him as the actor who plays the title role on Dexter: First Blood, by the end of the game, he'd become James Bond first and foremost. It's hard to see him any other way. 
Several missions in First Light would feel right at home in Hitman. Of all the boxes IO had to check to make First Light feel authentic, the only area where the team noticeably falters is driving sections. It's not really a Bond story without some car chases, and though First Light uses several different vehicles in several different ways, most of them feel like you're rather rigidly barreling down something close to a straight line. Nearly feeling on-rails, these flashy scenes of Aston Martins and speedboats still look and sound cool, but they're best for moving Bond from one shootout to another, while the driving sections themselves don't add much. Another issue that stems from telling a 20-hour Bond story is that you, perhaps necessarily, lose some of the supreme pacing the best of the movies have to offer. I enjoyed seeing Bond in his MI6-provided apartment with other recruits. That felt like the sort of downtime a movie wouldn't allow for, which managed to add layers to these new versions of old characters. But there are a couple of other sections later where you're meant to solve puzzles, usually involving locked doors, and in these sections, the pacing can grind to a halt, pulling me out of the otherwise-exciting story. That's a hard problem to solve, given how a game necessarily differs from a movie. One area in which the pacing doesn't suffer is First Light's secondary mode, TacSim (short for Tactical Simulation). The in-universe excuse for this challenge mode is that it's Bond's way of staying frosty, beating up virtual bad guys in virtual kitchens, villas, and military installments. What this amounts to for you is a highly replayable mode that gets right down to the game's best bits: its combat. Across many levels, you can attempt to complete dozens of challenges, which is something this studio has designed very well before. 
Vehicle sections look flashy, but they don't amount to much other than driving nearly in a straight line. I like this mode out of the gate, though the rewards feel lacking for now, with some lukewarm weapon skins and outfits on offer. IO plans to support TacSim with updates, and I look forward to seeing how it evolves. But for those who wondered if this could be the equivalent of Hitman's incredible Freelancer mode, it's far from that as of now. In the end, IO's take on James Bond was actually more like Hitman than I expected, but that's not to say it's simply Hitman by another name. As someone who has loved that series for nearly 25 years, it's fascinating to see IO apply everything it's learned. 007 First Light wisely repurposes what works in both universes but isn't afraid to reimagine or ditch those parts that don't. Though some aspects of the game do hinder the pacing, so much else feels authentic and riveting. As Hollywood seems uncertain about where to take Bond next, IO Interactive's debut effort is supremely confident. "James Bond will return," the movies always like to say. If and when IO's Bond returns, it'll have a great first act to follow...
Perhaps because he's so cute and marketable, Yoshi's adventures have been designed for a younger and younger audience for the last several years. 2006's Yoshi's Island DS was not out-of-step with the difficulty of a mainline Mario game, but since then, the challenge of mainline Yoshi games has been slowly softened to target younger audiences. With Yoshi and the Mysterious Book, Nintendo has made the gameplay even more gentle for gaming novices--but what it lacks in difficulty, it mostly makes up for in creativity and a playful gimmick built around discovery and exploration. Yoshi and the Mysterious Book isn't a typical platformer. You don't move left to right to reach a finish line, Yoshi can't die, and there aren't enemies to overcome in a traditional sense. Instead, the stages are little biospheres teeming with natural flora and fauna. Rather than fight them, you're there to study and document them--Yoshi is less of an adventurer this time around, and more of a research assistant. You're conducting research inside the pages of Mister Encyclopedia, aka Mr. E, a conscious compendium of all life on a remote, unnamed island. The Yoshis volunteer to jump into the pages of the book and document their findings, putting each of the creatures there through their paces. That usually includes documenting how they taste, what happens if you throw them, how they interact with their environment, and even how they interact with each other. This transforms stages into little standalone playgrounds where you experiment with a new creature and see what it can do. The play is about the discovery itself, as you observe different reactions and the game gently guides you to try new things. https://youtu.be/1d7IdzUK2MM?si=_8yC48jkJYyAqeXC It's surprising how well this works. Instead of reaching a goal line, the stages conclude when you make some pre-defined, especially significant discovery. For a set of flowers called Crazee Dayzees, for example, it's using them to grow large flower buds. For Shy Guys, it's finding all of their hiding spots. For Casterway, a creature with a fishing pole, it's catching a huge lunker of a fish lurking in the water below. I wasn't sure how well the game would approach guiding you towards your goals when no two goals are exactly the same, but it works remarkably well. You can always ask Mr. E for a hint, but I rarely needed to. The rhythms of the stages and cascading discoveries often just led me to the right conclusion. Years of Mario platformers, of which Yoshi owes its lineage, makes the general controls feel natural and fluid. You can run, jump, swallow things with your sticky tongue, and throw eggs using the left stick for aiming. But Yoshi and the Mysterious Book also gets a delightful amount of variety out of both its differentiated goals, and its myriad strange creatures. A Snurfboard creature functions like a surfboard, letting you ride on it and do tricks. Meanwhile, a Slugarang, a bug shaped like a boomerang, lets you toss it away as a projectile to mow down grass and trim trees, allowing you to make new discoveries. Each world has at least one creature like these two examples, and their inclusion mixes up the gameplay in some new and surprising way, which helps maintain a brisk pace of variety. And as you get deeper into the game, you start to find creatures that interact with other, earlier ones you had already discovered. You can go back and spend coins to buy hints for interactions you may have missed in a previous area if you want to see them all. I should say here, by the way, that each of these creatures can be named however you wish. You're the archeologist discovering them, so Mr. E lets you name them. I didn't use this functionality much, preferring to hear their canonical names per Mr. E's suggestion, but it's a cute touch that I'm sure kids will enjoy. The story is light to the point of being almost non-existent. Somehow, Bowser Jr. and Kamek have found themselves in the titular book as well and they're searching for a rare species. You restore the pages of the book to unlock new areas, and naturally that means you're on their trail, but you aren't given any particular motivation otherwise. That said, the main story culminates in a plot twist, of sorts, that is so bizarre and left-field that you really need to see it to believe it. The story was too bare-bones to evoke a strong emotional reaction from me, but I was still amused that such a cute game had such a dark idea lurking inside it. Speaking of seeing and believing, the visual style in Mysterious Book is gorgeous. Inside the book, the whole game has a visual layer that makes it look like illustrations on a page, with a colored pencil aesthetic and skipped frames to accent the effect. Especially when played in TV mode, Yoshi is full of expressive reactions to everything he sees, and in particular, everything he tastes. These playful cartoon expressions help to even further accentuate its appeal for younger players. This clear targeting of younger gamers has its drawbacks, though. Most notably, while this is a game that seems aimed at early- or pre-readers, it's absolutely chock full of text to read, and there is no voice acting or spoken dialogue to make the experience more accessible to the audience that will likely be enjoying this game most. Mr. E speaks in simlish-like vocalizing but the dialogue has to be read. Discoveries pop up as text as well. The hint system is all text too. A younger player without strong reading skills might be able to play with the systems and make discoveries, but it may be hard for them to progress without someone around to interpret the text for them. 
Yoshi and the Mysterious Book 
For older players, there is a little more complexity hidden behind the first ending. It's actually one of the coolest features the game has to offer, which makes it strange to rope it behind game completion. Once you finish the main story you open up a modular UI, with "Exploration Tools" that can be bought in exchange for the Smiley Flowers you've been gathering throughout the journey and then mapped to a grid overlay. These tools are unlocked in a particular order so you can't select which ones you want, but a few of them include a Bioscanner to track nearby creatures, thermometers to track temperature, and more. There's even a lifebar for Yoshi, which confusingly doesn't seem to do anything since you can't die--but when Yoshi gets low enough in health he visibly reacts. Presumably this system was running under the hood the whole time but I never even noticed until unlocking the tool. Those tools can be applied to extra biomes that open up after the first ending as well. That extends the adventure into new areas with new creatures, as well as allowing you to discover how those creatures and your new Exploration Tools interact with all the ones you've already found. How much mileage you get out of those extra stages, and in fact out of the entire game, relies largely on your level of curiosity. Yoshi and the Mysterious Book is fundamentally a game about poking and prodding at the world and seeing what happens. It won't test your precision platforming skills, but it serves as a gentle introduction for novices, and an experiment for even experienced gamers to see an audacious, expanded idea of what a platformer can be...
Imagine a Lego set that represents Batman 89, the Tim Burton classic that helped create the modern superhero blockbuster. Then imagine other sets that represent Batman Returns, Batman Begins, The Batman, and so on. You start breaking pieces apart from each set and piecing them back together. At first you can identify a chunk from one movie and distinguish it from another, but the more you mix, the more unrecognizable they become. Before long it's difficult to tell exactly where one begins and another ends. That's what it feels like to play Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight, a game that litters its influences so liberally that the pastiche becomes its own reality. In the process, it recaptures the glory days of licensed Lego games by feeling, for the first time in a long time, fresh. The freshness is what I kept coming back to throughout my time with Legacy of the Dark Knight. Like lots of people, I played Lego Star Wars: The Video Game, the 2005 Traveller's Tales game that established a house style for Lego games and began a flurry of licensed tie-ins. I loved it, and I spent countless hours plumbing its depths and unlocking every character. It was a simple game bursting with secrets to find as well as a playful take on a mythology that mattered to me. Since then, though, the franchisification of licensed Lego became supercharged, to its detriment. At the height of its power there would be three or even four licensed Lego games released in a single year, and the series burned itself out. You can only find hidden doodads so many times. In recent years, Lego has seemed more cautious, producing more artsy takes like Lego Builder's Journey or Lego Voyagers, with far fewer licensed games. Against that backdrop, Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight feels like a statement of intent. With additional care and time, this is what a Lego game can be. https://youtu.be/DfJaUpW_P00?si=E7H8uGwVttzcUqkR Legacy of the Dark Knight tells an original story, kind of, cobbled together and reassembled from the stories of various other Batman media. Most often these are pulled directly from the myriad movie adaptations and reboots, but it's also informed by stray influences from well-known comic arcs and at least one very notable video game influence. And since characters have crossed multiple movie adaptations and interpretations, there's some loose justifications put in to explain how the characters change over time. Jack Napier starts as a member of a regular gang, before donning the Red Hood and falling into a vat of chemicals, but he was always a sadist who liked to taunt his victims, and in this telling he even had the plan to poison people with Smilex before he succumbed to its effects himself. The Penguin is a low-level thug a la The Batman universe before he transitions to a mayoral candidate with animalistic habits as seen in Batman Returns. There are lots of other surprising developments that I'll let you discover on your own. By imitating and remixing so many classic movie moments, though, it does invite direct comparisons to the originals. It's simply strange to hear iconic moments with new voices. Jack Nicholson's lines as the Joker are especially seared into my mind, so it sounds just slightly off to hear him imitated by a voice that is meant to be a broader take on the character, to facilitate his various transformations. It feels unfair to lay that at the feet of the actor, who does a fine job with the material, but telling any actor to do an exact re-take of some of the most famous lines in superhero cinema history is a rough assignment. Similarly, the story can sometimes feel a little shaggy, briskly connecting two movie plots that weren't ever meant to connect. Usually this is played for laughs, so it works well enough since it gives the impression that the writing is in on the joke. Through all of these vignettes, the story mostly focuses on building the Bat-family, suggesting that's really the most important part of his legacy. Each chapter focuses primarily on befriending a new crime-fighter like Robin or Batgirl and learning their unique mechanics for battles and puzzle-solving. You're always playing as Batman alongside one ally, though your secondary character can be switched at will most of the time. This focus keeps the characters selection relatively small, a marked change from the sprawling roster in most Lego games that has led to sorting them into character types. Jim Gordon has a pair of special guns--one that fires sticky goo and another that fires a ricochet bulb--and he's the only one with that particular set of skills. Batgirl is the only one who can hack computers, Robin can pry open cracks with his bo staff, and so on. 
Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight Lego games are always collect-a-thons, and this one is no exception. But rather than a humongous roster, you're collecting currency to unlock new looks for your core crew, color modifiers that can be applied to any outfit, upgrade material, and trophies for your headquarters. It all feeds into itself very nicely, and I would often make a point of visiting the in-game shop to unlock new costumes. As both a Batman and Lego fan, it's just endlessly cool to see how different suits have been visualized in this style, and there are tons of extremely specific references to particular comic arcs alongside suits representing every movie and TV adaptation you can think of. I never cared much about unlocking every Droid in a Lego Star Wars game, but I want to see every single deep-cut Bat-suit this game has to offer. Legacy of the Dark Knight also pays homage to Rocksteady's Arkham universe, most notably as the foundation of its gameplay. The rightly praised Arkham combat makes a return here, with the same basic cadence of punches, dodges, and parries, augmented with gadgets as you upgrade your gear. It's a little slower-paced, but as the enemy count and combo meter increases it almost feels like an Arkham game with a Lego visual overhaul mod. It lacks some of the brutality and precision of the Arkham games, especially with more limited gear and gadget upgrades, but it very accurately recaptures the spirit of Arkham's rhythmic combat style. I don't want to oversell the Arkham connections, because the combat in Lego Batman doesn't reach that level of finesse. This is more Arkham Lite than a true successor to the Rocksteady games. However, the injection of even just some Arkham DNA does make combat much more satisfying than it has been in traditional Lego games, showing that even a little bit of that secret sauce goes a long way toward making a game feel more engaging. Similarly, traversal throughout the open world of Gotham feels almost a match for the traditional Arkham games. You have access anytime to your choice of Batmobile from across the spectrum of Batman's iconic car. For the most part these feel very similar, with the ability to quickly accelerate across straightaways as well as navigate hairpin turns. They do differ where it makes sense, though. The Tumbler from the Nolan movies feels much heavier and tank-like compared to the light and nimble Batman 89 version, for example. Most of the time, though, it's quicker and easier to simply grapple up to the nearest, highest point and leap, using your natural glide to cover long distances. Again, this doesn't quite match the balletic grace of the Arkham games, but it's remarkably close. 
Alright everyone, chill. The one spot where the Arkham comparisons fall short, though, is the stealth. The Arkham games were notable for living the fantasy of Batman, turning you into the predator and criminals--a cowardly and superstitious lot--into the prey. Stealth in Legacy of the Dark Knight is passable but unremarkable. You can sneak up on enemies for an instant takedown, but you have fewer tools to inspire fear in a room full of enemies or disappear if you're spotted. Instead of clearing a full room, I would often take out a couple enemies, get spotted, and finish off the rest with traditional combat. It's an unfortunate weak spot in a game that is otherwise extremely effective at emulating what are widely regarded as the best Batman games. And within those strong underpinnings, Legacy of the Dark Knight thrives on variety without feeling bloated or overstuffed with half-baked characters and mechanics. The open world of Gotham has tons of caches to find, Riddler and Cluemaster puzzle challenges, AR combat and racing challenges, crimes to stop, and even short environmental puzzles to unlock fast-travel points. Even within an individual mission you're never doing one thing for too long, as you'll transition from combat to puzzle to platforming challenge and back again. The story campaign itself moves at a brisk pace with lots to do, but you can also just get lost in Gotham finding things to unlock and empower your Bat-family. With so many options at my fingertips between multiple allies, I appreciated the addition of a sonar ping similar to Arkham's Detective Vision that would highlight objects of interest. Sometimes this would be necessary to scan a clue or follow footprints, but you can also use it to show the way forward. I have felt incredibly stupid at times playing past Lego games, knowing that I'm overlooking something obvious that's gating my progress forward. I never struggled with that in Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight, because the ping system was always there to highlight objects of interest. Most of the level gating involves breaking apart certain objects and then building them into some prop to move forward, so in a pinch this helped me identify which objects to break or even which ones were breakable. Adding another wrinkle of strategy is a stud-multiplier system that, if it has been in other Lego games, it must have been one that passed me by. Other Lego games have featured multipliers as unlockable bonuses, but in Legacy of the Dark Knight, it's a meter you build that then slowly drains. This actually adds a layer of decision-making to your wanton destruction, since it's best to build up a multiplier before going after a particularly high-value stud. It's just another way this game adds a tiny bit of extra depth--not enough to be overwhelming or feel out of place in a Lego game, but enough to keep it engaging for adults. And on that note, this is certainly a game aimed at adult Batman fans who are familiar with the character's rich history in cinema. Batman himself is portrayed with his trademark stoicism, but he's also a puckish, Bugs Bunny-style mischief maker. Nested within the reference-laiden story are individual references to influences as diverse as It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Street Fighter 2. The writing is sharp and frequently laugh-out-loud funny. This game in particular shows off a knack for timing and sight gags with cinematic flair. 
The extended Bat-family plays a prominent role in Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight Silly as it often is, this is a game that makes a point to show the passage of time. Bruce gets visibly older as the story proceeds and enters different phases of his life and his relationships with his allies. The iconic Bat Cave itself slowly develops from a natural rock formation with a handful of computer consoles to a sprawling technological marvel that documents your accomplishments and unlocks and allows you to customize many parts of it to your liking. In a larger sense, Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight is fundamentally about time and the changes that come with it. It's been more than 20 years since Lego games hit it big with Lego Star Wars, and for a while, it felt like it had lost its way and become a whirring franchise-printing machine. Legacy of the Dark Knight rights the ship by getting back to fundamentals with deeper focus, razor-sharp writing, and just the right amount of mechanical complexity. For the first time in a long time, this is a return to form for the Lego series. It's still simple, but not quite as simple, it's bursting with even more secrets, and it's another playful take on a mythology that I love. It's the most fun I've had with a Lego game since 2005, and a template for how Lego games can rebuild into something greater, piece by piece...
Following up a game as lauded as Disco Elysium would be an unenviable task for any developer, but especially one as fractured as ZA/UM. With many of the key creative minds behind the detective RPG separated from the studio following an ugly, and very public, legal dispute, it's up to those left behind to pick up the pieces. That's a lot of baggage to carry going into a brand-new, albeit familiar, game, so it's not surprising how ZA/UM has tried to distance itself from too many comparisons with its previous hit. As a spy thriller, Zero Parades: For Dead Spies largely strikes a different tone than Disco Elysium. Aspects of it are still inescapably familiar, however, and it's this looming shadow--and sense of imitation--that prevents it from matching the same highs as its spiritual predecessor. Yet there are also enough fresh ideas for it to stand on its own two feet, even if its footing is slightly uneven and less creatively distinct. Zero Parades' opening does little to quell the comparisons as you wake up on the floor of a small, dirty apartment. Hershel Wilk, codename Cascade, is here on an espionage mission. That's as much as both you and she know. The groggy spy was supposed to get more details from her mission partner, codenamed Pseudopod, but he's permanently indisposed--you find him unresponsive and sitting in a chair in his underwear, overlooking the city of Portofiro through the apartment's grimy first-floor windows. Rummaging through his pockets reveals an invoice for socks and a business card that simply reads, "All you need is a miracle." Figure out the rest on your own, agent. From here, Zero Parades follows the Disco Elysium blueprint incredibly closely. It's another high-concept, combatless, and verbose RPG, played from an isometric perspective with an emphasis on dialogue choices and skill checks. Like its forebear, it also lives and dies on the strengths of its narrative and loquacious writing. In this regard, it makes a good first impression and carries it through to the end--albeit with a few notable caveats. 
Your skills, for instance, form different parts of your mind and will regularly comment on your dialogue choices and the world around you, sometimes providing you with helpful pointers, interesting observations, or quirky remarks. Unlike in Disco Elysium, however, they don't feel like defined characters of their own and are largely interchangeable. This is partly due to the game's writing failing to distinguish among the different parts of Hershel's psyche, but also because they all share a similar voice. I'm convinced Boo Miller's raspy performance as Hershel and her skills will be divisive, but her vocal-fry-infused delivery eventually grew on me. The issue is that there's not much deviation between one inner thought and the next, unlike in Disco Elysium, where each skill's defined written voice was also brought to life by either Lenval Brown or Mikee W. Goodman--the latter of whom is a master at creating disparate sounds. Zero Parades' espionage vibes don't quite suit the same kind of eccentric performances, but it's disappointing that they're so samey either way. 
Fortunately, ZA/UM is still adept at crafting memorable personalities elsewhere. Hershel herself is an immediately compelling protagonist: messed up and haunted by past failures, but in a very different way to Disco Elysium's Harrier Du Bois. Hailing from a communist megastate known as the Superbloc, Herschel is a spy for a sprawling intelligence outfit called the Operant Bureau. This isn't her first time in Portofiro, but things didn't go to plan the last time she was here, leaving her former crew to fend for themselves. She's been in the Freezer (essentially condemned to ignominious desk duty) ever since, but this is a chance to potentially make amends and prove herself again. Once you hit the streets and begin to unravel not just your role in this story, but the world's layered history and the lives of Portofiro's varied denizens, Zero Parades makes for some fascinating spy fiction. At its covert heart, the writing emulates the dissociative and morally ambiguous style of John le Carré, but it doesn't box itself into this style either. Its literary prose is sharp, witty, and very funny on occasion, too, balancing surrealist undertones with geopolitics, spycraft, and interpersonal drama. 
It's not as poetic or as arthouse as Disco Elysium, and its off-kilter moments are rarer and often feel crammed-in because it was popular in ZA/UM's previous game, not necessarily because it works for the character or the story here. There's a moment early on, for example, where you're asked to fix a fax machine. A simple task, but one Zero Parades describes as though Harrier Du Bois is trying to break into the game, with Hershel explaining that she must pacify the machine's spirit of the demonic entities possessing it. This whole spiel feels out of place and highlights the sense of imitation that occasionally rears its head in Zero Parades, unable to escape Disco Elysium's daunting shadow. The city of Portofiro is, at least, a very different beast to Disco Elysium's Revachol. Parts of it are similarly dilapidated and decayed, echoing a more fruitful past, but it's still a much more vibrant city. It feels alive, caught within a three-way clash for cultural and ideological power that hums along just below the surface. On the opposite side to the communist Superbloc lies the Illuminated Empire, or La Luz, a techno-fascist state that used to be a vast colonial empire. Now it's trying to recapture its former glory by pursuing a strategy of cultural victory. 
You see it in the bustling marketplace of the Bootleg Bazaar, where a couple of children are transfixed by a small TV showing Sixty-Six Wolves, a Luzian cartoon filled with subtle techno-fascist propaganda. Nearby, there's a clothes vendor whose dad went missing after getting hopped up on conspiracy theories spewed forth by an Alex Jones-adjacent menace. A few streets away, you'll find a man so consumed by the latest imported fashion trends from La Luz that he's fallen into crippling debt. Most characters you meet have something interesting to say, whether they're shining a light on your current mission or revealing more about Zero Parades' world. Your quests often overlap in surprising ways as well, to the point where someone you interacted with earlier proves useful later for a completely unrelated task. This interconnected feeling makes Portofiro a captivating place to explore, which is only enhanced by the ways you engage with it. Narratively, as a spy, you can choose to be a disruptor, deploying subterfuge, deduction, and moments of violence to get what you want. Mechanically, you're doing this via dialogue choices, exploration, and skill checks. 
You have three main faculties that represent the key branches of an operant's training: Action, Relation, and Intellect. Each faculty consists of five skills that you can upgrade when leveling up. An Action skill, like Shadowplay, affects your ability to sneak and steal without being noticed, while an Intellect skill, such as Grey Matter, dictates how adept you are at using logic to pick up on inconsistencies and patterns. It's a familiar setup, but Zero Parades expands on the Disco Elysium formula by introducing three ailments that are tied to each faculty. Action is tied to Fatigue, Relation is tied to Anxiety, and Intellect is tied to Delirium. Each one has its own pseudo health bar, which rises and falls based on your actions and the events you witness. Examining your incapacitated partner at the start of the game increases your anxiety, but another outcome later on might lower it, for instance. You can also consume cigarettes, drugs, alcohol, and soft drinks to regulate these stressors, choosing to raise one in order to lower another. If an ailment exceeds the threshold, you're forced to reduce one of your faculty skills, so keeping them in check is a constant balancing act. 
This introduces some interesting decisions, as you can opt to intentionally increase an ailment in order to give yourself a better chance of passing a skill check. Typically, you roll two dice to determine a passing or failing grade, but by "exerting" yourself, you're given a third die in exchange for increasing one of your stressors. It's a systemic approach that's more gamified than anything in Disco Elysium, but one that suits your role as a trained operative, able to push your physical and mental limits to potentially gain an advantage. However, even if you might occasionally boost your chances of success, Zero Parades is still very much a game built around failure. In fact, it embraces the act of failing and the resulting consequences in a way few games do. It's baked into its branching quest design, where you might choose to solve a quest one way, only to stumble down a completely different avenue after a skill check gone awry. This feeds into the shift to a slightly larger map, allowing ZA/UM to create a multitude of literal branching paths. I won't get into specifics, but many quests can be solved in numerous ways, whether you know about each path or not. It blends failure with your own choices and chosen skillset, adding a sense of improvisation to how you navigate each situation. 
It's these systemic enhancements that most notably separate Zero Parades from Disco Elysium. It struggles in other areas, often feeling like a pale imitation of the studio's predecessor--dangerous territory when the likelihood of reaching the same heights is marginal at best. But even with these hiccups, this is still an excellent RPG, with varied and mostly well-defined characters, a fully realized setting encompassed by insurmountable depth, and an endlessly captivating narrative that offers myriad ways to maneuver through its fantastic twists and turns. It might not capture the same rarified magic, but it's well worth venturing into Zero Parades: For Dead Spies' clandestine world...
The first season of the anime adaptation of Devil May Cry on Netflix was a refreshing remix of the Capcom intellectual property, and its second season wastes no time in using the momentum from its cliffhanger ending to leap straight into action. As subtle as a sledgehammer to the face, Devil May Cry Season 2 is a sharper and bolder follow-up, expanding its ensemble cast and amplifying the action in this video game adaptation. Kicking off in the midst of the US's new war on demonic terror, spearheaded by a literal cowboy president--and orchestrated by sinister forces in the background--Season 2 is firmly in its numetal phase of action and storytelling. With Dante still on ice and Lady grappling with her guilt over her role in the slaughter of innocent demons, it's the introduction of Vergil that steals the show. Dante's twin brother brings his signature stoic attitude to the screen as he finds himself on a destined collision course with his sibling. Johnny Yong Bosch and Robbie Daymond have a commanding presence whenever they appear as Dante and Vergil, respectively. But when they share the stage? It's a jackpot moment as we see more of Vergil’s past, his motivations, and the forces manipulating him. The result is a story that's all gas and no brakes for its first half, before it finally slows down and takes a moment to breathe ahead of gearing up for the finale. Season 2 doesn't contain any narrative surprises, but because it doesn't need to do any setup work like the first season did, it has room to tell a tightly crafted story full of high-octane action and surprisingly tender moments. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jpie-fec5qY The second episode even tries to shake up the usual way animated stories are told, shifting between documentary-style interviews, different animation styles, and alternate viewpoints on all the chaos erupting around them. It doesn’t quite reach the heights of Season 1’s amazing sixth episode–an almost wordless showcase of stunning art direction and storytelling–but it’s clear the creators are trying new things, which is a theme throughout Season 2. If there's one universal consensus amongst Devil May Cry fans, it's that the first sequel is a dreadful departure from everything that made the first game so special. A rushed development cycle, boring gameplay, and a version of Dante who had the charisma of a boiled egg as its star, it's the black sheep of the series. In contrast, Season 2 salvages several interesting elements from the game, reusing and reimagining characters to give them a second chance in the spotlight. Arius is transformed from a one-note megalomaniac and into a fleshed-out villain with grand designs of godhood, while the looming threat of Argosax the Chaos raises the stakes further. Redemption for Devil May Cry 2 is the biggest surprise this season, and over the course of eight episodes, this adaptation brings out the best of an infamous game. The other big surprise is Season 2's primary villain, Arius. Allied alongside the zealous Vice President Baines (with Ian James Corlett taking over from the late Kevin Conroy), Arius shines as the architect of chaos who's hellbent on resurrecting an ancient evil. Voiced by veteran actor Graham McTavish (Outlander), Arius serves as the perfect foil to the Sons of Sparda as he outmaneuvers them with cunning and raw power gained from both his Uroboros Corporation and mystical Arcana. 
Considering how the antagonist has essentially been forgotten after only appearing in the maligned Devil May Cry 2 game, this new spin on Arius proves that showrunner Adi Shankar and the rest of the series' crew have a firm grip on the franchise and know exactly how to bring out the best of it. That's a running theme throughout Season 2, as the show embraces all things Devil May Cry. From strawberry sundae Easter eggs to quick cameos, the series is a celebration of the franchise. Studio Mir is at its best this season, combining its unique art style with stunning fight scenes that really capture the spirit of the games. Every action scene looks great and is set to 2000s rock and numetal tracks, making the battles even more intense than last season. The only downside is the occasional use of awkward CG animation, but it’s not as common as in the first season. Most of the time, CG is just used for backgrounds or quick shots, though a few scenes with 3D models still stand out against the beautiful 2D animation. Devil May Cry Season 2 doubles down on everything that made the first season so memorable, trading setup for momentum. Standout additions this season include the arrival of Vergil and a reimagined Arius, and while the narrative rarely surprises, it has strong performances and slick animation that captures the over-the-top spectacle of the source material and ultimately surpasses its predecessor...