Rebirth fails to clear the lofty narrative bar Remake set for itself, settling instead for walking back every interesting piece of setup from the previous game. It fails to accurately represent the characters, reducing most of them to Flanderized shells. It fails to provide an interesting open world, settling for rote checklist work that drags and drags. Aside from the finely tuned combat and inventive music, this game is an utter failure on nearly every imaginable front. At this point, we’re confident in saying we won’t be back for Reunion or whatever the fuck they end up calling it.

A small, independent studio in China took inspiration from some of our favorite mystery games, and spun it into a delightful detective story spread along (you guessed it) the Yangtze River. It’s clever, humorous and educational all at once: we appreciated getting to learn a few factoids about the Chinese legal system in the late 1800s/early 1900s, and how defending yourself could be a real uphill battle.

It stumbles at the end with some puzzles that demand precise ordering of events, and even though they’ve patched this already, the English localization could use more work. Aside from that, we’d recommend this to just about anyone who loves a good detective game.

As a die-hard The Order: 1886 defender (surprisingly short, but pretty and exciting), we expected to like this one! Space horror was already our jam, but a space thriller? That was an exciting prospect.

Unfortunately, the lead actor's performance sounds like shit, movement speed is abominably slow, and you more or less know how everything's going to turn out from the box art + the knowledge that Troy Baker is the biggest name on the box.

There's other, better narrative games set in space that you could be playing instead. Hell, we'd put ADR1FT over Fort Solis, and that game bored us to tears!

It's been 35 years since Jordan Mechner's influential masterpiece, and after a lengthy excursion into the third dimension, we once again have a side-scrolling platformer! It's one hell of an adventure, taking inspiration from its modern colleagues (Celeste, Hollow Knight and Metroid Dread) while doing more than enough to stand on its own.

Building a rock-solid combat system with exciting combos is difficult. Constructing platforming gauntlets that are challenging yet fair is its own struggle. Doing both in the same game, where one feeds into the other seamlessly? That's a Herculean feat. The Lost Crown goes above and beyond, delivering a special experience that will doubtlessly stick with us for years to come.

Dull. Repetitive. Music that grates on your ears. The twists at the end of each episode land with a thud, since you’re never invested in any of the characters.

We’re more than ok with mystery games where its investigations are on-rails, as long as there’s compelling questions that keep us engaged. But this game? This game is all about walking around, asking each question that’s in your journal, then answering a series of multiple choice questions before moving on to the next chapter. We’re not exaggerating when we say that this game made us feel consistently drowsy. Not the way we hoped to ring in 2024, but ah well.

We abandoned this one back in March, and only came back this month after receiving a new video card. It still feels lacking compared to the original: the treasure hunt excursions, side quests and brand-new segments take an already-bloated game (let's be real, OG RE4 was always a little too long) and stretch it to its breaking point. But treated as its own thing, there's at least some merit to what they've built here. Like the other Resident Evil remakes, it's a devilishly fun rollercoaster ride: it's just outshined by REMake 2 and 3 (not to mention the original RE4).

A promising start gets bogged down by one of the sloppiest undercover plots we've ever seen. It course corrects in the back half, but we spent a large chunk of the story burying our face in our hands, frustrated by the total lack of consequences for Ryoma whenever he refused to play along.

We're glad that we saw it through to the end: if you know a little bit of Shinsengumi history, your jaw will drop at some of the buckwild ways they bend reality. And when it's firing on all cylinders, it's fantastic! You just have to wade through a lot of bullshit to get to the good stuff, and we don't blame anyone who bows out before said good stuff arrives.

One of those delightful sequels that expands everything the first did well without coming across as bloated. The islands are drop-dead gorgeous, the puzzles are ingenuous and rarely frustrate, and there's so many little secrets littered about here and there.

More importantly, the philosophical questions that felt rote and shallow in the first game are given greater depth here. You're no longer reading what-ifs on terminals isolated from the rest of the world: you're surrounded by characters invested in your journey, as well as the future of their own city. Even when it gets obnoxious at points, there's a degree of humanity on display that makes each stray thought easier to swallow.

Anyway, this is one of the best puzzle games we've played in years, and we'd happily recommend it to anyone.