The Norwood Suite brought me new discoveries with every room. With his free-to-play 2015 release, Off-Peak, NYC musician and developer Cosmo D brought his electric, off-the-cuff style of jazz to game space. That energy is focused and brought to life in new ways in The Norwood Suite, one of the best first-person experience games(walking sim, if you prefer) since 2015's The Beginner's Guide. Strictly speaking, you progress through the game by performing menial tasks for the clientele and staff at The Norwood Suite, a demented hotel tucked among the evergreens in the rural sprawl around NYC. But the game’s charm lies in the setting and characters, a storied hotel with intrigue, Dadaist absurdity, and architecture that gleefully folds in on itself. The story goes...places, but it's the music that will constantly nip at your heels (literally, the music always manifests in the world through speakers peppering the estate), guiding you from hall to hall in a world where internet modems have eyes, voices are interpreted as freeform instrumentals, and Red Bull has taken over the world. It's the best world to get lost in, where musical and visual discovery await at every turn.

Night in the Woods made me relive the worst years of my life and I loved it. I wasted two years at the University of Pittsburgh before the marijuana faded away and all I had to show for it was a streak of black outs and insurmountable student debt. Those hazy memories bias me to more closely relate to a protagonist as deeply flawed and, at times, unlikeable as Mae Borowski. But, even without history coloring my experience, the writing from Infinite Fall's Bethany Hockenberry and Scott Benson imbues its world with tremendous empathy and slice-of-life details rarely seen in video games. It deserves to stand alongside works from other media like Bojack Horseman, Scott Pilgrim, and Ghost World--places where the surreality of the world masks our deepest wants, hopes, and fears. Never before has a game so clearly spoken to me personally and spoken for me generationally.

The fact that so much of Metroid Prime's 20 year old design not only holds up, but enthralls, is testament to the depth of its exploration and world-building. But, as a remaster, the offering here is largely superficial. The graphics upgrade, impressive as it is, ends up calling attention to the other elements that were left untouched. The save system, restrictive puzzle design, and dated soundscape are all elements that would be fine for a straight remaster, but feel jarring next to the contemporary graphics.

in typical sequel fashion, jedi: survivor is moreish to a fault. by the end I had tuned down the difficulty and started to autopilot through the game because I wanted to see the end of the story, but the combat systems couldn't keep me compelled past the 30 hour mark. still the level design is mostly great, and I appreciate how "gamey" this all feels. in many ways, the hub world of koboh is a collectathon in disguise, and I enjoyed slowly unveiling its map and learning more about its interesting but underutilized denizens. overall a good part two from respawn, but survivor lacks some of the novelty of the first entry and fails to build a strong villain (in this house we love trilla) by splitting its attention between a handful of baddies. still, where else can you drop kick a space gecko while rocking a mullet and a light sword?

This game is comedy at its heart, and so, it really demands that you play stealthy, not because of XP boosts or extra loot, but because otherwise you're going to miss all the anecdotes, and ridiculous dialogue that the enemies share. But it's also not really a stealth game--you'll either have to learn the enemy patrols or save scum your way through it--it's definitely a comedy from the 2000s, and so some of its comedy hasn't aged well, but the script, cutscenes, music, and main voice roles are all wonderful. This game is a cult classic for a reason, and I hope it gets a remake sooner than later.