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If you're craving a slow-paced shooter that offers something different, then you might get a kick out of Crisol's blood ammo system and folklore-religion fusion imagery. Without this very specific craving, however, all you're likely to find is a few neat ideas surrounded by a lot of unrealised potential.

Is This Seat Taken? is an incredibly charming and beautifully designed puzzle game that makes its truckload of logic puzzles tactile and fun to play with rather than intimidating. Despite the variety of location types, some core parts of the challenge can become repetitive, but there's more than enough to keep you going to credits.

Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound is an incredible revival for a venerable series. Pitch-perfect controls, fantastic encounter design, and a tough-but-fair challenge elevate this well beyond a sea of other retro action games. If there's any room for complaint, it's that I simply want more - more levels, and more reasons to come back to them.

MercurySteam follow up the career high point of Metroid Dread with a dark fantasy soulslike full of neat ideas. Blades of Fire dares to make the case for weapon degradation being a good thing and succeeds. The fun characters, secret-stuffed level design, and terrific combat don’t hurt either. A really pleasant surprise.

Many Nights a Whisper is a narrative-focused experience where great writing is just the launching pad for you to bring the rest of the story – reflecting on how you feel about the upcoming ritual as you balance granting wishes and archery training. With one chance to land a single, perfect shot – few games have this tension and impact, really making me sit with how I felt about everything.

While it sags occasionally, though, American Arcadia continues to stash plenty of tricks up its wide-cuffed sleeves, and ultimately even that rerun of a premise goes deeper than you might expect. In its own wild and glamorous way, the story sends its daring duo into an endless spiral where reality and freedom become less tangible with each rotation, leaving you something to chew on once the credits roll and the smile subsides. For a cinema-inspired story about a TV show, American Arcadia makes for a highly entertaining game.

Blasphemous 2 leans heavily into its inspirations, and therefore doesn't reinvent the wheel – but with more to see, more to do, and, of course, more to slaughter, it improves on its forerunner's familiar formula across the board with devastating results.

The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood is a masterwork of narrative and character, positing impactful questions while grounding everything against a backdrop of superb card-building intertwining with its story and moral dilemmas.

All the while, your burst of life and heart throw powers are repeatedly repurposed into methods of hitting switches to stop and start machinery, say, or shift mine carts along tracks to create makeshift steps. Against all the horrors of humanity, then, the real beauty here is understanding that something very different may come next.

It's not perfect, but Evil Dead: The Game is the most approachable asymmetrical horror out there and breathes new life into a genre with badass survivors, wonderfully ruthless demons, and a palpable love for an 80s horror icon.

Metroid Dread's often idiosyncratic approach to combat and control has a wide-reaching impact on what this 2D adventure can ultimately achieve. There's a great game buried in here, but you'll need to constantly push through some frustrating encounters and points of friction to find it. This isn't the return Metroid deserved after Fusion, but after 19 years perhaps it's no surprise that Samus Aran is a little off her game. 

Like an early card match at a pay-per-view event, WWE 2K Battlegrounds is meant to keep the crowd entertained before the main event re-enters the arena, but it's rarely as flashy or fun as its concept implies.

Gylt presents some bright ideas in its dark world even as its gameplay mechanics are often much too familiar.

Moonlighter manages to perfectly balance the best bits of Stardew Valley, Dark Souls and Binding of Isaac for a game that just keeps you coming back for more.

That being said, these aren't the kind of flaws that make Rime unplayable or even unpleasant. The modicum of frustration imposed by these technical failings is negligible compared to the constant sense of satisfaction it offers. Every time you solve a puzzle, uncover a secret passage, or collect a hidden trinket, you feel all the more clever because you saw the hint of something bigger and wanted to figure it out. You saw a path and wanted to see where it led.

Lacking the focus, clarity and coherence of its precursor, Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2 fails to satisfy as a sequel or as a game in its own right, delivering muddled game design and little narrative resolution.

Alien Spidy's environmental aesthetic, cute characters, and charming music are alluring, but beneath those features is an unbalanced platforming adventure that can drive you mad. The controls are unreliable, and the difficulty spikes are incredibly harsh--especially when mixed the the game's environments, which can often become muddled as you try to discern interactive object with pretty set piece. Alien Spidy may scratch the platforming itch for some challenge seekers, but if you're looking for a game that can do tight platforming and precision, that's something a Spidy can't.

For all the risks Mirror of Fate takes in terms of story and aesthetic, its core gameplay feels mired in antiquated design that just doesn’t feel that relevant anymore. This castle may look elaborate and multilayered, but the foundations it rests on are shaky. What could’ve been an entirely new avenue for the franchise feels more like a dead end.

Deadlight attempts to do too many things, and falls short in perfecting any of them. It's overwhelming in its ambition, but it’s this lack of focus prevents it from being anything more than an interesting, flawed experience. If the story was compelling and well-developed we’d have been interested in the journey, but it wasn’t. If the gameplay was tighter we would have been able to forgive the uninteresting narrative and dialog. Even with this lack of focus Deadlight is a fun game with wonderful fast platforming segments and magnificent art direction. But in the end the style stands tall, and the substance is but a shadow of what it could have been.

At first, Yesterday looked as though it was going to be a sound adventure title thanks to a strong premise, fine voice acting, and bold storytelling that paved the way for success. Eventually it lost focus, however, and Pendulo’s interesting story was too bogged down by asinine puzzles that weren’t witty, intuitive, or interesting, leaving us wanting in just about every area. There's some life in it, and a few folks might be able to put up with the issues, but for the most part, it's not really worth the time spent clicking random objects on other random objects.

Invizimals won’t be toppling the house that Pikachu built, but it’s at least an innovative competitor. The technology impresses, but the combat can be shallow and somewhat tedious. Trying out all of the different ways to acquire the creatures is fun, but more importantly it fuels optimism for future gameplay applications with the PSP camera. Inivizimals proves to be more than a just neat tech demo, but it is made for younger kids, so if you are of legal drinking age, or can’t wait to be, this is probably one you can skip.

Castlevania: Lords of Shadow reinvigorates the franchise by borrowing from other games, adding its own wonderful magic system, and ratcheting up the epic factor to ludicrous degrees. It's huge in scope, length, and depth, and it's polished with obvious love and passion.

What Commandos 2 does, and does exceptionally well, is push itself far enough away from dry tactical planning and into the world of quick-fire gameplay and addictive puzzling.