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With its one-of-a-kind charm and narrative chops, The Séance of Blake Manor is a master class in the detective genre and a delicious supernatural treat for the exact kind of freak I am.
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Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector fleshes out its predecessor’s RPG systems, develops a convincing cast of characters, and gives you the tools to be the space captain of your dreams, but its greatest accomplishment is how it makes you feel the full force of that quote in each fleeting moment.
So yeah, I think I’ll go to that rage room. Maybe I’ll blast Bloom and Rage’s “See You In Hell” (as played by Nora Kelly Band in real life) while I cause some destruction. The world doesn’t hold back with the destruction it delivers unto women, so fuck it. Fuck the fear and the harassment and the harm. Thank you especially to all the women who made this game what it is—see you in hell not alongside our enemies, but as the queens Bloom and Rage sang that we are.
Absolum was developed by Dotemu, Guard Crush Games, Supamonks, and published by Dotemu and Gamirror Games. Our review is based on the PC version. It is also available for the Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation 5.
Incredible visual presentation, an arresting atmosphere, and a charming travel partner make it worth taking a trip down The Midnight Walk.
Consume Me was developed by Jenny Jiao Hsia, AP Thomson, Jie En Lee, Violet W-P, and Ken “coda” Snyder, and was published by Hexecutable. It is available on Steam.
Through its unsettling atmosphere and total commitment to digital misery, this is an effective experiment that taps into how many of us are feeling about our increasingly tech-company-driven future: that is, very badly.
Melinoë and her travails are narratively rich, and the basic combat (whose debt to Supergiant’s first game Bastion remains unmistakable) is still strong enough, to ensure that Hades II is an excellent game that nails a precarious equity between story and action—and that should be enough to convince anybody to play it.
While Possessor(s) doesn’t fully break from a crowded field of search-action games, its compelling characters and pointed commentary give it some personality of its own. If you’re eager to explore man-made horrors, this flaming wreck of a company town will provide.
If I had to describe Ninja Gaiden 4, it’s like a metal song: loud, boisterous, hard as hell, and simultaneously brutish and complex. It’s hard to expect that much more from a Ninja Gaiden title, even in a new generation. If 4 is the base for future games, the Year of the Ninja may wind up needing a few pages in the calendar.
Who wants to go through all of that in hopes of maybe getting some weird sci-fi reference to Mappy? There needs to be something more than an Easter egg at the end of that labyrinth—especially when there’s a regular stream of Easter eggs on the way there.
But when the experience tries to be a copy of everything but itself, and not one of its limbs seems designed to stand out and leave a lasting impression, does any of this matter?
Wolfenstein has always embraced gratuitous violence, but The Old Blood just feels a little gratuitous.
The game also sings because it's never a slave to the perceived merits of tradition. It would have been all too easy to, say, shove in some little floating Shovel Knight heads, making you collect pointless extra lives for no reason other than that's how things were done back in the good old days. Yacht Club Games is smarter than that, and their game is, too.
So far, Climax Studios seems to remember what Ubisoft has long since forgotten: Assassin's Creed isn't about captaining a ship or poaching animals or curating an art gallery. It's about wearing a hood and assassinating people.
You kill many gods in Titan Souls, including a weird brain thing that lives in an ice cube, but the game's greatest victory is over the god of bloat. Long may he stay dead in the ground.
The upsells are just a thin layer of corporate monetization atop a mountain of sincerity, love, and dismemberment.
Put another way, it's a game that needs to be left unattended, so that you can return to it with fresh eyes and discover the surprises that seem to sprout while you're away.