Destructoid

Lara Croft has always lived in her father’s shadow. This famed archaeologist devoted the latter years of his life searching for The Divine Source, a Fountain of Youth-type mythological key to immortality. Like Ponce de León, he never found it. His quest eventually killed him.

I’ve been playing Dead Cells in early access for over a year now, but I never want to get too far if you know what I mean. I have a weird relationship with early access games in that unless I’m covering them professionally, I prefer to keep my distance until the thing is actually finished.

[Given that Yakuza 0 is out for PC today, we’re bumping the review up.]

When people say “Square doesn’t make old-school RPGs anymore” I can’t understand it. We might have been lucky to get two Bravely Defaults, but they’ve been investing in other projects for years like Setsuna and Lost Sphear.

Sony seems to have a thing for storybook adventure games. They hosted Until Dawn in 2015, and have been steadily supporting Quantic Dream for the past eight years with PlayStation exclusivity for Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls.

Hope County is heartbreaking. The stretch of Montana country is beautiful but racked by tragedy; a region of breathtaking views marred by the violent and vengeful grip of a doomsday cult called Eden’s Gate. That clash of bucolic, frontiersman-like Americana and end-of-days gloom brought on by the cult informs every aspect of Far Cry 5 but also highlights some of its biggest shortcomings.

I’ve played a great deal of role-playing games in my time, whether they be Japanese or Western, from your various Final Fantasy titles to the vast and open world Elder Scrolls games, and all things in-between. As great as these games are, what makes Kingdom Come: Deliverance stand out to me — and what keeps me playing late into the night — is simply how deep its systems are and the extreme attention to detail in almost everything it has you do.

Shadow of the Colossus is a timeless masterpiece. Some of the greatest games exist as the best representatives of an era or a genre. They were groundbreaking and influential in ways that guided and evolved future game design. They’re remembered fondly but maybe they don’t hold up as well as they used to.

Chop, cut, mince, craft, boil, eat, repeat. The life of a hunter is hard. Especially if you’re a vegetarian controlling one.

If you’re even remotely interested in this game, this review is a huge waste of your time. It’s good. It’s very fucking good. You should just go ahead and buy it.

In the distant future, you’re seemingly the sole survivor of a disastrous crash landing on a vibrant ocean planet. Stranded with little more than a lifepod and a rather magical fabricator that can turn resources plucked from the ecosystem into sophisticated equipment, it’s up to you to figure out what happened to your ship, the crew, and how to get back to a home that’s far, far away.

Do you remember back in 2013, when franchise reboot Wolfenstein: The New Order was first announced? Everyone was furious about the title’s marketing campaign, with many gamers taking genuine issue with the gleeful abandon in which the game’s Nazi-killing themes were represented.

When Super Mario 64 catapulted onto the scene, the entire genre shook so hard that the ripples are still felt today. It’s that pedigree that allows people to erroneously put any given release on a pedestal, like it needs to be the biggest thing that year.

I’ve beaten every mainline Assassin’s Creed to date. Crazy, I know.

The phrase Mordor is so intrinsically linked to my experience of the “Middle-earth” action series that I simply can’t escape it from my mind. I’ve typed “Shadow of Mordor” so many times it hurts, despite the fact that the sequel is indeed called Middle-earth: Shadow of War.

Beating Cuphead should come with a complimentary Mensa membership. It’s a tough game, but Cuphead‘s difficulty lies more in exhaustive pattern recognition than anywhere else. Reactive shooting and jumping only go so far. Eventually, it’s hardly reactionary anymore; it’s muscle memory at that point.

They breathe a certain spark of life into their projects that practically no one studio can replicate. Yet, they insist on crafting relatively simplistic action sequences that detract from much of what they set out to accomplish.

The heart of Prey isn’t in an obvious place. It isn’t in its scientific moral quandary or its inky aliens or its ever-escalating plot. It isn’t in its retconned 1960s history that serves to justify this research center or in its numerous combat abilities or even in its constant sense of tension and dread. No, the heart of Prey lies in its stories.

“I think that we’ve been surrounded by death for so long that we’ve just gotten used to it.” Edith Finch muses this aloud right before she walks into the family’s graveyard. She’s talking to herself because there’s no one left to talk to. Edith is the last living Finch and that’s meaningful because the Finches have one hell of a tough time staying alive. By my count, there are 37 tombstones in the cemetery — 12 for the humans and 25 for the pets. I probably missed some.

It’s been while since a game has ensnared me like this. Where lesser games struggle for my attention as I routinely check the clock and put on podcasts, Little Nightmares hypnotized me with ever-present suspense.