For as pleasant and intermittently clever as the game is, its breezy style comes at the cost of any real complexity.

You’ll be lost in the dark for a few hours, and probably for several more after that, but few JRPGs in recent memory can boast gameplay mechanics this dynamic or storytelling abilities as accomplished.

In the end, Have a Nice Death can’t escape its own premise.

If they’re still making these in 20 years, there’s gonna be a hell of a Showcase mode about it.

It’s utterly engrossing without ever feeling overwhelming, and every system feels fine-tuned for maximal enjoyment.

As is the case with the Destiny of late, this is a three-steps-forward-one-step-back situation.

With Mask of the Lunar Eclipse, you must take the good it offers along with its regressive design in order to even begin to ride its eerie wavelength. Which, for what it’s worth, is an exceptionally uncanny ride that never puts on the breaks long enough for boredom to ever set in, as even its wildest swings result in some considerably discomforting set pieces (the funeral-themed room inhabited by the hostile spirit Kageri Sendou and her maleficent doll Watashi, while a tad on the nose in its design, is a disturbing highlight). This may not be a game that was made for these modern times, but for those willing to put up with its old-school frustrations, it’s also one that will certainly keep you up at night and stick in your subconscious for weeks to come.

Dream Land has never looked better than it does on the Nintendo Switch with this release, which updates the relatively plain 3D characters of the Wii version with gorgeous cel-shaded renderings that look like a cartoon come to life.

Wild Hearts puts in the legwork of making the player learn and respect the world they’ve been dropped into, and the indigenous life therein.

Final Bar Line is a musical museum, but it’s a self-guided one that could, especially for those who aren’t connoisseurs of Final Fantasy soundtracks, benefit from a bit of curation.

Nearly every level of Wanted: Dead is practically the same, and no amount of stolen memes, nostalgic riffs, and non sequiturs can hide that depressing fact.

Ishin is nothing if not thorough, and much of its combat and activities are so delightfully goofy and intuitive that even if you lose your bearings, you can probably still get by and have a good time.

Emptiness resonates troublingly at the heart of Casus Ludi’s hand-drawn co-op adventure game.

The thrills come hard and heavy without numbing the player over a couple dozen hours.

What makes Fire Emblem Engage especially frustrating is that, even for all of its glaring issues, there’s an undeniable joy in successfully conquering a difficult battalion through a mixture of skill, luck, and good timing.

SEASON is a poetic, meditative game, but it often bluntly calls too much attention to its intentions, especially with fussy dialogue like “I feel a dulcet tension in the air.” Then again, it does capture the soothing sensation that comes from immersing oneself in another world and learning about it, and with the exception of the game’s final encounter, it’s nothing if not consistent. In the end, SEASON isn’t about answers so much as it is about coping with loss. As one character puts it, repeating one word like a mantra, time always moves on: flow, flow, flow.

Colossal Cave can hardly be called a modernization, because it would have felt antiquated even if it came out 20 years ago.

Part of the game’s charm is in the way it gives as much weight to building a home for a stray cat as it does playing a deadly game of hide-and-seek with a werebeast.

Forcing players to utilize their least played characters is particularly telling of the game’s design philosophy, for the success of your multipart battle proves that Midnight Suns is only as strong as its weakest links.

Even with some much-welcome extra polish, Reunion still feels like a game of the past, but it’s also a strong reminder of why FFVII fans are so immensely excited about the future, and what defying the fates might bring.

The game’s dedication to graphical fidelity feels like a blinder to thinking outside the box in every other regard. It can’t help but feel like intensive overcompensation for inconsistent, tension-less stealth, one-note combat, level design that doesn’t reward exploration, generically fleshy enemies, upgrades that don’t reward experimentation, and ineffective jump scares, from enemies that get cheap hits in on Jacob every single time, regardless of how well-prepared the player is.

Somerville feels like a slightly more grounded successor to suspenseful platformers like Limbo and Inside, though controlling an actual adult here is a welcome change of pace.

What nearly sinks Pokémon Violet in the end isn’t any pretense of player freedom. Rather, it’s the game’s glaring technical issues, as this is easily one of the sloppiest-looking triple AAA titles in recent memory.

The Knight Witch is a whip-smart, beautifully hand-drawn bullet-hell Metroidvania.

Faith’s masterful sense of timing and mood create a truly rare feeling of persistent uncertainty where anything can happen.

There’s not a single quest, not a single action, that isn’t without a reason, a story to tell, wrongs to address, a sight to see, or a direct emotional through line to follow for at least one of our menagerie of travelers. Every new quest in the game enriches these characters or the world they inhabit, sometimes both.

As a mystery to be solved and a mediation on how stories evolve over time, the game's focus wanders and ironically comes to fixate on elements like presentation and background lore that can all too easily overwhelm the basic tenets of telling an engaging story.

For a game that relies on a certain level of fluidity in its core mechanics, Sonic Frontiers often feels thoughtless.

The only real objective problem this time around is that Queen Bay may be a little too much woman for the Switch.

In the end, the eponymous requiem in question is a quite literal violent scream, giving way to sorrow, but ultimately acceptance and thanks for the time given.

Because its gameplay is already dramatically simplified compared to that of the Arkham series, Gotham Knights fails to fill the cowl.

This game never makes the leap from smaller-scale locales to more epic-sized ones, meaning that the notion of laying waste to a city block as Mr. Stay-Puft or some similarly silly, over-the-top paranormal leviathan against the Ghostbusters remains only a fantasy. Like the film that preceded it, Spirits Unleashed is stuck sending us down memory lane at the expense of stepping forward into new terrain. For many, this nostalgia will be enough, but even with updates it seems unlikely that Spirits Unleashed’s core gameplay will sustain it for long.

Sparks of Hope is more colorful, more fluid, and just all-around more fun than its predecessor.

For a beginner guitarist, Rocksmith+ is a godsend.

It feels strange to complain about simply getting more of a good thing, but Splatoon is still a young and creatively fertile series that can do even more, and should.

The game’s reign in blood is short, but unique and brutal enough to make it one of the most refreshing FPS titles in recent memory.

Throughout, going through the same motions hardly dulls the sheen of Cosmo D’s latest clever and wholly invigorating gaming experiment.

Xenoblade Chronicles 3 just cannot get out of its own way. This is, after all, a game that provides a tutorial on how to complete tutorials, and it keeps piling on slight mechanics well into the 20-hour range.

Immortality is an impressively layered work, filled with conflicted thoughts on the concept of the auteur, the collaborative process of art, and the prospect of going too deep in the service of expression.

The new Saints’ big ideas boil down to Instagram influencer nonsense but with a drop of extra murder involved, punctuated by reams of dialogue that feel like an experimental A.I. at Meta trying to imitate a 20-year-old.

The cutesy art style of Cursed to Golf obscures just how punishing the game can be.

Massive Monster’s Cult of the Lamb plays like an inventory of half-understood mechanics from other games.

While its aesthetic showcases no small amount of innovation, the game’s biggest triumph is in accomplishing so much with the most basic of dramatic tools.

Stray is most fun when you allow yourself to, well, stray from its narrative path.

The story, too, is left a bit wanting, though not for lack of ambition. Mothmen 1996 includes many character and conceptual threads that allow for the game to be engaging from moment to moment, but then the end suddenly arrives and it can feel as if a bow hasn’t been tied on everything. In particular, we never get a complete picture of everyone’s interpersonal relationships and insecurities. Mothmen 1966 is a compelling introduction to “pixel pulp,” though it’s something of a mixed success for the degree to which it leaves us wanting more.

The game isn’t just a nostalgia-driven throwback, as it also marks the evolution of a genre.

Where the similarly ambitious Until Dawn felt relatively seamless, The Quarry often feels as if it’s bitten off more than it can chew.

Neon White’s setting thrillingly liberates it from the pesky rules of gravity and the boring old architecture of humans.

In terms of the game’s narrative, shipbreaking is a predatory lie: It promises steady income alongside food and shelter, an apparent escape from earthly concerns that instead presents the player with an enormous bill. In terms of its very status as a video game, however, Hardspace: Shipbreaker can’t help but still be a fanciful escape.

When you’re not performing exactly as instructed, the game’s narrow and inconsistent margin of error is just frustrating.

The game’s faithfulness to its brutal and campy source material isn’t enough to make up for a litany of bugs and problems.

Elden Ring is FromSoftware taming the monster they created, not by filing down its teeth and claws, but by giving players the weapons and armor to endure it.

It’s a pseudo-sequel in the guise of a console port with some nice new accessibility options that cannot stop riffing on the fact that the original game was pretty much already a masterpiece.

Citizen Sleeper works very hard to ensure that it remains a story of perseverance rather than failure.

The line between a leisurely atmosphere and an aimless one is quite thin, and Sephonie often drifts across it.

This isn’t the first game to offer a dense, incredibly detailed rendering of Tokyo, but maybe it’s the first to make you feel like all of that work isn’t window dressing.

In this bursting-at-the-seams collection of over 350 handcrafted puzzles, you’ll need to think both inside and outside the box.

The Forgotten Land may not nail the world-building or plotting, but it’s not snoozing when it comes to Kirby’s transformations.

Playing Weird West, it’s hard to shake how much more gracefully other games of this type avoid similar pitfalls.

Tunic is more than a mere imitation, as it focuses on the most unexpected elements of its forerunners in order to reward players with a rapturous sense of discovery.

Triangle Strategy feels entirely intentional, structured to give you the maximum amount of struggle and conflict, and to never give you an easy way out.

WWE 2K22 is a fine wrestling game, but the most frustratingly realistic thing about it is just how hard it is to make new stars in it as it is in the WWE.

The game is devoted above all else to making the player believe that its world is worth saving and that its people are worth knowing.

Ice-Pick Lodge’s game is in direct conversation with the developer’s Pathologic series, and seems to serve as a kind of inverse to it.

The game’s story grouses about the downsides of seeking vengeance, but this is plainly the work of people who like to fast forward to the fight scenes.

Consistently, the world of Dying Light 2: Stay Human overwhelms us in lockstep with the dazzlingly dense gameplay.

Rainbow Six Extraction hopes to evoke the sensation of battling the unknown, and that’s terrific when it comes to each alien encounter.

The game runs away from any grand moment of clarity, skipping over self-reflection and settling for the thrill of nostalgia.

For all of its sense of genuine, thrilling speed in its mechanics, Solar Ash fails to muster any sense of accompanying narrative momentum.

Few space shooters are as dedicated as Chorus is to making such an impact as an engrossing, thoughtful adventure.

There are excellent RPG ideas powering the game, but they’re left stranded in search of a worthwhile role to play.

Only by leaving WWII in the rear-view mirror does the game live up to the innovation promised by its subtitle.

Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy is blissfully freeing in a way that not many shooters are these days.

Riders Republic is a buffet of breathtaking sights and catchy sounds, but it’s bogged down by checklists and grinds.

Lost Judgment feels like a genuine alternative to the Yakuza games of yore, albeit one that’s still reluctant to leave its comfort zone.

Nonsensical characterization is the order of the day throughout House of Ashes.

The game is an unholy hybrid of a roguelike deck-builder and first-person escape-room experience that reveals itself to be a grand reflection of and meditation on lives lived within a bubble.

The game perfects the 2D trappings of Metroid’s mechanics and hands players so much freedom when it comes to exploration.

The game’s aesthetic is wondrous, but you may remember Eastward most for its disrespect for the player’s time.

Far Cry 6 is on firmer ground when it’s squarely focused on the revolution, even if that exposes how little the game seeks to shake up the series’s formula.

Remedy’s Alan Wake certainly feels its age, even with a new coat of paint, and that’s okay.

Beautiful and elegant though it may seem on the outside, the game too often lets its stylistic tics drag the experience into varying degrees of frustration.

Deathloop brings a considerable measure of liveliness to the by now moth-eaten concept of the time loop.

Managing constant chaos has always been a core tenet of the WarioWare experience, and in doubling down on the randomness of its microgames, the series has at last gotten its shtick together.

For better and worse, the game lacks for the trailblazing go-anywhere spirit of Breath of the Wild.

Because the atmosphere encompasses so much of Sable’s appeal, the technical issues can be absolutely ruinous.

The game’s incredibly refined, real-time combat is complemented by the social lessons and warnings imparted by the story. At least for half of its campaign.

<em>The Artful Escape</em> may lack depth of interactivity, but in the end, the game is more of a trippy coming-of-age story than it is a career mode in <em>Rock Band</em>.

The game’s inventive and jokey writing goes a long way toward mitigating the frustrating linearity that takes over the campaign.

True Colors doesn’t show the world in a new light so much as it slaps an Instagram filter over it.

KeyWe’s final act, Winter, expands on that camaraderie, and not just within the office. You’ll be baking cookies and decorating cards to send out during Hollyjostle (the game’s answer to Christmas), and when an ice storm hits, you’ll be glad that you mastered those transcription skills so that you can quickly get out overlapping emergency broadcasts and ship supplies to those in need. KeyWe succeeds at creating novel ways for players to carry out familiar tasks, but it also turns a game about operating a telepost into a noble calling.

No More Heroes III shows no respect for the artistry or cultural context of the pop culture that it pilfers from.

Twelve Minutes feels like Something Awful copypasta wearing the skin of an Ibsen play.

If so much of this game is a reiteration of what worked about its predecessor, it functions as a reminder for just how much of the medium is still catching up to Psychonauts.

The game runs smoothly and looks great, but it would be more entertaining with just a little more gatekeeping.

By himself, Greak feels like a dull carbon copy of so many protagonists from recent action-exploration games, namely Hollow Knight. Having Adara and Raydel eventually accompany him, so that you’re simultaneously controlling three characters, adds a superficially more creative, if awkward, layer to the game, a multi-character gimmick that Greak never fully utilizes. But the puzzles tend toward the rote, as in one character needing to hold down a pressure plate or crank open a door to facilitate the path forward for everyone in the group.

The game’s initial familiarity and rigidity belie a world of intricate and formidable imagination.

The game will easily hook you with its well-crafted, hyper-focused narrative and immersive worldbuilding, if not its combat.