Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order looks and often feels like a generic Star Wars adventure, but Respawn elevates it nearly every step of the way. One doesn't necessarily expect a story about space wizards and evil empires to feel resonant, but this does, and it does so in a way that not many pieces of big-budget media do. Fallen Order is a game about confronting your past and fighting for the future when you don't know if that future is ever going to get better. That feels timely, and wrapped around that idea, the rest of the game just sings. If Fallen Order was connected to the Force, it would radiate power.

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is certainly not for everyone. For a certain type of player, it will undoubtedly feel like the most difficult game From Software has ever produced. But it's also enthrallingly atmospheric, its combat and setting contributing to a palpable, engaging sense of mood. It's a game of powerful imagery, of swords crossed in the morning mist. The challenge of Sekiro exists to create that mood and to answer a design problem in From's earlier games. That's not the point, exactly. But to enjoy Sekiro, you have to accept it anyway.

You won't find endless fun here, but you can play around for many hours before feeling like you've mastered the game.

If you or your kid loves to play open-ended games like Minecraft or create inspired Lego creations without instructions, the Variety Kit is a great way to go.

That gripe aside, Splatoon 2 subtly refines its predecessor, glossing it with a fresh coat of ink and adapting it to the flexibility of the Switch.

Magikarp Jump, as a result, takes what could be a mean joke about one of Pokémon Company’s sillier creations and turns it into a pleasant, engaging little game about companionship and raising a school of beautiful baby fish. When your first Magikarp reaches maturity, you gain experience as a trainer and can catch another Magikarp that grows even larger and jumpier. Let them swim around your pond, feed them, and train them with a variety of exercises to help them reach their full (albeit limited) potential. As with most mobile games, you can pay for bonuses that help your Magikarp grow up faster, but they’re unobtrusive and don’t break the game.

As a fighting game, it’s responsive, easy to learn with thick layers of complexity buried underneath. It’s a brilliant exercise in taking out your action figures and ramming them into each other until one of them breaks.

Prey doesn’t understand itself, and it obliviously gets in its own way. It’s ultimately too broad and too undefined to achieve its own grand ambitions. Instead of proudly stating its own identity, Prey feels adrift, the way I was during that one sublime moment in space. Unmoored of itself, it asks questions that are worth pondering but doesn’t have any answers. Absent of those rejoinders, it loses its own shape, getting stuck in patterns it can’t break out of, drifting further and further away from land until the credits roll.

To get the most out of a game like Tumbleseed, as with the brutal puzzle-platformers that inform it, you must do more than play. You must be willing to wrestle with it and, if not master it, at least develop some degree of proficiency. You must also accept that, despite your best efforts, you might not be able to. If you’re willing to devote some of your leisure energy into Tumbleseed, I imagine you’ll be rewarded. But I can’t guarantee it. I might just be the world’s worst Tumbleseed player.

If you’re willing to devote some of your leisure energy into Tumbleseed, I imagine you’ll be rewarded. But I can’t guarantee it. I might just be the world’s worst Tumbleseed player.

What Remains of Edith Finch is, above all, sincere, trying through even its most fantastical and gimmicky moments to tell a story about home, grief, and growing up.

If you’re willing to step away from the idea of goal-oriented achievement, Vignettes achieves something almost transcendent. Like its name implies, it feels like a series of short stories about objects, meditations on the secret lives of stuff. What do you really know about a lamp, anyway? Have you ever really looked at it? Isn’t it weird, how pear-shaped they usually are? Hey, who first came up with the lamp shade?

It occupies that role of a wronged young person immaculately, giving you control of a group of teenagers who see the cruelties of adults around them with severe clarity. Then it opens a door to a supernatural world of magic and treasure, and it gives you the one thing none of us had at that age: the means to fight back.

A final excursion into the world of Dark Souls—the developers have said that this will be the final game in the main series, at least for the foreseeable future—to try to understand its pleasures. I’ve loved all these games. But here, at the very end, I’m asking the same questions I asked at the very start: Is this journey worth taking? I want to see the Ringed City, uncover its secrets, and try to figure out what it’s doing here. I’m prepared to die; not because I want to die, but because it seems worth it. Sword and shield raised, I charge in.

My first session with the game lasted roughly half an hour longer than I meant it to. While there are puzzle packs available for in-app purchase, Typeshift is free, with a large bevy of puzzles to play immediately and a free daily puzzle. You can also shell out for hints if you get really stumped. By the time you get through the initial offering, two bucks for another set of puzzles will probably be a no-brainer if you’re still enjoying yourself. And you probably will be. Typeshift is more than a smart, fun word puzzler. It’s just good game design.

O’Reilly told me that Everything is designed to run forever. He described it to me as an “organism that keeps going.” Left its own devices, it will, in fact, play itself, running in an autoplay mode based on settings that you can calibrate to your own whims. Strangely, this might be the most remarkable showcase of Everything‘s power: watching the perspective tumble through O’Reilly’s pocket dimension like a sort of high-tech nature documentary, moving from thing to thing until you discover something you’ve never seen, an object whose life you need to learn more about, and you’re moved to pick up the controller all over again and take it for a spin.

The game lives most brightly in its quiet moments of melancholy: in the silence after Mae’s shitty teen band lets the last chord fall silent; in the second when they reflect on how honest the music they just sang was; in the quiet conversations where they admit to themselves and each other that it’s not even a specific future that they want. They just want to die somewhere else. Somewhere theirs.

It’s scale is unprecedented for a Zelda game, and it encourages you to move slowly. I want to honor that. And while I fear that the sheer breadth of the experience might ultimately push some players away, I’m relishing my time spent in this hushed, half-dead Hyrule. After thirty years of The Legend of Zelda, I’m delighted that the series has finally lost its way again.

To be clear, I’m not advocating real-life violence here. But I do suspect that games like this, tied up in gore and cruelty though they are, serve a social purpose. In creating an outlet to resist fascism in its most archetypal form, Sniper Elite 4—and the legacy of World War II media that informs it—reminds us that fascism is real, and needs to be resisted. The game’s power isn’t intelligence or insight, it’s the refusal to forget: By allowing players to fight and win against the ghosts of villains, it offers a quiet reminder that their villainy is real.

From its opening unhinged riff on Texas Chainsaw Massacre to the more traditional bulk of its gameplay, it’s an eerie, consistently entertaining puzzle box drenched in Southern gothic dread. And the videotapes are the stroke of genius that turn that puzzle box into a tesseract.

There are so many reasons this game shouldn’t exist, but I’m thrilled that it does.

If you resent games walling the player off or insisting on where they go next, you will hate Yakuza 0. But it uses its distinctly un-Western sense of constraint and mise–en–scène to tell a story more intelligent and subtle than anything you’d find in its foreign counterparts.

Let it Die is certainly addictive. There’s something there, in its madcap core, that is good and possibly great. I’m just not entirely sure what it is.

Dragon Ball is ultimately a story about transformation, about the idea that people can change to become more than they are.

The miracle of The Last Guardian is not that it escaped development hell, but that it did so with an unwavering vision as clear and uncompromised as it was on its first day. Not only is there a game available this week called The Last Guardian, that game is The Last Guardian.

There’s a buttload of money to be made here, and Nintendo has done the exact minimum amount of work necessary to make that very buttload, just in time for what’s probably going to be 3DS’ last big holiday season. Too bad it couldn’t be bothered to make this the definitive version of the game that it could have been.

Helping and being helped, working together, and loving everyone, regardless of where they’re coming from, is a lesson that we can all forget at times. And I’m overjoyed to know that children picking up these games today might just walk away better, more empathetic people even though at the end of the day they’re still teaching digital animals to tear each other apart.

It manages to keep the core gameplay of battling and trading magical monsters intact, while weaving in ideas that were vital to the television show and to the idea of Pokémon in general.