On September 13, 1996, musician, poet, actor, and activist Tupac Shakur was murdered in a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas, Nevada. As one of the most prominent figures in American pop culture at the time of his death, the impact of Shakur’s passing was widespread, and the fact that his murderer was never confirmed or found added mystery surrounding the events before and after the shooting — a mystery that was immediately capitalized upon by thousands in an effort to make money for themselves. In the wake of this tragedy, hundreds (if not thousands) of songs, albums, poems, books, and films have been released that prominently feature details about Shakur or contain references to him and his death. Posthumous albums featuring his work and voice, as well as collections of his private poems, were quickly disseminated, and untold numbers of memorabilia remain in circulation to this day. Tupac Shakur was never given the courtesy of peace, even after death — a fact that remains just as true now as it was in the 1990’s. Tupac Shakur's likeness as it appears in Stranger Than Heaven On June 5, 2026, Summer Games Fest held its keynote presentation showcasing a large number of upcoming video game titles to be released in the coming months and years. Among those titles was Stranger Than Heaven, an action-adventure title about gangs in Japan developed by RGG Studio — the famed makers of the Like a Dragon (Yakuza) series. In their presentation, RGG revealed that Tupac Shakur’s likeness would be prominently featured in the game, despite being deceased for 30 years. Of course, this is not the first time an actor or famous person has been posthumously puppeteered in this way. Actors like Carrie Fisher and Peter Cushing saw their visage portrayed in Star Wars films after their demise, and even Bruce Lee was imagined as an advocate for Johnny Walker, despite abstaining from alcohol himself. Shakur’s likeness is not even the only one to be featured in a major video game this year, with legendary actor Toshiro Mifune’s likeness being used as the main character in Onimusha: Way of the Sword. So why does Shakur’s inclusion in Stranger Than Heaven feel so much worse? I argue that it lies in several key areas: the nature of Shakur’s death and its relation to the subject matter of the game, legal battles over rights to Shakur’s estate, the fact that Shakur had no say in the matter, and the long history of the commodification of the black body post-death. In Resurrecting the Black Body: Race and the Digital Afterlife, author Tonia Sutherland states, “The use of digital technologies to reanimate the dead, understood here as a 'resurrection practice,' raises a complex set of sociocultural and ethical concerns, particularly around issues of spectacle, commodification, carcerality, and the Black body as souvenir and memory object. Closely related to notions of symbolic immortality and digital immortality practices (addressed in depth in chapter 5), digital resurrection is a modern phenomenon that uses a combination of innovative technologies, digital manipulations, and marketing appeal to construct a domain in which the deceased appear wholesale in new contexts as though alive today—and, in some cases, as though consciously aware of their own demise.” As noted earlier, Stranger Than Heaven is about gang violence in Japan, but more than that, it is about how the protagonist goes on to found the Tojo Clan, the largest and most powerful gang within the Like a Dragon games. The fact that Shakur was himself a victim of the type of violence the Tojo clan goes on to perpetuate makes his inclusion in the Tojo’s founding chapter astonishingly distasteful. RGG Studio’s explanation of his inclusion and depiction is lacking as well, with them telling Game Informer, “Well, if Snoop Dogg and Tupac have this relationship in the game together, you'd probably cry about that because it's so cool!'” Positioning Shakur’s specter as a mere tool to elicit emotion is one thing, but RGG Studio is aiming to go beyond a simple depiction of who Shakur was in life, stating within that same interview, “We wanted to try to envision who Tupac might be now, and we did this with the full approval step by step. Going through the family to make sure that everything met it. We wanted to say, 'Okay, if he was still alive now, thirty years later, how would he act? How would he express himself in that way? That's what we're trying to not going into his past, but rather his potential future.’” One problem with this approach comes in assuming to know how Shakur’s ideals or politics would present themselves today. He died 30 full years ago; it is impossible to know how his positions, demeanor, or appearance would have evolved. It is arrogant to assume such things, and RGG’s insistence on doing so is baffling. By utilizing Shakur’s likeness to voice their own ideas, they commodify him and reduce his inclusion to mere spectacle—a critique that echoes Sutherland’s observations. But this isn't the first time Shakur’s countenance has been paraded in public, either. At Coachella in 2012, a digital recreation was placed onstage alongside Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre to perform some of his songs. Sutherland describes it thusly: “So too was Tupac Shakur, resurrected in hologram form from the dead, expected to perform: he was set to dancing, set to singing, set to play the role of a shucking-and-jiving, oil-slicked, shiny, brawny, Black body—forever enslaved by the fetishism of the white gaze (just as Michael Jackson was) to the rhythm of his own music.” In the absence of Shakur himself, his estate controls the rights to his likeness. This is also true for every other person who has been brought back in this way, but there are key differences in how this has been handled among the various parties named earlier. For Fisher and Cushing, their inclusion was in a long-running series that they themselves had already been a part of in life. While they did not themselves agree to the appearances, there remains some level of continuity of point and purpose for the inclusion. For Shakur, the Like a Dragon series is entirely foreign. He did not know of it, and the extent of what Shakur could have envisioned as the use of his likeness in perpetuity is beyond our knowledge. Further still, the executors of Tupac Shakur’s estate are not actually members of his family; it is controlled by former Warner Brothers record executive Tom Whalley. Whalley was left the estate by Afeni Shakur, Tupac’s Mother, but ongoing legal battles with Tupac’s remaining family color Whalley’s handling as less than stellar. So while RGG Studio claims they received approval from the family, RGG Studios finds themselves between parties looking to control what remains of Tupac Shakur’s legacy. When all of this is considered, it becomes impossible to separate Shakur’s appearance in Stranger Than Heaven from the longstanding exploitation and commodification of black bodies throughout history. As noted in Resurrecting the Black Body: Race and the Digital Afterlife, Harvard restricted access to and profited from images of slaves in compromised positions (though they have since relinquished ownership), entire industries and subcultures were built upon photographs of lynchings, and more recent tragedies like the murder of George Floyd have been subject to continual public viewing, all while being used by corporations for marketing ends. Violence against black people is continually dredged up for some other purpose, removing the humanity of those involved from the equation. While I suspect few in the general populace understand or know about the history of this commodification, sentiment against Tupac Shakur’s inclusion has been comparatively large when stacked up against Toshiro Mifune’s likeness in Onimusha. There are likely a multitude of factors for this. First, RGG Studios' recent troubles should not be discounted when examining why backlash to Shakur’s incorporation has been met so loudly. Once considered a studio that could do no wrong, RGG has had several missteps in recent memory that have turned many against it, such as the removal of trans-related quests and including an actor in its game who has admitted to sexual misconduct because he seems like a “creep”. Second, the circumstances surrounding Mifune’s appearance are much less immediately recognizable as unsavory. His likeness is managed by the company he himself set up, Mifune Productions, and there are no ongoing concerns about its management. Additionally, the way he is used, as an actor portraying a role in a piece of media, does not aim to reveal some truth about Mifune as a person, past or present. Finally, while Tupac Shakur died from gang violence and is now set to appear in a game about it, Mifune’s passing was unrelated to the material at hand. No violence had been brought upon Mifune, and the exploitative aspects ring differently when put against the history of photographic and commercial exploitation of violence against black people. Mifune was not cut down with a katana in the streets of Tokyo, only to then have his digital clone puppeteered in a game about human murders via katana. Despite Mifune’s appearance being comparatively more agreeable, I argue against both. It is worth considering letting the dead rest; directing these dead bodies to express things to our liking feels ghoulish, especially when they deal with subjects so close to their own personal experiences. These methodologies are inherently exploitative, particularly when the deceased were never consulted in the first place. Toshiro Mifune's likeness as it appears in Onimusha: Way of the Sword. Such efforts to recreate the deceased in this way are distasteful in the same ways AI Companions wearing the skin of a dead loved ones are repugnant. There’s just something unnerving about taking the faces and histories of those who can no longer advocate for themselves and using them to our own perverse ends. It goes beyond simple memorialization. When companies like 2wai and the now-defunct Eternime compile replicas of our deceased loved ones, they are looking to monetize our pain, regurgitating their likeness to appeal to our longing for connection. In Laura Parker’s New Yorker article How to Become Virtually Immortal, she writes “For the time being, it seems that Eterni.me’s appeal is more philosophical than practical. 'A hundred years down the track you might not only be able to talk to your mom who died a year ago, but to your grandmother who died when you were sixteen, and your great-grandmother who died before you was born,' Susan Bluck, a psychology professor at the University of Florida, said. 'So it means that we could, in some way, forge relations with ancestors who lived and died well before our own lifetime.'” But these facsimiles are not the ones we cherish; they hold none of the hopes, dreams, skills, beliefs, or love in their hearts. The corporations that make these doppelgangers prey on and commodify those who cannot advocate for themselves, just as much as they prey on those who retain memory of the lost. They are simply replicas meant to extract capital from the living by donning the visage of the dead. And while Tupac Shakurs’s inclusion in Stranger Than Heaven is by no means the first or most prominent digital recreation of a deceased person, its connections to historical black exploitation and closeness to the circumstances surrounding his death carry their own weight in its reception.

I fire up Jenny the Witch, and for a brief moment, it is 2002 all over again. It arrives with the luster and bluster of a classic PS2-era action RPG — loud and unconcerned with hyper-realism. Positioned squarely as a hack-and-slash spectacle that attempts to marry character action combat with floaty platforming, my mind alights with possibility and nostalgia. However, despite design elements that show clear promise, uneven mechanical tuning and technical rough edges keep this witch from fully taking flight. Publisher: Catbird Soft Developer: Catbird Soft Platform: Played on PC (Steam) Availability: Released on July 22, 2026 on PC Visually, Jenny the Witch reaches for the nostalgic blocky aesthetic that has grown more popular over the last few years. For this game, that aesthetic manifests as bright colors and limited flashy effects during combat, while maintaining a bare-bones approach to environmental design. Between combat encounters, players will participate in some light platforming, a structure that, despite its “spectacle fighter” Steam tag, feels a bit more like Kingdom Hearts than a straight musou game like Dynasty Warriors. Yet, for all of its reverence for those aged classics, Jenny the Witch neglects to build up its story and characters in any meaningful way. You play as Jenny, a bounty hunter of sorts hired to investigate the mysterious disappearance of several miners at a remote dig site. Piloting a witch-themed mech, Jenny will need to fight through hordes of mechanical super soldiers in order to discover what happened to the missing people and uncover the group behind the events. There’s not much more to the setup than that, and the story remains minimal throughout, with brief dialogue exchanges appearing occasionally to establish basic context. With the plot pushed to the background, narrative tension rarely takes hold. Additionally, with a relatively small roster of enemy types and environment designs that can feel uniform over time, the progression across the campaign tends to blend together with few distinct thematic milestones. I never really got a sense of who Jenny is as a character. Her brief interactions with her hacker brother don't yield much characterization, and the gameplay gives few clues on its own. This isn’t a plea for more “story.” I don't think an explanation of the ins and outs of Jenny’s philosophy or reasoning is necessary for Jenny the Witch to be a compelling game, but she lands nearly devoid of personality — an empty husk, much like the mech suit she pilots. Character action games often live and die by their rich characters just as much as they do by their combat. They work in tandem to create memorable and exciting experiences. The characters inform the action, and the action informs us about the character — they become inseparable. For Jenny the Witch, so little of the action or characterization engrosses me, or drives the game forward. In some sense, you can get a taste of this by taunting when your hyper meter is empty, with Jenny launching insults toward her mechanical foes, but very little about Jenny can be gleaned from her actions or animations, and I think that’s a shame. Take a character like Bayonetta, the lead from the series of the same name; her attacks and movements are fluid, almost dancer-like; her walk exudes confidence. We can learn so much about her just by watching her. In comparison, Jenny attacks with rigid movements, rather than with the flair of a heroine or confident hunter. By contrast, the game’s final boss gets more characterization than all other characters combined, with interstitial vignettes showcasing their thought process and feelings throughout the game. Unfortunately, the game, along with the characterization, ends just as abruptly as it begins, with the ending sequence feeling intensely rushed as a means of shuffling us out the door. When evaluating an action title, game feel — the tactile feedback and responsiveness of player controls — is paramount. Jenny the Witch delivers a mixed bag here, offering satisfying weight in some areas while feeling restrictive in others. That feel in combat has its positives, like the attacks carrying a noticeable weight, aided by subtle micro-pauses upon landing hits that make strikes feel impactful. Against smaller enemies, this system shines as hits stagger foes outright. However, because larger enemies do not react or stagger when hit, engaging them up close carries high risk, especially on elevated difficulty settings. Jenny possesses both close-range melee attacks and long-range shooting mechanics. While melee combat is inherently more dynamic, yielding higher damage, hitting multiple targets, and filling the hyper attack meter much faster, it operates under noticeable constraints. A key design challenge lies in how the game ties both basic weapon attacks and dodge maneuvers to the same extremely limited resource pool. Because melee attacks feature relatively long recovery animations on their final hits, players are forced to spend this limited resource just to dash out of harm's way. Switching to ranged attacks, which refills energy reserves for melee, presents its own rhythm, as there is a brief input delay between pressing the button and firing. This friction is further compounded by the game's monetary economy, where upgrades and new moves are purchased using funds earned through high combo chains. While melee attacks build the combo meter faster, ranged attacks allow players to build and maintain chains safely from a distance without breaking the combo or risking heavy damage. As a result, the safest and most efficient way to play often disincentivizes close-quarters melee, even though that melee system is arguably where the core combat shines brightest. Once completed, Jenny the Witch opens up the ability to replay the story using your unlocked abilities, or participate in an "Arena" mode to face off against waves of enemies. The cliché is that “familiarity breeds contempt,” but thankfully, I’ve not found this to be the case. Playing the story on the highest difficulty comes with new enemy encounters, which forces engagement in melee due to the high volume of foes — something that is not true on normal difficulty. The increased difficulty necessitates a more robust playstyle, which does make it much more interesting to engage with than simply firing away at robots, but all of the aforementioned quirks and issues of melee remain the same, which can lead to frustration. The Arena provides flat, dull stages to face waves of foes so that you can practice more thoroughly, but confers no additional benefit, as far as I can gather. Still, there is something soothing about learning the combat of a character action game like this, even if there is little to take hold of. Being able to manipulate the character just so, gracefully dashing from foe to foe, all of it does bring fulfillment. But here it also makes me yearn for more — more freedom in dashing and melee, and the ability to make each fight my own. A key design challenge lies in how the game ties both offensive special attacks and basic dodge maneuvers to the same extremely limited resource pool. Beyond the combat loop, Jenny the Witch encounters its most significant hurdles in its camera system and platforming responsiveness. Platforming segments are not exacting in their timing, but the camera often struggles to keep up with the action, occasionally clipping into geometry or swinging abruptly during tight maneuvers, making it difficult to gauge landing spots and positioning. As such, camera collision issues near walls end up being the direct cause of most falls and deaths. Players may also occasionally encounter minor animation hitches, such as getting momentarily stuck in a jump state during frantic sequences, leaving the player unable to perform their normal combat actions and stranding them in a vulnerable state. On the positive side, early technical hiccups have seen active developer attention already. An early bug that prevented enemies from exiting spawn points was promptly addressed in a pre-launch patch. For early adopters, such day-one friction is not uncommon, and active patching bodes well for the game's ongoing stability. Verdict Ultimately, Jenny the Witch is a throwback that channels the vibrant spirit of classic action titles, but never fully captures it. Its core combat carries a satisfying weight, and its blend of colorful visuals with arcade-style scoring provides a fun foundation, but camera inconsistencies, strict resource limitations, and a minimal story keep it from reaching true classic status. That said, players who appreciate retro game feel and simpler hack-and-slash action will find a title and developer worth keeping an eye on. Image Credits: Catbird Soft and Taylor Rioux Disclaimer: We received a copy of this title for free from the publisher.

Making Art in a Broken World Authoritarian systems work hard to break us down, and every screw put to the people takes constant effort by the state. Yet people persist, making art and finding joy in even the darkest of moments. And so, these authoritarians take on the work of erasure, eliminating or subjugating dissidents, while squashing undesirable art and ideas in an effort to sustain the bloated husk of a fascist regime. Celestial Return, a three-part, story-driven RPG heavily inspired by text-heavy classics like Planescape: Torment, Citizen Sleeper, and Disco Elysium, examines this erasure. Publisher: Shoreline Games Developer: Metaphor Games Platform: Played on PC (Steam) Availability: Released on July 14, 2026 on PC In Celestial Return, every persuasion attempt or desperate acrobatic maneuver relies entirely on a limited pool of physical dice. As more of a visual novel than a standard RPG, you never take full control of the protagonist, Detective Howard, or his companions during a fight or within a scene; you simply select an action, roll, and watch it all play out. These rolls are supposed to matter. As part of the game’s prologue, the writer addresses the player directly to set expectations, promising that your choices will shape Howard’s character and alter the narrative. To an extent, they do. But Celestial Return also has a habit of railroading you into specific outcomes, forcing the plot down a predetermined path even if you pass your skill checks. The writer openly admits this in the introduction, as well, warning the player that the world will grind forward regardless of their choices. This funneling stings because dice in this world function as a diegetic currency that characters use in furtherance of their goals, while also serving as the means by which players interact with the world. When an outcome is static, spending those limited resources may feel completely pointless, as if the choices do not matter beyond the roleplaying aspect. Of course, role-playing is the point of such a game, isn’t it? It’s not really about finding the optimal outcome in every given scenario. When you inhabit a character in an RPG like this, I’ve always found more joy in crafting a character and sticking to that persona consistently to shape a story. How does this person interact with this world, and how does the world mold around them? When you inhabit a character in an RPG like this, I’ve always found more joy in crafting a character and sticking to that persona consistently to shape a story. That said, it is a bit of a let-down when your choices lead you to dead ends, or when success is meaningless despite the high opportunity cost of using dice on a roll. Too often failure is not used as a jumping-off point to tell further interesting stories; instead, it simply bars the player from receiving anything of interest. The highest cost is not in dice, but in narrative advancement. By missing a roll, the player is locked out of any kind of story from forming — the interactions are cut short, rather than replaced. We can derive meaning from failures. Whether we learn something new, or our characters are altered in some way, failure in one action does not have to be an end-state for the events of our lives. For Celestial Return, it too often is. There is nothing to be gained by this loss. The game is also plagued by myriad technical problems in at least two key areas — text progression and saving. For the text, I have encountered several moments where the advancement of the story was meant to present me with a choice, but the options did not appear on the screen. In other moments, the choice options did appear, but clicking on them did not have an effect, forcing a reload in both types of scenarios. Unfortunately, the save system is just as broken as the people of Netherveil. Loading a save will sometimes cause dialogue options to disappear upon reload, and it has a habit of not placing players in the scene or environment that they are trying to load into, instead having the text scrawl over the environs and imagery that was being loaded from. In both scenarios, the only consistent way forward is to load another file and hope it works, so maintaining as many save slots as possible is paramount. These mechanical frustrations might be easier to endure if the world they broke into felt seamless. Unfortunately, the game's technical instability mirrors the inconsistency in its writing and artwork. There is something a bit “off” about Celestial Return. The language is mostly stiff and sometimes stilted, but it ventures into moments of lucidity. There are times when the wording feels poetic and fluid, where the text on the screen feels evocative and purposeful in describing a scene, only for it to collapse into terse, repetitive, or mechanical wording. There are whole conversations filled with short, fragmented sentences, littered with cliché, contrasted framing such as “it's not just X, it's Y”. In one conversation with a character, the text made note of her “almond-shaped eyes” three times within the span of a few minutes, as if the writers could not stand the possibility that players might miss the fact that this character looks Asian. So, to solidify their intent, they have leaned upon racialized shorthand to “other” her. This is all coupled with infrequent but noticeable spelling and grammar mistakes. The artwork is similarly inconsistent. Characters may look different from piece to piece, with someone like the protagonist, Howard, looking different across the menus, the main screen, and his UI portrait. While the American comic book-style artwork can explain or mask some of these inconsistencies, I feel a bit uncomfortable when I look too closely. When I see things like a misshapen flowerpot, an oddly warped book, or features and shadows on a character that don’t quite make sense, I am given pause. Why are certain elements of this scene in a different perspective than others? How much can be attributed to artist errors, and what is intended? The inconsistency muddies my appreciation. The artist behind the game's imagery once defended these anomalies on Reddit, stating “I’ve been in the industry for years, but I still make mistakes” as part of an explanation for why a character had six fingers in a demo build. Perhaps these other pieces can similarly be waved away, but more time to iron out these details would have served the game much better than shipping as-is, both in terms of quality and perception. Yet, despite the distracting irregularities, Celestial Return finds its footing when it shifts its focus to the political architecture of Netherveil. The narrative leans heavily into the weight of fascism, citizens' complicity in building it, and how the gears of those systems crush individual lives and the aspirations of its people. While all of this is relevant to the world of today, the game has little to say about these systems that remains intriguing aside from one throughline — the place and purpose of art within these societies. Art plays a large role in the events of the game, with major questlines focused on art showings, and minor explorable events giving the characters moments to inspect or appreciate the artworks of those living within the city. All of these moments have something to say on the point and purpose of that art, and perhaps most surprisingly, players are given opportunities to bounce off those works themselves. Much like many CRPGs of late, this game showcases the protagonist’s personality as different distinct aspects, with Howard’s Virtue manifesting as a righteous do-gooder, intelligence playing the part of the pragmatist, and so on. In these moments where Howard is reflecting on the artworks he encounters, each of these personality traits has something different to say on the subject. In the art showing during the main quest, Howard’s thoughts on the work itself range from viewing it as pretentious or useless to holding it as important work. Ultimately, the player can at least partly decide how the character feels about the pieces and the people who made them. At another point, Howard sits down and admires a piece of graffiti on a nearby wall while speaking to Rose, the Abstract abomination of a talking rose donning a human-esque face. Rose wonders what the artwork showing two robots getting married is meant to symbolize, and from there a conversation unfolds where Rose wonders, “I don't get it. Why would someone paint that?” As the player, you decide whether Howard focuses on the artist's intent (they were bored, took the blank wall personally), the purpose of the work (doesn't need our permission to exist, artist is trying to figure something out), or its legality (it’s just vandalism), and choosing one will help inform Rose’s perception of the piece. More importantly, it shapes our shared understanding of the world. By taking the position of a supporter of the arts, Howard is able to contextualize how the piece fits into the broader picture. As it currently stands, the ruling government of Netherveil is fascistic and overbearing, tightly controlling what people can say and do, making no space for true self-expression without the support of the state. Immediately after the explanation, a cleaning drone washes away the artwork, as if it never existed. Ultimately, the player can at least partly decide how the character feels about the pieces and the people who made them. This is heavily contrasted by the propaganda pieces littering the city as you play, which are akin to wartime propaganda posters advocating for the support of government programs. There is a clear line from the first posters, which showcase communal efforts to do something ostensibly positive, to the outright demands by the government for compliance on the later posters. These prepared messages are allowed to linger thanks to their service toward the ongoing fascist project enacted by the government. Comply, and you will live. Resist, and you will be erased, just like that mural on the wall. But I wonder if any answer we give to Rose’s question would ever be sufficient. Why would someone paint that? The direction the game takes us through its writing speaks to art as a broad concept, but what about here, in this moment? Why would someone paint this picture under these conditions? What is the point, and why does it matter? These are all questions artists are asked today — questions artists ask of themselves. So many who see the works will remain unaffected, unmoved, and uninspired. What good does a single piece of art do in a sea of sorrow? Can this singular work change the world? Probably not, but it can change you, if you let it. And you — the reader, the viewer, the physical being engaged in the world today — can change what you think, what you feel, and how you act. You can guide those around you, and make the world a better place. You can change your world, and that is enough. These conversations about the work of artists make interpreting Celestial Return difficult in its own right, but the fault doesn't lie entirely with the game, either. Living in the United States of America for my entire life, I have seen the noose of fascism slowly tighten around the necks of its people. Surveillance programs like the PATRIOT Act have been used to spy on Americans, government-sponsored pogroms in the form of ICE raids terrorize communities across the nation, and even the suffocation and removal of art that depicts anything the state deems untoward have all been enacted in the name of safety. All of it has, to some degree, been further facilitated by the burgeoning use of AI in everyday life. Kinda wish the game's most meaningful conversations didn't happen with...this thing. It is here that the explicit erasure of art by a machine cuts entirely too close to home. Propaganda produced by the state carries the stink of an inhuman nature, with computer-generated nonsense spewed out in furtherance of their goals. AI tools are used to identify and accuse people of crimes, regardless of the accuracy of the tool or veracity of the claims. So, when I see the wobbly lines and six-fingered portraits, or read the tired, repetitive language of the text within Celestial Return, my stomach drops. And maybe that is not fair. Despite my unease, the development team behind the game, Metaphor Games, has stated on multiple occasions that they have not used AI in the production of this title. They’ve gone on record to say that all of the writing and artwork is handmade by humans, and the PR team behind the game has assured me of the same. By all accounts, I should believe them. I should take their word for it. More disturbingly, I should not even have to question it. So why is there a nagging at the back of my mind? It is a terrifying time to look too closely at a video game. When a warped perspective or artistic variance no longer registers as a human mistake, the simple act of my interpretation becomes infected by paranoia. Just as the protagonist struggles with making sense of the world around him, I wrestled with an uneasy distrust of the material I was meant to open myself up to. The heightened presence of AI has done something insidious to the space. It has cast doubt on the humanity and purpose of the art form. AI has not only changed the works that use it, but it has also changed me. It has changed the way I examine art, changed the way I interpret and interact with it. It has ruined my sense of reality — or rather my belief in a shared reality with other humans — in more ways than I care to admit. I just wish it hadn’t.

Twin-stick shooters are rarely my cup of tea. That isn’t to say I haven’t enjoyed my fair share of them — games like Enter the Gungeon, Hotline Miami, and Resogun are all titles I’ve happily run through. But a deep familiarity with the genre is not something I possess. Roguelites, however, have made up the bulk of my gaming diet over the last five years. Hyperwired aims to marry these two genres, taking the semi-randomized, choice-driven progression of a roguelite to spice up an otherwise sparse twin-stick shooting experience. Not content to leave things there, developer SIDRALGAMES also introduces its primary gameplay and level progression mechanic: plugging in. Publisher: SelectaPlay, Beep Japan Inc. Developer: SIDRALGAMES Platform: Played on Nintendo Switch Availability: Released July 2, 2026, for PC (Steam), Nintendo Switch and Switch 2, Playstation 4/5, and Xbox Series X/S While most twin-stick shooters are denoted by fluid, free-flowing movement and frantic bullet-dodging, Hyperwired grounds you. Plugging into an outlet tethers your ship to a small radius, restricting your mobility in exchange for energy, health, or stage progression. The Nintendo Switch version also notes this action with a nice little rumble in your hand, as if the power were now running through you, the player. On paper, this adds a compelling tactical dimension to the combat; in practice, the execution leaves much to be desired. Mechanically speaking, the tether system functions perfectly well. Snapping onto an outlet is proximity-based and intuitive, theoretically forcing you to make risk-reward decisions about when and where to anchor yourself. Unfortunately, the surrounding systems quickly homogenize the experience. Because normal levels feature sparse enemy numbers, your sole objective is to rush toward four specific stations, plug in to revive them, and unlock the exit. This loop severely trivializes the combat. The most optimal strategy is always to ignore the small drones and mechanical turrets that inhabit a level, sprint to an outlet, and only fire your weapons to temporarily clear encroaching foes while you charge up. While a scoring system exists, there is no mechanical incentive to chase a high score beyond self-satisfaction. Even if you get the urge to hunt down the mostly-harmless fliers drifting around the map, a stifling energy economy prevents you from venturing away from your power sources for long. This energy restriction is where Hyperwired ultimately short-circuits. Because your reserves deplete so rapidly, the most viable strategy during the much more punishing boss fights is to hover near a charging station. Take the giant helmet-like boss, for instance. It sits back and fires spreading shots at the player before slowly lumbering around to initiate contact damage. Getting in close poses a much greater risk of damage with little to no upside. By contrast, staying out of range tethered to a station means your energy, laser charge, or ammo reserves remain high, allowing you to deal much more damage over time with some room for safety, and this is even before upgrades for being plugged in are considered. The game does feature a roguelite upgrade tree to expand your energy capacity, but because upgrade drafts are randomized, prioritizing damage and movement speed is always the safer bet. On top of the randomization aspect, few of the upgrades feel noteworthy or exciting to receive. Sure, having a more powerful laser or more bullet damage is nice and valuable, but it doesn't alter how you play in any meaningful way. They’re not the types of upgrades you see offered and say “wow, I really want to try this out!” Roguelite genre titans like Hades make each run feel meaningful with not only the number of choices provided, but the ways in which those boons alter the play experience, crafting a run that feels like it is uniquely yours. By contrast, Hyperwired's incremental numbers-based approach feels totally unremarkable. While there is a certain element of “you control the buttons you press” to all of this, the severe lack of reserve resources sans multiple upgrades necessitates that players plug in frequently. There is an “overcharge” mechanic that is meant to mitigate staying plugged in eternally, forcibly unplugging the player from the socket, but it is slow to take hold. Plugging into a station with full energy will begin to build up overcharge (denoted by a red bar above your ship) only after several seconds of being plugged in, and will take an additional seven or so seconds to fully “overcharge” your ship. Unplugging from the station quickly lowers the overcharge bar, meaning only a few seconds off the power source are needed at any given time. While the tether should create tense, tactical trade-offs, its sheer necessity makes every run feel identical. This monotony is doubly felt when you realize the bosses appear in the exact same order every time. If you’ve made it to the end once, you have seen it all. Thankfully, power-ups aren’t the only means of differentiating runs, as players can unlock new ships to fly after rescuing them during the course of a level. When saved, these ships assist you in combat as automated minions, taking out the chaff while you focus on unlocking objectives. After a run is completed, these ships become selectable by the player and have their own unique abilities, such as more bombs. Despite the mechanical diversity of ships, the core structure remains the same — plug and move until you reach a boss. This mechanical monotony is unfortunately mirrored in the game's presentation. On a purely technical level, Hyperwired sounds great. A pulsing, techno-inspired soundtrack permeates the soundscape, and clear auditory feedback when firing your weapons or locking into a socket lends weight to the actions (especially when accompanied by the rumble). However, the soundscape ultimately suffers from the lack of action on screen; because the level is so routinely starved of enemies and urgent threats, the music feels like a rave playing to an empty club. Instead of escalating the tension during an intense firefight, the booming beats merely highlight how quiet and empty the levels actually are. Space that could be filled out by ships firing on you or explosions in the distance is simply left hollow. The same could be said of the visuals. While the ship designs are clean and the pixelated artstyle is clear and beautiful in motion, the dearth of onscreen action leaves mostly empty space to fill the view. When enemies do show up, there is little variety in their design. You face the same handful of enemies across the entire run, making it easy to lose track of how just how long you've been playing or how far you've progressed. Verdict I must admit I am a bit perplexed by the lack of excitement in Hyperwired. Twin-stick shooters can so rarely be considered boring, but this one manages to land with a dull thud. Without meaningful threats or interesting upgrade paths, the game just thoughtlessly advances, each room feeling just like the last. The plug mechanic, which should have been its saving grace, ultimately acts as the anchor weighing it down. Despite this, the game can be fun in short doses, making it a good fit for the portable modes on Switch or for a Steam Deck. Image Credits: SIDRALGAMES, SelectaPlay, Beep Japan Inc.

On Reviews as Price Evaluations Gaming is expensive, and it’s getting ever more so by the day. Thanks to massive data centers across the United States monopolizing computing hardware, components that would otherwise head to consumers — like RAM sticks and solid-state drives — are instead being diverted to AI projects spearheaded by Tech giants like Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI. Of course, the effects of these price increases are not contained solely within the realm of PC gaming. As gaming consoles need much of the same technology, the companies that make them have increased the costs associated with play, with consoles like the Xbox Series X|S getting multiple price increases over the last year alone. The Xbox Series X, initially priced at $499.99, climbed to $599.99 and now sits at $749.99, following several incremental increases. Meanwhile, Valve, the corporation behind PC gaming juggernaut Steam, had hoped to capitalize on its position as the de facto PC gaming platform and release a dedicated PC for gaming. Before the actual product’s release, speculation surrounding the newest iteration of the “Steam Machine” positioned it as likely an entry-level piece of hardware, rather than an enthusiast powerhouse. At the time of its initial announcement, such a machine would cost somewhere in the realm of $600-800 if a person built it themselves. While Valve was able to put together a machine comparable in power to the PS5, the prices for each model are all over the $1000 mark, with the top-end version being a hefty $1,430. The Steam Machine is a capable piece of hardware, but PC component prices have driven its price up. Alongside these price announcements came reviews for the Steam Machine, with evaluations on its capabilities, shape, and even its operating system landing on the pages and pages of words sent out upon the media embargo. While the listed price points are certainly worthy of talking about within these reviews and beyond them, assessments on whether or not the Steam Machine was “worth” the price were peppered throughout much of the prose. Discussion on the Steam Machine’s “worth” is impossible to avoid. In Jacqueline Thomas’s review at IGN, they state, “At $1049 (and $1349 for the 2TB model), the Steam Machine seems like it’d be hard to recommend to most people.” Similar sentiments are echoed by Andy Edser of PC Gamer, who writes, “I just can't square the Steam Machine's performance with any idea of consumer value. I really can't. The first question you need to ask yourself as a hardware reviewer is this: Would I buy one?” The evaluations of what a game or piece of hardware is “worth” come from those least equipped to make it. Price discourse is always a bit peculiar when it so often comes from people who do not actually have to make a buying decision on the thing they're speaking about, seeing as they do not have to pay for them. These products are given to the reviewer or company behind the review as part of the agreement to participate in the marketing blitz surrounding the product. In Jacqueline Thomas’s review at IGN, they state, “At $1049 (and $1349 for the 2TB model), the Steam Machine seems like it’d be hard to recommend to most people.” Sure, each reviewer knows the value of a dollar or euro to some extent, couching their perspective in their own lived experience. But there is a fundamental disconnect between a party that gets these products for free and those that do not, and that disconnect is hard to reconcile with the fact that reviews are so often positioned as generalized declarations of a product’s value. This disconnect births a sort of simulated financial anxiety within this criticism. Because many reviewers feel obligated to act as consumer advocates, they often perform an elaborate pantomime of budgeting. They scowl at the high price tag on behalf of the reader, projecting a hypothetical financial strain that they themselves never actually had to endure. It is a risk-free empathy. In these circumstances, the critic suffers no buyer's remorse if the product fails to deliver, nor do they feel the sting of a bank account drained by a hobby. By trying to calculate a transaction they never participated in, the reviewer ends up speaking over the actual material reality of the consumer class they claim to represent. These sorts of evaluations are often littered with numerous “ifs” and “buts”; if you are looking for X, this may be for you. It is expensive, but it could maybe, possibly, be worth the cost if you can afford to pay for it and want something that can do X, Y, or Z. It is not based on anything tangible and comes with so many caveats and suppositions that it is rendered meaningless within the text. Despite some disagreement with the particulars of the wording in these types of product reviews — such as Giant Bomb’s Dan Ryckert titling his review “The Best Beginner's Gaming PC... At an Enthusiast Price” when enthusiast PCs would realistically run you between $2000-5000 today, a price point far beyond that of the Steam Machine — this evaluation is somewhat forgivable when dealing with hardware, as we can do direct price-to-performance comparisons between other sets of machines and parts. The error occurs when we try to apply this same logic to the art of video games itself. Hardware possesses measurable utility; we can calculate frames per second, thermal efficiency, and gigabytes of storage per dollar. But a video game is an aesthetic and emotional experience, and you cannot run a benchmark on how deeply a narrative resonates or how elegant a game mechanic feels. When a critic treats software like hardware, they equate the canvas to the paintbrush, attempting to quantify an artistic relationship in a way that seems arbitrary. There is no set dollar-per-hour ratio you can devise for time played that can adequately capture the experience of playing a game, and how each person interacts with a title will vary wildly. Yet, this sort of “price discourse” still seeps its way into reviews for games all the same. That isn't to say people aren't calculating it, such as this one from https://mgtools.cloud/tools/game-cost-calculator. Look no further than the recent release of Star Fox on the Nintendo Switch 2. Releasing on June 25, 2026, with a price tag of $49.99, much was made of its status as a shorter game — and a remake to boot. When Dashiell Wood of TechRadar writes of Star Fox “the experience is still pretty fleeting and doesn’t feel befitting of the $49.99 / £41.99 / AU$84.95 digital (or $59.99 / £44.99 / AU$99.95 physical) asking price”, he is making an estimation based on his play experience and relationship with money, of course, but it is not based on Dash’s material reality. He did not have to pay for the game at any point, so why spend time trying to assert such playtime-to-dollar valuations to a more general audience? Who does this portion of the review serve, specifically? What makes a game “worth” the price, anyway? There are no definable metrics that I would use to evaluate such a thing, and any valuations of a game’s worth could only come after having played a game. Putting a price on games is hard enough, with titles running the gamut from free to $99.99 for just a single copy of GTA VI: Ultimate Edition. How can one quantify the difference in value between any two games? Everything from financial standing, expertise, and even play experience would come into making such a determination. It is inherently a deeply personal thing. Reviews are personal expressions of the reviewer's thoughts on the games they played, too, so a writer concluding that a game is or isn't worth the cash is not inherently misleading. I do not expect reviewers to account for every possible experience outside of their own to justify the cost, but it does not sit well with me to make these broad assertions if the reviewer never had to make the purchase in the first place. It is not useful to include price evaluations in a critical analysis of a work, but perhaps that’s not the intent. Many video game reviews exist in this space between critical evaluation and tech product review, where writers list gameplay mechanics like features on a washing machine and compare the prices of two entirely separate titles as if they could be directly equated. From this perspective, the price talk makes a bit more sense — if a potential consumer is choosing between two similar products, the length of use and price point are much more pressing concerns. But this is not the purview of the critic; it is the perspective of a salesman — games as product rather than art and experiences. Yet, cost has a place in criticism all the same. In Art as Experience by John Dewey, Dewey writes: “Costliness is, also, as Santayana has pointed out, an element in expression, a costliness that has nothing in common with vulgar display of purchasing power. Rarity counts to intensify expression whether the rarity is that of infrequent occurrence of patient labor, or because it has the glamor of a distant clime and initiates us into hardly known modes of living.” So how can game critics write about pricing in a way that is more aligned with the task they are performing? After all, if you are so inclined to put your thumb on the scale, pricing is an important determinant in readers making a purchasing decision. First, kill the salesman in your head. While product reviews are more suited for price discussion, and game reviews can certainly be used as buyer’s guides in their own right, pinning down what a game should be valued at for a broad audience is a fool’s errand, and you’re not actually here to make the sale, are you? If a reader has gone through an entire review, seen how a writer feels about the game top to bottom, and is given the information of a game’s price point, whether or not a reader then buys the game is out of the writer’s hands. Or at least it should be. Why would you need an entire section of your review dedicated to sussing out some sort of content-to-dollar ratio? What were all those other words for? Frankly, it would be best to leave determinations of a game’s monetary value up to the reader. The critic’s argument is in the substance of the art (or product). Without some sort of comparative analysis or an overview of market conditions (something a few reviews for the Steam Machine actually do), cementing a game’s worth in dollars is a nothing statement, and an ephemeral one at that. By insisting on pre-calculating this worth, critics trap themselves within a paradox. What is this game doing, how does it make the critic feel, what does the work say, and so on — these are all topics explored in a review, and a game's “worth” can only come as an evaluation of the experience. A product review is meant to guide a purchase decision before it happens; if a writer has produced the review, discussed the game, and provided the pricing information, the reader has all the tools they need to make a buying decision. After all, a writer doesn’t really need to tell the readers the value of a dollar.

Slide to the Left, Slide to the Right Shuffle Dungeons can feel a bit claustrophobic at first. Slinking through the halls of the trap-filled and shrine-heavy dungeon that I have assembled, I am reminded of the labyrinthine layouts and intense horrors of the video games I have played in the dungeon-crawling genre. I can't help but relive the corridors of King’s Field, or even reflect upon my time with Lunacid, fretting about how best to proceed, knowing each new room may bring my demise. While many tabletop entries in the genre have leaned on the display in excess by including elaborate pieces and layouts, Shuffle Dungeons opts for a simpler design and presentation. The game “board”, if you will, is entirely comprised of small cardboard tiles, each with varied pieces of equipment, rooms, and enemies wonderfully rendered upon them, but they are still sparse in terms of three-dimensional detail. Still, I find the absence of concrete minutiae gives way to a player's imagination. I can look at the detailed character and monster art and envision a tense combat scenario taking place in the damp halls unfolding before me. Product: Shuffle Dungeons Designer: Isaac Serafini, Jeremy Stark, Kyle Talbert Publisher: Luma Imports Price: $39.99 Age: 12+ At its core, Shuffle Dungeons is a collaborative effort in survival for one to four players. The thematic bones are traditional in every sense of the word — a party of distinct adventurers plunges into the dark depths of the dungeon, facing monsters and collecting gear all the while, eventually attempting to eliminate the Boss Monster guarding the exit. The physical manifestation of this journey is lean, relying on a modular architecture of 86 square, two-sided cards that serve a dual purpose. On one side, they are the rooms of the dungeon — shrines, traps, and empty corridors. The other side holds weapons, armor, spells, and snacks. This svelt gameplay is translated into the rules and experience, as well. There are only a handful of things to keep track of at any given time, with a limited hand size, a small selection of eight characters to play (each with only one ability), restricted equipment slots, and a compact ruleset for actions available on a player’s turn. While monsters can pose some small threat within those base rules, you can easily coordinate with your team through trading and drawing to ensure some level of safety. It is unfortunate, then, that the base rules leave so little in the way of threats for the player. While there is still some essence of delight in the collaboration and brick-laying done by players, the rules don’t punish simply wandering until you’ve collected your preferred gear and items, making the player unstoppable from early on. The modified rules (included in the rulebook) offer much more of a challenge, but the limited number of tiles and variation in equipment means the gameplay experience quickly feels homogenous between games. The characters themselves have very little identity as well, so they all feel quite similar when played, though there is certainly room for optimization. Still, the simplicity was charming, in a way. The cardboard tiles feel like pieces of a jigsaw, and finding the right spot for each one on your journey with friends for each moment is equivalent to finding the right puzzle piece in a sea of similar-looking fragments. Playing alone can’t really replicate this feeling. There are no “single-player” boss monsters, but the instructions dictate that you must choose a boss monster with the same number of spatial "gates" equal to the player count, so you’ll need to use the monster for a two-player game, and you’ll be forced to control two separate characters alone. Furthermore, while the visual identity of the game is striking, the packaging houses its own minor traps. The components feel substantial enough for its slight design, but certain hanging parts of the cardboard can snag during unboxing, threatening to tear the very tiles you are meant to explore with if removed with anything less than deliberate patience. And despite the lean nature of the game, the amount of table space required for a full game can also feel daunting. The lack of heft can never fully eliminate the space required to lay down this tapestry for display. The bulk of interactive gameplay comes from the combat. When a monster card is drawn, it is immediately placed by the player who drew it, along with “loot”, indicated by a number on the monster tile. These serve as rewards for defeating an enemy, and are a great way to collect new tiles to power up your character or optimize your layout. Combat is done through a dice roll-off between the players in combat and the enemy monster, with bonuses being awarded via equipment, snacks, spells, and even room effects. It’s simple, but there’s a nice tension to these do-or-die moments in the early game that can guide your decision-making. Do you try to avoid the enemy and collect better gear, or take it on now for immediate rewards? As the 13 boss monsters are the ultimate threat in the dungeon, you would expect a little more mechanical variety to their combat, but that’s not really true. Although they do have unique effects when initially revealed by playing a tile that connects to their gate, the actual combat progresses the same, just tougher. Thus, the player is still free to wander through shrines and traps hunting for buffs and gear to their hearts' content (or until time is nearly out under the alternate rules). What elevates Shuffle Dungeons beyond a simple exercise in card-counting is the aforementioned mutability. Everything from the equipment you carry, the rules you use, and the layout of the dungeon itself is left to players’ designs. On the flip side, the light rules and lack of variety in the ways turns play out left me longing for something a bit more substantial. Verdict Ultimately, Shuffle Dungeons succeeds because it understands that the true joy of a dungeon crawler isn't in detailed miniatures and elaborate sets, but in the weight of its choices. Make no mistake, the game is designed for a lighter play experience than most dungeon crawlers, even with the modified rules, but there is still room for player choice and expression. It is a design that respects both your time and your intelligence, wrapping a cooperative, highly modular experience into a quick hour of tense decision-making. With a little imagination, you can craft a nice scenario in your mind to run through as you play, with the onus for meaningful experience left up to the player by design. Disclosure: We received a free review copy of this product from the publisher.

SPOILER WARNING: Some plot spoilers for The Drifter are contained within this review. Sometimes, I think about where I’d be now if I didn't have the support of my younger sister, Kelsey. I was down on my luck, kicked out of my house just a few days before being shipped off to basic training to join the Army National Guard. The owners had sold the house without ever mentioning to us that it was up for sale — a real kick to the nuts while I already felt down enough about signing away my soul to the closest thing this Earth has to the Devil. Mick Carter is down on his luck, too, starting The Drifter off by riding in a boxcar on his way back to his old hometown so that he can attend his mother’s funeral. I never got that far down. For myself, I had two days in my car before making my way to Alabama and enjoying the luxuries of swamp air and abuse at the hands of drill sergeants. Once all that was over with, I got to come back home to a family who was willing to put me up on their couch. I had support when I needed it most. Mick doesn't seem to have that — or at least he doesn't think so. Publisher: Powerhoof Developer: Powerhoof Platform: Played on Nintendo Switch Availability: Released Jul 17, 2025, for PC (Steam); June 22, 2026, for Nintendo Switch and Switch 2 So when Mick makes his way back home, there are a lot of emotions wrapped up in his decision. It has been five full years since he’s been back, afraid to see his ex-wife, Sarah, child, and the family he left behind. Worse still, he’s a drifter, homeless and without purpose. Things change quickly when another homeless man sharing the car with him gets gunned down, and he subsequently becomes embroiled in a massive conspiracy surrounding the disappearance and murder of multiple unhoused people. A person completely untethered from society would make the perfect target for such a crime. Without family or friends to check in on them, a transient’s disappearance is likely to go unnoticed, or in the event it is stumbled upon, determined unworthy of our full attention. Mick being fully estranged from his family and ex-wife would mean certain death. But that’s the rub, isn’t it? Even when we’re down on our luck, even when we’ve messed up badly or hurt the ones we care about, sometimes it’s less about them and more about us. Mick can’t forgive himself for his past failures. Missing his son’s funeral, skipping town and leaving his family behind, never really being able to pull himself together and make something of his life after the divorce — all of this weighs on his mind heavily throughout the game, even as secret forces hunt him and his loved ones down. Yet despite his past failures, his friends and family are willing to set that past aside to help him through, as long as he lets them. Image Credits: Powerhoof The first time you meet Sarah in-game, Mick is going through an episode, and she’s angry. Her voice carries the weight of that anger, and the pain of her ex-husband now lying on their son’s grave, covered in filth and blood. Mick’s voice is similarly expressive, emoting his shock and sadness with intense fervor. The game's voice acting elevates these emotional beats, and Mick’s in particular is intensely powerful. Adrian Vaughan delivers one of the best performances in gaming, period. Between his sardonic quips, bouts of fear, fits of anger, and everything in between, each line serves to pull you into the action more deeply. Later, when we visit Sarah again, there is still pain behind Sarah’s words, but empathy too — a closeness that comes through in the tone and word choice rather than being delivered point-blank. So when you use the right stick to examine the various objects in the room, and get chastised for spending a little too much time on eating food off the counter, there’s a marrying effect that takes place between the gameplay and narrative. You don’t really think about the two separately in the same way that you otherwise might. The adventure game bones of The Drifter don’t weigh so heavily on the experience. That isn't always the case, however. While the conversion of point-and-click mechanics to the Switch is admirable — using a linear selection of nearby points of interest rather than a traditional cursor — The Drifter can never really escape the trial-and-error nature of its puzzles. I did not love how much of the advancement and arriving at solutions comes through this poking and prodding of everything I can find on screen. There are some great moments where allowing the player to think through solutions and actions elevated the gameplay into something more than haphazard stabbing at objects, such as when combining items to make tools that are immediately useful in a situation. Those moments feel earned, allowing players to think through utilizing their limited inventory; a feeling of revelation is gifted to the player by the curated interactions and narrow use cases. There are some great moments where allowing the player to think through solutions and actions elevated the gameplay into something more than haphazard stabbing at objects, such as when combining items to make tools that are immediately useful in a situation. In other cases, the answer is not so cleverly devised. You’d never really know some of the solutions unless you stumbled upon them. Other moments have the player bouncing back and forth between zones for single interactions at a time, dragging out what most frequently feels like a tight experience into bouts of tedium. Despite this, the more time-sensitive scenes of action still strike me as wondrous. Running from a monster, you only have moments to make a decision on where to go and what to do. Economy of action is necessary — one wrong move and you may find yourself splayed out on the pavement below a several-story-tall building. I found myself enamored with the ways in which the electronic thrums of the music were deployed in scenes full of tension, heightening the urgency with which players are pushed to act, and how that urgency bred mistakes. When Mick finally crawls his way out of each hole, you feel just as much relief as he does. But guys with guns aren't the only things Mick is running from; his own demons are the real threat to contend with. There’s never enough time to get everything done that we want to, and unexpected events can change the very course of our lives, pulling us away from the people who matter most. Yet, when the conspiracy completely spins out of control, Mick finally stops running. He learns to trust the family he abandoned, and they step up to pull him out of the dark—baggage and all. Sometimes, a little help is all you need to make it through the night. Verdict The Drifter stands out by masterfully intertwining its narrative depth with compelling gameplay and atmosphere. The game is driven by a powerful story about grief, estrangement, and redemption, which is elevated by Adrian Vaughan’s phenomenal and expressive voice acting. The Drifter marries traditional point-and-click mechanics with its narrative, utilizing item-combination puzzles and a Switch-focused control scheme that minimizes traditional genre friction. The Drifter excels at building high-stakes tension through its time-sensitive action sequences, where a pulsing electronic soundtrack perfectly heightens the urgency of Mick's narrow escapes. Ultimately, it delivers a deeply immersive experience that balances the thrill of a massive conspiracy thriller with a grounded, empathetic look at overcoming personal demons.

SPOILER WARNING: Some plot spoilers for Nine Sols are contained within this review. Cast down from on high by Eigong, leader of the then 10 Sols, our protagonist Yi finds himself trapped within the ever-expanding roots of the Fusang, the eternal roots that consume this world. After lying dormant for 500 years, Yi is finally awoken by a small child playing a flute, and after another year of rest and recovery, Yi can now begin his quest for vengeance in earnest. The player is not immediately privy to the particulars of the how and why of this quest, serving as the hook that dangles ahead to drive the action forward — something Nine Sols handles expertly. The opening scenes of Nine Sols are quite effective at conveying so much information through so few words. From the very first conversation in the game, you come to understand — or at least get a sense of — Yi’s relationship to Shuanshuan and the people of Peach Blossom Village. We get a feel for how much those villagers respect Yi, and how much they care for one another. Further still, we can sense Yi’s frustration and hatred for the ones who have wronged him, and his desire to see them brought low. It is compelling, effective. Publisher: RedCandleGames Developer: RedCandleGames Platform: Played on PC Availability: Released May 29, 2024, for PC (Steam); November 26, 2024 for Nintendo Switch, PS4/5, Xbox Series X/S, and Xbox One. Yet when handed the reins, the pull dissipates. The large gaps between the moments of genuine connection and emotion are inundated with collectibles and re-exploring the same rooms over and over, killing the same foes time and time again with no variation or surprise. Getting to the “True” ending of the game requires re-exploration of unchanging, unfeeling tedium, hiding satisfying narrative progression and character growth behind many “things” to do. I’ve been thinking back to and re-reading Jake Steinberg’s essay We Are All Becoming More Thick, where he talks about the lengths people will go to make sense of the games they play by bringing in connections to other material and outside context. He speaks about how the evidence and explanations outside of a game are so often used to “thicken” the persuasiveness of the argument via the accumulation of information. “At a certain point, the entire activity stops resembling dramatic experience altogether. The player becomes an archivist managing emotional evidence after the fact, endlessly thickening the structure surrounding scenes that never fully lived on their own.” This is, unfortunately, how I have experienced much of Nine Sols. There is a certain benefit to being a game reviewer that often goes unexamined — the privilege of fresh experiences. When we get a game prior to release, we get to experience it unblemished by online discussion or talking points. We get to play the games a little more freely from expectation and discourse. Guides don't exist for games under embargo, so you just play the game in front of you. But that’s not how most people experience games. That’s not how I approached Nine Sols. Algorithms on sites like Reddit would push topics about Nine Sols into my feed. I knew what people liked about the game, I saw the way it was spoken about on socials, and viewed short-form videos that explored the untold lore — all of which arrived at my feet without deliberate desire to do so on my end. Step into one of these subreddits, and hundreds of people are waiting with bated breath to inform you of all the connections to mythology, all the little morsels of data you might have glossed over, and how these crumbs then make everything else work well when enough are accumulated. I felt very little of this in playing the game, yet I could not escape it. Connections to the tales of Hou Yi and the Peach Blossom Spring are obvious to those in the know, but serve little purpose in understanding the actual events of this game. They feel about as closely connected as Son Goku and Sun Wukong in the moment — a cute reference that, once drawn upon, can be quickly discarded. Knowing that Nine Sols is a parallel to the tale of Hou Yi and the 10 suns is about as useful as knowing which Dragonball cast members reflect each specific Journey to the West personage — it is largely irrelevant to the thing at hand. The game feels at odds with itself, trying to tell a more traditionally constructed story while also trying to appease the “lore sickos” of the world, hiding notes and piles of world-building in the background through its collectibles. These hidden nuggets of information rarely serve to further the story or stakes of the game in any meaningful way, providing little more than an accumulation of information that can then be collected, organized, and rattled off to explain more deeply how any of it mattered in the first place. This stands in stark contrast to the cutscenes and character interactions throughout the game, which beautifully communicate character relationships, their ever-evolving goals, feelings, and their growth, all through gorgeously drawn and animated sprites and short dialogue sequences. All of it was thrown into the pot with the roux of information congealed through those paratextual readings and viewing. In totality, Nine Sols is a game of few words, at least as the main story is concerned, but Yi’s personal quest for vengeance, and the softening or hardening of his convictions throughout, are borne out through our play. Which quests we do, how we complete them, and decisions on which characters you kill all play a part in the evolving experience of Nine Sols. Yet there is still this lingering tedium that must also be done, to read these bits of text here and there that don’t move anything forward and only rarely work to change our perspective. This feeling is exacerbated by the overwhelming overreliance on parrying as the mechanism for both our offense and defense. Every enemy encounter requires a bit of patience to learn the enemies’ moves, to dial in on the timing required for parries so as to avoid damage from attacks, and then respond in kind. But with the large number of enemies and frequent re-exploration of the zones required for full game completion, the act and elation of parrying not only becomes rote, but descends further into monotony. An almost hypnotically boring repetition of the same button press patterns and timings across a few dozen hours. I find this deeply unfortunate, because the character interactions at the base and within the cutscenes are meticulous and artful, and there’s purpose and power in the environmental design in each area. Beyond simple mystery, these things create an atmosphere that draws players in, wanting to learn a bit more about what happened, while communicating more than enough on their own to satiate over the course of the journey. Additionally, the combat that begins to feel tired over the length of the game is tightly controlled and balanced. Parrying is fundamentally the most important aspect of every encounter in the game; the decisions on which techniques to use or how much aggression to apply in any given moment makes for some intense on-the-fly decision-making. The tension and triumph of success in boss fights are particularly noteworthy, with bosses having a multitude of unique attack patterns and gimmicks that players must contend with to move forward. That tension and purpose are lost in the in-between when navigating the platforms and halls of Nine Sols. The smaller hordes feel much more like an annoyance than a true threat, as if they were simple time-wasters meant to drive you mad over the mundanity rather than actually harm you. Approaching them sleepily does come at a cost, however, with smaller enemies entirely capable of downing Yi in just a few attack strings on their own. It did not take long before I simply tried to avoid as many fights as possible so I could get to the “good stuff”. And there’s plenty of good to go around. Aside from the aforementioned bosses, environments, and character interactions, the platforming is a lot of fun, as well. In fact, I found that by working to avoid enemies, the platforming and navigation were actually elevated. These would-be assailants are much more interesting as roadway hazards than they could ever hope to be as combatants. Moving from space to space while jumping, dashing, and bouncing my way through environmental hazards and foes alike offered a frequently fast-paced and considered experience, serving as a nice change of pace over the more reflexive combat. It felt like a dance as much as the boss fights did, and learning how to move swiftly through each zone became something I looked forward to more and more as the game went on. Despite this, I could never shake the feeling that I was being pushed to do the more boring aspects quite heavily. Upgrades locked behind finding those collectibles, map markers, and icons telling me exactly what I was missing at every turn, and even major story beats hidden behind the tedium of accumulation — all of it in service of gathering oats for my own porridge. If I got enough, surely I would be satiated. But I was satiated. I liked the bosses, the conversations, the environments, the visual style, and the mystery of it all as it pertained to the in-game events. In this sense, the information was not “thickened” in the same way Steinberg speaks about in his essay. Rather than explainers trying to make sense of things that weren't there, the sequence of events leading up to the start of the game is overexplained, ensuring those who encounter the information have enough to work with to draw further connections and parallels beyond the text. Steinberg writes, “One explanation leads to another and then another. The archive keeps expanding. The game keeps improving somewhere else.” Nine Sols is a game that wants to be archived. It wants players to find and draw these connections. It works tirelessly to ensure that each player knows that something more is going on here, and it utilizes the drive of the archivists to catalogue every line of information as justification for its existence. These collectibles are not without their own merits in an aggregate sense. As pieces of the world they exist in, they do stand on their own. As opposed to many other games that hide lore in item descriptions, you will get the full picture of this self-contained story. That said, while they do flesh out the world more fully and provide history and context to it, they never felt hugely important in driving the action. Many contain repeat information, or asides that mean very little in the grand order of things — except to Yi himself. Despite much of the information being things he already innately knows, Yi’s growth (and the ultimate resolution of his character arc) is entirely reliant on completing this menagerie. It was as if his epiphany could only come through the act of repetition itself. Truth discerned by wrenching away the mystique previously held. But I quite liked that mystique, and I wish I could have held onto it a bit longer before being thrust into the annals of the archives. Verdict

The shows and marketing blitz surrounding Summer Games Fest seems to be winding down after a week of nearly non-stop trailers and announcements for games across every major platform, bookended by a PlayStation State of Play and a Nintendo Direct. Nintendo’s presentation has been of particular interest to me for a few reasons. To start, it was extremely reliant on remakes, remasters, and re-releases as part of its showing. Nintendo has already received some flak recently for playing things too safe, and will likely continue to do so as long as they fall back on their mascots and re-releases as heavily as they do currently, but that’s not really why I take issue with the moment. Nintendo is, ultimately, delivering what its audience wants. As a company, specifically the de facto “family-friendly” game company, it behooves them to act accordingly. Rather, I am a bit disturbed by the lengths people ostensibly in the video game press space are willing to breathlessly uphold Nintendo’s marketing efforts. This sort of thing is not inherently unique to Nintendo’s games, but they do enjoy the benefit of a shield from criticism that very few companies could ever hope to see. Even the mere idea that a game announcement showcase could underwhelm someone is enough to elicit disdain. From Liz Ryerson’s “i played some games for Steam Next Fest” When people, like Ryan Easby here, go to bat for these companies, it almost invariably ends with the same question: “Do (the people who didn’t like the trailers) even like games?” Yes, I love them. I love them more than anything in this world, save my son and wife. I love the medium. I love the ways in which we can express and experience a multitude of feelings and stories through play and interaction. I love how they exemplify the intersection of visual storytelling, the written word, and tactile interaction in a way that so few things can touch. But I suppose that’s the disconnect here — I love the games. If the idea that someone, in some far-off place, being less excited for a game that another person wants is enough to dampen appreciation for it, I have to question the strength of that appreciation. Because it seems to me that, in such cases, the excitement is not about the game itself. The anticipation for the game is what matters. But these sentiments are not limited to the random musings of writers on social media — they are elevated to the default position of many organizations in games media. When Gavin Lane of Nintendo Life writes “Lots of known quantities, sure, but that's been the case with Switch 2 since launch and it's unlikely to change…As for the knowns, it would be churlish to complain” and “You can't argue with that lineup”, he presents it as statement of fact. The status quo is the ideal, and its righteousness is set in stone. There can be no difference of opinion here, unless you were some sort of barbarian. In a now-deleted post on Bluesky, IGN’s Logan Plant bemoaned how knowledge or rumor of the existence of an Ocarina of Time remake being put out into the wild a few weeks before the announcement “ruined” it. But what has been ruined by this knowledge? An Ocarina of Time remake has been a near inevitability for some time, with credible rumors of its existence circulating for years. What has been lost by some guy on the internet saying it is happening? The game will still be made. I suspect he means the “surprise”. The most important thing in this scenario is not whether the game will be good, nor is it about what the remakes entail. There is very little curiosity surrounding these announcements as to what the games will actually be, as so few care to ask themselves the ”how” or “why” of this season's latest big reimaginings. The only aspect that really matters is maintaining collective excitement; being surprised and letting everyone know that a thing exists — and that you want it — is “the point”. In his defense of marketing, Ryan questions other people's love of video games. He is not the first to do so, nor will he be the last. I suppose this is just a symptom of the games media space being one dominated by enthusiast press rather than critics or the sort of investigative journalists that one would expect to examine and uncover truth. Every breath in relation to these press events must uphold the marketing. After all, if we’re not getting excited about games, what are we even doing here? Actually, what are we here for? And who is “we”? Examining this requires some introspection and admission on my part, of course, but I hope anyone who reads this will join me in thinking about their own purpose. Reviewers of games are often asked to adhere to embargos before producing coverage. These embargos may be as small as agreeing to hold coverage until a specific date, or as extensive as avoiding speaking about major segments of the game itself. When reviewers accept these embargoes, we are tacitly agreeing to participate as marketing for the game in question, even if only marginally. Even if your analysis lands in the negative, the mere adherence to the company's terms for the time, place, and content of the written word makes it so. Despite this, there is a difference in the way individuals in the space approach the work. I have often held that there is a distinction between the product review–style writings of major outlets* and the more analytical approaches to criticism often found at the edges of the independent space. There is value in both, and doing one or the other is not necessarily some sign of elevated status, but they are different. Product reviews work well for the general gaming audience, aiming to tell readers what the thing is and if they should buy it. The same people doing them are often the same voices engaging in developer interviews and news articles on the latest games. I cannot stress enough how great it is for me to go to a site like IGN and be able to learn everything I need to about what a game is and who the people behind it are. This is work that keeps me informed, and (perhaps just as importantly) it is not work that I want to do. In their piece If You Ask Nicely, Autumn Wright has many points I agree with, but one in particular has stuck with me. “Upholding feelings—especially feelings as pretextual as fun and excitement—is not the work of a critic. Nor is upholding particular feelings IGN's work as a publisher of reporting and criticism. ‘If we’re not getting excited about games, what are we even doing here?’ is not an argument. It is pure ideology.” The place of the critic is not to endlessly maintain the excitement generated by the ads a company shows. That is not the place of a journalist, either. Many of us in the space wear (or have worn) multiple hats regarding reporting on and examining games, and coming to terms with the “access journalism” aspect of it all is certainly a struggle I experience. Yet, I imagine that the impetus for most writers joining the field was not simply to carry water for companies. None of us has played any of these games in full, so who does it serve to drown out dissent? I cannot fathom why it would be important for critics or journalists to shield any of these companies from critique. The marketing didn't land for some people. How does that dampen another person’s enjoyment of the game when it is released? If one truly, deeply cares and is excited for the games that were announced, why would they be concerned with denigrating the naysayers over their reception to a trailer? In his piece Abundance Reigns, Nicholas Capozzoli ends with the following line: “By declaring ourselves beyond the trenches of critique, our interests beyond the purview of critics, we are fooling ourselves, proclaiming that by cutting off the spited nose, we have somehow ended up with so much more face.” Games writing has been decimated by layoffs, cuts to budgets, and the closures of many outlets over the last few years. Jobs and opportunities are limited, and positions are precarious. Many of the most effective and talented writers I know struggle to find consistent work. I know how hard it is to be here. I know the pressures many face in doing the work. But I have to believe games writers can be more than corporate sycophants, that there is value in approaching marketing with a little skepticism. I have to believe that my excitement or anticipation for a game does not mean I must carry the torch for a developer over a game I have not even played. If I am to be asked, “do you even like games?” or “if we’re not getting excited about games, what are we even doing here?”, then the answer is simple: I am here because I love games, not because I love corporations. What are you here for? Other reading: Abundance Reigns If You Ask Nicely Who Is We? [1] Major outlets are not alone in this. Many independent spaces work to uphold the status quo of games writing, and it is something my own site JetsonPlaysGames has also engaged in. Major outlets are simply the most prolific purveyors of this particular brand of prose.

SPOILER WARNING: Major plot spoilers for Duppy Detective Tashia are contained within this review. Many things are lost to us over time; Remotes swallowed by the couch, keys misplaced on the counter, memories of days gone by — any number of things can escape us, given enough space. Culture may be chief among them, especially when different cultures collide or grow together over decades. So, when Tashia is transported to another world full of spirits — known as “Duppy” in Jamaican Patwa — it comes as a shock to her, as does her untimely demise. Set on the task of solving the mystery behind the murder of Anansi the Spider, Tashia engages in a journey of discovery, both for the truth and her heritage. By speaking to the resident duppy of the Halfway Market, she is living the stories told by her grandmother, connecting to her forebears and their legends made manifest. Publisher: Spritewrench Developer: Spritewrench Platform: Played on PC Availability: Released June 7, 2026, for PC (Steam). But Tashia is, by all accounts, a contemporary girl — at least at first. She speaks in everyday, American-style English and is more focused on her phone than the world around her. When navigating the Halfway Market, each of those delightful character icons bob and dance in unison to the beat of the music, even Tashia’s, yet her words set her apart in some ways. She is othered not only by her connection to the world of the living, but by the way she acts and speaks in relation to these ancient duppy within the visual novel–style conversations. Things change a bit as the game advances. Her dialect evolves over the course of the game through interactions with the Duppy, shifting toward a more Patwa cadence that mirrors her connection to the spirits surrounding her. Perhaps this could be read as code-switching, but I think it goes beyond this. When she returns to the land of the living, she adopts its use going forward; she has simply become more comfortable, more in touch with that aspect of herself than she had been previously. This is exemplified in the final scene of the game, when Tashia visits her grandmother’s grave, vowing to carry those stories and experiences with her and promising to share them with others. The events of the story have left an indelible mark upon her very soul, propelling her to action beyond solving a mystery. Duppy Detective Tashia has a lovely look and personality to its art. There’s a fitting African American English phrase that has seen heavy use in broader US culture over the last decade, largely thanks to former NFL player Michael Irvin: "We're losing recipes." Obviously, this is true in a literal sense, with old cooking techniques or family secrets being buried alongside the ones who carried them, but it extends to our cultures and other memes, as well. Like many of the people and places that have been ravaged by the United States’ empire, the Caribbean islands have been subject to military and cultural intervention over more than a century — efforts that in large part remain ongoing. And while many people have sought to preserve and evolve the cultures and identities of these places over generations, the American mission to flatten everyone and everything into its vision continues. That is why I see Tashia’s insistence on bringing these stories forward as an act of resistance. It’s not just a matter of telling people about a cool experience she had or convincing them the duppy are real, it‘s about bringing the culture forward into new generations, dispensing those stories as a means of connection with a shared identity and heritage. The idea of living as a sovereign entity, undiminished by the imperial foot, is a powerful one, but not impossible. After all, we’ve seen flowers bloom through the cracks in concrete. However, playing games is not, by any means, real resistance — especially for games as light and breezy as Duppy Detective Tashia. Moving from conversation to conversation holds no real stakes, none of the choices you make have much sway on the way things seem to go, and for the player, very little in the game is pushing the boundary mechanically or narratively. Duppy Detective is less a call for action than it is a call for community, but there is a beauty in its simplicity, even with the rough edges of minor bugs and continuity issues coloring the experience. So what can I take from a game like Duppy Detective Tashia? While the characters of the game are interesting expressions of Caribbean culture and history, that’s not mine to take and share. But I do think Tashia has the right of it — I could stand to hear the stories of my own elders and bring those forward to future generations in their place, helping preserve that history lest it be lost to time.

Editor's Note: Major plot details are discussed during this review. If you do not want to be spoiled, please come back after beating the game. Wake up. The alarm is blaring, and I try to look around a bit to see if anything is visible amongst the darkness. The player character — Viktor Kaminskyi, the navigator of this boring vessel — opens his eyes, revealing only fuzzy red lines visible at an indeterminate distance. We reach for the alarm, pressing it to turn off the incessant buzzing, before turning and fumbling toward a pair of glasses atop an illuminated desk. Finally, we can see. As we turn on the lights, the room becomes clear: a small space in a seemingly decrepit vehicle that houses personal effects and a sort of retro-futurist assortment of technology, including cassette tapes and monitors used as both information devices and locking mechanisms. Interacting with every object requires a tactile touch; the manual turning of knobs, the deliberate insertion of a key into its corresponding lock — each element intended for the player to inhabit the body of Kaminskyi as much as the mind. Publisher: Oro Interactive Developer: Off Black Creations Platform: Played on PC Availability: Released June 15, 2026, for PC (Steam). And what a mind it is! Kaminskyi is plagued by voices and visions, subjecting the player to the inner workings of a man broken by tragedy and circumstance. Forced into medical debt due to his dying son’s hospital bills, the navigator finds himself delving into the abyss in search of a signal. This signal causes a form of madness in all who hear it — though the ways that madness manifests, and just how susceptible one is to it, vary from person to person. It won’t take long to recognize things are amiss. After turning the lights on in the Rec room, players can see a dead body on the floor with a screwdriver jammed into its mangled form. The lights also reveal a kitchen, with newspaper clippings, furniture, and other items — each telling its own story — filling the space in a way that makes it feel lived-in. Those clippings are short blurbs that detail the impetus for the journey we are on, and do plenty for developing both the atmosphere and the stakes, telling us just enough to make the importance and necessity of the mission known, all while leaving space for players to fill in the gaps. The unknown calls to us, prodding the spirit of curiosity laid within. I want to know what’s down here, I want to know what the signal is, and I want to know what comes next. In the beginning, the ship lies empty, leaving only the player character to traverse the dorms, the rec room, and the comms room in search of clues as to what has transpired and what must ensue. These opening moments set the tone, with cramped hallways and extreme darkness working in tandem to create those feelings of claustrophobia, isolation, and uncertainty horror connoisseurs are so accustomed to, but MOLE’s execution of them is superb, thanks in large part to the monster that prowls the ship in search of Kaminskyi. I am astonished at the way MOLE uses perspective and imagery to tell its story. A phone call rings out, and another crew member tells us to meet them in their quarters, but the lights have gone out. The phenomenal deployment of sound and lighting here elicits that aforementioned dread and uncertainty, as the creaks and groans of the ship, plus some unknown banging, ring throughout the now-darkened space. Something is going to happen. I know it, you know it, Kaminskyi knows it — we just don’t know what. So when we approach the crewmember’s cabin and a monster pops out, it may feel somewhat expected, but the violence and speed with which it happens calls for immediate reaction. The only option is to run, but with the space now being nearly pitch black, fleeing becomes a tense affair. “Where do I run? What do I do?” — questions that must be answered through action within seconds lest we be grabbed by the monster, a second of which leads to an instant game over. These encounters with the monster are among the most tense in the entire game, but are done sparingly. Despite this, the mere threat of their appearance adds tension to every moment. It’s hard to say when the monster will come back, and escaping it is often more than a simple matter of running away. Later encounters involve navigating pitch-black areas and solving puzzles, forcing players to make use of their minds to escape. Can you remember the route to the exit, and can you recall the sequence needed to unlock the doors? There is a feeling created by its mere existence that changes the tenor of every new interaction. A checkpoint and autosave notification should be a relief, but when I saw it, I was driven to fear instead. Sure, there is safety in the existence of a return point, but by showing itself now, I had to wonder why the checkpoint appeared at all. Would the monster return? Would I need to escape? I would then have to prepare, recounting my route or the sequencing of button presses needed to complete a nearby task — all simply because the monster might appear in those dark, cramped hallways. Oftentimes, this was not the case. The monster may not have appeared, and the checkpoint was a simple safety net for some other reason, but this was no comfort in the moment. The fear remained. But the darkness does more than hide monsters; it also obfuscates the space itself. There are moments when walking through the passageways that Kaminskyi and the players find themselves in new, seemingly impossible spaces. Paths that formerly led to the rec area now lead into an empty classroom with windows looking outside on a sunny day, or a door that was once an exit from the cockpit now brings us into an elevator to Kaminskyi’s past apartment. These spaces and pathways are ephemeral, disappearing just as quickly as they appeared. These fleeting rooms, combined with the voices and other visions, are reminders that Kaminskyi is unwell, but the question is not “is all of this real,” but “how much of this is real?” When bodies and objects shift or disappear, doubt is sown. Are we experiencing an episode now, or did we have one before? How much of this is because of the signal, and how much is because of Kaminskyi himself? Where does one begin and the other end? Virginia Woolf, in her essay On Being Ill says, “In illness words seem to possess a mystic quality. We grasp what is beyond their surface meaning, gather instinctively this, that, and the other — a sound, a colour, here a stress, there a pause — which the poet, knowing words to be meagre in comparison with ideas, has strewn about his page to evoke, when collected, a state of mind which neither words can express nor the reason explain. Incomprehensibility has an enormous power over us in illness, more legitimately perhaps than the upright will allow.” Kaminskyi seems to have fully embodied this sentiment, with the voice's words becoming true in a way that feels entirely real to the player and to the avatar of our interaction. These visions are just as affecting and just as deadly as any moment in the real world. We experience the events emotionally in a way that a rote recounting of words could never dream of matching, with Kamisky’s thoughts, memories, and emotions coloring this world in patterns that may seem incomprehensible to the sane, but coalesce into a richer picture with a full understanding of the story. Every hallucination and each line of dialogue is laden with meaning, but in some respects, it can create even more questions. Kaminskyi’s decision to board this vessel to earn funds and pay back the debt related to the end-of-life care for his now-dead son carries with it some uncertainty of its own, requiring further interrogation. As the disembodied voice promises to reunite the navigator with his son, one has to wonder just how much Kaminskyi is in control of his actions. Every time we drill deeper, new messages are delivered from the surface, warnings about continuing to drill deeper and finding the signal source are given, and eventually, the mission is cancelled altogether — a demand that is promptly ignored. We can see new bodies of crewmembers piling up on the ship as our journey continues, and while we do not know the specifics of their demise, we press on, excavating ever further into the abyss. The correlation between drilling and bad things happening is unmistakable. Finding the signal will spell ruin for people on the surface, and perhaps even Kaminskyi himself. But we drill anyway. I don't see this as Kaminskyi being controlled. I barely see it as manipulation. He is desperate. He wants nothing more than to see his son again, a son he feels that he has failed, and would do anything to see that through. I think Kaminskyi knows just how unlikely it is that the voice would bring Petro back, but even that sliver of hope is enough to try, world be damned. I suppose this would be the part where I should excoriate the reasoning, where I should denounce the thought of lighting the world on fire for one child. I find myself unable to do so. For all the faulty logic behind it, Kaminskyi’s journey is one I would likely mirror in the same situation. It feels like a cheap trick to pull at one's heartstrings like this, to find connection in the desperate struggle of parenthood, yet I found it all the same. I would give anything to see my son live and do anything to see him shine. The thought of losing him is unbearable, impossible. I relate in more ways than I probably should, and that’s scary, too. Horror shines a mirror unto us. I suppose this would be the part where I should excoriate the reasoning, where I should denounce the thought of lighting the world on fire for one child. I find myself unable to do so. In the end, the player and Kaminskyi succeed at finding the signal. Through desperate trials of ingenuity and memorization, we dig, and dig, and dig, until the light shines upon us. Of course, the voice reveals one last trick, convincing Kaminskyi to sacrifice his son’s digitized consciousness to record the signal on the cassette Petro was held within, and killing Kaminskyi in the process. Despite this, the voice does keep at least one part of its initial promise. Wake up. This time, the alarm blares only after we awake to sunlight streaming through the windows. There is a gentleness to the scenery and music that we have not felt before, a quiet comfort of seeing Kaminskyi’s old home in the daylight, Petro's toys peppering the floor. We see a life well-lived, with awards and pictures hung upon the walls. When we push Kaminskyi through the front door, we see Petro in full as he swings below a massive tree; reunited at last. Verdict Image Credits: Oro Interactive via JetsonPlaysGames Disclaimer: A copy of this game was provided to us by the publisher.

No Secrets Here. *Editor's Note: Story details are discussed in this review. Video games are a sort of magical medium, in my mind. They exist at this sort of intersection of many other art forms, utilizing the visual language of films, the written word of novels, and the tactile experience of play. The way that the experience of a game is simultaneously affected by the sound, look, and feel is fascinating, allowing us to derive meaning and form stories through our engagement with the material. However, there is also a sort of friction built into their design, existing simultaneously as works of art and toys. But there is artistry in toymaking. Although the aims may seemingly be less lofty than those of the marble sculptor, few would say that there is a lack of intent or craftsmanship in their design. For games, much of the narrative is experiential. Stories are oft told through text, and a plot that selectively delivers them in the intended sequence to derive meaning — something Hollowbody achieves through flashbacks and found writings as the game progresses — but we engage with games through play. This relationship allows us to not only take something from the effort but also bring something into it as well. Publisher: Headware Games Developer: Headware Games Platform: Played on PlayStation 5 Availability: Released on September 12, 2024 for PC, and June 4, 2026, for PS5 and XBOX Series X/S. Hollowbody hands you control quickly, wasting little time in having players take the long walk down to a beach to investigate some anomaly. There is a dreariness to the visuals that recalls the Jurassic Coast on a cloudy day, the uncomfortable controls lending weight to the unease of the moment. This intro is short, but it sets the plot in motion, showing the disappearance of the main character’s partner under mysterious circumstances. We then cut to our lead, Mica, who crashes into a city — specifically, the Exclusion Zone —while searching for her other half, leaving no way out; the only way out is through. I couldn't help shake the feeling that we’ve been here before. Landing on the foggy streets of this desolate urban sprawl, the roads drive us to a run-down apartment complex nearby. The apartments are dilapidated, crawling with bugs, mold, and grime. Exploring within leads us to dried-out bodies and handwritten notes, fleshing out the thoughts and actions of the people trapped here as their end approached, confusion dripping in much like the malaise that snaked through the pipes. Occasionally, you can even pick up signals with your COTAC hand radio that relive the past through little vignettes, offering more intimate looks at the people who live in the houses or stayed in the nearby rooms. Unfortunately, these notes and calls never amount to more than a basic recounting of things that transpired. There is a sense that those in the city were largely unaware of what was happening until it was too late, with these portraits painting a picture of people becoming more and more isolated, confused, and dejected over time. However, there's no particular prevailing theme or message. No buildup to what comes next, or how the things you’ve already seen might relate to the events at hand beyond simple explanation. Their abundance makes the world-building feel repetitive, with each new piece doing little to differentiate itself from the last. This is exemplified at the end of the game’s first area, where you come across a man on the ledge of the rooftop. Hollowbody doesn’t give you the full picture in any moment in its short runtime, least of all in its most important ones. This is one of the few instances in the game with a cutscene, so you know it is meant to matter, but I don’t think many would have guessed that this is the only event throughout the entire scenario that matters at all for the ending. While we cannot see him fully, this man appears to be undergoing some physical distress, with his visage being reminiscent of the monsters you fight through the level. The conversation that takes place allows players to make choices in how to approach or address this person, and if players want to see the “good” ending, they must answer in a specific way to save him, and, by extension, Mica. However, there's no particular prevailing theme or message. No buildup to what comes next, or how the things you’ve already seen might relate to the events at hand. The problem, I suppose, isn't in the fact that this single encounter determines our fate. On the contrary, many events and decisions in our lives have pointed outcomes and effects. Instead, the failing is in the buildup and resolution. There are no hints as to who or what this stranger is, before or after the encounter. He is functionally a non-entity thematically and narratively — just a thing that might save you later, unbeknownst to you. A shallow object. Empty. A function. His presence feels ephemeral, like a will-o'-the-wisp sent from beyond only to then dissipate. Except he stays nearby — a hanger-on to Mica’s little adventure. If he didn’t appear in the ending as an active participant, I’d almost wonder if he was a hallucination — a major technique that Hollowbody frequently employs in its scares. Faces appear in the corners of the room as the player navigates the dark, disgusting homes, and rooms shift wildly as things get tense, subverting the player’s understanding and expectations of what comes next from room to room. But the lighting is a major detriment to showcasing this, and greatly hinders both the navigation and experience of engagement. Hollowbody is much too dark to ever really get a sense of the space you are in. At times, I felt as if I were playing a bumblebee, buzzing from point to point, clumsily bashing into everything until I found the right object or the correct room to move forward. Despite obfuscating the actual elements held within the corridors, this darkness largely fails to bring any real tension. While numerous horrifying entities are wandering the hallways, streets, and sewers of the world, they are given away by the rattling noises they make when nearby. There is little mystery to what the next room may hold when you can echolocate each living being within a four-mile radius. In some cases, these enemies can be clearly seen, while in others, it may require a bit of stumbling to engage with them. There is an uncertainty to these encounters, despite them posing no real threat to the player, and it comes in the form of how incompetent Mica is at doing much of anything. Aiming at an enemy, swinging your weapon, or even running — each action as awkward as a baby bird’s first flight, only poor Mica must flail in the dark instead of under the supervision of a caretaker. Perhaps Mica is simply afraid, letting the scenery get the best of her, a trepidation under Mother’s watchful eye. Bashing their heads in with a guitar is a mercy. Not only are these waking nightmares pathetic as combatants, but they are made up of those aforementioned trapped citizens — a sad end to the people locked within this town. The clumsiness caused by the pervasive darkness gets its tendrils into other mechanical aspects, as well. Without the ability to clearly see, players must rely on dim lights to indicate points of interest and spatial direction. And so the player must meander toward the lights, like a moth searching for salvation. There does happen to be a flashlight for players to use, but it provides very little focused light and swings wildly as players run or flail a weapon about. Yet the flashlight does reveal the pathway to us, even if only marginally. When traversing the dark tunnels of the sewers or the shadowy halls of a hotel, the flashlight slowly illuminates our path, revealing details one would otherwise miss in a casual jaunt through a bright room. The darkness recedes in small chunks as players press forward, giving off the appearance of a creeping mold set to devour this world. But our light, our torch, drives it away. The darkness cleansed as if facing the full power of the Sun. But when that darkness is driven away, there is very little of interest to be found. This is especially true in the back half of the game, where the environments and cohesion of the writing lose a bit of focus, with the final spaces shuffling Mica from point to point seemingly haphazardly, until we finally blunder into whichever ending we have been given based on the presence of the mysterious stranger. The darkness recedes in small chunks as players press forward, giving off the appearance of a creeping mold set to devour this world. But our light, our torch, drives it away. The darkness cleansed as if facing the full power of the Sun. So, the question remains: what makes a great horror work? There’s a quote from John Carpenter that I love to think about: “There’s a very specific secret: It should be scary.” Fear can be brought forth in myriad ways. Threat of bodily harm is certainly the most prevalent one, but great horror films, books, and games build on their ideas, formulate the story and perspective, and shape it into an experience that elicits some sort of response to the actions of the characters and monsters; they drive us into caring about the characters, set up the stakes, and put those characters through something. In Hollowbody, Mica mostly moves through the action undisturbed. I was left undisturbed. Aside from a few short conversations on the telephone, very little can be taken from Mica as a character. She has no reactions to any of the events as they transpire, and she makes few comments on the monsters prowling about or the sadness of the people who became them. She exists only as a means to move through this space. Much has been made of a supposed horror game renaissance in the last decade or so, but one does have to wonder: why is this moment considered a resurgent period? I’ve never really gotten the sense that horror left. Every era since the original PlayStation has generated classics, with indie and blockbuster titles making names for themselves in equal measure. Is it by simple numbers that we are seeing more great horror games? That much is true — the sheer volume of games made today outlandishly eclipses the numbers of yesteryear — but I think something else is happening to push this along: nostalgia. The current attitudes toward horror are not necessarily driven by the elevated quality of the works, but by recognition. This can be seen in the fevered reactions to each new Resident Evil remake, and in the overwhelming response to reinterpreted games like Silent Hill 2 (the Bloober one). Conversations, impressions, and expectations are all foisted upon the games before they have even come out — another thing Hollowbody has itself fallen prey to in the past. Conversations, impressions, and expectations are all foisted upon the games before they have even come out — another thing Hollowbody has itself fallen prey to in the past Even many new, original releases are explicitly trying to capture the feel or essence of older games, and Hollowbody is one such example. It adopts the graphical stylings and atmospheric language of its direct influence, the Silent Hill series, harkening back to a time when games were made “like this”. It reaches for the past, trying to tie itself into conversation with Silent Hill, without ever attempting to emulate the “why” that makes those games interesting or unique. There's a certain romanticization of the horror classics seen in the game that just doesn't do anything for me, and I think it largely comes down to the types of things Hollowbody takes from its inspirations. The secret notes, the malformed bodies, all the way to how the game looks — these are not the essence of those classics. It is not what made them great. By pushing itself into the same room as the classics and deliberately evoking them, Hollowbody does itself a disservice. In the simplest terms, Silent Hill games are about more than fighting scary guys, and are aiming to convey specific messages and themes, using both the language of play and the written word to guide players into taking something from the experience. When James fights a monster in Silent Hill 2, he is reckoning with his own fears and mistakes, but when Mica fights a monster, it is just a thing that happens — a hollow body in the way of task completion. Verdict Image Credits: Headware Games via JetsonPlaysGames Disclaimer: We received a copy of this title for free from the publisher.