Gamer Gaming 最近的评测

In this charming 2D physics platformer, you control a knight whose mission is undermined somewhat by his dinky little sword, which has little to no effect on the dragon at the end of the cave. Rather than jumping, the knight manoeuvres himself around in the vein of Getting Over It, using his sword as a sort of lever by swinging it in an arc. Over the course of only six levels, the length and weight of the sword is increased, which influence how the knight traverses the cave on his next journey. The game took me around half an hour, but Deepest Sword is overall a fun diversion.

Like Getting Over It, the first battle is learning how to move. There's non-configurable gamepad support (except in menus) that I found counter-intuitive compared to the keyboard controls. The initial tutorial level explains just enough to get going, and from then on you are mostly trusted to work things out by yourself. There are a few floating hint messages when you make certain mistakes, but you'll only find out the most important aspect of the problem solving through your own effort. When you think you've found a solution, you then have to execute it with the physics engine in mind, so in a sense you feel doubly clever for beating an obstacle. Only one puzzle didn't fit this formula; what to do was obvious but unnecessarily awkward to execute and succeeding just felt like getting lucky.

The cave you traverse has the interesting property of changing its obstacles despite looking the same each time. There are usually two routes through most sections, but as the sword gets longer, you can gain or even lose access to a route. Eventually the sword is long enough to complete the section easily, at which point the cave is extended with a new section. I would have liked to see a few more routes in the earlier sections to keep them interesting, but you don't spend much time in them anyway.

Deepest Sword seems more interested in being a speed game than a puzzle game - around half its achievements are related to completing it as quickly as you can, and with no quicksaving you're forced to complete it in a single sitting. A sub-five-minute time seems pretty achievable, and with relatively few actions to remember and almost completely predictable physics, this might be a good pick for aspiring speedrunners.

It's the sort of game you wouldn't really mind coming back to either. The pixel art is pleasantly chunky with light yet atmospheric detail. Despite the pixels the sprite motion is super-smooth and the sword has a convincing weight. A highlight for me is seeing the effort the knight makes to pull himself around in later levels. The music is a bit too repetitive to listen to for half an hour straight, though.

Occasionally your efforts are rewarded with some not-very-subtle innuendo, and in that spirit I'll conclude that Deepest Sword didn't leave me perfectly satisfied but is a great choice if you're looking for an enjoyable quickie.

Psychonauts debuted to little fanfare and less financial success, but found widespread critical acclaim. While absolutely not a perfect 3D platformer, that aspect is dwarfed by strong characterisation, scrupulous attention to detail and distinctive, memorable art.

Psychonauts are agents that jump into the minds of troubled people and navigate worlds that serve as extended metaphors for their psyche. For example, one mind is presented as a simple white cube befitting the person's orderly nature, but a part of the level is unpacked from each face of the cube, and each part is a kind of diorama symbolising a different neatly-repressed childhood memory. A disturbing boss fight represents the negative consequences of that approach. Straight from the tutorial as you enter your first mind, your own mind begins to think about the potential of this premise. The game will only tease this for a while, and it's a slow burner but during your levitation training the game shows you how far it's prepared to go, then continues to deliver from there. The story never leans into its full dramatic potential - the sequel goes more in that direction - but via characters' minds you are treated to some deep, intriguing character profiles with a wide emotional range, which manage to be funny and surreal while maintaining a strange kind of dignity and maturity.

I have never seen a game put such a painstaking degree of thought into fleshing out its characters, and there are very few games that can make you really *empathise* with a character like this one. I thought the game was telling a bit too much and showing a bit too little, but even after completing the game 100% there were plenty of details I only realized after reading around. World gameplay mechanics, positioning and even appearance of collectibles are deliberately chosen to reveal details about your "patient". A similar level of detail exists in the main world too; the side characters seem like set dressing but have their own story arcs which (I found out after playing) you can take part in if you wish. You can feel Schafer's point-and-click history in Psychonauts' veins, from your bizarre inventory to the surprising interactions with people, enemies and the environment as you unlock abilities. It might be best played as if you don't plan to complete it; feel free to explore and try any interaction you want, and chances are Double Fine will have anticipated it. I look forward to revisiting this game one day, looking for those details that passed me by when I was simply intent on 100% completion.


I was at first put off by the angular, kooky summer camp scenery - maybe as a gamer in 2020 I'm just used to higher definition, and as a Brit I'm just missing out on the relatability of that setting. However, the overworld grew on me in time, and each mind contains a radical shift in scenery, and sometimes gameplay, that will surprise you. Also worth mentioning is the impressive ugliness of most of the NPCs - hearing them referred to as human felt almost like a plot twist. Everyone looks like how Tim Burton would design Mr Potato Head (with an actual rotten potato for a head). In a gaming era where aesthetics seem to be everything it's refreshing to see the ugly, and be forced to look for the inner beauty instead. I'm faintly disappointed that they didn't fully commit and make the protagonist and love interest as misshapen as everyone else. The somewhat layered soundtrack suits each environment well, even at its most jarring and discordant. Sadly the voice acting leaves something to be desired: several characters are sadly quite monotonous and quiet, and the accents of European characters are fairly weak and unconvincing.

Fundamentally, this is a 3D collect-a-thon platformer. Your circus experience gives you various fluid modes of movement, but especially in the first and last levels the snapping to rails, ledges and one particular ladder felt unfairly precise, leading to tedious repeats of lengthy sections which broke the pacing and tension. You have plenty of combat options, but the most efficient are also the most robotic, and the enemies are varied but stupid, so it's not satisfying. If you want 100% you need collectibles, but they're mostly 2D sprites that fade in and out so you can't always see them, and their placement makes backtracking a chore. Unfortunate, but worth soldiering through for the story.

At time of writing, Psychonauts 2 is wowing players and a GOTY contender, so now is a great time to experience the ancient origins of the series, and maybe help make up for the sales Double Fine didn't achieve the first time. This is the definition of a rough diamond, but (apart from the sequel) I've never played anything quite like it.

[Updated after a November 2021 quality of life update]

After fifteen years the glorious Psychonauts returns with a full game, again delivering that gold standard of environment design, characterisation and platforming. As boldly creative as ever, this time players are treated to such sights as vomiting glove puppets, a whale summoner and a bowling apocalypse. Everything Psychonauts 1 achieved has been aced again here, and there's a great improvement on the technical side too. With a very healthy accessibility menu, this game can be played by as many people as possible, which I would recommend.

Apart from nostalgia for most players, the main feeling as the game begins is of playing a blockbuster movie. Psychonauts' eccentric art style looks gorgeous in current-gen graphics, and new rendering trickery enables a new level of psychedelia. The beefier soundtrack, courtesy of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, nails every environment and is so rich that it could have come straight out of a Disney movie.

The story is rather Disney-like too, taking the classic sequel route of delving into the hero's family history. It's rather ambitious, throwing together a host of new characters and expecting the player to appreciate them all and how they all connect together in just twenty hours, but it does manage it. From the midpoint of the game, the atmosphere becomes more sombre and grown-up. Characters in the original game often had quite dark stories, mitigated by a bright facade. Here the darkness is more overt, but the comedy and bizarre visuals blend even more richly with it to create some unexpectedly beautiful dramatic moments. Any attempt to explain them without context could not do them justice. I felt some characters were a little heavily explained; things got exposited that would have had to be discovered by the player in the first game. It was a shame not to feel special for noticing certain details, but I don't doubt that there are plenty of hidden details I've missed anyway.

Even without the first game's inventory, curiosity is always rewarded. The larger overworld provides a few side quests to get on with, and minds have several kinds of collectibles to explore and find. These are now much easier to see and collect, which is not only less frustrating but lets the player appreciate how they contribute to the level. 100% completion is not possible before the final battle, freeing you to take the game at your own pace and mop everything up in the post-game state, which doubles as a nice playable epilogue, if you want to.

Most essential PSI-powers from Psychonauts 1 are back, and nerfed and re-tooled for a smarter, more hack-and-slashy combat system. Enemy variety is more interesting and better encourages use of a range of PSI-powers, rather than the two or three that got you through the first game. It's a lot more fun than in the first game, but still doesn't provide the wow factor that good dedicated action platformers can. Two of the three new abilities are interesting and fun to use, but certainly nothing we haven't seen in other games. The third, Mental Connection, could have been the new Clairvoyance - it has incredible potential for creative and complex level design, but maybe because of the resources it would involve is sadly only properly used in its introductory level. Beyond that it makes for a decent exploration mechanic.

As you level up you can now invest points into PSI-powers to strengthen them, and augment them further with purchasable Pins. You have space for three Pins throughout the whole game, so gameplay versatility is limited by your patience for opening the menu to switch them out. In addition, all cosmetics are Pins, so
if you want a white thought bubble, you can't have any extra abilities. An obvious misstep that I think could have been avoided easily.

With a few rare exceptions platforming is never nearly as annoying as it got in the first game, though it is still frustrating to have to repeat the kind of short sections you should only have to see once, if you miss a collectible. Hunting is overall an enjoyably smooth experience thanks to an indication of which sub-levels haven't been cleaned out, as well as an optional collectible detector. A decent photo mode lets you collect some gorgeous views on your travels, which this game has no shortage of.

Between this game's very conclusive ending, and the struggle it seems to take to create and market this series' games, I can't help feeling that this might be the last we see of Psychonauts. I'm not sure anyone can jump into my head and fix that, but it's nevertheless a pleasure to play such a visual, narrative and level design masterclass of a series. People looking for top-of-the-range combat or next-gen graphics might not be satisfied, but these just aren't good enough reasons to overlook Psychonauts and the things it does right, probably even does the best. I would simply recommend this series to anyone who cares about video games.

If you like Psychonauts, make sure not to overlook this underrated title. It doesn't have the extravagance of a full Psychonauts game, and it's linear enough to be nearly as fun to watch as to play, but for a two hour stationary VR Psychonauts experience made in 2017, it's hard to imagine it being any better. I wouldn't say no to another VR Psychonauts in 2033, if they want to make one.

This game starts almost immediately after the events of Psychonauts 1. As Raz, you're jetting off to save the head of the Psychonauts, but an unfortunate turn of events endangers the rest of your team, too. This opens the door for some more opportunities to nose around in your new friends' heads. The game's not long enough for you to explore any fully-fledged mental worlds, but via a hallucination-inducing psychic field, you do get more insight into some of your new colleagues. Raz's circus skills won't appear here - this is a stationary VR experience so the writers come up with good reasons for him to be stuck in a chair in-game - but what card-carrying Psychonaut would let that stop them? Some psi-powers from the first game re-appear, and are surprisingly fluid to use, though
the gameplay departs from that of the mainline games. The core gameplay is about looking around in each scene for interactable objects and figuring out which power to use on them, in order to break each character out of their hallucination, making it more like a VR point-and-click adventure. The best players of these kinds of games are endlessly curious, and though level design is much more limited than usual, there are a couple of secret interactions you can look for in each scene. The Steam achievements can guide you towards them but you know you're a true Psychonaut if you can get them all in one playthrough without ever looking.

If you're worried the 2005 graphics are returning there's nothing to fear. Thanks to Unreal Engine lighting and updated models (shown off in the staple VR way of having characters talk right into your face), this game looks great for 2017. The developers once again let loose with uniquely bizarre environments. There's even a shift into stop-motion animation for one moving sequence; I'd love to see things like that in future titles. The game isn't shy about playing with scale for maximum spectacle either. Basically, Psychonauts once again brings you sights quite unlike anything else in video games. The great sound quality in today's headsets hammers home the strength of Psychonauts' sound and music too. This and nearly everything else I compliment in this review is exemplified by a brilliant Bond-style title sequence in VR - if you see that and like it, you'll probably enjoy the rest of the game too.

Another signature aspect of Psychonauts is its comedy. Rhombus of Ruin has its fair share of funny moments, but in VR it can trip itself up. As is tradition in Tim Schafer's games, interacting with objects rewards the player with funny voice lines. However, between the narrative voice lines in your mind, the speech of characters outside your mind, voice lines triggered by interacting with an object AND voice lines triggered by accident, such as by looking at something, the voice lines often talk over each other and you're not clear what anyone's said. Enabling subtitles is recommended if you don't want to miss anything and don't mind a slight loss of immersion.

The game ends with a full-length performance of the hilarious title theme - maybe the best I've heard in a video game. After that is the most thrilling sentence possible for those who loved Psychonauts since playing it in 2005: "Raz will return in Psychonauts 2". I would recommend playing or at least watching this as a fun interlude between the two games, rather than the teasing non-sequel it used to be. Clever simile coming up to tie things together: much like Raz escaping the confines of his chairs, Double Fine have shown that the constraints of VR can't stop them delivering a quality experience worthy of their other games. I hope to one day see their bottomless creativity applied to the increasingly bold VR medium again.

Continuing to surf their veritable tsunami of goodwill in recent years, Capcom have decided to bless gamers with their next port of the venerated Ace Attorney - not by continuing to port the mainline series, but by revisiting a prequel duology that sold poorly. It's a risky move, but it feels like a lot of passion, effort and money has been placed in this, and in my opinion it's well-spent. The port contains all-new English translation, from voice actors based in Britain and British translators, and most but not all of the content from the original release, such as unused art and music, three alternate character outfits and eight comedic mini-episodes.

"Phoenix Wright"'s ancestor, law student Ryunosuke Naruhodo, travels from Meiji-era Japan to Victorian-era London, amid stormy international relations, to learn the British approach to pointing and shouting, while trying to complete the mission of a friend. The change of location doesn't seem to have phased the Ace Attorney team one bit. All the Victorian London boxes are ticked, and that Ace Attorney kookiness is stamped on top. England has more than its fair share of eccentrics, so the caricatures in the witness stand are right at home in the setting and series. Two stand-out examples are consulting idiot "Herlock Sholmes" and real-life author Soseki Natsume! The 4-hour orchestral soundtrack suits the setting down to the ground too.

These are the most extravagant entries yet, but not as complete as I would have liked. The 3D animation is easily the best it's ever looked. An automatic Story mode saves us from A-1 having to make an anime adaptation. The good but sporadic voice acting didn't always sound clear against the music (sound levels can't be adjusted). There are even anime-style cutscenes, but only in the first half. Generally the game is extremely polished, but I hope Capcom will come back and patch a series of typos and minor visual issues that I couldn't help noticing.

The two new mechanics are fun, but not used to their full potential. The uncharacteristically snazzy Dance of Deduction has you course-correct Sholmes' bizarre snap deductions by simply... looking around a bit. If you somehow get the wrong answer, you'll get specific penalty dialogue. Back in court, you're constantly in danger of the capricious jury pronouncing your defendant guilty, and the Summation Examination is a last-ditch attempt to talk them round. They're fun to play but the challenge is again minimal.

Befitting the series' legendary localisation, the writing is full of personality and humour as well as functional. Where the rest of the series plays at being American, characters here are unabashedly from their respective nations, and freely reference local concepts and vernacular, which frequently had me reaching for a search engine. I often thought I'd found a typo or anachronism, then looked it up and realised the game knew English better than I do. I admire the decision not to stop and explain every new word to me, but other areas could have benefitted from this lack of explication too.

There's a kind of frustration to the first four cases. They're very simple, and small in scale and stakes. These suit a fledgling law career, but nevertheless lack much of the eccentricity and thrill factor of previous games. They're also so drawn out that I suspect they're some of the longest in the series. The need to mechanically scrutinise everything, digging into two or three layers of testimony, until a trivial contradiction pops out, occurs far too often. As ever, it's entertaining to see the key evidence you need come from the most unlikely place, but that by itself doesn't make you feel smart, just lucky. It could be that the team were aiming to use these games as a series entry point, showing players how to play... but imagine how potent Ace Attorney games could be if they, quite reasonably, assumed you had at least played the first game, and just got on with things.

Thankfully, what the first half is really doing is setting up a slew of mysteries that finally pay off in the second, with every case linking to another. Almost immediately it feels like a missing piece has been placed into the game, as it sets about answering questions (and throwing in more), adding more challenge, scope, stakes and energy, and building to a complex ending I will be thinking about for a while longer. This is really a brilliant spin-off; it's just a shame it kicks off with what felt to me like a 25-hour slow burn. I can't imagine how the 3DS players felt, waiting two years for a satisfactory resolution, but they certainly got one.

Capcom are considering a third instalment. I would be delighted to spend another 80 hours in this new world, but I don't know how it can clear the very high bar it has set for itself. I hope if it gets made, it's for art's, not popularity's, sake. I absolutely recommend this, but only to Ace Attorney fans - newbies should try the original Trilogy first.

Bombastic visual novel Danganronpa is an engaging set of mysteries, but its art, surprising writing and eccentric characterisation are its strongest points. Long-time mystery gamers might find the puzzles lacking, but those looking for lighter puzzling and a thrilling story will find a lot to enjoy.

Fifteen students have been assembled at a school for the gifted and talented, but they are soon coerced into taking part in a sort of battle royale. Any undetected murderers are allowed to leave, but if you're found guilty in a Class Trial, you die. It's all overseen by a horrible little teddy bear called Monokuma, whose only goal is to inflict as much misery on our heroes as possible. A malevolent, chubby cartoon bent on making life hard for society's "elites" is the kind of populist hero the West is crying out for, but cruelly painted as the villain in this Japanese game.

While Monokuma drums up motivation for the next murder, you explore the school in a first-person point-and-click fashion. In "Free Time" you can play the game's ironic Dating Sim element, revealing information about characters through the power of friendship. Dating is important because it adds some texture to the archetypes the students are introduced as, but you still can't get a full picture of most characters in a single run through the game. The object of your affections will likely up and die on you, but a left-field post-game mode will let you belatedly flesh them out. Some are more bearable than others - and some exhibit tropes which might get disapproving looks from a creative writing teacher - but all are highly memorable. While wildly different to each other, they interact in unexpected funny and dramatic ways that also play into the story. Especially in Class Trials, dialogue is supported by a good deal of variable-quality (at least in English) voice acting.

The surreal black comedy premise is a great vehicle for the writing, which is funny in a range of ways, as well as tense and moving when it wants to be. There's a genuine feeling of being trapped with a bunch of teenagers - not adults in teenagers' bodies, as you often find in anime. The writers aren't shy about tantalising their teenage target audience with some mostly cringe-inducing sexual humour, either. This produced a feeling of reading the comments underneath a dirty Reddit post instead, but these moments aren't too common.

When a dead body is discovered, the Mystery gameplay begins. In Investigations, you click around gathering evidence and crafting it into "Truth Bullets" for later use. Then the Class Trial begins. Here, you listen to students' arguments, then fire one of your Truth Bullets at a phrase which contradicts it. Spotting each contradiction pushes the trial forwards. (At this point, you'll have noticed that the OST is incredible - so catchy that I still put myself at grave risk of series spoilers by replaying it online.) Sometimes you'll need to create a "Flashback Bullet" from one phrase, and shoot it at a phrase which contradicts it. This might be due to the English translation, but it's often unclear which phrases contradict each other. Misleadingly, your Flashback Bullet may come from a phrase spoken later on in the discussion. It was never clear to me whether to "shoot backwards" or "shoot forwards" so even if I was right, it often took two attempts to move the trial on.

These are not the end of Danganronpa's strange creative decisions. Minigames can be confusing, but are introduced with dialogue box text rather than a much more helpful interactive tutorial. A "Re:Action" system interrupts one dialogue sequence with a different one, inducing FOMO about the original dialogue. You can't change difficulty without starting a new game. You need in-game coins just to watch second-long "cutscenes" you've already seen in the story, and they have to be farmed by replaying chapters you've beaten. The first-person camera is at crotch height. I won't spoil them all for you but I wish there was less fixing of game conventions that aren't broken.

The murder plots and surrounding events are inventive, but Investigations spell out 80-90% of how they happened, not leaving you much to think about in Class Trials. The remaining questions can be challenging to wrap up, and to breeze through these you'll need to be the Dating Sim player, remembering character details from sometimes even before the Investigation. All of the above applies to the game's overarching mystery, too. Whatever your selected difficulty, Danganronpa is very forgiving in that it simply restores your health if you run out, and lets you pause and save in 10 different slots at almost any point. Hints are hard to avoid and usually too generous, but I appreciated them in the tougher moments.

Danganronpa is surprising, stylish, accessible and highly enjoyable, ignoring some detrimental design decisions. I think it's earned its hit status and I'm looking forward to the next games.

One hero. One great big monster. One arrow. The key to Titan Souls is the solid job it does of creating simple, distilled tension, as a single strike decides the battle. That makes Acid Nerve's debut game feel fairly short, looking back, but there's actually enough depth here for a solid experience, especially if aiming for 100% completion.

Our protagonist's quest: to kill and absorb the souls of the Titans of the world. Their origins, motivations, thoughts and identity are unknown - and will probably stay that way. There is almost zero exposition and you'll have to infer the story from every (very) little graphical and textual clue you can find. More of the story is revealed beyond the game's Normal Mode. Even having beaten the game twice, I feel I still don't really know any of it.

Each Titan battle is a matter of shooting the Titan's weak spot (which could be any part of it) before it hits your weak spot (which is all of you). Windows for dodging attacks are small, and for landing the final shot, even smaller. Expect to die a lot; I averaged around 20 deaths per Titan on Normal Mode. Despite this, most bosses are primarily strategic fights, and through all the dying you'll realise are simple and mostly deterministic, with fair telegraphing and few attack patterns to account for. It's reasonably easy to learn the patterns, how to dodge them and how to expose the weak spot; half your deaths are spent executing that strategy. Every
battle ends with the screen turning grey and the music cutting out: if you die, you can silently contemplate mortality as the screen fades to black and the boss keeps mashing your battered corpse; if you win, there's the twang of the arrow finding its mark, and the satisfying animation as you rip out the arrow, along with a new soul. That last hit could either be a cool, calculated strike or a split-second Hail Mary - both are equally satisfying.

Fights tend to be hard-fought, improvised skirmishes capped off with a well-timed shot. This gets you through normal mode, but post-game gameplay demands more strategy. If you really put your mind to it, there's more than one way to skin a Titan. Speedrunners can take out most Titans in under five seconds, with normal
gameplay but clever planning. Completing Titan Souls' Steam achievements will reveal clever secret interactions for defeating some Titans. There's further problem solving outside combat too; you'll need some creative thinking to unlock certain bosses, and there's a secret room that I never figured out. If you
don't have skill/puzzle-solving ability/patience, worry not - you have the option to skip a certain number of bosses and still make it to the end. This does stop you accessing the game's true ending, so I recommend putting the time in to see every Titan.

After normal mode, Titan Souls has some more content for you to flex your newfound skill on. Hard Mode powers up each boss so your speed and precision are tested further, and in the best cases the encounter is tweaked so that you have to figure out a new strategy. If you enjoyed Normal Mode I recommend beating Hard Mode too; it's more achievable than you might think. Two more modes challenge your strategic thinking and pattern knowledge further, and these modes can be combined with each other should you want more challenge (I don't know if combined modes can be beaten).

Visually and aurally Titan Souls has a conventional, but clean and pretty style, occasionally breaking away in fun ways. It looks and sounds a lot like you would expect a top-down indie fantasy to, really. The camera is pulled right back to show how small you are, zooming in suspensefully as you draw back your bow. The overworld's mostly ruins and empty plains, with a few secret areas providing environmental storytelling.
Though not always that exciting to look at, the huge Titans are the stars of the battle, drawing your focus and making you pay attention. Some bosses are clearly 3D meshes rather than just sprites, but it somehow fits really well. The soundtrack is pitch-perfect orchestral fantasy fare, sometimes departing into different genres. Amusingly, most pieces are 2-3 minutes long, even though you usually only hear the first 10 seconds over and over. It's worth listening through, as you can't fully appreciate it in normal gameplay.

Technically Titan Souls is well put together, though I feel I took some unfair deaths due to some odd collision detection on certain bosses. Unless you're highly skilled gamepad is recommended, but menuing and combat controls didn't always do what they were told - my gamepad is fairly old, so you may not have this problem.

Titan Souls doesn't totally knock it out of the park, but it's a clever, varied, absorbing and deceptively deep debut suitable for a range of skill levels, and I'd love to see the one-shot mechanic return. I recommend this for exploit hunters and fans of action and puzzles.

Second time's the charm: 2010 cult hit NieR has been given another chance at life. Yoko Taro's heartbreaking tale of the last vestiges of humanity, and how they confront the future they created, can have its time in the spotlight without the technical and gameplay issues that held it back before. It's a very faithful "illegal remodification" (Yoko's words), so some awkward aspects of the original game remain, but if you're patient enough for those the experience is excellent overall.

New features of the remodification include: beautiful updated models and textures; reworked combat and music more in keeping with the Automata style; a stand-out, previously-cut boss fight; and almost every line in the game painstakingly voice-acted. If you've played NieR: Automata, be sure to grab the free "4 YoRHa" DLC for some nice nostalgia. General advice for a NieR game is to go in blind, but the rest of the review will talk about the whole game, so beware of spoilers. This is one of the most engaging and thought-provoking stories in video games, though, making it one of the best blind purchases on the market today.

You play as a boy on a mission to save his sister from her illness, and potentially everyone around him from a shadowy threat. He attracts some hangers-on - an uppity spellbook, an eye-poppingly-dressed she-warrior who might be single-handedly responsible for the game's 18 rating, and a teenager struggling to cope with the overwhelming power thrust upon him. In an unusual narrative structure, the story takes place over a number of iterations, in which new details change how you perceive a moment the next time, or events are revealed to have occurred differently. With this system, the cast's tragic backstories and motivations are gradually unveiled, along with the grim realities of their fantasy-hero intentions. This is a system with lots of potential, and Replicant created some really impactful moments with it. Noticing something new renewed my enjoyment and often spawned a fresh batch of questions - I just wish that had happened more often. Some events either played out exactly the same, or just reaffirmed things you probably worked out earlier. Unfortunately, sitting through the same thing again is bound to be less impressive than the first time, and that was where I felt the emotion of some moments giving way to impatience. Plenty more details could have been dropped in to keep things lively - the answers to practically all your unanswered post-game questions exist, but you'll only find them by digging into the Yoko Taro Multimedia Iceberg. Completionists are rewarded with wild previously-cut secret content that connects the two NieR games while rounding out the story nicely.

Gameplay is not as immediately brilliant as Automata's, with a rather flaccid tutorial leading into a hit-and-miss introductory segment. Naturally you'll be getting acquainted with the setting and characters by running errands. Objectives often have you dashing back and forth between areas - jokily acknowledging it doesn't make it entertaining! - across open plains that lack variety. Grinding for crafting materials and enchantments will also cause certain areas to far outstay their welcome, but none of it's necessary and the game is at its most memorable and impactful when engaging with the main content. It might be worth looking up which quests are good uses of your time, but if you want to complete them all it'll be about twelve hours before the game really gets going. After that point, you gain access to more weapons, the elusive fast travel system, new massive threats and the feeling of enjoying yourself properly.

NieR soundtracks need no introduction. This time, a la Automata there's a focus on the vocals, and though it's not as wildly varied as Automata's soundtrack there are plenty of distinctive orchestral bangers to get stuck in your head. Percussion is layered on during tense moments, and done so well that even the fishing minigame becomes almost fun. The upgraded combat is now worthy of the battle music; magic and melee can be combined more fluidly, and while you're not as graceful as 2B the smooth animation and near-effortless control is pleasingly familiar. Hard Mode is lacking, but Normal Mode always asks for just enough effort and the Easy Mode and accessibility options are well fleshed out. One definite improvement over Automata is 60 FPS cutscenes that often adjust to your player selections.

NieR: Replicant is worth playing for anyone who cares about solid writing and interactive storytelling innovation - and a must-play for any fan of Yoko's stories. It might test your patience at times, but at some risk of spoilers I'd suggest some community intervention: the Special K patch mod to fix Replicant's visual and FPS bugs; quest advice; grinding tips; the wiki for all your questions afterwards. It's still not perfect for me, but it does feel like you're pretty much playing the game NieR was meant to be.

It Takes Two is larger-than-life director Josef Fares' third outing, taking the co-op-focused adventure engine of his previous game, A Way Out, but ditching the po-faced action movie pretensions that made it unintentionally funny, in favour of hyperactive fantasy spectacle that players can easily engage with on the same emotional wavelength. As before, anyone can download It Takes Two for free, and play it with anyone who buys the full game and invites them.

The game starts with the central duo, May and Cody, mentioning their upcoming divorce during an argument. Unfortunately, their daughter witnesses the whole thing, and her sadness kick-starts the "magical 12-hour couples' therapy adventure" stage, which will be familiar to anyone who has undergone divorce proceedings before. May and Cody spend most of the game as strange little voodoo dolls their daughter made, solving puzzles and fighting household objects while searching for a way back to their world. They're frankly bullied into this by a magical Hispanic marriage guidance book called Doctor Hakim, who won't leave them in peace until their relationship is fixed. His design and accent will be seared into your mind if you've seen the trailer, but I didn't find him quite as funny and engaging as the trailer promised. In fact, he can't outshine Josef Fares himself, who for our money would have been the best character for this role.

May and Cody themselves are difficult characters to write, caught between being disillusioned former lovers and stand-ins for the presumably-friendly players. The writers resolve this by making them readily cooperative throughout, taking a little time to bicker during cutscenes, but working towards "destructive" objectives in the hope of just returning home quickly, before Hakim pushes them into more "constructive" activities that might actually repair their relationship. The drama peaks at an expertly executed, unbearable scene halfway through, even more powerful than A Way Out's grand twist. From there it's a fairly uncomplicated journey down to a simple but heartwarming ending, but the excellent art and gameplay pulled us all the way to the end even when the story didn't.

May and Cody are likeable enough characters but It Takes Two will really be remembered for its level design. It's a whirlwind tour of beautiful, fun environments, including a perilous giant workshop, a grand cardboard fortress and a time-twisting clock tower. In every area you can expect some combination of chase sequences (Cody is pretty much always driving, if you like that), combat (with plenty of fun bosses), rail-grind sections, platforming sections, QTEs, well-hinted puzzles, 1v1 minigames, Easter eggs and smaller attractions where you can have a little break. There's often a section where gameplay will shift in reference to another game, but the default is acrobatic third-person platforming that heavily reminded us of NieR: Automata (by no means a complaint).

Each location is a magical version of some area of May and Cody's home, so it holds some significance to their lives, though if you're expecting deep environmental storytelling you won't quite get that, as the characters tend to exposit the meaning behind everything. This is a good choice really, as you have two cameras on screen and are communicating with your partner, so we always got what was going on even when our attention was a bit divided. Every location comes with its own pair of complementary abilities, which are fun enough to use for the game to be worth replaying later from the other character's point of view. You could make whole games out of each environment and pair of abilities, but I presume Fares gets bored and wants to move on every 90 minutes, so everything changes up again. The levels and abilities are so varied, and often so exotic that we weren't sure whether the artists or the programmers had more work to do, but the game is visually gorgeous and technically brilliant from start to finish.

This is the kind of game you'd want to play with a friend or loved one, and it's likely one of you won't be a gamer. The game is relaxed and forgiving enough for non-gamers, though not a good first game - from the start, it assumes some gaming competency which might be best acquired without the pressure of your partner waiting for you to get your act together. The awkward design of some bosses and action sequences had us wipe out a few times even though we're pretty experienced, weakening some of the spectacle, but at least you can be sure you'll be challenged at points. It's also not for young children, despite looking like a Pixar movie.

It's rare for EA to invest in something with this much heart; this much creativity; this pricing scheme. This triumph for Hazelight Studios gives me the impression that some part of EA is still motivated by games, not just money - surely if it can do that, it's worth checking out. Our average score for this game was 95%.

This is kind of like an extended Kotaku article about Valve's "wilderness" period in the 2010s, detailing what they were getting up to (not limited to Alyx development) when most fans had decided they were just resting on their laurels. Apps like these are really valuable for providing insight into an often secretive company, and The Final Hours does exactly that. It adds some much-needed context to those years by thoroughly detailing the activity behind the scenes, following and interviewing a range of Valve employees to get into their heads a bit, and describing the tension of remaining competitive as a company against the creative freedom they try to promote, like a more grounded answer to Valve's slightly utopian employee handbook. The tone is slightly fanboyish but ultimately professional and neutral (which seems like a reasonable description of Keighley himself) and makes for very easy reading. Towards the end it starts dropping a few sly hints at what Valve might be working on next, which is great fandom fuel. It ends with the message that we're looking at a new era for Valve - though Keighley acknowledges that might be a bit too early to call.

The text is interspersed with high quality animations which progress as you keep scrolling, and some fun and insightful interactive pieces like concept art slideshows, a sound mixer to create your own headcrab sounds, and interactive model and animation viewers (unfortunately, character models are not 360 degree views and you don't get multiple animations for a model). In addition to the article there is a Google Maps-style tour of Valve's main floor using high-quality 360-degree panoramas. You can also sacrifice some quality and switch to a laser-scanned 3D model of most of the floor, that you can walk around in first person. This might be exciting for anyone aspiring to work there but it's also a nice surprise to spot things that appeared in the "article" part of the app.

The article could use some fleshing-out. It has chapter selection, but you have to do some annoying scrolling to access it and there's no bookmarking feature. Sometimes the writing deploys some industry slang or "geek speak" and doesn't always explain what it means, breaking the flow as you search outside the app for the definition. More clickable text in general to provide extra information would have been great. The text could use some more proofreading, and as far as I know it's only available in English, yet there is no translation for certain pictures containing Russian text.

All in all it's a nice companion piece with information and insight. Most of the information will have been repackaged into YouTube videos and so on, but this is still worth getting for the interactive aspect, great look, and the personal touch.